Avant!

Editor’s Note: This article is a follow up to the Reportback from Chicago piece. We received many comments discussing the question of race and identity in relation to the communist movement, and forwarded them all to the author. This is their reply to many of the concerns raised.

“The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, 

is to establish the truth of this world” – Karl Marx

Understanding Race

As communists, we are primarily concerned with how classes form, interact, and struggle against one another. “History” is simply the accumulation of these struggles and how they develop, with contradictory elements leading to new social syntheses. How the classes express themselves amidst contradiction, then, is important for a qualitative understanding of fomenting class struggle, what tactics to embrace, and in what manner we must carry the banner of communism forward. Yet, it often becomes strenuous to identify what is an expression of genuine class consciousness, in comparison to oppressed classes simply mimicking the slurred drawl of bourgeois reaction. In a time of American decline this language becomes all the more delirious; Reactionaries have proven they can grasp onto the most radical of ideas and defang them, of course after stabbing the communist movement with their sharpest ideological edge. 

With this in mind, we draw our attention to the content of the racial politic: That is, the question of race, its relevance to communist organizing and the task of immediate communisation. The communist-activist space has spiraled into drastically different views on this topic. So much so that a “non-radical” bystander could be forgiven for mistaking this flurry of debate as one that doesn’t quite all gather under the communist masthead. And depending on who you ask, the genuine communists are only the few who wholeheartedly embrace race, or only the few who reject any notion of its existence, or better yet, the majority of communists who only have some vaguely important notion of race as an equivalent to class or other identities, not a fleshed out politic or rejection thereof. For as contentious as this debate is-especially in the United States-we feel that it is also fairly straightforward. Race, in its very essence, is an idea arising out of historical contradictions, one that has transcended its own immaterial nature by its imposition on material society. As Marx states on this phenomenon:

“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, is that it proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved forsaken, despicable being.” ¹

As such, race can be considered a nonreal analysis of social relationships: In existence it is a kaleidoscopic view of class society and development, and typically one that is limited to a previous historical consciousness of man, which misses the juncture at which the communist movement has arrived. Take the stereotypical European conquistador or mercenary of the 16th century, who is contracted out to plunder the riches of the New World. They travel great lengths, perhaps to come upon a Native tribal community, only to gather their form of social relations as more “primitive” due to the differing use of labor as well as the distribution of goods and value. Whether they knew it, the European was attempting to-informed by their knowledge of European social relations-assess the basis of class society within this tribal community. However, due to the history of consciousness before them, they can only come to the conclusion that this social hierarchy, culture, and distribution of the Earth is a product of genetic-cultural potential. Regarding the tribal community as backwards due to its lack of resemblance with European society, the European can only make a shallow phenotypical judgement of his own species. While we understand solely phenotypical variations in nature do not exemplify differing species, many a time man has weaponized alternative geospatial development in making conclusions based on these variations.

With the existence of eugenics, race science, and the centuries of recent developments in regards to social-racial hierarchy, we can conclude that racialist pseudoscience has been bled material. The imposition of race as a social category into industrial life, i.e. chattel slavery, the subsequent segregation of American social life and labor (including the labor market, trade unions, etc.) and the effects of deindustrialization on redlined communities, has made it a material social phenomenon which we will account for in the following section.

When our fellow communists debate race, they pine for its relevance to class. For the racialists it burns class, and for many of our comrades it is a pseudoscience. The latter position is correct on the ideological basis of race, for we are discussing an idea which is a metaphysical, improper understanding of social relationships. However, this position misses the codification of race into social relationships. Meanwhile, the former often misses the historical purpose of race science: As a distorted insight on class, it has been codified within class, forever tied to it. It is not something apart from class altogether, but always a means to analyze social relationships from a reactionary lens. It is a categorized race system which has placed, for example, Black and White workers on altogether different rungs of the social ladder. This is an aspect of labor value studies as a whole, and ultimately is only most relevant when understanding both groups’ relation to the means of production.

The question is of course not whether race exists, but its relevance and if it can be reconciled. In an age of declining standards for all American workers (real wages, health, debt, safety, etc.) do the Black workers and the White workers find any similar footing? And of course, what is the current battleground between communism and reaction, and how are these groups responding to their own protagonization? 

Labor Value & Race in the Mid-2020s

In J. Sakai’s defining work ‘Settlers’, the author comes to the conclusion that laboring American Whites and Blacks have never been class allies, citing the formulaic tendency of the former to ally with the bourgeoisie against the latter. Furthermore, they find the White “Euro-Amerikans” constitute the vast majority of the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeosie, and labor aristocracy, thus being overwhelming non-proletarian. We disagree with their understandings of class, labor, and labor value here, but any communist can contend with this: Through extending their own lifeforce, the American bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie have feverishly dealt out concessions to the White workers. Many of these concessions have been likewise weapons pointed at the Black workers: We can point to the myriad of segregated workplaces, unions, neighborhoods, towns, and entire cities.

In 2025, this relationship extends through a reflection on each group’s share of social life. Let us look foremost at class. While there is no data accurately describing the total nature of the US population’s class structure, we can work with income levels, employment, and small business ownership to understand these factors. As a baseline, the US population in 2024 was roughly 57.5% White (not including those of Hispanic or Latino origin), and 13.7% Black.² Studies that can trace small business ownership (enterprises with sub-500 employees) find that roughly 85% are majority White-owned, whereas only 3% are on the part of Black Americans.³ Furthermore, in 2024 the median household income for Whites was roughly $92,000, while Black households made about 60% of that figure at $56,290. They were also the only racial group to see a decrease in gross household income-not even accounting for inflation- at a rate of 3.3% between 2023-2024. In this same time period, Whites saw no marginal decrease, and Asian ($121,700) and Hispanic ($70,950) households saw 5.1 and 5.5% increases in household income, respectively.⁴ Black Americans over 16 also held an unemployment rate of 7.8% compared to the national average of 4.6%, while 16.4% of Black families fell under the poverty line, almost double that of the national standard at 8.5%.⁵ It is thus apparent that of any major racial group in America, Blacks continue to hold the least labor value per capita, and likewise contain the largest proletariat per capita. This last study extends outward to access to healthcare and educational attainment (specifically undergraduate degree attainment), correlating in a lower lifespan and limit to professional/white collar work for Black workers as a whole. We can also get into the myriad of statistics on anywhere from segregation to gun violence to proximity to pollution: These all remain linear with the Black population bearing a much more extensive burden than any other group, especially Whites.

Regarding the weaponization of labor value to reconstitute its own position, it is important to be said that across the country, union membership as a whole is not a particularly white phenomenon. Black Americans 16 and older are now unionized at the highest clip of any racial group, still at a limp 11.8%, compared to a paltry 9.6% for Whites, and 8.5% for both Latinos and Asians, respectively.⁶ At the same time, a relative lack of access to white collar work or any formative training means that the most robust and enriching union structures are still exclusionary, and Black workers are still relegated to menial service labor with far less compensation. Even some traditional, disproportionately Black trades have suffered. The pinnacle of trade unionism in Chicago, the Chicago Teachers Union, has seen an astonishing decline in Black public school teachers in just 10 years, as they have plummeted from 50% to 20% of the teaching workforce.⁷ Likewise, more “blue collar” trades all report relatively vast occupational segregation; As of 2021 most Black union membership was limited largely to various transit unions.⁸ Thus, even as Black workers are more likely to enter a union, the entry to membership is still reliant on their relatively little training received. We could regurgitate federal statistics further, but at this time the case seems to be clear with little objection. 

As struggles against value accelerate and undermine the capitalist world in longer crises, many Black workers are relegated to the most meagre of social lives. They are afforded almost no safety net, and are seeing declining conditions at the quickest rate compared to other racial groups. This makes the Black workers prone to combust at any moment, particularly with the onset of even deeper crises. At the same time, there is a power vacuum in the cities and deindustrial near hinterland, where liberal strongholds are proving not so strong. As the communist movement fails to show its own muscle, the main threat to working class abolition is yet another story of allocationist demands. On these grounds which we will study in the next section, we can only say this feature of Marxism, liberalism, and fascism is the primary enemy of the proletariat. With an urgency we must resist any attempt to carve up capital, as an all too familiar language is sinking itself amongst the Black proletariat.

Contending with Black Nativism 

It’s a sour Wednesday morning, and I’m in my car, driving home a handful of radical Black trade unionists. These proletarians were, and are to this day, some of the most resilient, advanced, and militant members of the American working class. A daily life compounded by capitalist misery on the edge of society, I had grown to admire their tenacity and raw strength amidst the decay. In these friends, I am convinced that there exists the ability for the working class to abolish itself. 

We had just finished an action, berating various Chicago Aldermen for being beholden to capital, opening up their communities to private finance and enriching themselves in the process, while leaving thousands of Black workers in Section-8 Public Housing’s most miserable conditions. It was a self-indulgent action, but for these unionists it had been meaningful to finally see the power in City Hall that had been so keen on working in darkness in their redlined and poverty-stricken neighborhood. Of course, that is how Chicago politics have always worked. Outside of the mayoral debates and pageantry in the heart of the city, the far-Southside, Chicago’s very own hinterland, is auctioned off every few years to private developers and the most debased of capitalists. Aldermen and neighborhood councils here usher in a wave of neoliberal development in the name of jobs, safety, and economic integrity. When the rug pulls and the jobs either amount to $16.50 at an Amazon warehouse or simply an empty plot of land, there is no organized opposition to rally against the entire process. Federal funds and grants paid for by taxpayers wind up missing or utilized dubiously by shadowy developers. Unemployment skyrockets, leading to more bouts of drug usage and supposedly random acts of violence, symptomatic of the rollercoaster to nowhere. Outside of a few uncomfortable moments, the Aldermanic machine will continue, and the working class will either grow nihilistic or revolutionary, if they cannot scrape together the means to leave Chicago’s outskirts altogether. Even if they seek revolt here, there are no faces to direct their pain. The private equity firm in California that bought up their housing project is not planning a visit to the property anytime soon, only intending to collect millions in annual revenue from the Feds to reward them for their safekeeping. Everything is dubious, everything is cloaked in fraud and sick mystery.

As the ride from Chicago’s Loop to its border with Indiana came to an end, we continued to rattle off our woes at the system. The topic, as always, breached the territory of the federal government. My unionist friends, politically conscious and full of stories to tell, frequently railed against it to no end; This of course was no problem for me. Joining in, I recounted how capital’s crisis only evoked more terroristic measures on part of Chicago, Illinois, and DC. 

“And these fucking pigs in the government, what they don’t give to these slumlords they give to immigration!”

I went on for a minute recounting how American tax dollars went directly back into the very tools of our demise, accumulation and allocation, when I realized I was being met with a car full of blank stares. After a moment of quiet, one of the younger unionists, roughly 30 years old, responded.

“Yeah, that’s right. But personally I don’t like all that money going to the immigrants up in Roseland” (the predominantly Black neighborhood directly north). “It’s a lot for their housing, not ours.”

One by one, other folks chimed in, echoing the same sentiment until we broached the topic of ICE itself. For my friends, they held strong beliefs that corrupt Democrats were siphoning money off to illegal Mexican or Puerto Rican immigrants, and that that the federal government had every right to deport them all. I pushed back on the mutual bond of labor, the enslavement the migrants face in relation to the menial service and logistical work the unionists undertook to feed their families. I let them out of the car, and before a last slam of the door against the light drizzle of the rain, the middle-aged woman who sat in my passenger seat shot me an exasperated glance.

“These politicians are doing everything for everyone besides us.”

In many aspects of this, she was right. This woman, I will call her R, lived in the Roseland and West Pullman neighborhoods all of her life. She grew up hearing stories about the glory days of Roseland, its commercial district packed to the brim with flashing lights, businesses, and children chasing each other through the street. In her childhood, through the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s, the decay had been immortalized in an avalanche of foreclosures, empty businesses, gang expansion and unemployment. Her own apartment complex, which had been close to 80% White until the late 70s, quickly became 100% Black, and the site of a string of murders and drug dealing activity. In truth her community is more newsworthy than its ever been, of course all for the wrong reasons. Outside of the housing, it doesn’t take much of a walk through the vacancies and abandoned buildings-turned trap houses to see what she’s talking about. Today there are but a handful of remaining businesses and Baptist or Evangelical storefront churches in the area, with everything else boarded up or caving in.

After I said goodbye to her and walked through the housing project, sitting in the living rooms of other union members and discussing life, the curiosity of the earlier conversation gnawed at me. I began to ask these friends about ICE activity, including the murder of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez. I expected natural apathy at a political question not overtly implicating Black workers, but was surprised to find a rage bubbling over in each unit I visited. In conversations with about 20-25 active union organizers and local agitators, friends that I looked up to and admired, support for ICE was unanimous, with only 2 having even neutral opinions on the matter. For some, the question was of Mayor Brandon Johnson and his inability to look after Black people. Others were concerned with the hotels and motels housing migrants, especially in nearby Roseland. Another predominant fear was the lack of safety in the area, and the proposition Trump made of sending the National Guard to clean up crime. Despite concerns about the allocation of wealth, all felt ICE was legitimate in its force, and were not concerned about the explosion of federal funding if it meant less migrants would be in Chicago or the United States, as well as criminals in general. The mangled string of ideology that I managed to tie together from each member, their life story, and local history of the area can adequately be described as Black nationalism turned Black nativism. Or, if we are to be correct, an ongoing decay of nationalist sentiment leading to its most likely offspring: Allocationist nativism and subservience to the American bourgeoisie. Let us continue.

  Once considered a bastion of radical politics, it has been roughly a half century since the epoch of Black nationalism and the Black power movements. Following its bloody dismemberment on part of the police State and numerous extrajudicial killings of movement leaders and youth, Black Power today feels like a relic of a bygone era. Its sentiment is still popular among activists, but any real movement for a Black nation has seemingly been wiped out by COINTELPRO. Which is why it is all the more surprising that its remnants have found an unlikely home with the conservative bourgeoisie, manifesting itself in opposition to the recent liberal-democratic anti-ICE movement. 

The anti-ICE movement is an agglomeration of things: Class interests, political consequences regarding the correction of capital’s labor quota, and racial and nationalist conflict. As the contradictions of capitalism buckle, the cheap labor of migrants is both systematically eradicated and glorified. The bourgeoisie of various industries grow shaky, fearing for their bottom lines, and will attack or sustain the migrant on this basis. Thus it is no surprise that ultimately, opportunists seeking to protect the bourgeois right to domestic extraction promise a return to status-quo American civic nationalism. This return entails no reform, but rather codifies the conditions prevalent so far this century: Growing poverty, alienation, and slavery. For the Black worker, this also guarantees the White supremacy of the State and American society at large.

Who else more than the Black worker would be incensed by this very proposition? A chasm of cries to “return to normal” by liberals and the Black liberal capitalist see the Black worker at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy, pressed into the most menial, degrading, and alienating of labor. Migrants continue to meet the inexhaustible needs of the bourgeoisie, and in exchange many will climb higher than the Black working class within a generation or two. Correspondingly, we have outlined the circumstances on which the Black workers hold the least labor value in American society, and the introduction of undocumented workers who-through no fault of their own-further drive down the value of Black labor. What’s left is a moral, racial, and national crisis in which Blacks and migrants are posed to engage in struggle against one another, both subjected to the degradation of value. Liberals only cough up a solidarity politic, choosing not to fan flames of class war but ask folks to be kind to one another. Communists, however, understand that the subject of Black and migrant misery is simultaneously the source of their potential allyship: Only workers themselves, as those that hold all of the labor power in society, have the ability to abolish their own codification as workers. In light of this, the bourgeoisie has decided to enlist class collaborators and racialists in an absurd nativist program.

As Black bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and workers lead all racial demographics in Democratic support (83% of Black voters cast ballots for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in 2024, 93% for Democrats in the House in 2022, 92% for Biden over Trump in 2020, 92% for Democrats in the House in 2018, 91% for Clinton over Trump in 2016, etc. etc.), both liberals and leftists have taken for granted Black consciousness.⁹ In place of communists building strength, many Black communities are sandwiched between useless NGOs, class collaborators, and abjectly dour political representation, all manifestations of their being left to the devices of bourgeois and local petit-bourgeois nonsense. Many times we White workers fail to notice these developments: After all, even the Black rulers tend to twist their lies in the language of racial liberation, love and freedom. 

All the same it makes for a dubious solution for the liberation of the Black proletariat. There is yet to be any evidence that Black capitalism, Black liberalism, or Black parliamentary language has granted even a degree of liberation for any proletarians. Thus while these industrial and local heroes prop themselves up-with the language of the Democratic stronghold in hand-Black workers draw away from this politic. When they do, they open themselves up to revolutionary sentiment. But as with any social vacancy, this also leaves room for the Right to swoop in if antagonized on the wrong line. Case in point: Race & Nation.

Black Power movements have sought to liberate the Black Race and Nation in what they identified as a land of settler-oppressors. The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, only has to perpetuate a fractional view of this national outline. In wake of the neoliberal order, the illegal migrant now represents a new generation of “settlers”, painted in a caricature as all nativist programs have done in the past. Using economic-allocative language (When will the resources be distributed to my group?), nativist campaigns appeal to the cold economic logic of supply and demand. In there is the kernel of truth that capital requires the influx of labor to drive down the cost of production. For communities having already faced collapse, it is then relatively easy to instill fear of an ever steeper decline on the horizon. It’s already there.

For my unionist friends, the most advanced section of the proletariat, they are ready to abolish capitalism in one swoop. But in this quest the question of resource distribution and racial history remains, flagrantly waiting to be broached by the opportune. Instead of communist protagonization on the prospect of wage abolition, it is both the bourgeoisie and much of the communist Left advocating vaguely for Black power and Black national interests. There can only be so much room for both, as they directly implicate each other. The abolition of the wage system implies the dissolving of the State apparatuses which upheld accumulation, while the construction of a Black ethnostate directly implicates the movement of migrants and their enslavement, as any and all nations will have allocationist demands. While most Leftists can agree that Black nationalism is surely an improvement on the conditions of today, this fails to approach the working class with any communist rhetoric or language. If we are to believe the workers and everyday people genuinely have the power to abolish work, we cannot at the same time point towards an intermediary stage of development where allocation prevails, where the workers fight each other for a declining pile of scraps.

Let us revisit the language of nationalism. The onboarding strategies of right-wing conspiracist groups like ‘Chicago Flips Red’, referencing the desire to turn Chicago into a Republican stronghold, have capitalized on this, often using progressive racial-nationalist rhetoric, slyly coating their American nationalism in a streak of Blackness. Utilizing immigration as a trigger point for the decline of American capitalism, CFR represents the conservative bourgeoisie’s willingness to incorporate Black people into a new, cosmopolitan American nationalism. This thesis can be seen in the decline of White supremacism after 2017’s infamous Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ Rally. Following the violent congregation of the far-right, more mainstream, palatable reactionaries took the chance to prosecute and sever ties with their racialist co-conspirators. In the wake of this, many far-right groups rebranded as nativist, nationalist types. The Proud Boys are one example of a group that is certainly racist, but ultimately prioritizing the Nation over the White race (perhaps to build power and pivot back to racialism later, but who can be sure). 

In this pivot, some of the far-right are finally courting Black American support for the National project, and it is beginning to seep into the trade unions and progressive organizations while their collaborationist leaders cry for a return to normal. Now, just as many great revolutionaries have waved the flag of allocationist nationalism, the far-right does the same. They, not the Democrat liberal, appear here as great cosmopolitan reformers, arguing that there is a place for Black America within America. It is the Democrats who want a continued reign of terror in Black neighborhoods, a continued lack of resources, a prolonging of wage slavery and sorrow. The Democratic establishment, with the great trade unions in tow, can only bow to normalcy to avoid their own contradictory nature. This allows new Rightists to weaponize economic backslide, health, education, and safety issues to prove these points. 

What is important to understand is that, even in the midst of a 10 point swing towards Donald Trump, the far-right has still failed to mobilize anything material in Chicago’s Black community. There is no movement. They hold little material power outside rhetoric. But we cannot underestimate them, on the fact that they have managed to capture the attention of alienated workers who are otherwise waging their own battle for survival against slumlords and the bourgeoisie. Circulation of their material has begun in its infancy. The task of communists at this moment is to emphasize our own strength, and illuminate the folly of allocative struggle. This can only be done with a physical presence and desire to cultivate communal relationships. Theories of what this may look like are to be thoroughly dissected, experimented on, and so forth. But we must retire the banner of race and nationalism just as we have of reform. This does not mean to pretend race is not bled material, but to emphasize the radical shattering of class and all of its transgressions.

Conclusion

While the bourgeoisie capitalizes on the common anxiety of allocation, the crux of this issue is always value. Value is the price of one’s being and penance for their consciousness. And it is still exceptionally clear that the Black workers have the most fraught relationship to value, on the understanding that their life force is bargained for on the most absolute cheap. Likewise, the remaining effects of chattel slavery and the ongoing bribes of the White working class have resulted in an American proletariat whose value has been codified by color, and which has often failed its historical mission. It has only led the more reactionary elements to further entrench themselves in genocide, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism. 

To ignore these stark contrasts is to ignore the ongoing bribes of the conservative bourgeoisie toward the Black workers, which is really no bribe at all and rather a defined calculation. All the same we must understand what impedes us: It is both the White supremacy of the nationalist anti-ICE movement, and the defensive racial-allocationist demands of the conservative bourgeoisie. In these contradictions the struggle for communism is as obvious as ever, as we must no longer attempt to play progressive bourgeois against one another. We must no longer envelope and tolerate any ideology of States and borders. 

The workers’ vices are those of their movement masters: Nationalism, Statism, Allocationism, Justice and Fairness and Moralism. They will only scream and cheer on the side of “either” bourgeoisie as they continue to wade in nihilist misery. In this time we can only raise to them a possibility of abolition and all the movement entails. We are workers against work, and in this sacrilege we have discovered that no idea is truly holy.

Footnotes:

1. Marx, K. (1844). Abstract from The Introduction to Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of Right. Marxists. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/law-abs.htm ↩︎
2. U.S. Census Bureau quickfacts: United States. (2025). https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI225224 ↩︎
3. Leppert, R. (2024, April 22). A Look at Small Businesses in the U.S. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/22/a-look-at-small-businesses-in-the-us/#:~:text=Looking%20at%20small%20businesses%20where,other%20Pacific%20Islander%20majority%20owners. 
   ↩︎
4. Scherer, M. K. and Z. (2025, September 9). Income in the United States: 2024. Census.gov. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-286.html ↩︎
5. Black/African American Health. Office of Minority Health. (2024b). https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/blackafrican-american-health ↩︎
6. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, January 28). Union Membership (annual) News Release – 2024 A01 results. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.htm ↩︎
7. Chicago Teachers Union. Facebook. (2025, January 5). https://www.facebook.com/ctulocal1/posts/over-the-last-decade-the-percentage-of-black-educators-in-cps-has-dropped-from-n/1008739441297210/ ↩︎
8. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023, January 1). Composition of the Labor Force. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/race-and-ethnicity/2021/#:~:text=Hispanics%20accounted%20for%2018%20percent,(See%20table%208.) ↩︎
9. Hartig, H. (2025, June 26). Voting Patterns in the 2024 election. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patterns-in-the-2024-election/ 
   ↩︎

References

• Marx, K. (1844). Abstract from The Introduction to Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of Right. Marxists. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/law-abs.htm
• U.S. Census Bureau quickfacts: United States. (2025). https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI225224  
• Leppert, R. (2024, April 22). A Look at Small Businesses in the U.S. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/22/a-look-at-small-businesses-in-the-us/#:~:text=Looking%20at%20small%20businesses%20where,other%20Pacific%20Islander%20majority%20owners. 
• Scherer, M. K. and Z. (2025, September 9). Income in the United States: 2024. Census.gov. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-286.html 
• Black/African American Health. Office of Minority Health. (2024b). https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/blackafrican-american-health 
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, January 28). Union Membership (annual) News Release – 2024 A01 results. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.htm 
• Chicago Teachers Union. Facebook. (2025, January 5). https://www.facebook.com/ctulocal1/posts/over-the-last-decade-the-percentage-of-black-educators-in-cps-has-dropped-from-n/1008739441297210/ 
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023, January 1). Composition of the Labor Force. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/race-and-ethnicity/2021/#:~:text=Hispanics%20accounted%20for%2018%20percent,(See%20table%208.) 
• Hartig, H. (2025, June 26). Voting Patterns in the 2024 election. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patterns-in-the-2024-election/ 

3 Feet on the Pedal

Capital is reeling. In its death throes it has the opportunity to not just unseat the fabric of class society, but to destroy the Earth we inhabit. Speaking frankly, the latter seems more likely to happen. Even if we are to throw off the shackles of Capital its vices have permanently scarred this planet, its rot seeped so thoroughly deep. Climate Scientists have long agreed that we are past the point of no return. Our strategies are no longer preventative, but are questions of how we even survive the incoming fallout. The worst part: most, or at least many, people acknowledge this.

What separates the Left and the Right is a matter of action, not observation.¹ The Dissident Right (Anti-Liberal Right) and the Far Left (Anarchists and Communists) both can offer a sort of descriptive writeup of society and its ills, where they break is the prescriptive role of action and solution.² However, there is one action where dissident factions find themselves tactically united on: Accelerationism.

Accelerationism, for those not in the know, is the broad range of ideas, tactics, and strategies that advocate for the hastening, or acceleration, of the material conditions. Oftentimes this presents itself as keeping dismal living conditions or making them worse, usually through acts of indiscriminate or targeted terror. Tactics such as these are found across history, regardless of time and place. Currently, accelerationism is found most common in right wing spaces. Groups such as AtomWaffen and The Base seek to ferment a racial war through terroristic means. Mike Ma writes his thinly veiled fetish novels pretending to be political theory. Militias train for “The Great Reset”. Similarly on the left, groups engage in targeted terror campaigns against the State, anarchists have their own writings, such as Desert. Looking at the past, even the Narodniks represented a form of proto-accelerationism. What unites these people in their strategies is one thing: alienation.

One of Capital’s most pernicious evils it inflicts upon society is the widespread alienation that is thrust onto humanity. Marx, as well as a multitude of writers since him, has already described capitalist alienation at length, so I’ll save myself the effort of relitigating his words. If we examine accelerationist and terroristic means, one of the subconscious goals is the hijacking of the Spectacle (Re: Debord). In the spectacle-ist and capitalist economy, attention is just as meaningful of a currency as the U.S. dollar. Corporations vie for your every second of attention. Patents based on “consumer retention” are created everyday. Your algorithm is hand catered to keep you consuming for as long as possible (as well as in the most profitable way). It should be no surprise then that accelerationists do not carry out their terrorism anonymously. 17 year old white supremacists adorn their father’s AR-15 with the slogans of their movement. Attacks are livestreamed online with clips disseminated across social media. Every bomb that goes off is paired with a communique sent to every local and regional news station. The Spectacle is reinvented. 

Hijacking the Spectacle

Or is it? Terrorism does little to move the needle towards revolution or societal collapse. What terrorism does offer is attention. To the disaffected young man who is alienated from his labor, his family, humanity, and himself what better life can exist than to be “canonized” and venerated amongst the dozens of other alienated youth?³ Accelerationism is less of a coherent political ideology and more of the exasperated sigh of the oppressed (to bite off Marx). In one final act, they attempt to write the world in their image and wrestle control of the Spectacle. It’s similar to the way suicide allows one to end their life “on their own terms”. Ultimately, both terrorism and suicide are worthless acts. Any individual act to subvert the Spectacle will ultimately be reformatted into itself and become commodified. It also fails to notice that Capital doesn’t need external acceleration to ramp up its contradictions. It’s already headed on that path.

Even though terrorism offers up no real political strategy, one cannot help but notice the sort of romantic appeal it has. For a brief moment, whoever has carried out the attack protagonizes themselves. They are vilified and reviled; venerated and celebrated. Their slavish, cattle-like life is up-ended and their legacy is immortalized, for better or for worse. Who can blame them? Who wouldn’t choose to burn bright like a gas-soaked fire, even if for only a moment? This is the true danger of accelerationist thought, it preys on the pre-existing decay of social cohesion. Whether consciously or not, the individual worker seeks to protagonize their meaningless and futile existence. The easiest way to achieve this is to play by the rules set out by society, that is to hijack the spectacle.⁴

“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as an instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.”

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

From birth, mankind is thrust into the world of communication. Babies are urged to utter their first words. When they grow up they are introduced to picture books, although recently electronics are substituting physical media. News, romance, entertainment, friendships, everything on this planet ruled by humanity is mediated through the lens of communication, and in our current technological landscape the digital world of the Spectacle has united our communications even more. At first glance it would seem that the globalization of the communication economy has given way to a more democratic world, but upon closer inspection the only victors in this outcome are of course those that have previously won the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries: the bourgeoisie. It makes no difference to our overlords that there exists pockets of free, radical action online where information is disseminated openly. We use their very platforms to communicate our disdain for them, yet they have already made their dollar. In terms of the question on accelerationism, every new terroristic campaign carried out has a direct, proportional relation to revenue earned. In fact there are already entire online industries dedicated to profiting off these “tragedies”!⁵

When placed in the realm of conscious acts, accelerationism does little to actually accelerate. Racialized attacks against minorities only seek to alienate the dissident right from mainstream, normal conversation, on the other hand left wing terror only gives credence to the legitimacy of the state and allows for further repression and state terror. The only acceleration happening is the hegemony of the capitalist class. This is, of course, not to say that there is no place in our movement for violence, or even terroristic, tactics; it is to say that our intention and expectation with these should be different.

Accelerationism not only fails in its aims, but it also operates off the same teleological framework that it, supposedly, rivals. Examining the understanding of history that accelerationism puts up shows that it is merely the developmentalist worldview that most Marxists already subscribe to, simply inverted. Marxists, mainly those of the Leninist variety, already claim the stageist view of history. What is accelerationism if not flipping the role of the stageist development on its head? In both cases the Marxist and the accelerationist both believe in the power of the proletariat to seize the reigns of history with their own hands. Regardless of the tactical and strategical differences, the teleology remains similar.

Now or Never

Bordiga once said something to the effect of “Long Live the Butcher Hitler who works in spite of himself to bring about the proletarian revolution”. While his quote has been incessantly satirized by detractors, there exists a bit of truth to it. As the rate of profit falls to an unstable level, the bourgeoisie will employ ever more reactionary and cutthroat tactics. We can see this presently in America with cuts to the most basic of social security and welfare. Accelerationism’s most ardent warriors are not the Tiqqunists blowing up railways or the Pagan Neo-Nazi teenager who shoots up his school; but instead are the federal bureaucrats, liberal politicians, and architects of the current administration.⁶ 

To this we have little to say but:

LONG LIVE THE BOURGEOISIE AND THEIR CLIQUE, WHOM SO GRACIOUSLY WORK IN SPITE OF THEMSELVES TO BRING ABOUT THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION AND THE END OF CLASS SOCIETY!

Notes:

1. In terms of “Left” and “Right”, I am acknowledging the farthest ends of either spectrum. Any of those who subscribe to a sort of “Anti-Liberal” politics. ↩︎
2. This is of course not to mention that the Right (both in its Liberal and “Anti-Liberal” wings) offers no real solution to the question of Capital. They can only muster up varying forms of reaction in whether they want to uphold Capital, which they already identify as a negative force on society, or to return to a pre-capitalist lifestyle (physically and socially impossible). ↩︎
3. Canonization is a practice commonly found on the accelerationist and white supremacist “Terrorgram” network where individuals that commit acts of mass terror and violence are “canonized” as Saints in the movement. Many recent shootings have had references to certain “saints”, such as the Columbine Shooters. ↩︎
4. Similar to the role alienation plays in this article, I will not spend time discussing the minutia of the Spectacle, if you don’t understand what it is I implore you to read Debord’s seminal piece Society of the Spectacle and then return to this article. ↩︎
5. Look up the “True Crime” Community. ↩︎
6. There are some accelerationist theorists who arrived at pro-capitalist positions. Nick Land came to support a wider form of pro-capitalist acceleration in that technological development would allow for a self over becoming of the social and economic. This is of course not mentioning his current ketamine fueled anti immigrant tirades he goes on, but I digress… ↩︎

Editor’s Note: This is an outside submission not written by either of the editors of Avant!. The text has been minorly changed for grammatical reasons, but other than that it is largely unchanged. Enjoy this report back from the front. To bite off the author: Abolish Borders, Abolish Nations, Abolish Work.

When we refer to white collaborators in our present moment, we speak not of whites nor of isolated white liberals. Rather, we speak of the ideology of the entire anti-ICE movement, including its “abolitionist” dress. White collaborationism is simply class collaboration with the bourgeoisie, enveloped in a civil respectability and solidarity politic. It places faith in a national project and legal system that, so far, has only ever granted mere concessions to the white proletariat. We can consider this civic legal nationalism one of the strongest remaining blocks to real white solidarity: Abolition of the race system itself.

This ideology has decapitated a working class struggle and left it to run around aimlessly in the name of human rights. And at this moment it is simply tragic timing: The last few months of Chicago have been incredibly bloody, with September through November marking an intense escalation on the part of federal agents and their allies. The surveilance state has made leaps and bounds in its implementation, armed not only with a fleet of rental cars but helicopters, drones, and facial identification sofware, hunting and searching for life without discrimination. For the majority of this time they have been victorious in a total domination of even white collaborationist aims. In this we find a resistance on multiple fronts: Against the federal State, the State of Illinois’s jurisdiction, and the local City-State itself. Yet on every front and on every issue, we face a churning dilemma of collaboration which leaves neither mark nor scar but jovial cheers.

Questions of what is liberatory are locked with a padlock and kept in high places. Class enemies continue to sink their teeth into the anti-State movement, subverting it, fracturing it and leaving it limp and lifeless. The classes themselves are brimming with contempt for each other. These contradictions propel us forward, but to where and what ends? This is the dilemma of whiteness and of white liberalism which plagues Chicago at this hour. Where are we going?

Recent Developments in Chicago

If we looked at the Anti-ICE mobilizations in Chicago from Trump’s inauguration to August, one could be mistaken for thinking this was not a mass movement at all. Citywide, nonprofits (mainly the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR)) both dominated and restrained the scene in the name of optics and incrementalism. It would mostly be a display of sadistic fanfare; Allusions to humanity and human rights were made, and that would be decisively it. These nonprofits held a flurry of public events and “training” sessions during this time, which served to entrench white allies in a placated white hero’s liberalism. The solution to thee burgeoning issues, ICIRR argued, was cheery solidarity politics. Or rather, a moral politics of the bystander. In this warped view of class expression, to look out for one’s neighbor meant to watch them be mauled by federal agents before being shipped off to a prison camp. The real work was in standing to the side and documenting the kidnapping as it occurred. ICIRR succeeded in pushing this view because of a lack of radical resistance in this sphere of organizing, but also because they employed white politics better than any other. They knew exactly how to facilitate an environment where their own bourgeois identity served as the basis for their supremacy, not class basis, tactical expertise or skillset. They simply had money and were the undocumented rights organization, which allowed them to isolate and dismember communists as outside agitators or federal agents looking for a fight. This tactic would be repeated by the white liberal movement several times, which we will discuss shortly. But it’s important to note by the end of Spring, there were very few raids. If you did show up to one of these few and refused to comply with the State, or worse, engage in community defense, you would be find yourself “documented” (doxxed) by their extensive volunteer network, segregated from the rest of the movement, and even physically fed to the Chicago Police Department.

ICIRR was not the only organization attempting to capitalize on the popular interests of the time, though. Several large Communist Party/Popular Front marches were held downtown, culminating in a mazy PSL demonstration in early June. There, police vehicles were quietly attacked, and the streets of Chicago’s Loop bubbled in enthusiasm. The outside agitators bounced around with glee as CPD were pushed back several times by a wave of demonstrators. After putting up a meek fight, the city’s forces ultimately buckled its knees and allowed marchers to descend on them as they wished. For all of this effort, even a march of this trajectory was self-policing. ICIRR-trained civillians brandishing American flags droned on as blocced anarchists set their sights on property. It seemed half the crowd was there for an uproar, and the remaining group was there to rehabilitate the American Exceptionalism we have so sorely missed. This contradiction would not really boil over, as much as solidify the latter’s rightful place in the movement by the day’s end. And the day would end, with the more radical splinters of the march culminating in a massive police kettle. Small afflictions to property aside, the city kept churning on. After this day many radicals were turned off to these events if they had not been already. Marches drew less and less crowds as July encroached. Likewise, ICE would show themselves sporadically, but with few in strength it was just as possible those dwindling mobilizations were protesting an army of ghosts.  In Chicago we felt safe and sound, with our movement leaders reassuring us that there would be no need for rebellion.

After the flashy demos leading in early June,  small groups of radicals and liberals alike began targeting ICE’s downtown Loop infrastructure. The only targets where ICE had been consistently present, this included a courthouse ICE camped out of to snatch migrants, as well as the DHS Chicago offices. Daily lookouts formed at these locations, culminating in a blockade of the courthouse’s parking lots which deterred ICE vehicles from rolling up unsuspecting. These insulated actions had varying degrees of success, but ultimately regressed into ICE Watch groups and spectacular protesting. Anarchists and a few radical liberals would muster a few numbers each workday, standing with signs and banners but no real struggle. If ICE were to show up, and they often did, the lack of crowd (especially at the DHS office) would mean there was little to be done anyway. Thus these displays soon died. 

Chicago ultimately felt like a passenger to the wider movement and the decisions of the federal government. But as summer drew to a close and the leaves began to turn, so did the disposition of the federal government toward a Chicago-centric invasion. Whereas the working class could have learned from previous lessons around the country (i.e. Minneapolis, Los Angeles), we were wholly unprepared for anything the State were to throw at us. Movement leadership only doubled down on the white nature of our work, splitting the vast majority of the working class into vaguely distinct factions.

On September 8th, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced ‘Operation Midway Blitz.’ Staged by Trump as “training grounds for our military”, hundreds of ICE agents bashed their way into the fabric of our city.

Old Tactics, Old Faces

This brutal operation touched every corner of Chicago, with a special emphasis on the Latino majority Southwest Side. It was immediately successful: In the first 13 days of the offensive alone, DHS claimed over 550 people were kidnapped by ICE. As this unfolded, various tactics became favorable among activists still under the ICIRR umbrella. The primary form was to assemble rapid response (RR) groups within each neighborhood or special geographic location, where local activists respond to ICE sightings upon receiving a notice from ICIRR. This infrastructure had been laid months ago by ICIRR in the hopes of providing civil and restrained responses to ICE activity; As stated earlier, ICIRR wanted responders to solely document ICE. Furthermore, all the RR groups report to ICIRR on their activities, enlist their membership to complete ICIRR’s trainings, and provide ICIRR their leadership’s personal identities. ICIRR is also notorious for monitoring these groups personally, through injecting their staff or allies into RR projects they would otherwise have no relation to. In return, RR groups receive information about ICE activity in the city, but ICIRR still maintains a monopoly on what information is allowed to reach the public. If an incident doesn’t receive their rubber stamp, it will go unanswered by any RR groups and sink quietly into the past. This has directly allowed numerous kidnappings to take place, and implicitly altered the fate of countless more.

There were many obvious issues with these tactics, beginning with the liberal nature of whom they answered to, which prompted some nieghborhoods to implement RR groups with their own tactical basis. Instead of preaching ICIRR’s bystander framework, notable groups introduced a diversity of tactics into their community norms. Albeit a long and ongoing struggle, it ultimately proved successful in onboarding sympathetic community members and building a reassuredly critical space. One that was open to questioning capitalism, activist’s authority, and the State. This of course earned the ire of ICIRR-adjacents, who continously sought to infiltrate these spaces and undermine their membership. Ultimately they were opportunistic enough to keep radical elements around, as long as the radicals were outnumbered and uncomfortable.

When ICE presence began to multiply further, ICIRR shifted their primary focus from solely reprimanding activists. Yet after long debacles, doxxing, and community drama, sat the truth that rapid response was not a viable tactic in preventing kidnappings. By the time reports had been made, verified, and rapid responders dispatched, ICE had either located their target or managed to escape the premises. In a chance scenario where networks could muster a handful of responders, they would be reduced to shouting and waving their phones at caravans of armed agents. Thus even with ballooning memberships and public interest in stopping ICE, it became obvious responding was not enough to complete basic community defense, let alone push for a romantic class struggle that the few were pining for.

While thousands across the city continued to pour into the rapid response networks, by September a second tactical frontier had emerged: Broadview. After some spectacular protesting and arrests at the turn of fall, this tiny Immigration Processing Center in a small western suburb of Chicago started to draw headlines. As a processing center and temporary prison for hundreds, it held an ultimate importance in conducting ICE operations across the Midwest. Without it, ICE would not be able to transport its prisoners to nearby airports and out of the country. Likewise, Broadview is an immense accumulation of federal capital and personnel. Should either avenue be frustrated in any serous capacity, should the Processing Center be taken out of the picture, Operation Midway Blitz would have been seriously jeopardized. Outside of the jurisdiction of CPD and with no hegemonic control from controlled opposition, Broadview quickly became the hot new thing on everyone’s minds. Marxist-Leninist cronies flocked there for press conferences as Anarchists were routinely arrested; Catholics prayed the Rosary while Democrat politicians fawned in front of a seas of cameras. It was an ideological Wild West, a circus of performance and spectacle bent by the underlying truth that something historic could really be done here.

What were the outside agitators doing at this time? A new consensus resulted in rapid response being shelved at this time, as scores of activists continued to respond to calls and ultimately failed in stopping ICE. Instead of roaming around after a call had been sent out, the Leftists had its first site to coalesce. And with Broadview it represented a choke point, a definitive location that could be broadcasted to the working class to mobilize.

Initially these calls were restricted to familiar contingents of activists, and the composition of the crowd typically represented as such. While a few loud liberals and clerical opportunists gathered for the photos and press, many anarchists and communists also took Broadview seriously. As the initial clashes commenced, anywhere from a few dozen to 150 activists mobilized every Friday and Saturday outside the facility’s front steps. When cars packed with prisoners entered and exited the building, activists routinely attempted to block them from access. Due to collaboration with the local police departments and general opportunism from hopeful electeds and clergy, these first experiences were relatively muted and tame. Crowds would surge to block a vehicle entering the facility, police and ICE would enter the mix, and dearresting was virtually impossible due to swarms of press restricting activists from each other. As a scare tactic, ICE was able to slap each detainee with federal charges, albeit said charges didn’t always stick. Regardless it proved effective in isolating detained activist from the outside, and ensuring that dearrest opportunities were limited in the future.

In understanding how the white collaborators acted here, we have to understand the planning of Broadview’s protests at this time. The planning forum was “autonomous” in name and completely open to anyone who had attended a protest, thus becoming both unsecure and ideologically eclectic. Two blocs quickly began to form. One group, the nationalists, were mobilized by clergy and hopeful Democratic lawakers. They spouted off for civic nationalism and legal reform. The other group at this time, the anti-nationalists and communists/anarchists, had less vocal members yet slightly more approval from the general crowd. It goes to be said that the vast majority of this planning forum, which typically counted about 75 to 100 people, were relatively unideological in scope. As such, these two groups clashed often for the approval of the remaining majority, and many messes were made along the way.

The most eventful happened to be on the removal of any electeds, social media influencers, reporters, or otherwise public figures from this chat for the sake of transparency and combatting careerism. For example, a Democrat in this forum happened to be a member of the Illinois National Guard, which clearly confounded the ability to operate securely. The liberals of course rejected this on the basis of being exclusionary, and quickly sunk their teeth into radicals for being abrasive. Regardless, a vote was eventually held, and every single radical petition had been won. Yet the very next day when radicals took to the forum and announced the results, several liberals alleged the vote to have been rigged and/or simply a false vote. They swiftly petitioned with clergy and were allowed to stay. It was sheer irony then those who have most faith in democratic process quickly jumped to dissolve this one.

This stage in planning ultimately led to much of the anti-nationalist group bowing out of the tactical debate, and operating completely autonomously again. Yet even still, the next mobilizations responded by drawing on crowds that dwarfed the previous ones. We can say at these later protests, around mid-September, there existed anywhere from 250 to 400 protestors at absolute peak. Messages were muffled, and attempts to rein in on the movement by Democrats and clergy alike were mixed. With a shutdown of the facility-and its subsequent repurposing by the workers-as an absolute goal, protestors began fighting back, utilizing shield wall formations, de-arrest tactics, and responding to heaps of tear gas by either diffusing cannisters or throwing them back. Some prominent liberals at this time took to social media to denounce these actions and joined hands with the State to paint the angry masses as the primary source of violence. The liberals attempted to mute the movement into something they could control and utilize to advertise their own likeness, but with Broadview a new frontier, their strategy was untested. Just as quickly as some politicians entered into the fray at Broadview with glee, they exited (albeit not exactly kicking their feet; Some careers were assuredly made by these antics). Broadview was now consolidated as a mostly autonomous protesting scene.

What was to follow after these splinters and spontaneous actions of resistance soured the mood, however. Following attempts to form another, more comprehensive shield line and push ICE out, they installed a chained fence some 20 or 30 yards from the facility. Heavily militarized with a tank, snipers, and a swath of armed Special Response Team units, any hope of an offensive seemed to have been foiled. This did not stop ICE from continuing to shower activists with less-lethal munitions, including rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper balls, and eventually a pattern emerged. A docile crowd is angered by the sight of agents or blacked-out buses, begin shouting and pushing toward the fence, ICE opens the fence and all hell breaks lose until the crowd ends up even farther away from the Processing Facility than where they started. This period would last a few weeks, marked by liberal calls for bourgeois peace. Earlier, the liberal peace message had been shattered by terror and brutality; Now with the masses having little alternative, nationalists had a chance to regroup, and reinforce these ideological shackles. It was at this time that many radicals seemed to abandon Broadview as a lost opportunity.

Despite this trough, numbers continued to swell, so much so that Illinois State Police entered the circus by October. Compared with the erratic behavior of ICE and their SRTs, the ISP proved to be a composed and methodical force. Having been trained in crowd control tactics, ISP engaged in more directly physical conduct than ICE’s “shoot from afar” strategy. Wielding batons, ISP battered and brutalized activists with no remorse in their early encounters. They also established a stronger perimeter of the facility, and collaborated with even more local police departments to put the surrounding streets and neighborhood under a microscope. Protestors were also kettled into blocked-off walkways even farther from the facility, not even being able to take the street as they had rountinely done in weeks past. This was a thorough crushing of the movement, something disembodied and hardly resemblant of the clashes that had previously taken place with ICE. This was a genuine occupation by Illinois State forces, and one that they consolidated overnight.

Many were still ready for a long-term fight at this time. This illusion shattered when leading clergy, and several nationalist activists attempted to broker a peace deal with Illinois State Police. Done without the consent of any other individuals within the planning forum nor on the streets, this group attempted to place themselves as leadership of the entire movement. In true spirit of collaboration, they told the same State Police force that had been crushing demonstrators on a weekly basis that: 1.) They needed special protections and safety measures, 2.) The State Police needed to de-escalate, and 3.) If they didn’t like an owner of a pack of dogs this group would sic the scary anarchists once more on the Police. It goes without saying that ISP didn’t take this exchange incredibly seriously, and this ultimately just led to further discontentment in the entire anti-ICE camp.

Having faced severe repression and isolated by collaborators, radicals took note of both the errors of rapid response and Broadview. Rapid response, while feeling critical, had the right idea of community defense but offered no real cover. Broadview offered a tactical site for hundreds to gather at, but felt completely lost after over a month of severe repression. What was theorized next was a combination of community defense and a proper site. To do this, radicals would need to refamiliarize themselves with the working class.

The Workers & the World

Just as quickly as many communists and anarchists bought stock in Broadview, they were to dump all hopes in fomenting revolt. The loss described prior encapsulated the sheer lack of direction felt, hitting a brick wall in the State that simply overpowered the white hesitance of the Broadview protests. Now activists had to search past a damning indictment for something new, and that would show itself in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.

Some 5 weeks prior, ICE and CPD collaborated once more in rounding up migrants and activists alike. The result was the use of lethal munitions against a female driver, as ICE agents shot into her car multiple times before she fired back. The detainments and these actions prompted a wide response from the community, where over 100 locals quickly mobilized. Some threw projectiles at agents. The road was shut down, with ICE eventually having to draw back and escape with the help of a CPD line. While there was no victory today, it reminded activists of the potential of local hotspots. Even with an SRT detachment and the help of local police, ICE was quickly outnumbered by a mass on their own turf.

Fast forward a week and the impetus shifted once more to the workers themselves. As ICE staged outside locations where migrants regularly coalesced, this manifested itself in their picking up day laborers at the Back of the Yards Home Depot on 47th and Western.

There, a community center has been built to decisively combat the raids and ensure as much safety as possible for migrants. To varying extents, this has been somewhat successful in doing so. Several times, agents flocked to the area only to be turned or chased back by the community. In other circumstances, the community was simply able to prepare spaces for migrants to hide. Regardless, the communalizing of the space provides for distinct relationships between activists and locals, and the regularity of both groups mean they can depend on each other beyond community defense. Over food, coffee and agitprop, the most meaningful interactions between the two are shared.

The primary issue is that even if property is repurposed, this does not mean it is communised. That is, it does not mean property is not beholden to capital. In fact, the current practice just mitigates the recirculation of capital. And it is not just activists still have to gome home, thus inserting a repurposed space back into capitalist life; Community defense alone is awfully neoliberal. Every laborer escorted to the back of a pick-up truck is an activist assisting in slavery. And there is no glory in subjugation, no matter how spectacular the shape of resistance has occasionally taken. This itself is its own form of tacit white collaboration.

As many are reflecting on this time period, the true goals of the movement need to be discussed. The anti-nationalists can either show the working class the nature of the antagonism that exists, or collaborate on their own front for community defense. The latter is not without merit: The radical are the few who have taken the most leadership and have been the most beaten, time and time again. But we have concerns with recent assessments of this movement’s success on the grounds that they maintain the capitalist status quo. There is no need for a solidarity politic. ICE is a State enemy, yes, but we are not here just to fight ICE. We are not here just to fight CPD, or ISP, or CBP. Our scope includes all of the former as well as class abolition itself. We exist to put an end to our miserable condition. 

Black Disenchantment with White Identity

Editors Note: This section encompasses our questions regarding tenant organizing work being done on Chicago’s Far South Side, and the role of the Black proletariat in relation to a white movement.

Outside of white collaborator bases, this invasion ironically had more support from the far South and West Sides. Trump and ICE touted this as a pretext for both military rule and a matter of public safety. For many Black workers, they believed that their communities would be safer as a result. In this, they took on the white collaborationist views of the other bourgeoisie, who otherwise had but a few scattered ethnic White strongholds in Chicago.

This is symptomatic of a wider issue: The movement’s own white identity with the class base most subjugated in Chicago for over a century. As a foundation it is wrapped in slurred nationalist drawl. It is clear the Right’s political language is appealing for the Black worker, but also there is a notable absence of the ICIRR-adjacent political landscape even making its way to Black neighborhoods. Not that it would do much good. The legalists and nationalists parrot those things which many Black proletarians have come to know are wholly untrue proclamations. The bourgeoisie have been attempting to sell the world a vision of Chicago before ICE, and the petit-bourgeoisie and white liberals could not have been more enthusiastic to buy. Likewise, the Latino sections of the city  have seen the most ICE presence, and understandably are participants in this visionary spectacle. The group this vision most dismembers is the Black proletariat, and the liberal foot soldiers have made no use in catering to them. We call these out as much as we must call out our own spaces. For Chicago to ever communise, it would require most sections of the proletariat to come together or simply revolt at the same time, due to similar causes. Our failure to engage with the Black proletariat, then, represents the ongoing failure to alter the content of this movement, if it can even be so. 

Just as tenant organizing was pivotal in shifting Los Angeles’ community defense into more offensive content, tenant struggles have been engaged with on Chicago’s Far South Side. The nature of these unions are problematic in the same way that any trade union movement is such. There is a magnificent vehicle being built off the struggles of so many workers and their families, fighting against billionaire slumlords who live across the country. The growth of these tenants as they continue to hold up the struggle and extend it to their neighbors is the kernel of communism that we wish to seek. And after almost a year of struggle, these tenants have been mobilized to fight for a seat at their management’s table. As much as it is impressive, in the heart of a community that has been entirely left to rot by the city, we have to engage in self-criticism when understanding that this union function only breeds a content reformism. This may be enough to keep the workers alive a bit longer, but it does not fundamentally alter anything.

Thus, when tenants are engaged with on the basis of migrant struggles, a behavior is exhibited similar to that of the student being asked to step off university. This union is phenomenally being granted its seat in community administration, and wishing to manage wholeheartedly. We fear how quickly this giddy to manage becomes manifested in a gleeful casting aside of other symptoms of the proletarian condition.

We have to remind ourselves that the Black workers’ opposition to this movement is not on the grounds that it is impossible to engage in both migrant and Black struggle. But rather, that the movement itself has been sanitized and stripped of its class character, thus granting it an opposition from Black workers. The question is of how to rid both communities of the capitalist in one swoop.

Cutting Ties With Ideologues

The collaborators have done an immense job in securing Chicago for ICE. But even radicals are dooming themselves to haggle over the price of their soul. To defeat ICE,  we need to defeat the sanctity of the working class. That is, to stop viewing workers as mystical cattle to be herded, but as a contradiction which be only be unclassed through revolutionary struggle. So far, the movement in Chicago has not been reformist, let alone revolutionary. It is simply a scrap of activists and workers fighting to maintain the status quo. We have to break with this decisively,as  nearing December the presence of ICE remains.

Abolish Borders, Abolish Nations, Abolish Work.

Editor’s Note: There is a PDF version of this text at the bottom of the article. Feel free to download and share. – L.V.

Marx’s Severed Head

A flagrant misunderstanding of our revolutionary tradition has seen Marxism codified into a historical ideology; This error has enclosed historical-political and historical-economic (the realms of bourgeois science and allocation) speculations and passed them off as eternal truths. Instead of changing the world, the overwhelming majority of Marxists now seek only to interpret it, to identity objects as they currently exist. To commit what Marx himself considered pseudoscientific analysis in his own critique of political-economy. In essence: To end history in the age of liberalism.

Likewise, the Marxists constitute the most outwardly reactionary elements of the communist left. In the United States, their representatives spend their time sandwiched between parliamentary reformism, spectacular protesting, class collaboration, and chasing Anarchist shadows. Through building their Parties and organizations external to the movement of communisation itself, these mediators have warranted themselves a precious role in making revolution. This of course has come at the cost of revolution in practice. Their philosophy simply pools together transient clumps of activists, and/or divides the proletariat along liberal-bourgeois lines. Just like Bernstein and the bourgeois democrats sought the death of revolutionary social democracy, Marx’s own followers have sought his swift decapitation.

Thus, it becomes almost impossible for any communist -that is, any subject of capitalist alienation who is conscious of the real existing movement for communisation- to earnestly call themselves a Marxist. In order to properly address these issues with the relevant currents of such a diverse tradition, we will discuss the philosophical content of leading Marxists and their recent discrepancies in action. We speak of many tendencies here: The DSA’s concoction of reform and revolution, Leninist-inspired PSL, Leninist-role playing FRSO, and the Maoists and libertarian communists of varying cliques and tendencies. In these organizations we have analyzed and sometimes even collaborated with “Democratic Socialists”, “Orthodox Marxists”, “Marxist-Leninists”, “Marxist-Leninist-Maoists”, “Gonzaloites”, “Councilists”, and “Autonomists”. While there are various refutations of these historical tendencies, this article seeks to understand how they live and interact today.

Political Enthusiasm

Of any communist, it seems that the Marxist is always the most enthusiastic to engage in bourgeois politics. Outside of the Leftist Maoists and Gonzaloites (the more fringe of the general Marxist canon), each and every Marxist has tried and failed to penetrate this bourgeois apparatus. Whereas they conduct trench warfare and fight for mere inches on one another, this struggle is situated on a mountain of scraps. The DSA and Orthodox may be most guilty of this, but likewise Leninists cling to the illusion that running their programs in the realm of politics produces revolutionary potential in the platforming of demands. We emphasize that this cannot be any further from the truth. For example, glance around at how the Leninists, Trotskyists, and hardcore Stalinists hold their candles to the flame. Nowhere do any of these groups call for Communism, but for an enlightened welfare state and the virtue of Man. The very moment one limits their work to the scope of this bourgeois science, is the moment communism cannot possibly bear its own weight. Communism and liberalism are incompatible, and liberal ideas of moving the masses likewise. 

But what of the momentum of successful Marxist electoral campaigns today? Do they not present our best opportunities yet to connect to the masses? Simply put, no. The movements of Zohran and DSA’s allies represent the pinnacle of anyone from Bernstein to the Roosevelts to Mussolini. To be clear, we can have our own feelings regarding conditions potentially bettering for the proletariat. But whether a cookie or a crumb, Zohran, for example, has won his campaign due to the contradictions of capitalism propelling him forward. Of course New York City is unaffordable: Rent is infamously astronomical, food costs are rising still, and transport is not cheap. This is the real contradiction of capitalist life slowly grinding away at its own children, its inputs to production. This increases the feverish pitch of communisation, but also signals the loosening of the leash. With this comes the widening palate of the bourgeoisie and the befriending of the petit-bourgeoisie, possibly the most reactionary base in society. These groups will serve as allies to the political campaign in some respects, as many have done with charming Zohran. Demands for small businesses are even made in his own program! This contradiction is all fine, as it is only a contradiction in name: Together, the petit-bourgeoisie and social democrats are the true stopgaps to Communism. Historically these two have taken it on themselves to beat the life out of the communist movement, insofar as to turn around and ask their bourgeois masters for acceptance. This goes for any social democrat, from NYC to Minneapolis and so on.

The rest of the bourgeoisie may fear Marxists in office, yet this is precisely because they fail to study Marx or his contemporaries. For them, a 2% raise in taxes is the culmination of the real movement, of communisation in final form. If they were truly aware of an imminent revolutionary threat, they would raise taxes on themselves tenfold. So we can laugh at their childishness, but turn our noses up at these theatric practices. The sad tale is that this is not a trend of Democratic Socialists, but again of the majority of contemporary Marxist organizations. They adopted Marx’s political opinions at the time of writing the first edition of the Manifesto (i.e. raising taxes), and subsequently left the theoretical model to rot. 

Of course, the language of bourgeois politics is more than holding a program to the light or partaking in an election to seek concessions. It is a violent strain of thought that has found its way in Marxist theorizing and understanding of the world (see our work on Multipolarity for a more complete analysis). Every Marxist is an allocator of an absurd-typically nationalist-bent. By allocation we mean to take existing capitalist relations and diagnose the problem at distribution, not production itself. In this Marxists use a political understanding to sharpen their weapons and shape their campaigns. They will be the first to ask for fairness for entire peripheral State apparatuses and mystifying their proletariat, for better trade deals, for more diplomacy, and representation. They will instruct themselves on class struggle through the lens of geopolitics and devil’s advocacy of a lesser bourgeoisie (BRICS). None of these questions have to do with making war with the international bourgeoisie, but strengthening alliances on the false premise that our only option is collaboration!

Economics & Allocation

If the favored action of the Marxist is political, the favored language is economic. If you handed them the world today, they would promptly re-allocate the existing system and leave its functioning as is. We have discussed this extensively but from the wider-reaching tendencies. Yet be it any flavor of Marxism, even councilists or autonomists, and this typically stands. How so?

This is all due to the understanding many Marxists have of history: As a process of linear development. The idea that progress is pushing inevitability, and that the cycles of history always push us to a new epoch of development, a higher plane. If the revered Stalin was to be correct, the capitalist mode of production can be utilized to push forward socialist production. If not Stalin but Pannekoek, and it is the workers who should directly observe their own misery through the implementation of workers’ calculated management. This still rests on measuring productivity and various schemes of increasing productivity through coercion. If not Stalin not Pannekoek but Negri, and it is the workers who both should find glory in their own identity as worker, and strive to have autonomy over their localized poverty. Similar to the councilists, this is ultimately a new form of management. A more palatable one? Of course. But revolution breaks here yet.

We say this, writing with affinity for the questions Pannekoek and Negri have raised as well as their contributions to the communist movement: To synthesize the communist movement as a movement to manage capitalism is an error, precisely because new management does not break capitalist socialization. Similar to the errors of Stalin, we can call these forms of developmentalism or stageism, two of the primary enemies of the communist movement yet two critical elements of the Marxist canon. Let us continue.

Developmentalists may hold the belief that history is a process of economic development, but they stretch this to include the claim that the modern capitalist economy simply requires a higher stage of development for socialism. This can typically be contextualized in the praise of China’s great “modernization” or any other supposed region which has not undergone “sufficient” development for socialism. Likewise, stageism simply implies the existence of unique and linear historical stages of development, furthering the claim that from feudalism to early capitalism to late capitalism, we will finally arrive at socialism. To contend with these ideas seriously is just as reasonable as to submit to the Abrahamic God. Regardless, we address them both with their very liberal birthmarks.

The Stalinists and their offspring are the most rugged of developmentalists, this is true. They assumed they could develop the Soviet Union into Communism, they were proved to be wrong, and their ideas bounced around the globe as they took root in the minds of peripheral bourgeoisies and intelligentsias. Seize a nation, nationalize as one pleases, and modernize to a new socialist age. Now China and “Dengism”, or “Maoist Thought” is the rage. Yet this is the same exact deficiency that was found in Stalin’s project: A belief in the progress of humanity through defined stages, and that progress was implied through modernizing. Meanwhile the Chinese bourgeoisie launches even more attacks on the proletariat, both domestic and international. All in the name of developmentalism, it has become apparent that increasing economic output and efficiency does not breed a working class revolution.

The councilists and libertarian Marxists are more rigorous in their approach and earnest in class struggle. Recognizing the excesses of Russia’s bureaucratic nightmare, they have opted for a stage of Communism closer to the ground. But this is still yet a belief in a mostly linear transition and needless prolonging of capitalism, should it not last forevermore. The historical step “up” to toppling management and placing the workers at the seat is all too much similar to the Bolsheviks’ theses. They argue the workers’ liberation must be made through war with the bourgeoisie. We argue that war must be made with the entire mode of production, with the inputs of the mode of production-such as the workers, abolishing themselves as workers in immediacy. The mere fulfillment of capitalism’s contradiction without fomenting extra steps. These views are not reconcilable as long as workerism, Stalinism, or any “ism” clings to the real movement. 

We refer back to the introduction and implication that Marxists wish to “end history” in the age of liberalism here: They wish to imbue in the world the preceding Enlightenment notion that progress is not only necessary, but guaranteed. This is a thoughtful notion that attempts to make sense out of the history of humanity, but this does not make it less utopian. Stalin surmises the working masses will inevitably smash capitalism, Deng claims that the modern nation will give birth to true socialism; We cannot always be so sure. At every moment, our allegiance can only be with the working class and its immediate victory.

Marxists in Action

In our time and place, the Marxists are more likely to be at the services of the State than of the proletariat. Elections are one thing, peace-policing is another. At the advent of a wave of energy, they are in vests, hoping to quell the rage. It is their everlasting wish to bottle up the rage and save it for when they have prescribed it best fit. When this epoch never presents itself, they never admit defeat, but change the definition of success. These experiences are based on both Chicago’s Leninist-NGO marriage, the “Coalition Against the Trump Agenda”, and PSL’s own marches. These actions will draw anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people, feature platitudes of “fighting back” and “getting organized” before a masturbatory claim that these showings in themselves are a success. While these protests celebrated progressive culture in the downtown Loop, neighborhoods continued to be ravaged by federal agents. These bubble-like alternative realities are nauseating and deceptive. 

While these claims may feel too broad to be applicable to the many tendencies of Marxism, they are assurably in the nature of the dominant positions we are reviewing today. The Democratic Socialists, Orthodox, and Leninists are the first victims of their own ineptitude. Parroting Enlightenment ideals of progress and fairness, they have limited their own action to the accumulation of capital. While endearingly, the Maoists and Gonzaloites preach a gospel of “mass work”, they are still abject friends of accumulation and resolute nationalists, the basis of many an intellectual poverty. Their work thus consists of rousing “nationally-oppressed” communities on the basis of their identity or race, rather than from their potential to communise. They’ll next proceed with a push for civil rights for these nationalities on varying grounds. Likewise with the “less radical” variants of Marxism, they shoot themselves in the foot in a push for a fairer allocation of resources.

In a similar vein, the Marxists engage with trade unionism at an industrial level but only go so far as to jostle for the reins. In a city like Chicago, absolutely brimming with union activity (relative to the rest of the country), there is a completely compartmentalized trade union movement. Union representatives and ardent socialists meet with the bourgeoisie, haggle over the price of their members, and both will claim they have won a tremendous victory. Meanwhile the more critical Marxists devoid of hedge fund backing (see: PSL) will pine for a workers’ trade union movement. While romantic, this action is still the inverse of linear stageist philosophy and we cannot parse out a movement bent on reinforcing wage slavery. The workers do not yearn for work.

The many ways these groups act in relation to the proletariat is that of a teacher mistreating the learning of a student. By assuming the proletariat does not have the ability to abolish itself without canonised Marxist ideology, these revolutionaries dumb down, or altogether alter the most radical of the canon: The content of capitalism itself. For the proletariat, this places Communism on a political-economic-ideological mantle with liberalism, or conservative liberalism, of Democrats and Republicans. Something to be tried and tested within the confines of liberal democracy, and dispensed with after each experiment inevitably goes haywire. Instead of vying for the proletarian’s attention with a “new” ideological communism, perhaps we should just reject ideological communism in favor of Communism itself?

Dismembering Class Against the Wishes of Marxists

As per our work on the topic of ICE: Should the Marxists or other degenerations of liberalism triumph, we will be doomed to haggle over the price of our damnation. To scientifically allocate our share of life, our time of death, always evading the cause. 

The bourgeoisie is international, yet communisation is not a thought. It is a historical process inherent in our social tension now. This does not mean it is inevitable. Only the international working class, in a movement of abolishing itself, can fulfill this decisively. Thus, we say not “Long Live the Workers”, but “Abolish Work”. We seek to leave behind our miseries and sorrows in the Old World, to revolt and communise.

Refutations of Anarchism’s Value System

If not a historical Marxism, it is many a Communist’s pivot to Anarchism which can be just as troubling. To be transparent, we find ourselves sympathetic to Anarchism in the same way we might be of councilism or autonomism. We recognize its historical vindication in the errors of Marxism-Leninism, and especially with the rise of the Stalinists and Maoists. We recognize its place on the cutting edge of tactical approaches in America and worldwide, and its contributions as an ideology in imbuing these approaches with sufficient leverage to combat the State. Yet, when we recognize its relevance as a value system and historical ideology, we must also address its shortcomings. Like Marxists, Anarchists have fashioned-sometimes an even more obvious-historical ideology. Tracing back their rich heritage centuries, they also cling to the ideological burden that comes with these tactical innovations. We can refer to these as Anti-Authoritarianism, Freedom, Human Rights, Liberty, Justice, and so on. 

Most Anarchists remain committed to these values, and our intent is for these values to be dissected at once. We critique the usage of any value system for studying history. Even if we happen to agree that “authoritarianism” genuinely relates to something harmful, or deem it necessary to fight for a society with more “freedom” or “liberty”. These values are not eternal but transient manifestations of class society at a given time. What constitutes “Human Rights” at one point may be the right to conduct a diabolical chattel slavery, or have ownership over their spouse. Likewise, we must recognize that even if values were less malleable, they are not the movers of history. Rather it is the basis of class society, and the contradictions which lead to conflict, collapse, and revolution. Since some Anarchists do not seem necessarily interested in the observation of class society, they tend to roam about in declassed movements which treat each one as a human rather than a Marxist would a worker. This is ironically a closer conception to what a communised society could look like, but it forgets one thing: We are not yet occupants of a communist society. We recognize this philosophical slide as very much an equivalent to the Marxist’s stageist-utopian vision. 

Whereas many Anarchist-dominated movements are declassed, or void of class content, whereas we seek a violent abolition of class, or class movement to abolish classes. The former is subject to the most intense of bourgeois co-option: Our Anarchist friends know this well. Yet even still, the liberals successfully sink their teeth into the trove of values Anarchists offer. Where they mainly come to differ (the State), they still resemble themselves on the topics of liberty, human rights, and freedom. In a crowd you couldn’t pick these two out; If the liberal is feeling dangerous, they’ll even throw on the bloc to match. In the end the sea of reaction will split open to brutalize and detain the Anarchist, and the movement will be left in a repressed mess. 

It is not the fact that Anarchists have failed on which we rest our criticism: We are a historical tradition of failures. Rather, it is the basis of their activism which draws it out. On this basis they have made great analysis about the role of the State and coercion, and the necessity to do away with it at once. But because these were conducted on ideological lines, they could not see this for the half-baked equation that it is. Namely, the forces that have led to the rise of the State, and the forces that have taken part in its maintenance. They have left these forces unaddressed in popular movements where class struggle is most eminent. In practice, it shelves communism itself for a debate on moral righteousness amongst class enemies. 

We analyze these similarities between Marxists and Anarchists because they both fall along ideological lines. Yet what is needed is the embrace of communism, with the content of communism: Neither program or ideology will do. Tactically astute and more apt for confronting the State, Anarchist contributions cannot be overlooked. Yet as we must break free of the Marxists’ liberalism to revolt, we must of the Anarchists’ to communise.

Editor’s Note: There is a PDF version of this text at the bottom of the article. Feel free to download and share. – L.V.

Marx’s Severed Head

A flagrant misunderstanding of our revolutionary tradition has seen Marxism codified into a historical ideology; This error has enclosed historical-political and historical-economic (the realms of bourgeois science and allocation) speculations and passed them off as eternal truths. Instead of changing the world, the overwhelming majority of Marxists now seek only to interpret it, to identity objects as they currently exist. To commit what Marx himself considered pseudoscientific analysis in his own critique of political-economy. In essence: To end history in the age of liberalism.

Likewise, the Marxists constitute the most outwardly reactionary elements of the communist left. In the United States, their representatives spend their time sandwiched between parliamentary reformism, spectacular protesting, class collaboration, and chasing Anarchist shadows. Through building their Parties and organizations external to the movement of communisation itself, these mediators have warranted themselves a precious role in making revolution. This of course has come at the cost of revolution in practice. Their philosophy simply pools together transient clumps of activists, and/or divides the proletariat along liberal-bourgeois lines. Just like Bernstein and the bourgeois democrats sought the death of revolutionary social democracy, Marx’s own followers have sought his swift decapitation.

Thus, it becomes almost impossible for any communist -that is, any subject of capitalist alienation who is conscious of the real existing movement for communisation- to earnestly call themselves a Marxist. In order to properly address these issues with the relevant currents of such a diverse tradition, we will discuss the philosophical content of leading Marxists and their recent discrepancies in action. We speak of many tendencies here: The DSA’s concoction of reform and revolution, Leninist-inspired PSL, Leninist-role playing FRSO, and the Maoists and libertarian communists of varying cliques and tendencies. In these organizations we have analyzed and sometimes even collaborated with “Democratic Socialists”, “Orthodox Marxists”, “Marxist-Leninists”, “Marxist-Leninist-Maoists”, “Gonzaloites”, “Councilists”, and “Autonomists”. While there are various refutations of these historical tendencies, this article seeks to understand how they live and interact today.

Political Enthusiasm

Of any communist, it seems that the Marxist is always the most enthusiastic to engage in bourgeois politics. Outside of the Leftist Maoists and Gonzaloites (the more fringe of the general Marxist canon), each and every Marxist has tried and failed to penetrate this bourgeois apparatus. Whereas they conduct trench warfare and fight for mere inches on one another, this struggle is situated on a mountain of scraps. The DSA and Orthodox may be most guilty of this, but likewise Leninists cling to the illusion that running their programs in the realm of politics produces revolutionary potential in the platforming of demands. We emphasize that this cannot be any further from the truth. For example, glance around at how the Leninists, Trotskyists, and hardcore Stalinists hold their candles to the flame. Nowhere do any of these groups call for Communism, but for an enlightened welfare state and the virtue of Man. The very moment one limits their work to the scope of this bourgeois science, is the moment communism cannot possibly bear its own weight. Communism and liberalism are incompatible, and liberal ideas of moving the masses likewise. 

But what of the momentum of successful Marxist electoral campaigns today? Do they not present our best opportunities yet to connect to the masses? Simply put, no. The movements of Zohran and DSA’s allies represent the pinnacle of anyone from Bernstein to the Roosevelts to Mussolini. To be clear, we can have our own feelings regarding conditions potentially bettering for the proletariat. But whether a cookie or a crumb, Zohran, for example, has won his campaign due to the contradictions of capitalism propelling him forward. Of course New York City is unaffordable: Rent is infamously astronomical, food costs are rising still, and transport is not cheap. This is the real contradiction of capitalist life slowly grinding away at its own children, its inputs to production. This increases the feverish pitch of communisation, but also signals the loosening of the leash. With this comes the widening palate of the bourgeoisie and the befriending of the petit-bourgeoisie, possibly the most reactionary base in society. These groups will serve as allies to the political campaign in some respects, as many have done with charming Zohran. Demands for small businesses are even made in his own program! This contradiction is all fine, as it is only a contradiction in name: Together, the petit-bourgeoisie and social democrats are the true stopgaps to Communism. Historically these two have taken it on themselves to beat the life out of the communist movement, insofar as to turn around and ask their bourgeois masters for acceptance. This goes for any social democrat, from NYC to Minneapolis and so on.

The rest of the bourgeoisie may fear Marxists in office, yet this is precisely because they fail to study Marx or his contemporaries. For them, a 2% raise in taxes is the culmination of the real movement, of communisation in final form. If they were truly aware of an imminent revolutionary threat, they would raise taxes on themselves tenfold. So we can laugh at their childishness, but turn our noses up at these theatric practices. The sad tale is that this is not a trend of Democratic Socialists, but again of the majority of contemporary Marxist organizations. They adopted Marx’s political opinions at the time of writing the first edition of the Manifesto (i.e. raising taxes), and subsequently left the theoretical model to rot. 

Of course, the language of bourgeois politics is more than holding a program to the light or partaking in an election to seek concessions. It is a violent strain of thought that has found its way in Marxist theorizing and understanding of the world (see our work on Multipolarity for a more complete analysis). Every Marxist is an allocator of an absurd-typically nationalist-bent. By allocation we mean to take existing capitalist relations and diagnose the problem at distribution, not production itself. In this Marxists use a political understanding to sharpen their weapons and shape their campaigns. They will be the first to ask for fairness for entire peripheral State apparatuses and mystifying their proletariat, for better trade deals, for more diplomacy, and representation. They will instruct themselves on class struggle through the lens of geopolitics and devil’s advocacy of a lesser bourgeoisie (BRICS). None of these questions have to do with making war with the international bourgeoisie, but strengthening alliances on the false premise that our only option is collaboration!

Economics & Allocation

If the favored action of the Marxist is political, the favored language is economic. If you handed them the world today, they would promptly re-allocate the existing system and leave its functioning as is. We have discussed this extensively but from the wider-reaching tendencies. Yet be it any flavor of Marxism, even councilists or autonomists, and this typically stands. How so?

This is all due to the understanding many Marxists have of history: As a process of linear development. The idea that progress is pushing inevitability, and that the cycles of history always push us to a new epoch of development, a higher plane. If the revered Stalin was to be correct, the capitalist mode of production can be utilized to push forward socialist production. If not Stalin but Pannekoek, and it is the workers who should directly observe their own misery through the implementation of workers’ calculated management. This still rests on measuring productivity and various schemes of increasing productivity through coercion. If not Stalin not Pannekoek but Negri, and it is the workers who both should find glory in their own identity as worker, and strive to have autonomy over their localized poverty. Similar to the councilists, this is ultimately a new form of management. A more palatable one? Of course. But revolution breaks here yet.

We say this, writing with affinity for the questions Pannekoek and Negri have raised as well as their contributions to the communist movement: To synthesize the communist movement as a movement to manage capitalism is an error, precisely because new management does not break capitalist socialization. Similar to the errors of Stalin, we can call these forms of developmentalism or stageism, two of the primary enemies of the communist movement yet two critical elements of the Marxist canon. Let us continue.

Developmentalists may hold the belief that history is a process of economic development, but they stretch this to include the claim that the modern capitalist economy simply requires a higher stage of development for socialism. This can typically be contextualized in the praise of China’s great “modernization” or any other supposed region which has not undergone “sufficient” development for socialism. Likewise, stageism simply implies the existence of unique and linear historical stages of development, furthering the claim that from feudalism to early capitalism to late capitalism, we will finally arrive at socialism. To contend with these ideas seriously is just as reasonable as to submit to the Abrahamic God. Regardless, we address them both with their very liberal birthmarks.

The Stalinists and their offspring are the most rugged of developmentalists, this is true. They assumed they could develop the Soviet Union into Communism, they were proved to be wrong, and their ideas bounced around the globe as they took root in the minds of peripheral bourgeoisies and intelligentsias. Seize a nation, nationalize as one pleases, and modernize to a new socialist age. Now China and “Dengism”, or “Maoist Thought” is the rage. Yet this is the same exact deficiency that was found in Stalin’s project: A belief in the progress of humanity through defined stages, and that progress was implied through modernizing. Meanwhile the Chinese bourgeoisie launches even more attacks on the proletariat, both domestic and international. All in the name of developmentalism, it has become apparent that increasing economic output and efficiency does not breed a working class revolution.

The councilists and libertarian Marxists are more rigorous in their approach and earnest in class struggle. Recognizing the excesses of Russia’s bureaucratic nightmare, they have opted for a stage of Communism closer to the ground. But this is still yet a belief in a mostly linear transition and needless prolonging of capitalism, should it not last forevermore. The historical step “up” to toppling management and placing the workers at the seat is all too much similar to the Bolsheviks’ theses. They argue the workers’ liberation must be made through war with the bourgeoisie. We argue that war must be made with the entire mode of production, with the inputs of the mode of production-such as the workers, abolishing themselves as workers in immediacy. The mere fulfillment of capitalism’s contradiction without fomenting extra steps. These views are not reconcilable as long as workerism, Stalinism, or any “ism” clings to the real movement. 

We refer back to the introduction and implication that Marxists wish to “end history” in the age of liberalism here: They wish to imbue in the world the preceding Enlightenment notion that progress is not only necessary, but guaranteed. This is a thoughtful notion that attempts to make sense out of the history of humanity, but this does not make it less utopian. Stalin surmises the working masses will inevitably smash capitalism, Deng claims that the modern nation will give birth to true socialism; We cannot always be so sure. At every moment, our allegiance can only be with the working class and its immediate victory.

Marxists in Action

In our time and place, the Marxists are more likely to be at the services of the State than of the proletariat. Elections are one thing, peace-policing is another. At the advent of a wave of energy, they are in vests, hoping to quell the rage. It is their everlasting wish to bottle up the rage and save it for when they have prescribed it best fit. When this epoch never presents itself, they never admit defeat, but change the definition of success. These experiences are based on both Chicago’s Leninist-NGO marriage, the “Coalition Against the Trump Agenda”, and PSL’s own marches. These actions will draw anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people, feature platitudes of “fighting back” and “getting organized” before a masturbatory claim that these showings in themselves are a success. While these protests celebrated progressive culture in the downtown Loop, neighborhoods continued to be ravaged by federal agents. These bubble-like alternative realities are nauseating and deceptive. 

While these claims may feel too broad to be applicable to the many tendencies of Marxism, they are assurably in the nature of the dominant positions we are reviewing today. The Democratic Socialists, Orthodox, and Leninists are the first victims of their own ineptitude. Parroting Enlightenment ideals of progress and fairness, they have limited their own action to the accumulation of capital. While endearingly, the Maoists and Gonzaloites preach a gospel of “mass work”, they are still abject friends of accumulation and resolute nationalists, the basis of many an intellectual poverty. Their work thus consists of rousing “nationally-oppressed” communities on the basis of their identity or race, rather than from their potential to communise. They’ll next proceed with a push for civil rights for these nationalities on varying grounds. Likewise with the “less radical” variants of Marxism, they shoot themselves in the foot in a push for a fairer allocation of resources.

In a similar vein, the Marxists engage with trade unionism at an industrial level but only go so far as to jostle for the reins. In a city like Chicago, absolutely brimming with union activity (relative to the rest of the country), there is a completely compartmentalized trade union movement. Union representatives and ardent socialists meet with the bourgeoisie, haggle over the price of their members, and both will claim they have won a tremendous victory. Meanwhile the more critical Marxists devoid of hedge fund backing (see: PSL) will pine for a workers’ trade union movement. While romantic, this action is still the inverse of linear stageist philosophy and we cannot parse out a movement bent on reinforcing wage slavery. The workers do not yearn for work.

The many ways these groups act in relation to the proletariat is that of a teacher mistreating the learning of a student. By assuming the proletariat does not have the ability to abolish itself without canonised Marxist ideology, these revolutionaries dumb down, or altogether alter the most radical of the canon: The content of capitalism itself. For the proletariat, this places Communism on a political-economic-ideological mantle with liberalism, or conservative liberalism, of Democrats and Republicans. Something to be tried and tested within the confines of liberal democracy, and dispensed with after each experiment inevitably goes haywire. Instead of vying for the proletarian’s attention with a “new” ideological communism, perhaps we should just reject ideological communism in favor of Communism itself?

Dismembering Class Against the Wishes of Marxists

As per our work on the topic of ICE: Should the Marxists or other degenerations of liberalism triumph, we will be doomed to haggle over the price of our damnation. To scientifically allocate our share of life, our time of death, always evading the cause. 

The bourgeoisie is international, yet communisation is not a thought. It is a historical process inherent in our social tension now. This does not mean it is inevitable. Only the international working class, in a movement of abolishing itself, can fulfill this decisively. Thus, we say not “Long Live the Workers”, but “Abolish Work”. We seek to leave behind our miseries and sorrows in the Old World, to revolt and communise.

Refutations of Anarchism’s Value System

If not a historical Marxism, it is many a Communist’s pivot to Anarchism which can be just as troubling. To be transparent, we find ourselves sympathetic to Anarchism in the same way we might be of councilism or autonomism. We recognize its historical vindication in the errors of Marxism-Leninism, and especially with the rise of the Stalinists and Maoists. We recognize its place on the cutting edge of tactical approaches in America and worldwide, and its contributions as an ideology in imbuing these approaches with sufficient leverage to combat the State. Yet, when we recognize its relevance as a value system and historical ideology, we must also address its shortcomings. Like Marxists, Anarchists have fashioned-sometimes an even more obvious-historical ideology. Tracing back their rich heritage centuries, they also cling to the ideological burden that comes with these tactical innovations. We can refer to these as Anti-Authoritarianism, Freedom, Human Rights, Liberty, Justice, and so on. 

Most Anarchists remain committed to these values, and our intent is for these values to be dissected at once. We critique the usage of any value system for studying history. Even if we happen to agree that “authoritarianism” genuinely relates to something harmful, or deem it necessary to fight for a society with more “freedom” or “liberty”. These values are not eternal but transient manifestations of class society at a given time. What constitutes “Human Rights” at one point may be the right to conduct a diabolical chattel slavery, or have ownership over their spouse. Likewise, we must recognize that even if values were less malleable, they are not the movers of history. Rather it is the basis of class society, and the contradictions which lead to conflict, collapse, and revolution. Since some Anarchists do not seem necessarily interested in the observation of class society, they tend to roam about in declassed movements which treat each one as a human rather than a Marxist would a worker. This is ironically a closer conception to what a communised society could look like, but it forgets one thing: We are not yet occupants of a communist society. We recognize this philosophical slide as very much an equivalent to the Marxist’s stageist-utopian vision. 

Whereas many Anarchist-dominated movements are declassed, or void of class content, whereas we seek a violent abolition of class, or class movement to abolish classes. The former is subject to the most intense of bourgeois co-option: Our Anarchist friends know this well. Yet even still, the liberals successfully sink their teeth into the trove of values Anarchists offer. Where they mainly come to differ (the State), they still resemble themselves on the topics of liberty, human rights, and freedom. In a crowd you couldn’t pick these two out; If the liberal is feeling dangerous, they’ll even throw on the bloc to match. In the end the sea of reaction will split open to brutalize and detain the Anarchist, and the movement will be left in a repressed mess. 

It is not the fact that Anarchists have failed on which we rest our criticism: We are a historical tradition of failures. Rather, it is the basis of their activism which draws it out. On this basis they have made great analysis about the role of the State and coercion, and the necessity to do away with it at once. But because these were conducted on ideological lines, they could not see this for the half-baked equation that it is. Namely, the forces that have led to the rise of the State, and the forces that have taken part in its maintenance. They have left these forces unaddressed in popular movements where class struggle is most eminent. In practice, it shelves communism itself for a debate on moral righteousness amongst class enemies. 

We analyze these similarities between Marxists and Anarchists because they both fall along ideological lines. Yet what is needed is the embrace of communism, with the content of communism: Neither program or ideology will do. Tactically astute and more apt for confronting the State, Anarchist contributions cannot be overlooked. Yet as we must break free of the Marxists’ liberalism to revolt, we must of the Anarchists’ to communise.

Editor’s Note: We have discussed in our previous work, ‘In the Midst of ICE: Against Protesting & the Allure of Nothing’, the tepid nature of protest work. Specifically in its structure and how the protest confines the real movement to an isolated event, we understand these events ultimately to be reactionary spaces. Derived from the real movement to abolish classes and the real movement alone, they are the brainchild of activists and intellectuals competing for ideological hegemony. In this piece, we will peel back further some of these errors specifically with the popular language protests these days typically take. This popular language is nothing more than a popular mediation which seeks to mask the true nature of capitalist life, and we will analyze them both in their content in the format of a “sloganeering” encyclopedia.

Protests often have the intended consequence of assailing an attendee’s senses. There’s the monotonous droning of, an often all too small, megaphone haphazardly clung to the belt of a scrawny organizer. Faintly one can make out the lull of a kettle bell or drum struck just ever-so-slightly off beat that it induces a sensory nightmare. Party organizations and NGOs dissect what momentum has grown to insert their own rhetoric, complete with heady speeches and a lengthy pamphlet which you will throw in the trash shortly after the scene has disbanded. All of these and more bless a gracious viewer who sifts through rubbish, hoping to find something worthwhile; this is a barren and hostile environment, littered with plastic and debris. 

However, nothing at a protest is more mind numbing and intellectually jarring than the abysmal sloganeering which cloaks the mechanisms which define life. And like a broken record, these chants are repeated ad nauseum until they are burned into memory, satirical soundbites which loop in the brain well after the event has died. Furthermore, nearly all of the Parties involved in this spectacle seem to have no stake in revolutionary action or activity, thus to fuel their revolutionary itch they “muster up their courage” to stand on the side of a street or intersection and hurl their chants like spells at any passerby that is unfortunate enough to be in their vicinity. 

Now, whether we have issues with these ideological vagrants of the Left propping themselves up on a busy intersection is not the purpose of this article (See the aforementioned piece for more). Today, we draw our issue in the specific content of these slogans and chants and what their language reveals about their aims and methods. Tactics aside, it is the content itself that seeks a departure from class struggle into something else altogether. Organizers will draw in the masses off the energy of the real movement, and leave them with nothing but a moral set of values. This itself is violence, violence waged against the working masses in the hopes of nullifying them before they take the chance to resist. Before the worker can reassemble life they are confronted by these values, which please them by offering an alternative reality where the clinical life remains holy. Thus these values must be dissected and taken apart, semantic or otherwise. Let us examine a few grotesque examples:

“Protesting is not a Crime! Justice for the [group of arrested activists]!”

At first glance you may say: “What’s wrong with this? All I hear is calls for justice against an unjust state.”, and that is precisely where we draw our issue. Moralistic claims such as these are alien to Communism, as was demonstrated heavily in Marx’s work Poverty of Philosophy. The statement above acts functionally identical to that of Proudhon’s claim that “Property is theft”, in that it is objectively incorrect in its analysis of the present situation. Let us examine this slogan piecemeal before looking at it in its totality. 

1. “Protesting is not a Crime!”

An utterly false statement on its face. While in America there exists minimal protections for the “right” to protest and assemble, the State consistently throws off its sheepskin of “civil rights” to gnaw its true fangs. Many of the tactics taken by protestors across the U.S. are indeed illegal under U.S. law. It is illegal to block highways. It is illegal to impede traffic. It is illegal to even use amplified sound in some areas! Nearly every stage of a protest is full of many micro-actions that are often very much illegal, and this is by design! The Bourgeois State wants you, the hopeful proletariat, to believe that it can use the very mechanism of state power to reform the system by limiting the spontaneous power of action in the streets and workplace. We can see that this call is not only factually incorrect, but in its core messaging it seeks to integrate itself into the system! By claiming that they are not acting illegally they believe that they are granted some special privilege to continue their acts. It is a foolish and childish mistake.

2. Justice for the [group of arrested activists]!”

Calls for “Justice” are utterly meaningless and devoid of Communist sympathies because whose “Justice” are we seeking out? One may say: “We are seeking justice for our bereaved comrades who were valiantly assaulted in the class struggle.” Very well, but who is to deliver this “Justice”? Is this holy “Justice” to be rained down on the aggrieving pigs by the Communists themselves? Of course the answer to that is “No”, so then, again, who is to deliver this “Justice” we seek? We see that the only entity that could possibly right this wrong is not the Proletarian class at large, but rather the Capitalist State itself! What logic is this? The State has already dispensed its justice! You ask me what “Justice” looks like and I’ll show you. Justice looks like an army of pigs descending upon the streets, cracking their batons at anyone they see. Justice looks like the bullet that every pig fires at an unarmed black teen. Justice is the blood that runs down the streets and into the gutters after every vicious attack upon those of our class. You see, this is the justice you cling to so rapidly. The State will never right this wrong, because by all legal definitions no wrong has been committed!

3. “Protesting is not a Crime! Justice for the [group of arrested activists]!”

Now we see the true nature of this slogan. It is not a harmless cry of anger, but is the carefully articulated response designed by the State to mediate and pacify the Proletariat once again. This is not to say those that call for justice are class enemies, but that they are both mistaken and misguided in their approach for retribution. Justice will not come from the halls of the courts, but from the barrel of the rifle, as it rings out the last shot in our final battle. It is to say that we must cease with these calls that show our adherence to liberalism and the State. We must throw off the veil of mediation and dawn the cloak of insurrection. Embrace the illegalism they cast upon us! In this matter the State is correct! What we do is illegal precisely because we have no wish, want, or desire to exist under the State or its so-called justice anymore!

Let’s sort through another common slogan found in recent protests:

“Hands off Iran! [Or any country our State is currently aggressive towards]”

Again, at first glance this phrase may seem innocuous, or even positive. What could possibly be the issue with being anti-war? Well, is this phrase necessarily anti-war? We would answer this question in the negative. Even if the slogan was reformatted to say “No war with Iran!” we  would still find issues with it. Under its current makeup, the slogan does little to show genuine internationalist sympathies with the proletariat of Iran, all it does is show allegiance to a foreign state rather than the United States. No state is worthy of defense or support. The correct position to hold in this matter is to agitate against both the American and Iranian states, as no state is innocent under the Capitalist Imperialist system. All states are the aggressors and the international proletariat are their victims.

After reading this, you may believe that our argument here is purely a semantic one. That our goal here is to create a “Pure Communism”, but that is not the case. We merely seek to truthfully represent the tenets of Communism as it exists as a real movement to abolish what exists. As it stands, these linguistic deviations serve little to do but act as lip service for the State and Capitalism. They take moments of unrest and convert them into ideas easily rehabilitated by liberalism, and thus by nurturing sects of the bourgeoisie. This is not simply a matter of semantics, but of rhetoric. When a proletarian that is burgeoning in class consciousness and sympathetic to Communism is approached with these slogans and liberal ideas their revolutionary potential is effectively neutered. That is why we must be precise and cautious with our language, and show genuine discipline in these moments where conditions are deteriorating. It has real and tangible results on our practice. 

Unfortunately in environments predicated on a spoken or unspoken Democratic Centralism, there is either little debate on rhetoric, or it is actively discouraged. To question leading ideas is mischaracterized as idealist itself, a bitter irony considering the role of the activists’ mediatory ideas in building these movements. When we criticize ideas and especially these ideas, we are not-necessarily-criticizing those that struggle for them; We are certainly not criticizing the rank-and-file. We are criticizing the bourgeoisie, and the idealists with their head in the clouds of righteousness. They claim not to want to draw out debate on immaterial issues, but when they so graciously welcome bourgeois ideas into the movement, these ideas materialize in the most violent of ways. To criticize before, during, or after a critical moment is imperative.

The following section includes a small encyclopedic analysis of some of the most present language in movements with Communist presence today. We provide alternative slogans not because we are master sloganeers, but rather to hint at a more revolutionary direction that language can be taken. As it stands, movement language either hinges on humanity and the rights of man, concessional rhetoric, lawfulness, and other diversions which stifle a clear understanding of each issue. What we hope to incite is not a laundry list of our own slogans, but to encourage Communists to critically examine the slogans they struggle under and for.

ALTERNATIVE SLOGANS AND THEIR REASONING

Original Slogan:

“Protesting is not a Crime! Justice for the [group of arrested activists]!”

Amended Slogan:

“Abolish the Courts! Tear down the Prisons!”

Stated above. Legality is morality and morality is legality, i.e. the supremacy of liberalism.

Original Slogan:

“Hands off Iran!”

Amended Slogan: 

“No War but Class War!”

The proletariat have no nation or incentive to defend their State rulers. States and the Capitalist class trap workers inside their nations and keep them held hostage. When we, as Communists, choose sides between Capitalists we grant legitimacy to their cause, whether that be tacit or explicit. By cheerleading for one imperialist power over another we effectively mediate the class conflict that is happening abroad in the minds of the domestic proletariat. The most recent wave of escalations between the United States and Iran have done little, except exacerbate the suffering of the Iranian proletariat, but to justify, and solidify, the existence of the Iranian State and ruling class. Our goal is to always escalate the class struggle to its highest level, the international revolution. We must thoroughly reject any war, but the class war.

Original Slogan: 

“Fight for 15!”

Amended Slogan:

“Abolish Wages!”

Many Communists create an arbitrary distinction between the supposed “immediate” struggle and “end goals”. While well meaning in their attempts to alleviate the suffering of those around us they misunderstand what the Communist tactic is. Class struggle is not a moralistic claim, or a simple tactic to be used and then abandoned when needed. Class struggle is the driver of history, to deny the role of the real struggle in the current movement is to deny Communism altogether. 

Not to mention that wages are the tools of the Capitalist class. Serfdom, and the peasantry, was eradicated by the creation of the wage labor system. By attaching our aims to the tools and framework of the Capitalist mode of production we do nothing but assert and affirm our class position instead of denying it.

Original Slogan: 

“No Human is Illegal”

Amended Slogan:
“No Borders, No Nations!”

As we have discussed in our previous article, In the Midst of ICE: Against Protesting & the Allure of Nothing, we discussed the issue of inserting ourselves in the intra-class fighting of the bourgeoisie. Our support for those proletarians that are shouldered with the “undocumented” label must lie concretely in their dignity as humans and our assault must be against the very bourgeois legal system itself. Our criticisms of the legalistic and moralistic rhetoric found in the first section of this article stand here as well. To read further on this specific issue we recommend reading our article, In the Midst of ICE: Against Protesting & the Allure of Nothing, in its totality.

Original Slogan:
“Housing is a Human Right!”

Amended Slogan:
“Communal Housing for All!”

Human rights trace their existence to the beginning of bourgeois philosophy. To speak of rights presupposes the question of who/what will enforce and protect that right, and that responsibility falls upon the State. As we have demonstrated and said (as well as can be found in numerous other Communist works) many times now, the State is the vessel of class society. As long as the State remains, so does class. As long as class exists, so do the miserable and alienated lives of the proletariat remain. We must also look at what type of housing we are demanding. Well it is certainly true that any housing is better than no housing, the revolutionary viewpoint necessitates that we must end the current housing system, of large swaths of single family homes, that breeds alienation and replace it with communal housing. 

Original Slogan:

“Freeze the Rent!”

Amended Slogan:

“Cancel all Rents!“

A similar argument to those of increasing wages, calling for a mere freezing of rents represents a temporary halt in the progression of the deteriorating quality of life the proletariat faces. It is not necessary to repeat the same line of argumentation twice; however, it is important to note that the primary call of campaigns surrounding access to housing and rents should be centered on the decommodification of housing and the ability to live. 

Original Slogan:

“It’s Time to Get Organized” (As seen with National PSL)

This slogan doesn’t require amending, simply the end of its use for it grossly misunderstands social organization. To put it mildly, at points of crisis we seek the dissolution of every tangible class form, of the social relationship of labor, and so on. This means that there is no “time to get organized” as much as there are more and less tangible moments to strike at capital. 

Yet at every social inflection point there is a Marxist group shouting at the masses to “Get Organized!”, which is usually a feeble attempt to draw away a few unsuspecting recruits into an activist and/or book club adjacent environment. They do this as inherent opportunists: What they really mean is to get organized with us and our programming, which is the only real program and the only really revolutionary program that can transform social relations. As if the proletariat needs to be pampered with source material for a movement to become “real”. 

All we see here is a bleak departure from any notion of action or movement. “Getting Organized” just means to hyper fetishize structure and growing memberships, neither of which correlate with the overthrow of capitalism nor provide the platform for capital’s death. When a struggle is to be won or lost, and a group’s rallying cry is one of sublime organization, we see an ambitious SPD with a kernel of their capacity.

Original Slogan:

“Keep the Promise” (As seen with United Auto Workers)

Amended Slogan:

“We Demand Nothing But the World”

The bourgeoisie do not make concessions, they make concessions as fit which are ultimately subject to a falling rate of profit. The righteousness of capitalists is a cheap appeal, albeit one that is well ingrained in union circles.

Original Slogan:

“March for Humanity” (As seen with National PSL)

Amended Slogan:

“March for Workers’ Liberation”

A march for humanity could be led by absolutely anyone from PSL to the Democratic and Republican Parties. Furthermore, if class is the distinction on which these claims of human rights are made, then it is class against class that we will abolish such notions. 

Original Slogan:

“No Money for Massacres” (As seen with National DSA)

(Money for the State, just not this one specific tragedy)

Amended Slogan: 

“Abolish the State, Abolish Capitalism”

Only an ingrained ideologue could look at a history of State-sanctioned genocides over the entirety of its existence, isolate it to one time period and as one variable to be contained, and contrast it to other forms of public expenditure.

There is frankly one correct way to approach the question of “money for massacres”, and it is not in the maintenance of a parasitic capitalist life form.

Original Slogan:

“Abolish ICE” (As seen everywhere)

Amended Slogan:

“Abolish the State, Abolish Capitalism”

The American State has overseen some of the most calculating genocides, atrocities, and wars in human history, much of which it has dealt with on its own soil. This regime has consolidated itself like no other Empire in history, and it has done so for centuries without the existence of ICE. Thus when critiquing its use of force, why do we isolate ICE as a historical phenomenon? It is an inflection point undoubtedly, but it is the product of an incredibly cyclical spiral of nativist campaigns, deportation efforts, and maintaining hegemonic capital. ICE is a norm, a product of an entire ethos and employment of life. And in the context of our contributors, we have seen first hand how this derailment aids liberal entryist mystique. Any hope of struggle is ceased, because this slogan substitutes an existential threat for a medication that is easy to stomach.

Original Slogan:

“Unions Uniting so Families Keep Thriving” (As seen with Teamsters)

Amended Slogan:

“Abolish Labor For a Liberated Life”

One of the greatest achievements of the union bureaucracy in this country is that they have managed to still convince masses of people that they are guiding an upward trend. The unions are not only subject to little criticism, but in fact they are subject to no public criticism even when they undergo the underwriting of contemporary history. Families have not thrived this century! But we are to believe them insofar that when we sign their cards, they will lead us to this new imagination. 

The unions fear an employment of life that is not predicated on wage labor, so they paint over the cracks left by capitalist education, media, and superstructure. 

Original Slogan:

“Defend Pilsen: Stop the TIF Expansion” (As seen with Residents Against TIF Expansion)

Amended Slogan:

“Liberate Pilsen: Fight Capital”

Gentrification is a perfect microcosm for those defense movements that go so wrong. This is precisely because the term and understanding of gentrification itself is bourgeois! Just as we attack the use of life under wage labor, we attack the use of land under State, finance, and so on. But in the case of labor we are not satisfied with a return to higher real wages or a step towards workplace parity. No, we seek the evolution of our collective life to something greater, more liberating. The same must be said for gentrification then in that we must resist staking a claim on gentrification, as if what? The petit-bourgeoisie are the base of support we seek to build our platform on? As if poverty, caste, and segregation are anymore desirable? 

We must resist this tendency.

Original Slogan:

“It is Right to Rebel/Resist” (As seen with Maoists, FRSO, SDS)

Amended Slogan:

“Abolish Rights, Abolish Classes”

As we have previously stated, ad nauseum, rights are inextricably tied to the bourgeois system. Since we have discussed this at length we see no reason to relitigate the issue at large, however we will still discuss the peculiarities of this phrase. No State has allowed this “Right to Rebel” in practical terms. Philosophers and Leaders have opined and made gestures towards this “right”, such as Locke and Jefferson to even Lenin, but in practice this right has never materialized. In America, the “right of succession” was shot down with the Civil War and rebellions were quashed in Indian Country. Out of all the  rights that “exist:”, this one is the most insane. 

Original Slogan:

“No Justice, No Peace!”

Amended Slogan:

“We Seek Neither Justice or Peace: Only Liberation”

Justice is a fluid and slanted judgement. It holds no truth to its claims, and as such there should be a staunch rejection of empty promises. What is justice can only be defined by the justice system, and thus we observe this slogan as another which leaves a sour taste in our mouths. 

Peace is likewise a virtue so exalted as it is hollow. We cannot come to define peace as anything other than passivity, and as such we view peace as reactionary. Any peace we seek can only come in the abolition of classes, i.e. not under capitalism nor its justice system. Yet even then this supposed peace can only come at the end of the bitter struggle that will undoubtedly leave bloodshed and destruction around the world. Thus, we seek no justice, and no peace.

Original Slogan:

“Arrest Killer Cops!”

Amended Slogan:

“Abolish Police & the State”

Arresting killer cops implies the supremacy of  the justice system. As we discuss above, this is empty and reactionary. Furthermore, this slogan also implies the existence of good cops within the State system, therefore relying on a juxtaposition of morality within the State itself.

As much as one may enjoy a moral witch-hunt of such capacity, we simply don’t share in this hilarity. The bourgeoisie can purge its forces’ ranks every 4 years, and we would still be left in crisis.

There are no good nor bad police officers, and there is no divine nor inspired justice. Abolition-the absence of any being at all-is thus what we are left with.

Original Slogan:

“Protect Academic Freedom”

Amended Slogan:

“Return Education to Life!”

When not institutionalized or severed from life, education as an action can be incredibly valuable. That is, we are proponents of education as a process of engaging with life itself, and through those interactions forming comprehensive knowledge. Or rather, when learning ceases to be reduced to education. 

We are not proponents of the State’s monopoly on this process, its institutionalization, and reduction to beautifying labor power. As such there is a need to return education to its intentional use: Learning and life.

Original Slogan:

“#ShutDownNation, Boycott Israel, Defund Israel, Stop Supplying Weapons to Israel, etc.” (As seen with the BDS Movement)

Amended Slogan:

“To Free Palestine, Free the Working Class”

The various economic attempts to punish Israel (as discussed in our first piece, “The Student Psyche in Political Crisis”) are entirely hapless. Throwing one’s weight behind such a movement is not viable due to the appeals toward both the petit-bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie proper, and so on. Any one of the “popular” slogans listed are slogans utilized by the bourgeoisie to protect itself from criticism or examination during this movement. The truth is that should Palestine be liberated, it can only come with the liberation of the international working class. Thus we seek not economic reallocation but a war on economics itself.

In the aftermath of the most recent convention of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organization stands in a precarious situation. Conflicts between the “Left” and “Right” of the DSA threaten to dismantle, or at the least disrupt, the current activities of the organization. However much the Left and Right disagree on issues, such as Palestine, the American national question, etc., they have found themselves united in the meditation of class conflict instead of its escalation. Many are familiar with “the largest socialist organization in the country” (in their own words), and many more will certainly become more familiar with their name following the primary election of Zohran Mamdani for NYC mayor and other minor campaigns, such as those of Omar Fateh. This is where both wings of the DSA unite together into a single organization that has seemingly shifted its dedication towards putting up candidates for public office.

If this everlong, and ultimately futile, quest to obtain any modicum of political power was only sought after by the liberal elements of the DSA, we would have nothing to say as we are not liberals nor have any interest in opining on what tactics and strategies liberals take. Our issue comes when some of the most ardent defenders and proponents of electoralism are coming from the “Communist” camp of the DSA, those of the neo-Kautskyite Marxist Unity Group or the post-Trotskyist Bread and Roses (just to name a few). We have prepared some criticisms of a draft program written by Marxist Unity Group called The Florence Program, and while this specific draft program is slightly out of date (written in February 2025) it still retains the core essence of the ideology we seek to critique. In fact, in its content the Florence Program surmises a large proportion of the errors within not only the Right and Left of DSA. This critique is larger than just the Florence Program itself, larger than even Marxist Unity Group and the DSA as a whole. It is an attack leveled at the idealism that has permeated and entrenched itself into the Left. This program is not unique in its use of mediation, it is however just one of the most comprehensive in its analysis and practice.

The Florence Program:

The preamble of the Program serves as a, mainly, inoffensive retelling of the history of American Capitalism, where most of the contents are either agreeable or simply not worth arguing over. However, there still remains a large amount of contradictions in their writings that we take pause with and have comments on.

Paragraph One: “Capitalism is a failed system. The capitalist class has unleashed misery on the workers of the world, turning to environmental devastation, militarized policing, mass incarceration, wars of genocide and conquest, and radicalization of existing forms of social domination, all in the pursuit of profits.”

Is Capitalism a failed system? When we examine the reasoning laid out in the Program they cite the moral failings of Capital: Alienation and misery of workers, environmental destruction, militarized police, etc. However, these issues listed are the products of Capitalism, not its goal. If Capitalism has failed, then we must assume that the goal of Capital is the creation of a libertine utopia free of conflict, but that is not the goal of Capital. Marxist Unity Group even correctly identifies the actual purpose of Capital further on. 

In Paragraph Two: “Capitalism transforms or abolishes all existing social structures to serve the production of surplus-value, the root of the ruling classes’ incomes of profit, interest, and rent… capitalism concentrates increasing capital in fewer hands, crosses every national border, subsumes every aspect of society into one vast market…”
The true goal of Capital is the accumulation of private property and the extraction of surplus value in the form of profit, even Marxist Unity Group admits. Now that we recognize the purpose of Capitalism, can we truly classify it as a failed system? We answer this question in the negative. 

In fact, through analyzing the conditions of the present epoch, we can ascertain that currently Capitalism is at its peak (as of now) and it is inarguably the most successful it has ever been since the very first joint-stock venture companies were founded in England and Holland. 

1. Capital has spread itself internationally, finally overthrowing the last vestiges and remnants of the old order of agrarianism and manorialism, and in its stead has hoisted up the banner of wage-labor and private property.
2. Capital has extended itself past the material realm, where transactions and the gears of the economy no longer need to turn in the world we exist in. The digitization of the economy has allowed for the proliferation of fictitious finance capital, which was once housed in only a few countries.
3. Capital has co-opted the struggle against itself and deemed it in its own terms, in the process infecting nearly all of its detractors with the language of their oppressors. Its final victory culminated in the complete valorization of class and work by the “Communist” and Socialist Left, such that the warriors against Capital inadvertently became the most ardent defenders of its social relations.

In Paragraph 9: The workers’ movement has arisen from the struggle of workers to improve their conditions against the interests of their bosses, landlords, and rulers through demands that only partially address their domination under capitalism. These struggles and the collective organizations that wage them—trade-unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and at the highest level, the political party—hold the secret to reconstructing a world without a ruling class and an exploited class: the democratic control of society by the people whose labor creates it.

Marxist Unity Group correctly identifies that the reformist positions and platforms held by the currently existing workers’ organs do not adequately address the issues of Capitalism and only seek to alleviate the results of the mode of production. However, the Group immediately contradicts themselves and posits that it is the same toothless and defanged reformist organizations that will lead us to the future that they are incapable of even envisioning. The Group claims that these institutions hold “the secret” to “reconstructing a world” in a, hopefully, brighter and better image, and cites their role in the current social order; however, it is in their linguistics that we draw our criticism and where they show their own misunderstanding of Communism and our goals.

1. The usage of “the secret” implies that these reformist trade unions hold the sole, or at least a great deal of, authority by which we can build a sense of “dual power” (a delusion in its own right, however that is a topic for another time). This is a far cry from merely recognizing the potential progressive nature of these institutions, such as when Engels surmised that “nationalization may provide a hint” for socialization, but quickly clarified it was not the end of the matter, rather the beginning. Marxist Unity Group seems to misunderstand this premise.
2. “Reconstructing” is also a curious word choice to use. When a building burns down and it is reconstructed, it would be the assumption that the same, or a similar enough, building would be built in its stead. As was the case for the historical era of “Reconstruction” in American history, where the country was undergoing massive social change, but that the country was still decidedly going to be rebuilt in a similar image of itself before the war. It is interesting that they would use this phrasing instead of just clarifying that they wish to construct an entirely new society. It begs the question if they even have the political desire or imagination to construct a different society.

Outside of their linguistic issues, their logic itself and conception of these organizations is detached from reality. Trade unions, cooperatives, and mutual aid societies do not hold some special key that unlocks communization, in fact it is the opposite. These organizations can only exist under the current social relations of Capitalism, and we will run through their faults briefly.

• Trade Unions: Unions themselves, as stated outright by Marxist Unity Group, only seek to alleviate the effects of Capital, not to revolt against it. The express purpose of a union is strictly to engage in direct collaboration and mediation with the boss and management, such that class is directly reaffirmed by their actions. Through their struggle for “bread and butter” issues they affirm the role of the proletariat as wage earners, just this time slightly better paid.
• Cooperatives: Co-ops certainly provide an alternative to traditional wage-labor, however this alternative is simply to turn the worker into an owner. Similar to unions, co-ops only help quell the symptoms of Capital and reinforce the current social order. 
• Mutual Aid: This one is perhaps the worst example Marxist Unity Group could’ve picked. Mutual aid essentially acts as charity which is in itself nowhere near revolutionary. 

All of these are very brief overviews and we do not seek to hope that this suffices as a full, in-depth critique of these forms of organization, but just to introduce the criticisms.

The debate surrounding the role and usage of political parties is still yet raging. While we are often critical of the actions and organizational form of the Party, we are neutral in regards to the usage of the party form as a tool in the class struggle. However, we certainly disagree with Marxist Unity Group’s claim that the Party is the “highest level” of the class struggle. The highest level of the class struggle is the Revolution. Could the party form be active in the revolutionary struggle and even prove itself useful? Of course! Is it the deciding factor leading the Revolution? Of course not! The Group falls short to defend its position in the necessity of the party form and desperately clings to the “historical validity” of the role of the Party all while failing to critically examine its role through the history of the class struggle.

In Paragraph 10: “Only socialism, the project of universal human emancipation led by the working class, can overcome such adversity.”

This is where the Marxist Unity Group completely breaks from any relation to the works of Marx and should erase his name and etch in those of Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Danton. Socialism, a term which has become altogether meaningless in its application, is assuredly not the “project of universal human emancipation” as the Group claims, and it is for the following reasons:

1. Communism is not for the universal emancipation of mankind, it is the specific liberation of the proletariat from the realm of class society. This line of logic is more Jacobin than it is Marxist, and it is this attitude that has already been critiqued and noted for nearly 150 years. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels remarks on the sloganeering that the liberal thinkers of the French Enlightenment would use in their demands for revolution, and how these phrases found themselves into the proto-Communist thinkers. 
2. To posit that we, as Communists, seek universal emancipation of humanity is built on the notion that, in some manner, the bourgeoisie is limited in their expression under the reign of Capital. This is a patently absurd idea as the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie (and even some of the higher segments of the proletarian class) are living the most luxurious lives anyone could live in human history, both materially and psychologically. Meanwhile, the international proletariat languishes away in the Tartarus that is wage-labor and employment.

Also in Paragraph 10: In short, we must merge socialism with the workers’ movement. As this merger develops, so too will the farsightedness, confidence, and organization of the working class that enables their emergence as the hegemonic class of society. Working class victory in this struggle—the conquest of political power—is propelled by the formation and practice of the socialist party. 

To claim that Socialism and Communism must be merged with the workers’ movement highlights a disastrous flaw in the psyche of Marxist Unity Group. In our first journal, Reflections on the Student Movement, we discussed a glaring issue in the way organizations position themselves as foreign to the workers’ and that they must encircle the proletariat and get them to accept the Party. When in reality, there is but one true movement and that is Communism. Communism is, by definition, the definitive workers’ movement as it advocates for the proletariat’s self abolition and its immediate freedom from the wedges of class society. Marxist Unity Group falls into the same trap that we’ve previously highlighted. They see themselves as being alien to the current proletarian population and, as we explored previously, will necessarily lead to a tactic of organization that further alienates them from the very class they seek to speak for.

Furthermore, the victory of the proletariat is not predicated on a conquest of political power, but rather on its abolition. The Communist Revolution is a revolt not simply against the Capitalist class, but against all its tools, including: the State and Politics. Politics is the dominion of the bourgeoisie. It is one their most nefarious tools in its quest of societal domination against the proletariat. As well, the final victory of the proletariat is not propelled by the formation of the Party, but in the everyday spontaneous struggle of all workers across the world.

In Paragraph 11: The working class must lead the battle to sweep away this political order and establish a truly democratic republic, freeing the workers of the world from the chains of American imperialism, and setting the stage for the working class to lead a socialist transformation of our society.

A common motif found among many Communist sects and creeds, not strictly that of Marxist Unity Group’s, is that we do not live in a “democratic society”, and that our goal as Communists must then be to establish this “truly democratic republic”. What all these groups fail to understand is that we do indeed live under a democracy, a true one at that. In previous articles we have outlined that democracy and, by extension, the democratic republic are both intrinsically tied to bourgeois society. For brevity’s we will not go fully in depth on this matter (currently), but democracy is the ultimate and final mediation the bourgeois class cedes to the proletariat

In Paragraph 12: Through this process, the special role of the state standing above society withers away and, as the revolution expands internationally, national divisions and inequalities between peoples are eliminated.

A State is not an entity that often allows itself to be withered away, in most regards. The State, in its essence, is the mediator of class conflict, such that it was historically used by one class to prop up its own economic and social interests over others, but also that in the contemporary Capitalist era the State, as a tool, is used directly by the Capitalist class to smooth over class antagonisms and pacify the proletariat. Even if we are to “smash the ready made State machinery” and build up a “new state”, that State would still take the role as the mediator of class conflict. It would not simply exist to combat against the remnants of the defeated Capitalist class, as Leninists would argue, but it would exist to take its place and only transfer political power from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. A mere transfership of power will only result in the continuing of capitalistic relations as we have seen time and time again in the experiments of old, such as the Soviet Union and even the CNT-FAI’s tenure over the Spanish Republic. Wherever the State exists, so do capitalistic relations. They are as inseparable as the bond between a mother and her child.

In Paragraph 13: Proceeding from these principles, the Democratic Socialists of America unites around a strategy of class independence from the capitalist Democratic and Republican Parties, the development of independent working class organizations to a critical mass, and struggling for consistent democracy throughout all spheres of society. In so doing, we first demand a people’s constitutional convention elected by universal, equal, and direct suffrage to establish a democratic republic that allows for the political rule of the working class

It seems Marxist Unity Group can only conceive of a revolution in the terms of a national democratic one. Do they not know that we have already had several? Did 1789, 1820, 1866, 1870, 1919, and 1965 not all usher in this democratic republic that they seek? Do we exist in some alternate reality in which the right to vote does not exist? This obsession with democracy seeks to do nothing but to defang the Communist movement and pivot our fight towards mediating the class struggle instead of intensifying it.

After this long preamble, Marxist Unity Group finally unleashes their demands and they are underwhelming to say the least. The first 15 demands are what we can call State Building Demands, as in they exist to be implemented by a new “Democratic Republic” upon its arrival and to grant it legitimacy. Many of these are demands that either A). already exist, or B). can very feasibly exist under the current economic and social system. Perhaps their most ludicrous demand is the renaming of the “House of Representatives” to the “People’s House of Representatives”, and then vesting all of the legislative power in it. Their plan for government still has the same 3 branches of government that currently exist, albeit with a neutered executive (the President is to be replaced with the new Executive Council). All in all, these demands are feckless and, most, can be waived as utter nonsense that wouldn’t even have been seen as radical in the time of the Founding Fathers.

 The secondary set of demands are focused less on State Building and are rather “immediate measures” to be implemented, and then these are followed by a set of international demands. Again, as said above, many of these “immediate” demands can be satisfied by the Capitalist mode of production, and currently are around the world. Take for example, the call for a standard 32 hour work week. Instead of offering up a negative critique, let us offer a positive one instead and show what we would rather call for. In place of the establishment of a 32 hour work week, we would call for the immediate cessation of the commodity based economy. In one fell swoop we would end the undignified and slave-like practice that is “work”. In its stead we would create the volunteer economy, where we live by the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. 

Many of these demands show a glaring flaw in the thought process of Marxist Unity Group: they either are unwilling to succeed in class victory, or they simply don’t want to. Take for example Demand 8: Periodic suppression of public and private debts owed by workers. Can we get more arbitrary and abstract than this? Many would point at us and laugh off our critiques as abstract, but they cannot even decide whether they want to eliminate debt or not! What kind of socialist society would allow for the existence of private debts? Certainly not one we would like to live under. Many would look at these demands and our critiques and say “these are immediate demands! We can still work towards the abolition of Capital!”, but under this framework we simply can’t. Even in the event that we do wrestle political control through the barrel of the gun we cannot even conceive of a different world. We cannot imagine abolishing the present state of things. In that sense this program is the ultimate mediation! It placates the class antagonisms faced by the working class by offering it mere scraps at the table. Higher wages, access to medicine, the right to vote. Are we so sheepish that we would meekly accept this? While these are mere issues with a single program, it is a symptom of a greater wound. The Left cannot dare to dream of a new society, so it does not. As such we fall into the same pitfalls theorists and activists did 50, 100, and 150 years ago. We are thus condemning the real movement to the same destruction of the past, because our vision itself is a mere reflection of that very past. It seems long gone are the days where the (self appointed) representatives of the proletariat look to storm the Gates of Heaven, now they merely want to take Saint Peter’s seat.

Appendix:

Link to the Florence Program in its entirety.

editor’s note: you can find a pdf copy of this text at the bottom of the page. as always, feel free to download and distribute. enjoy!

Author’s Note

This article was originally conceived in the context of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, but has taken a new meaning in light of recent Anti-ICE demonstrations. With the former the threat of repression was stratified and void of refined purpose, as the primary target was an insubordinate overseas entity. Furthermore, with the secondary target in this scenario-fictitious and abstract capital (American investments and government financing of Israel)-there was still an absence of direct conflict with America itself. Thus, the American State simply sought a lower socially necessary amount of repression. Certainly demonstrators were bloodied, beaten, and arrested, but because their intentions were against governmental transactions and Israeli aggression, the American bourgeoisie was largely comfortable. Its hegemony was comfortable and enforcement lax, picking cat fights with college students as a form of spectacular amusement. The streets sang not with class struggle, but with justice, peace, and inalienable rights, all values the State could absorb and reproduce. There were few large-scale skirmishes with law enforcement, and those that existed were tucked away on the campus. The daily life of capital was able to reproduce itself, the function of the State was merely blotted with minor inconveniences, and so on. These flaws became responsible for the decline of the solidarity movement in general, and even as activists split into more and less radical camps there was little to be done.

Here the anti-ICE demonstrations represent a renewed focus on the immediacy of the American State. With this immediacy comes new territory, mainly the threat of the State and its functionaries, its ability to supervise capitalist reproduction. Now Communists can really represent a challenge to State hegemony and its efficacy in oppressing the working class, now they can fight a battle that can yield a greater outcome. Yet only if they can imagine it. As ICE grows bolder and better equipped, the consequences and fates of lives hang: Whether it be the targets of ICE, their families, demonstrators, or ICE itself. Thus, any marginal inconsistency with the program of the alleged resistance must be taken to even greater extremes. As such, it is in this analysis we have to sharply criticize the weapons of choice for the movement leadership: The Protest, the fetish of nothing, and various other factors featured in recent demonstrations across the United States.

On Opportunism Amidst Anti-ICE Sentiment

As with our previous issue on the Palestine Solidarity Movement and the student movement, we find it important first to elaborate on the specific historical conditions in which our thesis is currently relevant: A resuscitated, burgeoning anti-ICE struggle. Thus, we will briefly critique the forms of opportunism in this struggle specifically, i.e. language, slogans, and tactics, before developing a large-scale critique on protesting and solidarity as action. Given that the anti-ICE struggle has primarily consisted of these two variables, it is a perfect contextual background for what we intend to deconstruct.

Beginning with the current movement, the crux of the contradiction is simple: After initial outbreaks of resistance which could be deemed anti-formist, the question of migration has crawled back into a safe space. That being, a contradiction marked by deprivations on the international working class has been co-opted into a political question. This has long been the case, but with a deepening political crisis and worries regarding ICE, resistance began to take shape that was not altogether liberal. Yet within weeks it backslid to its political content, which judges the existence of the migrant on their economic and pseudo-cultural output to America. Now how could this be, with a movement’s target as markedly clear as the American State and the US-Mexico border? Primarily, it is due to the various sects of the bourgeoisie which contain some opposition to ICE. Immigrant labor, and especially immigrant labor further subsidized by its illegality, is a cornerstone of American industry: For example, in 2022 roughly 45% of all agricultural workers were estimated to be undocumented.[1] Take these figures with an understandable grain of salt, as data for immigrant laborers and especially undocumented laborers are hard to track. But various studies show similar results: In 2021 undocumented migrants were estimated to compose 40% of the farmworker population, and in some states such as California this number rises to 75%.[2] [3]Regardless of which figure you take, it is plausible to understand the necessity of cheap migrant labor for the agricultural industry. Similar studies can be found for other industries, where in 2024 it was estimated that 30% of laborers in major construction trades (plasterers, roofers, painters) and 25% of all housekeeping cleaners are undocumented. [4] 

We see this phenomenon of bourgeois fervor then, for example, in the large scale farms which bemoan Trump’s border policy, putting forward alternative measures such as the Farm Workforce Modernization Act in 2023. This bill, which failed to pass, would have allowed over a million undocumented agricultural workers amnesty, yet severely limit their already depraved workplace conditions.[5] As such, even if the “progressive” bourgeoisie propagandize and lobby against the severity of Trump’s migrant policy, they merely understand the precariousness of their business and seek to consolidate in an industry with a fatality rate 5 times higher than the national average.[6] 

As this economic language becomes political, alliances are made to consolidate a political opposition and alternative. They still mobilize for the sake of global submission to capital, yet their forces come in the name of peace, justice, equality, and the most ludicrous and yet stereotypical of all bourgeois slogans: Abstract human rights. Human rights are then the language in which we eat and sleep. Human rights are used to tell the time of day, even when less than 25% of undocumented agricultural workers have health insurance (compared to a still paltry 48% for all agricultural workers) and median wages for undocumented laborers are less than half of their minimum-waged, documented counterparts.[7] It is then human rights that we reject, as we reject the right to toil and the conscription of life to such. Yet the bourgeois mobilization has already made strides, given that as of the time of writing, Trump has seemingly gone back on large-scale ICE raids at farms, hotels, and restaurants.[8] This presents a concession for various sects of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie where there has previously been extensive infighting, and thus we can expect they will quietly fall in line with much of Trump’s remaining program.

Where is liberation for the worker derided as a migrant or alien? Surely not in these programs championing the global melting pot of capital, the capitalism with a place for everyone under its dominion. This is the sick and twisted nature of these democratic protests led by all the classes: They only further strangle the migrant into submission, with progressives seeking to implicate American workers in this process. We must remember that as almost all mass movements which are dressed by and for the “people”, these “diverse peoples” essentially boil down to conflicting bourgeois interests. Thus we cannot rely on morality in this movement, but outwardly criticize those who sell us eternal concepts.

Furthermore and as bourgeois interests shift, the resistance to ICE has given a platform to a feverish kind of “anti-fascist” patriotism equally abhorrent to its Republican opposition. In a remarkable shift from the progressivist cries of 2020 where we sacrificed class to look to a future America, the liberal establishment now yearns for the lost days of a law and order America, an America that stuck to tough laws and followed its judicial promises with brute force. An America that beat back fascism in Europe, raised the flag at Iwo Jima, and subsequently enveloped the entire globe. In their eternal morality they pine for an America that is strong and powerful, both ideologically but also as a global empire of accumulation. They miss the days of the 1990s when America represented the only entity in the world, an unconscious arbiter of reason and thought. Thus it is no surprise that these liberals bank their hopes on the last forces that era represented: The elected officials and all their horses and all their men, who toy with the ability to call in city and State police forces. While this dream-or rather, hallucination-has slowly dimmed, it is still incredibly relevant for the millions of Americans impassioned yet unable to justify doing. They want and desire an Empire that acts independent of democracy, a State that can positively deride all alternatives as fascist or totalitarian. The liberals themselves want fascism, if only in the sense that they plead to capital that its interests will entirely unite from above. This is not perversion but the ultimate manifestation of human rights. If previously unclear, now these new black shirts have displayed in their  “people’s marches” across the country a central theme: To “Take back our America!”. This trope is true to the inversion of conservatism by playing into the bourgeois culture war of defining and redefining Americana, and largely identical to the supposedly “fascist” opposition who rallies under the same cry!

All we as Communists are left with is a brutal irony that while marching under the banner of migrant rights, we champion the classic safeguard of  “the nation”. This movement which usurps even the established Communist infrastructure in scope is not to be sympathized with; It is conservative reaction that will need to be fought as much as any ICE battalion. We do not seek the global bondage nor our own, and we cannot sacrifice our imagination to the nation.

As we will explore with diligence in the next section, the task of Communists is certainly to resist the spectacle of protesting proper. But in order to do such, Communists must resist the allure of aiding one bourgeoisie against another in these reactionary mass movements. This makes it all the more dooming that the ideals of nationalism, of truepatriotism and moral righteousness are the pretext on which even Communist national demonstrations are being held. It is not a matter of making revolution but consolidating a lost American way of life and ethos. But the Communists are late to this pole, as it’s truly where Trump’s support has already been banked. In a sleek fashion bourgeois language has enveloped its own contradictions and made a fashionable mold out of this struggle, one that has been resold back to the revolutionaries for a significant price. 

This threat has long permeated the resistance to border patrol, ICE, and the federal government, but now we risk the bloodying of our own in exchange for bourgeois consolidation. We feel the need to remind Communists, then, that this is no longer a protest on the corner of the street, with no target or aims, ambition or imagination! We, in any situation such as the interventions against ICE, can truly define and redefine society as we wish. How life is used, what we do with it, can all be called into question with even a single blockade. Yet if we are to make a gamble, a truly serious one with our blood as the medium of currency, it should not die for a preferred means of super exploitation. Our response to bourgeois cries of peace and justice are not just the abolition of ICE: This gives them a medium under which the nation-state remains and readjusts. No, we must propagate and organize around the abolition of borders, of the nation state, and of global capitalism in all its forms through a working class struggle. 

If we are to make a serious gamble, we must first consider a serious imagination outside of our current confines. Reject bourgeois culture, reject bourgeois demands, reject everything but the world. Is that not but all we demand?

Demands alone are not enough, as the current demonstrations could be organized on the pinnacle of Communist sloganeering and still be hapless. Thus, the second point of struggle which delineates the aforementioned idealism is the site of struggle itself. We are witnessing a time when bourgeois idealism and proletarian outrage clash at each demonstration, but it is the site of the protest which envelopes all. It is in this setting where abstract ideology only goes so far, and we are not ideologists. 

On Protest As Spectacle

Protesting tugs at the heart of the imagination of all classes, and for the proletarian it is the culmination of unrealized dreams and an alienated subject. Protesting is everything and nothing: It is the promise of action while demanding inaction, an inexorable mold of doing, of seeking and becoming something else other than what one was. In other words, it is an emotional connection that is not materially consequential.

Protesting, as class antagonisms well, occurs when some mass take on vocal action; This is not exceptional by its own measure. Whenever the social relation is picked at like a scab, there is always some action being done by the warring classes. However, when this action is isolated into a single category of examination, is compartmentalized into a right unto itself and into an action unto itself, it serves as the golden birthmark of capitalist democracy. Severed by capitalist spectacle and the transfer of lived experience onto images, protesting itself becomes separate from the action of doing. Rather it is the admittance that nothing is to be done. Therefore, protesting is not a neutral development or excuse, but a wholly reactionary concept with a shoddy foundation for both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This foundation leads to dreadful confusion and false truths that fool both classes, but insofar as it is a capitalist product and right, it has largely been weaponized by the capitalists at the proletariat’s expense. Furthermore, while the act of protesting is a general reaction to capitalist contradiction and can be accompanied by a variety of factors outside of itself (strikes, armed insurrection, sabotage, looting), the protest as an event is none of these things. It exists not as the spontaneous uprising of the proletariat or of the students, but as an isolating mediation between the masses and capital. And a spectacular one at that!

We will proceed to examine this mediation through the conditions that give rise to its existence: Namely, the unrest of the masses, the tasks of Communists/organizers/activists during this unrest, and the means of presenting the spectacle to the masses.

First, let us briefly press on the conditions that make protest possible on a mass scale. As Communists, we understand this simply to be the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, as well as the corresponding alienation that governs and fractures the workers’ lives. But we must understand these features are natural to capitalist relations and integral to their reproduction; We do not cause them nor do we facilitate their development as organizers or spectacular agitators. These exist outside ourselves, our work, and our respective ideology. Thus it is not a matter of growing and sustaining a mass susceptible to our ideology or our work, as much as it is communicating what is really happening and offering a point for unrest to coalesce. To puncture all ideology thoroughly.

The prospect of the protest appears here, not to sever alienation at the source nor to provide any action of doing. Rather, it is birthed as the thought of struggle by organizers. By thought, we refer to the imposition of a set of ideas and values on the class struggle itself, into an ideology separate from social relationships. This ideology serves as a mediated concept from class struggle in its inception, seeking to bridge the relation between the mass of workers and the organizer, activist, or intellectual. The ideology can be “revolutionary” or “liberal”, this is not especially important when in relation to the protest. Both result in a similar world-building from the purveyor, which denotes this new reality as the only way to remain true to whichever specified cause. 

This is not a social relation itself, just an observation, and eventually a thesis developed into a thought. And this thought has a tendency to prioritize itself, through sheer compulsion, in order to justify its own existence. It must reach some sort of consensus, no matter how minute or miniscule, or just as it was conceived it will perish. And for the purveyor, it is unconsciously the death of ideas which is the point of primacy, not the break in the social relation we all despise.

However lofty, inevitably ideology must brush with the ground. When it does-and comes into genesis physically with the bourgeoisie-it is a prison from which only partial truths of the class struggle can form. It seeks to validate class struggle only through its own lens, or most often to do away with it altogether. This idealism causes the separation of the protest from its initial social content. First as thought, but now with a second division as the voyeur of action. When such spectacular events are formed, the ideology-State relationship presents a controlled environment with preset expectations. As such one protests not to act, but to watch as history unfolds before them. While tempting, they cannot construct an action outside of the event; The subject can only view and interpret through the gaze of ideology. As this phenomenon expands to greater subjects and the protest justifies its own existence, it ironically betrays the very action it was constructed to view. The uncontrolled action that is the cause of the protest has been isolated and reduced to spectacle. Robbed of its spontaneity and vibrance, the action is treated as an uncanny outlier from a different society. One that will remain foreign until it is inexplicably sorted out by the delegates of Empire. All action is criticized, all viewership glorified, and the protest is the final form of this fetishization. A new reality is formed, separate from classes, from struggle, and from society as a whole.

When this fetishism grows noticeable, there is very obviously a detachment from the struggle, from the real, in favor of ideology and optical abstraction. But ideological mediation is only ideological, it cannot confound the real completely. A real relation still exists, there is still struggle to be waged in some form, wrestling with ideals as it must. As such the protest requires real mediation, to anchor irregularities and create a moral spectacle outside of present society, outside of reality. What is this real mediation, and what does it look like?

It is the marshals, the liaisons, the organizers, it is the speakers, the leading NGOs and nonprofits, the trade unions and their affiliates as well as elected officials and their coalitions. It is the swathes of these that serve as a protracted arm of the State, ready and capable of dipping all eyes into a political program and optical comfort. For the sake of simplicity we can classify these into several groups: Rhetorical mediators (implementation of programs and slogans to the protest), internal mediators (the marshals, liaisons, and self-policing culture that sprout from organization), and State mediators ( the police, military, media and so on). 

Rhetorical devices serve as the agents of ideology, of the vision of class struggle through the eyes of its absence. Their purpose is as the original line of defense, for their images are the images on which mass protest takes form. Slogans are everywhere, reiterated all at once, directing subjects from their subservience to capital to an ideological concept they find agreeable in their present state. The rhetoric further perverts and fetishizes the uncontrolled action which presents the cause of thought. Thus, rhetorical success is practically confirmed with all protests. Should this not be enough, the internal mediators activate themselves abruptly. They coordinate with State thugs on a permissible event program and utilize their own authority to keep the masses’ shape. Through militant self-policing, they identify agitators, Communist or Anarchist, and alienate them from the rest of the protesting mass to ensure obedience to the rhetorical and therefore the optical illusions of moral grandeur. The State, through messages of violence and fear, will of course do the rest. But it is the protest in its own form that takes it to the level of the State, justifying itself by suppressing dissent, suppressing the class struggle itself. When all are present, the protest is a carefully constructed message of immediate democratic aims. As it grows its own consciousness throughout the duration of its lifespan, it dreams of nothing more than respect from the bourgeoisie, sacrificing more and more of its original content to do so. Eating away at itself, the young protest may completely be cannibalized if left to its own devices. But if its origin is so enthralling, so spectacular that it offers masses a remote alternative to illusion, the protest can subsist on its own life force some time longer. Through its very own servants, it will mass build across class lines until class ceases to exist, thoroughly abolished by and replaced by a pan-class morality and framework.

This is a 4th mediation which arguably triumphs all others: Time. Under capitalism everything is a race against time, including leisure time. What the masses do for pleasure wholly matters, and thus the protest itself is a cost to them and the capitalist system (whereas they could be contributing to social product through commodities). They must get some reward out of it, whether it is merely satisfaction or a false flag of revolutionary fervor. The masses are thus excited and anxious, awaiting something to happen to prove their gamble correct. The protest already knows it will never provide this, its ideologists even more so, but it does all it can to present real stakes to show an image of seriousness. Whether the decision to “take” a street or the sporadic random arrests to keep the mobs at bay, illusions of power and vibrancy keep mass energy in line but activated. They are led to feel independent of everything, unwittingly trapped in a falser reality than ever before. The closer they get to the edge of action and viewership, the further into constructed spectacle they plummet.

This real mediation becomes a supreme spectacle of mass energy, where all solutions to the world become obvious and present. Joy and justice are eternal; Ideas are everywhere just as in relation to the class struggle they are nowhere. Everything can be won, not through struggle but due to the mass being stripped of its class agency. After all, this is a mass struggle, and the mass struggle in protest is in favor of the unity of everything as long as resistance remains allegorical. We stress this to the highest degree: With a collection of every class, every idea is pronounced, expounded upon, provided in bits and pieces. But only as a voyeur to history. Should action be taken, should any subject do anything, this is a breach of the empty platitudes provided by the organizers and harnessed by the collection of mass that forms the demonstration. Even a hapless individual action threatens this balance. This is why the protest acts as the solvent to the class struggle, of any accord or variety.

Many Communists mistake these pitfalls as tendencies of liberal protesting alone. But the protests of Communists are just as shameful for they attempt to really peel back the mysticism of capitalist life. Here, they bellow insults at the police, call for a glorious triumph of the working class, and urge its agency in its own liberation. Their rhetorical defense is still just a false flag. Just as Leninists seek to operate the same machinery that facilitates capitalist reproduction in the State, they play with bourgeois tools while they wait for the revolution to be made. Due to the rhetorical confusion, Leninist protest has to overcompensate with an even more rigid internal mediation. The Communists in their lowly standing become more punishing than the liberals, dividing and conquering the masses while offering up agitators to the elements as “traitors from the outside.” 

Even the Communist protest is just an experience and a means to process life, to view it in its fullness, still divorced from the act of doing. In the next section, we will consider what it means to protest in the midst of the Communist spectacular.

The Allure of Nothing: Between 2 Movements

As the resistance to ICE has numerically grown but gone both rhetorically and actually stagnant, it reminds us much of the Palestine Solidarity Movement in its epoch. Not just because the same organizations organize mass protests, but because of the allure of nothing. While headlines capture the imaginations of all, these demonstrations exist in a vacuum of space which is hard to call reality. It is mystic, not realistic. We recount the burning death of Palestine solidarity last year through this attitude.

In Spring 2024 amidst the final throes of Palestine solidarity, the President of the United States was set to make a trip to our city. Roughly half a year to that point had been wasted on the spectacular protests, which drew in thousands of masses of all classes. Recurring events would be insulated and largely mystic to a feverish pitch, producing a popular morality for our mass struggle to guide us with. This morality was growing old very quickly however, and its continued imposition by organizers contradicted the severity of the genocide, the images upon which the morality had been imposed. As things churned forward we were growing tired and expectant, praying for something to unfold before us so we would be blessed with new energy. But it would not come. Instead, we continued to stay relegated to viewership, not just of genocide but of the protest spectacle itself. It was feeding on itself, developing products from its imposition, and slowly losing mass turnout as a result. 

As the spectacle could no longer subsist on itself, it now relied on outside action or events. In this instance, the physical presence of President Biden provided us with an audience and target in mind, so the protest could safely continue at least for a moment. At once, we set out with our marshals and liaisons and nationalistic human rights appeals. Eagerly we shared news with fellow organizers and agitators; Now was the time to plan something big, now the event would truly be the greatest spectacle of all. But while small groups of activists agitated on vague escalation, our dream itself was still wrapped up in the absence of action. We knew only the protest and its allure of absolutely nothing. So just as we had done for months, we took to the streets, or rather protest organizers partitioned a carefully defined segment of the sidewalk, tucked roughly a half mile away from the President. When the protest spectacle’s image-its very source of life-is so close to the spectacle, things once again get frenetic and the threat of losing control looms. This contradiction began to show itself while Biden rolled in through the entrance, and the protest stuck to location. Our youth was furious to be confined to such a position, and as such we agitated segments of the masses to venture forward with us. Members of the crowd began to agree, if not completely sure of how to act, they knew that they had to. We only agitated on action and proximity, but this was enough to break with the entire fabric of the event. And some of the masses followed, eventually fomenting enough momentum that later a pre-planned march plan went slightly off-course. See, organizers had gotten approval to parade alongside the sidewalk adjacent to the auditorium Biden was speaking at. They dared not get close, but for the sake of satiating that line between action and viewership, we marched with plans to turn around once by the gate entrance. We crawled closer to the gate, and before organizers could divert, it suddenly felt as if our small sect had created something new. Hundreds of protestors seemed bent on marching toward the President’s location, a small university building just inside an entrance way. Scattered police mobilized in this direction, seemingly confused about the show but nonetheless prepared to escalate. As their numbers were relatively small, an offensive of our own seemed on the table.

While we paraded marginally closer to Biden’s rally, we would never get a taste of State confrontation. Instead, Party and NGO organizers stood at an intersection, parting the march in two. With the use of their arms and a megaphone alone they were able to herd like cattle the march back to the limit of protesting capabilities, back to our enclave some 3 or 4 blocks away. Where our little mass attempted to push on, we quickly realized we were outdone by the revolutionaries. On our own we stood no chance of resisting the police and whatever federal detachments awaited within the gates, and so while making a show of our intentions, we made our way back to the receding mass. This was an elementary embarrassment and a failure on our part which can be viciously dissected, but we already understand the nature of all variables at play. Martials serve to police, and organizers serve to glorious mediations of class struggle conceived by viewers. The Parties and NGOs, we all cry, are traitors, equals to mouthpieces of  the bourgeoisie as they sell us perversions of our own dreams. For us this is apparent, and for the reader also.

Even so, the true tragedy was the folly of our expectations and the allure of Biden’s appearance relative to its relationship to the social relation. The physical target spoke to us in a way long and abstract marches couldn’t; A suburban march of a few blocks became more enticing than a parade through the central business district of the city. But it did not intensify the class struggle in our favor, nor would it have been if it was successful. In fact it did not question social relationships at all, rather a bourgeois politician’s hold over a supposed liberatory anti-politics. Concessional nationalist rhetoric was sharpened, and workers went home. Biden’s appearance brought a brief question to the spectacle of protesting, but it was swiftly and mechanically dealt with. All thought in preparation was monopolized by the Parties and NGOs, yet due to the “Communist nature” of this event, the rhetorical devices contradicted protest policy. For a brief movement, a Communist Party seemed to be leading a charge toward the President of the United States. It wasn’t until their internal mediation techniques held mass potential to a standstill that it was truly dead. This is a self-cannibalizing nature of the protest spectacle when led by Communists who cannot help but call for struggle, when in actuality they are drawn to nothing.

This is an extremely specific example that we cite not to draw out this conversation, but to serve as a greater entry in this storied allure. For the masses, there is nothing more fragrant than possibility. They will bet again and again on the prospect of something new, of an outcome or action that excites them. But with the hegemony of a controlled organizing body on one hand and the State on the other, this proposition becomes an empty soul. And the masses, even the working class, fall in line dutifully in a fatal balance of attraction: To watch history unfold before our eyes with the luxury of a spectator, whereas even the Communists lambast the poverty of a participant. To capitalism history is not scary, it is a death sentence upon which its own ruins are made. Hence the force at which we are encouraged not to do. The proximity of action to the protest is enough, and Communists are better than any other at taking the face of action. Even if one does not act in a real sense, they may go days, weeks, months, or years without realizing such.

We also must address that between 2 movements of solidarity lies a bloody reminder that no sacrifice goes unpunished. Those protestors who act now are bloodied, beaten, detained and imprisoned. So why do we watch alongside so few actors as if we have less to lose? This question is not a litmus test of morality, it is a condemnation of our employment of life. It is a condemnation of our existence in the face of capital. And it is the organizers, not the working class, who benefit from the allure of nothing. 

The hold of nothing has eased and strengthened recently as embryonic actions fall short of genesis. Just in the few weeks at a large Communist march, thousands of protestors in Chicago easily outmaneuvered the Police Department. Going off the script of march plans, demonstrators easily beat CPD back despite brutality, forcing them to let the march take the streets of its spontaneous choosing. Spinning and turning against the State, sufficiently de-arresting, even very meekly testing the supremacy of property, this was the show for a bourgeois democratic rhetoric. CPD was even briefly set up to be kettled by the marchers themselves. Yet when it truly mattered, the absence of action was more enticing than action itself. A chance for something really spectacular was gasping for life, but succumbed under the weight of the environment. The demonstrators could not break with the protest nor the morality it had instilled. Marchers turned away from corned police and marched nonsensically toward no destination at all. The march, after being injected by that which it could not control, was finally set to subsist on itself until it died in the night. This is the protest in its flesh, the culmination of everything and most decidedly, of nothing at all.

Destabilizing the Solidarity Politic

As much as any ideologist may like to claim, the real movement (the struggle between classes) does not consist of empaths. Yet the Palestine and anti-ICE movements are dominated by them! This is precisely the problem. What is thought and instilled by activists has poisoned the remaining supply of resources from which to draw from. We do not need a bourgeois morality, for the working class are not moralists. Thus, along with the protest and the allure of absolutely nothing at all, we relinquish one final measure: The solidarity politic. Let us explain.

It is true that workers do an immense amount of action in solidarity with their fellow workers and oppressed groups around the world. We can refer to these acts as solidarity when they are perceived by the subject as having little impact on their material lives, perhaps a small departure from other definitions. This is not meant to be a positive or negative thing when workers or activists do this. Rather, it’s something we innately grasp and relate to in the sake of mitigating alienation. The problem arises predominantly when a movement is effectively dismembered by its ideological leadership and left to die, we are left with nothing but a corpse of solidarity politics. One then has to ask what has actually occurred, why the images of solidarity failed to such an extent, and to what degree they facilitated this death.

The toothlessness truly sets in when activists perpetuate a moralist conception of an event as a need to be righteous. We had discussed already how they seek to produce a thought and transcribe it onto the masses. What is often produced is just lazy solidarity politic: Palestine, ICE, and so on. They fail to consider that the bourgeoisie does not care, the petit-bourgeoisie does not care, and certainly the workers will not care about their platitude. But because many activists and organizers are tied to organizations who cannot play to the class struggle, they cannot do anything but leave us with vague notions of intersectionality and moralistic platitudes. Both of these items further push down a worker’s throat the ideas of self-responsibility and solidarity, which may encourage them to do more good deeds when they are not grinded to a halt by capital. Yet this is not a reliable platform to pursue our objectives in a real sense, only fit to half-heartedly protest and meander about until our morals wear out.

When the latter occurs, we refer to this as a defined politic. It is a fashionable way of advocacy, of showing one’s support for trending issues in a legitimate fashion. You can take this politic to the streets and polls, your home or workplace and immediately be commended for it. Many may even envy your solidarity politic! This is resembling a strict departure of the intent of the solidarity action. Rather it is a politician’s co-optation waiting to happen, a flag they can wave to garner support among the morally inclined. But a working class struggle is inherently anti-political, for it knows no respect for bourgeois democracy nor for this kind of social voyeurism. It not only represents but entails the destruction of the political realm until it is a remnant of the past. 

Just as reformists hijack movements and platform themselves on existing social contradictions, they platform themselves on existing relations between workers. We understand that every object and interaction is a class struggle, nothing more and nothing less. Workers already face alienation and they already respond communally as they are able to in points of crisis. They may even show solidarity. But to hedge a movement on solidarity itself is an activist’s lie, and to bolster one around solidarity politics is a bourgeois’ lie. For a protest’s grip to be broken, it will take the working class living radically in its own self-interest. In this scenario there is no room for platitudes of “the people”, in which no class acts selfishly but simply comes together in harmony. No, it will take the destruction of harmony and peace, and of course as we have already discussed, morality. The solidarity politic of the hour is the culmination of all of these things and the transcription of a popular image into a powerful feeling.

Certainly, in historic times of crisis, we can refer to various heroic acts of moral solidarity on behalf of the workers. We also see some workers who are politically active, and behave with reverence toward the political system. But both of these things are mediations which point to the real movement; The moral worker and the political worker have just embraced a language to activate their own interests. They can express themselves through it, even step outside of an event briefly and take action. But these tools are still just transcribed language in the bourgeois sense, and their appeals can only go so far. Solidarity itself is one of these appeals, typically provided by organizers to rally the masses into one social movement or the other. In the current setting it is the call to show solidarity with migrants. But these appeals become fruitless, because they are always stripped of their original image-the depiction of class-and converted into a moral tone. 

The solidarity politic’s greatest sin is here: Taking the raw human weakness of an image and converting it into something purely optical. It uses the struggle of the migrant worker and twists it into a political question and ultimately a question of good and evil. The migrant worker’s liberation is sold for this platitude. But so is the worker when they are confronted with this image: It is a senseless and disturbing image, and they may show moral outrage, but they are called only to spectate history, they cannot find themselves or their struggle in what they see. Thus, migrants themselves become only more foreign and abstract to the worker, totally unrelatable. 

The limits of solidarity politics are obvious and intentional. Their striking imposition in both the Palestine Solidarity Movement and the Anti-ICE demonstrations has contributed to the failure of both. The solution is as simple as our demands are wide: Agitate and activate the worker’s consciousness through their own share of life. Not through questions of allocation or public policy, but of the share of life in its totality. That is the motivation that moves all classes, and the ability to imagine is critical to our proposition.

By encouraging the workers to be selfish, they will show more real collective will with other workers than addressing them through the solidarity politic ever could. Everything is an attack on them, and in the absence of everything, nothing still strikes a blow. If they stand on the precipice of action in midst of crisis, there is no need to toss them in through a fashionable politic, let alone one that isn’t the product of their own reality. Their share of life is the spark.

 “Don’t change employers, change the employment of life!” 

– Read on the walls of Paris, May 1968

Parasitism, a Conclusion

Class enemies exist all around us. They, like us, exist to live. Yet they are certain they can get by in this social relation, and as such, they have already hedged their bets against the working class. They want a continuation of protests, of propagation, of isolated self-sacrifice and of individual torment. They want the movement to burn heavily on the individual, such that one continues to funnel themselves towards a parasite. Yet a parasite needs a host, and seemingly for the NGOs and Communist Parties, they have found it in the international working class. Decidedly they will feed on the class struggle, with the migrant as the perverted image of choice. Then they will continue to carve out a leading role for themselves by mutilating one’s host, through shameless sabotage and power struggle. 

We cannot be sure what the conclusion of this movement holds, only expend our life as if its reins are still up for dispute. No matter how tight is the leash of the organizers or the State, there is a bubbling rage, simmering, opportune to spill over into a boil. The workers are without the machinery and institutions of the past, but this does not mean they are weak. What is, is the establishment of organizations serving as controlled opposition to the federal attacks. What is weak is the protest movement itself, feeding off images of resistance in Los Angeles and elsewhere, teetering between a dangerous balance where a single uncontrolled variable could push it over the edge. The organizers have long sought to control a narrative on this movement, and while they’ve gotten their wish, cracks will continue to form. Their own advice runs dry as federal agents swarm our cities, bloodying resisters and abducting working families. Every worker and activist left restless by their actions will be one capable of taking the movement into new heights. But only with the working class, can we rebel against the protest and all its spectacle.

Every struggle is a workers struggle. Every battle is fought over the worker’s destiny. It is our collective will, or capital’s dominating use of our life. The recent mobilizations ask not what you will do for the immigrants, but what we will do for our life.

References

1. Rosenbloom, Raquel. “A Profile of Undocumented Agricultural Workers in the United States.” The Center for Migration Studies of New York , 30 Aug. 2022, cmsny.org/agricultural-workers-rosenbloom-083022/#:~:text=CMS%20estimates%20characteristics%20of%20populations,are%20female%20(Figure%202).&text=According%20to%20CMS%20estimates%2C%20approximately,Oregon%20(4%20percent). 
2. “Farm Labor.” Farm Labor | Economic Research Service, USDA, 2021, www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor#legalstatus. 
3. “Farmworker Health Study.” UC Merced Community and Labor Center, 2025, clc.ucmerced.edu/farmworker-health-study. 
4. “Mass Deportation.” American Immigration Council, 1 Oct. 2024, www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation/. 
5. Tremblay, Hannah, and Jessica Kurn. “Immigration and the Food System.” Farm Aid, 9 Jan. 2025, www.farmaid.org/blog/fact-sheet/immigration-and-the-food-system/.
6. “Table A-1. Fatal Occupational Injuries By Industry and Event or Exposure, All United States, 2022.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022, www.bls.gov/iif/fatal-injuries-tables/fatal-occupational-injuries-table-a-1-2022.htm. 
7. Bacon, David. “Strawberry Farmworkers Fight for a Living Wage.” Civil Eats, 29 Apr. 2024, civileats.com/2024/04/24/strawberry-farmworkers-fight-for-a-living-wage/#:~:text=Immigration%20status%20also%20plays%20a,and%20tighter%20border%20security%20policies.%E2%80%9D. 
8. Hesson, Ted, and Marisa Taylor. ICE Ordered to Pause Most Raids on Farms, Hotels and Restaurants | Reuters, Reuters, 14 June 2025, www.reuters.com/world/us/us-immigration-officials-told-largely-pause-raids-farms-hotels-nyt-reports-2025-06-14/. 

---

[1] Rosenbloom, Raquel. “A Profile of Undocumented Agricultural Workers in the United States.” The Center for Migration Studies of New York , 30 Aug. 2022.

[2] “Farm Labor.” Farm Labor | Economic Research Service, USDA, 2021.

[3] “Farmworker Health Study.” UC Merced Community and Labor Center, 2025.

[4] “Mass Deportation.” American Immigration Council, 1 Oct. 2014.

[5] Tremblay, Hannah, and Jessica Kurn. “Immigration and the Food System.” Farm Aid, 9 Jan. 2025.

[6] “Table A-1. Fatal Occupational Injuries By Industry and Event or Exposure, All United States, 2022.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022.

[7] Bacon, David. “Strawberry Farmworkers Fight for a Living Wage.” Civil Eats, 29 Apr. 2024.

[8] Hesson, Ted, and Marisa Taylor. ICE Ordered to Pause Most Raids on Farms, Hotels and Restaurants | Reuters, Reuters, 14 June 2025.

Editor’s Note: This is an article that acts a preliminary attack on the most reactionary element of the Current Communist Movement: the abandonment of Internationalism. Rather than being a deep dive into the issues, it serves as an introduction of sorts for an on-going series on Internationalism and the Mythology of Anti-Imperialism.

– L.V.

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

• 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, K. Marx.

One does not have to go searching very hard before they encounter anti-Marxist and anti-Communist positions, that much is certain. Cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie is everywhere and nearly everyone has some kernel of liberalism wedged deep in their core. While we expect our class enemies to launch libelous campaigns against our doctrine, and for unconscious and under-educated workers to follow along, we don’t expect it from our “comrades”. An overwhelming number of self identified “Communists”, especially those who claim the title of “Marxist-Leninist”, parrot outright anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist, and quite frankly, anti-Communist positions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current trend of “Multipolarity”.

First, before we can begin our discussions about multipolarity, we must look to the past. In the latter half of the 19th Century the Socialist movement was at its peak. Still fresh off the ideas of the late Marx and Engels, around Europe the phenomena of “Social Democracy” began to spread. In its first inception, Social Democracy was a genuinely revolutionary position, and this revolutionary fervor allowed for the burgeoning Social Democratic parties to court the favor of the growing Proletariat. No party, in this regard, was held in such high esteem as the German Social Democratic Party, or SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) for short. The SPD spent its time building revolutionary bases and workers clubs all while functioning as an illegal party. By the first decade of the 20th Century the SPD was the largest socialist party in Western Europe and looked to be the harbingers of a potential proletarian revolution.

However, this Social Democratic revolution would not happen, at least not in Germany and not by the SPD. Important to note is that the SPD held onto a firmly internationalist foreign policy, a policy that attracted many workers, both German and foreign. This internationalism would not last for very long however. With the advent of the first World War, the SPD unilaterally chose to vote in favor of war credits, that is to fund the current war raging across the European Continent.

As the European powers geared for war and set themselves up amongst their allies, there was a break in the worldwide socialist movement, the Second International. The then currently existing Social Democratic parties had split amongst themselves on whether to support the war on the side of their respective countries, or to reject the war and turn it into class war. Lenin sums up the internationalist perspective best:

“In short, the Manifesto defines all these as conflicts emanating from “capitalist imperialism”. Thus, the Manifesto very clearly recognises the predatory, imperialist, reactionary, slave-driving character of the present war, i.e., a character which makes the idea of defending the fatherland theoretical nonsense and a practical absurdity. The big sharks are fighting each other to gobble up other peoples’ “fatherlands”. The Manifesto draws the inevitable conclusions from undisputed historical facts: the war “cannot be justified on the slightest pretext of its being in the interest of the people”; it is being prepared “for the sake of the capitalists’ profits and the ambitions of dynasties”. It would be a “crime” for the workers to “shoot each other down”. That is what the Manifesto says.”

• Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International, V. Lenin.

Lenin was among the first to call out this opportunist and revisionist trend, correctly identifying those who supported the war as “Social Chauvinists”, or those who are “socialists in word, chauvinist in deeds” and would gladly help their country enslave another. This rising chauvinism abandoned the class struggle for the national struggle and replaced class warfare with class collaboration. It was in this break during the Second International that authentic Marxism could be developed, away from the rotting corpse that was Social Democracy. 

While not serving as a conclusive history, the narrative above shows us one of the first, major flaws: National Chauvinism. The American Communist movement is no stranger to national chauvinism, as evidenced by the Browderite takeover of the Communist Party, (Or frankly looking at any moment in American history) but while the national chauvinism towards the American state has significantly declined, a re-branded form has cropped up.

Polarity refers to how power and influence is distributed amongst the international community, with power either being unipolar or multipolar. Unipolarity is where there is a single ruling power, or a hegemon, of the world. Multipolarity is the inverse, where power is split up amongst several actors. Multipolarists state that the United States, backed by the E.U. and NATO, constitute the world hegemon and the world is currently a unipolar world. To fight this they say that the solution would be for the U.S. to be dethroned, or to at least have equal competition. A further understanding of multipolarity can only be complete with an understanding of “campism”.

Campism is the notion that the world can be split up into competing “camps”, with the first camp being the U.S. and its allies and the second camp being those that wish to tear down American hegemony, such as Russia, Iran, and China. Campists posit that in order to lay siege against American Imperialism, the “First Camp”, we Communists must support the second camp. Without much thought this idea should be readily dismissed as an outright anti-Communist revision. 

While this idea can be waved aside as asinine by any genuine Marxist, some of the largest “Marxist-Leninist” parties in the U.S. seem to buy into drivel, such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. These groups, along with many others, give support to any actor as long as they portray their actions as “Anti American”. That is how these groups can end up supporting anti-Communist regimes, such as: Assad’s Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya, and Putin’s Russia. Sometimes this campism shows itself as support for the “Actually Existing Socialist” state China as well, but unlike Putin and Assad at least China claims to be socialist. This crude form of geopolitics lends the Communist movement to embarrassment as they support regimes that either: would gladly kill us, or historically have killed Communists (such as Gaddafi and Khomeini). Multipolarists can only envision the world under the current bourgeois order, and seek to replace the existing Imperialists with a new coat of paint. Such that, multipolarity is simply a cover for inter-imperialist conflict, however, instead of a blind national chauvinism for one’s own country, it has been flipped where the revisionists uncritically support the enemy of one’s country. 

This idea also bears a striking resemblance to the anti-Marxist theory of Three Worlds spouted by Mao. Three Worlds Theory is the notion that the world is divided into 3 hemispheres of influence: the 1st world being the United States, Europe, and their allies, the 2nd world being the Soviet Union and their allies, and the 3rd world being the globally oppressed nations. It is assumed that China would be the global vanguard to pick up the pieces of the Communist movement and lead the oppressed victory. Three Worlds Theory is an utterly chauvinist viewpoint that places undue importance on the Chinese, allowing them to fulfill their own imperialist ambitions, all while denying the class struggle for the national struggle. Hoxha builds upon this idea in his Imperialism and the Revolution:

“The Chinese leadership takes no account of the fact that in the “third world” there are oppressed and oppressors, the proletariat and the enslaved, poverty-stricken and destitute peasantry, on the one hand, and the capitalists and landowners, who exploit and fleece the people, on the other.

To fail to point out this class situation in the so-called “third world”, to fail to point out the antagonisms which exist, means to revise Marxism-Leninism and defend capitalism. In the countries of the so-called “third world”, in general, the capitalist bourgeoisie is in power. This bourgeoisie exploits the country, exploits and oppresses the poor people in its own class interests, to make the largest possible profits for itself and to keep the people in perpetual slavery and misery.

In many countries of the “third world”, the governments in power are bourgeois, capitalist governments, of course, with differing political nuances. They are governments of the class hostile to the proletariat, the oppressed and poor peasantry, hostile to the revolution and liberation wars.

The bourgeoisie, which has state power in these countries, is protecting precisely that capitalist society which the proletariat in alliance with the poor strata of town and countryside, seeks to overthrow. It constitutes that upper class which, proceeding from its own narrow interests, is ready, at any moment, at any turn of events, to sell the wealth of the land and the underground assets of the country, the freedom, independence and sovereignty of the homeland, to foreign capitalism. This class, wherever it is in power, is opposed to the struggle and aspirations of the proletariat and its allies, the oppressed classes and strata.

Many of the states which the Chinese leadership includes in the “third world” are not opposed to American imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. To call such states “the main motive force of the revolution and the struggle against imperialism”, as Mao Tsetung advocates, is a glaring mistake that stands out like the Himalayas. There are other pseudo-Marxists, too, but they at least know how to hide and disguise themselves behind their bourgeois theories.“

Furthermore, the Chinese falsifiers completely disregard the proletariat of the 1st and 2nd worlds, who are allies in our cause of International Revolution. 

While it is wholly true that “during a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government”, it is also true that we must turn the inter-imperialist conflict that currently exists into class conflict and proletarian revolution. The matter stands that Lenin, and all of the revolutionaries during the early 20th Century, lived during an age of so-called “multipolarity”, and all it led to was World War and the slaughter of proletarians en masse. This is not to say that we should support a unipolar world, it is in fact the exact opposite. Communists should support a “nonpolar” world, or a world where there is no power divided amongst the international community, but is held collectively by the international proletariat.

Multipolarity and Campism are not new phenomena by any means, as previously said some of these ideas are strikingly similar to the anti-Marxist strain of “Maoist Third-Worldism”, but this most recent inception has a shocking origin. 

Aleksandr Dugin is Russian Philosopher, commonly cited as “Putin’s Brain”. Dugin himself was an active anti-Soviet dissident in the 80s, and was one of the leading figures of the National Bolshevik Party in the 90s. Dugin subscribes to an ideology called “Neo-Eurasianism”

“Eurasianism, in its broadest meaning, is a basic geopolitical term which seeks to understand the entire world from the historical and geographical point of view, excluding the Western sector of world civilization. It also attempts an understanding of the world from the military-strategic point of view, specifically in terms of those countries that do not approve of the expansionist policies of the United States and their NATO partners. In terms of culture, it desires the preservation and development of organic national, ethnic and religious traditions; and from the social point of view, it embraces all the various forms of economic life and efforts toward the “socially just society.”

• Eurasian Mission – An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism,               A. Dugin.

Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism is most certainly a variant of fascist ideology, even though he purports it to be the “Fourth Way” (Against Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism). Dugin repeatedly defends the stance of multipolarism: 

“The Eurasianists consequently defend the principle of multipolarity, standing against the project of unipolar globalism that is being imposed by the Atlanticists.”

• Eurasian Mission – An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism,               A. Dugin.

Multipolarity is so central to Dugin’s theses because it gives Russia the clearance to imperialize places such as Africa and the Middle East, all in an effort to combat “the West”. These ideas have a slim overlap with the Leninist conception of Imperialism, but it fails to hit the mark. Since the revisionists either fail to understand Lenin, or wholly reject his ideas, they readily cling to the crypto-fascist ideology of Eurasianism as a part of the revolutionary struggle, either tacitly or openly.

Groups in America have already adopted these positions. FRSO has adopted the false line of “Actually Existing Socialism” in their fervent support of the “Communist” Party of China. PSL works with RT (formerly Russia Today) together with Sputnik to produce online video content, as well as pushes for a multipolar world, specifically in places such as Africa where they support military juntas all in the name of “anti imperialism”. Perhaps the most brazen is the American “Communist” Party, who outright platforms Dugin and upholds him as a modern Marx.

Aligning with neo-fascist ideology, whether willing or not, presents no viable alternative for the working class. Historically, we already know what the outcome of multipolarity will be and that is World War. Wherever there exists competition amongst imperialists it will turn violent, if not catastrophic. 

The contemporary Communist movement is in an unfavorable position. Everywhere there are revisionists, opportunists, and falsifiers that seek to entrench themselves in our cause to defang the class struggle. While there are many rank and file members of these revisionists organizations that have unknowingly fallen prey to this line of thinking, they still parrot multipolarity and campism as an effective strategy for the liberation of the international proletariat, and it there that we must launch an ideological struggle against these tendencies. 

It may cause some concern that openly attacking these tendencies could cause friction in the already neutered Communist movement in America, but this is the most opportune time to do so. The American Communist movement is in a premature stage of development. As the conditions of Capitalism worsen and the contradictions heighten, more and more workers will be radicalized towards Marxism. We, as authentic Communists, must stand firm in our ideological commitment for the liberation of the International Proletariat and struggle against any and all forms that seek to derail the movement. During the First World War, Lenin could have sat back and not attacked the degenerated Social Democratic parties of the Second International in the interest of “not splitting the movement”, but he and the Bolsheviks chose to stand firm. It is in the same vein of thought that we must also stand firm and struggle, not to splinter the movement, but to foster its development free from all revisions. We cannot sit idly by as we watch so-called Communists repeat the same mistakes of our predecessors. We must struggle for an authentic Communist future!

This is one of the articles included in our first volume of Avant!, “Reflections on the Student Movement”. As we finish up the volume feel free to read and enjoy the work we’ve already written!

1. Introduction

Organizational structures, and their competing effectiveness, have been among the primary conversations of debate surrounding the Communist left for several decades. Following the fall of the New Communist Movement these discussions slid back into irrelevance, and Democratic Centralism has solidified itself in what little Communist movement exists in America. The 21st Century represents a stagnation in Communist ideology. Individual Communists act little more than historians of their favorite epoch, and cannot fathom acts outside their prescribed formulas written over a century ago. 

Historical Materialism gives us the tools to effectively examine the mechanisms of history, and in this evaluation we can ascertain that as society shifts the methods of class struggle also adapt. We do not expect to use the same tactics and strategies of the European Peasant Revolts or those of the French Revolution, so why do so many “Communists” relentlessly mimic century old organizational strategies? As with many other issues, a healthy dose of idealism and a misunderstanding of history are to blame.

Lenin’s work stands as a sort of Gospel for many on the Left. Instead of critically examining works such as What is to Be Done? and State and Revolution, and understanding their role in the material conditions of a still highly feudalistic empire over 100 years ago, many treat these as “how-to guides”. That these seminal texts represent a blueprint for struggle, and not as a representation of class struggle in a specific time and place. This is not to deride or deny Lenin’s contributions, but rather to understand them in relation to the totality of history.

One specific demographic of struggle that is significantly stunted ideologically is the youth, and accompanying student, movement. Once the bastion of new, revolutionary ideas with the  youth being lively with debate; the contemporary movement has been thoroughly centralized around the organizational principle of democratic centralism and Leninism. We will come to argue that the principle of democratic centralism is an inefficient model, if not outright hostile, for the current class struggle, at least as it relates to the youth and their organizing. [1]

Youth organizing has a special connotation. While the youth are not inherently revolutionary, as many on the Marxist left proclaim, they do serve as a useful microcosm of wider bourgeois society. Any ideological hypotheses we have can be thoroughly experimented on with the youth. Youth organizing lacks a sense of permanence that other facets often have, mainly due to the transitory nature of young people (specifically students).[2]  With this in mind, we can begin to analyze the effectiveness of different organizational strategies, namely those of democratic versus organic centralism.

2. What is Centralism?

Democratic Centralism is the organizing principle that nearly all Marxists abide by, but what even is it? Democratic Centralism is the method of structuring an organization in such a way that prioritizes operational unity. Lenin formulates Democratic Centralism in What is to Be Done?, and would later be evolved to stress the fundamental importance of “Unity of Action”, rather than outright freedom to criticize. 

“The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.” [3]

It would not be long until the Democratic Centralist principle became law in the party, as by 1917 the Party had firmly adopted that line. 

“The Sixth Congress adopted new Party Rules. These rules provided that all Party organizations shall be built on the principle of democratic centralism.
    This meant:
    1) That all directing bodies of the Party, from top to bottom, shall be elected;
    2) That Party bodies shall give periodical accounts of their activities to their respective Party organizations;
    3) That there shall be strict Party discipline and the subordination of the minority to the majority;
    4) That all decisions of higher bodies shall be absolutely binding on lower bodies and on all Party members.
    The Party Rules provided that admission of new members to the Party shall be through local Party organizations on the recommendation of two Party members and on the sanction of a general membership meeting of the local organization.” [4]

When codified into the Party Platform and Program, Democratic Centralism shifted from an organizational strategy to a principle of governance. A policy that negates the historical conditions that led to the creation of Democratic Centralism in the first place. Its codification led to the establishment of a Party Bureaucracy that stifled freedom of expression and allowed for the conservative Stalinist clique to take root and plant itself firmly in the party’s leadership. 

As time went on, various flavors of the International Communist Movement became disillusioned with the Soviet model and posited their own alternatives. While Maoist and Trotskyist cliques criticized the function of the Soviet bureaucracy, they failed to adequately critique the organizational form that assisted the Soviet degeneration. Only the various sections of the “Ultra-Left”: the anarchists, German-Dutch Current, and the Italian left, tackled the topic of organization, among those namely the Italian left (who is the topic of this essay).

By the mid 20th century, Democratic Centralism had proven itself to be an idealist and, at times, reactionary organizing principle. Instead of uplifting debate and conversation it shut it down. Instead of advancing the Party it closed it off and neutered its development. The battle cries of “Unity of Action” had fermented and degenerated into a “Unity of Leadership”. 

“The danger of bourgeois influences acting on the class party doesn’t appear historically as the organisation of fractions, but rather as a shrewd penetration stoking up unitary demagoguery and operating as a dictatorship from above, and immobilising initiatives by the proletarian vanguard.

This defeatist factor cannot be identified and eliminated by posing the question of discipline in order to prevent fractionist initiatives, but rather by successfully managing to orientate the party and the proletariat against such a peril at the moment when it manifests itself not just as a doctrinal revision, but as an express proposal for an important political manoeuvre with anti classist consequences.” [5]

Opposed to Democratic Centralism and its degenerative tendencies, the Italian Left raised the banner of “Organic Centralism” in its stead. Unlike Democratic Centralism, Organic Centralism can be harder to pin down as an ideology and principle. 

“All this should be treated much more broadly, but it is still possible to achieve a conclusion about the party’s organisational structure in such a difficult transition. It would be a fatal error to consider the party as dividable into two groups, one of which is dedicated to the study and the other to action; such a distinction is deadly for the body of the party, as well as for the individual militant. The meaning of unitarism and of organic centralism is that the party develops inside itself the organs suited to the various functions, which we call propaganda, proselytism, proletarian organisation, union work, etc., up to tomorrow, the armed organisation; but nothing can be inferred from the number of comrades destined for such functions, as on principle no comrade must be left out of any of them.” [6]

Organic Centralism can be summed up as the notion that factionalism is not an inherently negative behavior that must be combatted and shut down, and that internal factions of the Party, or any organization, are actually beneficial to its developments. These principles can be seen in the historical tradition of the Communist Movement, and even in the Leninist annals of history. Marx himself was a factionalist in the 1st International when he struggled against the lines of Bakunin and Proudhon. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were factionalists when they broke with the Mensheviks of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In each of these situations, the organic development of the proletariat and its organs was spurred on by factional splits in the existing movement against bourgeois reaction. 

Organic Centralism does not posit that there should be infinite splits until the “Invariant” line is held supreme, but rather that unity of action necessarily cannot be arrived at from strict ideological unity. In fact, adherence to strict and remorseless ideological unity was one of the deciding factors that led to the murder of the Bolshevik movement in its infancy.

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” [7]

We are currently in the farce stage of ideological and historical development. Questions of centralism and its role are of the most pressing matter to our current movement, both proletarian and youth. Even though the 21st century remains one of the most ideologically free and liberating epochs of the historical movement, it is going through its own period of “Bolshevization”. [8] “Unity of Action” has again become the rally cry of the left. A “Unity” which necessitates the ideological dictatorship of methods that have proven themselves to fail time and time again. If we are to preserve any semblance of authentic struggle in our movement we must ruthless critique and struggle against these idealist measures. 

3. Idealism and Organization in the Youth and Student Movement

What one must understand about the Youth movement is that it is dominated primarily by students. Students on their own serve as a problematic demographic to build a revolutionary base off of, but that is not the topic of this essay. [9] Of the many concerns present the primary is the organizational strategy of the youth movement. Whether consciously aware of it or not, the prevailing principle of the day is Democratic Centralism. Leninists and Crypto-Leninists currently have a monopoly on the student “movement”, which itself is the majority of contemporary youth organizing. Leninist cliques, such as Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) are heavily tied to the “established” Communist Parties in the US, with SDS being the unofficial student wing of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and PYM being closely linked to the Party for “Socialism” and Liberation (PSL). Other smaller parties influence separate student unions, and even unaffiliated and independent student groups fall into the wider Leninist ecosystem. Leninist principles of vanguardism are copy and pasted onto the student and youth experience, and these mass organizations either are operated as micro parties or themselves become an organ of said party. In both instances, idealism prevails as the basis for organization.

Many aspiring young Leninists and Revolutionaries will join local organizations and parties. In fact, they might even create their own organization. In any case, the rigid cycle of Leninism and Democratic Centralism begins with the poor youth unwillingly thrust into it. Let us, for example, look at a pre-existing social organization and its effects. Take the Students for a Democratic Society. SDS is a nominally left-wing student movement that is built around the theme of international solidarity and espouses an anti-war message. This is all fine except for the fact that SDS is a direct funnel organization to the wider national party of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Gullible and impressionable young teens join the SDS looking to make a positive impact on their community, both local and international, but from the very minute they join they are ideologically groomed into accepting FRSO’s line. I’m not saying that it is necessarily wrong for an organization to have a specific ideological slant, but what I am saying is that this is kept under wraps and key and is not made clear from the start. 

Let’s rejoin our aspiring young radical. Now a semester has passed and they have become fully ingrained into the SDS, or any other youth group’s, culture. They attend protests and rallies. They might lead chants or give speeches. After a certain amount of time they get approached by a more senior member of the group and are informed about this exciting new opportunity to join a national movement. Most young people would be ecstatic to hear this news. Their sense of self worth is inflated and they can now call themselves a Communist. When joining this nationally oriented party, they are introduced to the works of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. They are taught this in a closed environment where the gospel in these texts is already pre supposed to be accurate and true. It is here that Democratic Centralism strikes its first blow. 

Following the premise of adherence to organizational unity, it is a logical conclusion to extend this out to a strict unity of ideological matters. After all, ideology is just the rhetorical form of physical organization. When parties and organizations are formed it is often in mind that it subscribes to a specific strand of Marxism, such as a Marxist-Leninist Student Group, a Maoist Party, or a Trotskyist Reading Group. Under this principle an objective truth is already decided upon and anyone who joins must be ordained in these Communist ecclesiastes. Democratic Centralism in this manner is not an organizing principle, but is a tool to enforce a rigid ideological hierarchy. Prospective cadres and members are exposed to Communism through the lens of the equation already being solved long ago and that we just need to apply the correct historical formula. Since the youth is shackled by the principles of Democratic Centralism they are not able to criticize elements of the ideological or organizational base without risk of expulsion or re-education. Such that Democratic Centralism has fully ceased to be democratic in any meaningful capacity and has devolved into vulgar centralism. Or rather than a de-evolution it is the logical conclusion. It has deviated from its idealized conception of democratic debate and instead replaced it with the reality of its implementation: that the minority must be harshly combatted.

Returning to our stand in Communist, they have now fully joined the ranks of the Party and are a committed and faithful cadre in the ideological service of Marxism-Leninism (or Trotskyism, or Maoism. It really doesn’t matter, the function of centralism doesn’t change in its relation as a way to bind the youth to the Party). Since their ideological base is merely adopted and not critically examined they have ceased to be a Communist and are instead a vector of organizing for whatever social club they decided to join. In essence, the Communist becomes a living, breathing automaton designed to regurgitate whatever party propaganda was fed to them, and is all too willing and happy to do so. This all operates under the principle of Democratic Centralism, and this system is kept in motion via its reproduction with new cadre. 

Now is where we diverge in our analysis, as the young Communist has two pathways they can take. They either submit themselves willingly to the Party and allow their local youth organizing to become just another organ of the Party, or they engage in the creation of the micro party. Let us examine the former first, since it lines up neatly with the narrative of the youth we have crafted. Picking up where we left off, this young aspirational revolutionary has joined a national party and is now a faithful leader of its student and youth wing in their local area. Being such a faithful soldier of the Party, they are sure to implement all of the ideological and organizational directives that are set upon them, no matter the cost. Across the country, perhaps the world, this process repeats itself ad nauseum.  Thousands of well-to-do young Communists fall to the trap of nationally led organizations. In order to please their superiors and to fall in line with the centralization of the Party, local organizing is subordinated to the realm of obscurity and national campaigns reign supreme.

In the organic development of revolutionary theory and praxis it is certain that as locations change so do the strategic, tactical, organizational, and even ideological considerations. While it is possible to prescribe a national strategy in some cases, in most others regional differences are often far too profound that a qualitative change in tactics must be considered. For example, across the United States there exists a great variance in class consciousness, economic development, and other class considerations. It would not make sense to use the same tactics in the radical city of Chicago and the rural, less conscious South. However, parties take their nationally coordinated campaign and offer it as a panacea to the afflictions of Capital. 

When national organizing interests trump local and regional interests it only ends up splintering the efforts of those at the local level. Under threat of not following the party line, local activists and organizers are coerced into abiding by national action. For example let’s look at a local case of the relationship between a nationally led organization and how it interacts with local organizing. Coalitions are the lifeblood of any local organizing scene, uniting both competing sects of the Communist movement and single-issue or identity groups. These grand alliances can only work if all those present are willing to come together and run events communally, however due to the presence of nationally led groups this dynamic can often sour. Let’s say that a local coalition has an event planned for next Friday. It takes a large amount of effort to coordinate several groups and their respective membership as well as promote it to the unaffiliated masses. Now, in this example, one group has been given the memo that next Wednesday is set to be the host of a “National Day of Action” and their local chapter is expected, sometimes required, to schedule an event. Often these national events and local events are being organized around similar, if not the same, topic, but the national Party cannot exercise control over the local coalition in the same manner it can its local branch. This presents an odd situation for all parties involved. Locally, the coalition has already expended a large amount of effort and manpower to get the event up and running; the regional branch itself has obligations to both the local coalition and the Party. Given that the Party necessarily trumps the locals, if not then why else would it exist, the branch is fundamentally coerced into abiding by Democratic Centralism and following the will of the Party, as nationally coordinated actions would have been decided upon democratically. Following this, the branch coordinates its own event that competes with the local coalition and this causes confusion amongst the workers who are not up to date with party politics, and causes strife and antagonism among the local activist scene. In this equation no one wins and everyone loses, and it all boils back down to the backwards organizing principles that have been forced onto everyone involved. As far as the regional branch is concerned, it has ceased to have all autonomy and is turned into an organ under the direct control of the Party. Under the direct control of the Party, the branch slowly becomes completely alienated from all forms of local organizing as its base for existing is constructed inorganically and is hostile to the rest of the locality. This is not just an organizational coincidence, but is a long standing tactic of many groups, and is something we have much experience dealing with. Locally this strategy has only led to branches that act in this manner to be looked at with derision and they have been fully relegated into ideological poverty, obscurity, and both rhetorically and materially meaningless, “protests”, “rallies”, and “marches”.

The branch can continue down its current path of self isolation from the wider “movement” in favor of appeasing Party bureaucrats, or it can take a second road. In any given organization that is tied to another it is bound to have, at some point, an antagonistic relationship with its parent. Youth wings tend to break in some way or fashion from the Party proper, and while still being tied to it begin to form their own micro-party. Adhering to Leninist principles, many of the youth will take democratic centralism and apply it to their wider based mass organization, in practice turning it into a “micro-party”. Due to the previous conditions laid out in the relationship between the branch and the Party, the branch’s efforts in local organizing can be strained, or at worse they can be politically isolated. If the branch seeks to remain politically and ideologically relevant it necessitates a split or division away from the parent Party. In this struggle, the division’s cause is seen as a tactical difference in strategy and the ideological component is left unthought of and thus the same ideals that caused tensions to ferment and cause the split are still firmly in control. In order to protect itself materially and ideologically the leadership of the local branch keeps Democratic Centralism as a central principle. Democratic Centralism acts as a shield for the branch, now in all intents and purposes the “micro-party”, to wield in the struggle against the parent Party and elements in the branch that would remain loyal to it. Centralism again serves as a tool to solve practical differences in the short term while doing nothing to solve the long term implications of its enactment. While a split certainly helps with the validity of the new micro-party in the eyes of the local community, it does nothing to fundamentally, or even meaningfully, change the social relations present in the organization. Leadership has only nominally been replaced with a centralist and faux democratic chain of command. It is the perfect analogy to the conception many Leninists have of revolution, that if only we rearrange the managers of society we could flourish. 

Solutions lay not with discarding national strategy, nor with the adoption of localist and regionalist attitudes, but with instead with a radical shift the social relations that are present in political organization and how leadership and participation exists. These shifts come under the analysis that there are specific strategic and tactical considerations to keep in mind, as well as ideological obligations. In our own personal experience, we took the route of tactical decentralization. All official positions that previously existed and their associated privileges, as well as the very notion of the micro party were all immediately abolished. In its place we pushed for the organic development and organization of our members, and while there were some growing pains we adjusted well and the membership is more active and we have more meaningful campaigns. However, this is just one example. In your area or organization it is possible that a tactical centralization could be the more effective development. As long as the ideological component remains consistent, matters of tactics and strategy do not need to be universalized.

 Democratic Centralism utterly fails to achieve any of its ideological or practical goals of unity or anti-factionalism, in fact it is the very reason why factionalism and disunity come about in the first place. Had there not been a rigid hierarchy in the social organization of the relationship between the Party and its branch, there would be no factional struggle launched by the localists since they would be free to pursue campaigns at their own discretion. Historically, these principles have not succeeded in their goals and have only existed to cement whatever leadership body exists, whether that be the Stalinist Clique that betrayed the Russian Revolutionaries, the Khruschevite Bloc that summarily betrayed the Stalinist Clique, or in a more apt example the German SDP and its expulsion of its youth wing that got too radical for its own good in the 60s. Throughout history we can see that Democratic Centralism has only ever been used as a tool for the ruling circle to defend its leadership under the guise of party unity. Unlike the Trotskyist sections of the movement, we do not claim fault to lay with the personal failings of those in leadership, but with the very principles of Democratic Centralism that embolden leadership to alienate the general membership and secure their own political legacies. The ultimate tragedy is that the current groups ruling over their national parties are only ruling over micro sects of the movement and will have little to no legacy to speak of. If fault lies with Democratic Centralism and the way it manages social relations, then what is the way forward for the Communist Movement? And how should we approach inner social organization?

4. The Way Forward

Central to the Communist thesis is the abolition of current social relations and its replacement with a new social order. Following this understanding we must also realize that our current inter-Communist social organization must continually work against the current order and inside our own spheres we can begin the process of developing new social relations. Democratic Centralism has shown itself to be little more than a series of principles that do nothing to degrade Capital, but instead reinforces it through rigid hierarchy. The question still remains, how we can begin to shift our relations while still living under the dictatorship of Capital, and the solution presents itself as adopting a new and different structure. I believe that the solution lies in discarding Democratic Centralism and adopting Organic Centralism as our sole principle.

Democracy as an ideal itself is harmful to communism and contemporary communization of social systems. Organizational structures are inherently tied to their matching modes of production and the overwhelming consensus among Capitalists is that democracy is the preferred social model. Democracy is so intrinsically tied up with Liberalism that the two cannot be separated and thus the calls from Communists that it is actually communism that will bring about “true democracy” often ring hollow. Not only are they incorrect in their assertion that liberal democracy is “not real democracy”, but that our structure under communism will be inherently anti-democratic. Instead of vague platitudes of equality we must uphold the authentic character of Communism that is the organic self organization and development of the proletariat in abolishing itself, and it is Organic Centralism that can lead us down that path.

Organic Centralism holds the keys to the self abolition of existing social relations in that it prioritizes the development of the proletariat first and foremost. Many often take “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” in purely economical terms, such that a Communist society is one that merely distributes and reallocates resources in a more efficient manner, however this also applies to the social relations. In the Communist Party, each member will act according to their ability, meaning that they will organize in a manner that is best for their conditions and that they will receive what support and guidance is needed. Unlike some others on the Ultra-Left, it is not my position that the Party should be the arbiter of all action and ideological matters, and nor is it my position that localism and regionalism should reign supreme; that the very notion of the Party should be scorned. It is my position that the Party should be an existing outlet of Communism in practice, that it directly begins to break down social relations in its immediacy and provides as an example to the proletariat of what communist society can look like. 

Back to its application to the youth movement, Organic Centralism can be very neatly applied to it because many in the movement already practice Organic Centralism. Inside many youth organizations, structure is guided by the principle “those that can, do”. Democratic Centralism often presents itself in a manner such that it is employed in strictly ideological matters and used as a defensive tool to protect the legitimacy of leadership. However, inter organizational structures are often merit based and revolve around several factions and cliques that take up different segments of work. Rather than being directed to fulfill their expectations, the individual finds one, or more, segment of organizing that they find fulfilling and they act on it. Whether it be mutual aid, education, etc, there are often several inter-organizational factions that form for the advancement of the groups practical efforts, and these factions work in tandem for the betterment of the entire organization such that there is a free association of organizers.

The principle goal of Communism lies not in its program but in its content and character. We simply cannot expect to usher in a classless society when we operate off the Liberal and Capitalist framework of social relations. In our everyday lives and political work we must tirelessly effort to hasten the communization of our communities, not in the hopes of constructing political capital to wield, but with the goal of destroying both Capital and politics in one fell swoop.

References / Notes

[1] Youth organizing is the only experience in organizing and taking part in the class struggle that I personally have. I do not want to attempt to universalize the monolith that is the struggle against Capital, however many overlaps between youth and traditional organizing may exist.

[2] Young people often lack ties to an area that older proletarians have, such as children, a partner, or a consistent home. It is not uncommon for younger people to move away from their hometown permanently or for a short period of time. This is exacerbated with students who themselves are often disconnected from the traditional social relations of the community they live in and are not expected to live in the same area that they obtained their education (Many graduates may end up having to move for employment if they have a specialized degree or skill set).

[3] Vladimir Lenin. Freedom to Criticize and Unity of Action.

[4] History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Page 198

[5] Amadeo Bordiga. Section 5 of the Lyons Theses.

[6]  Amadeo Bordiga. Considerations on the party’s organic activity when the general situation is historically unfavourable.

[7] Karl Marx. 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

[8]  “Ideologically free” in the sense of comparing our situation to the pre-WW2 era with the mass level of Bolshevization and centralization of the party lines around the sect of “Marxism-Leninism” following the power struggle in the USSR.

[9] This topic is covered much more in depth in the following piece The Student Psyche in Crisis, which is also found in this journal.