Our comrades at the Sonoran Internationalists have brought forth two criticisms of the local movement against the Project Blue hyperscale datacenter. Their first, “Project Blue: Not in My Backyard,” was written at the peak of the movement’s limited success in its strategy to appeal to local government. Their second, “A Final Addendum to Project Blue,” has been written at the current low point in the movement.
We believe that while their analysis is worthwhile, they fail to appreciate the importance of engaging in local struggles and have a vastly expansive definition of “reformism”
Our definition of reformism is any movement which is involved in demanding reforms to the capitalist system from the ruling class.
The No Desert Data Center Coalition (NDDCC) is obviously reformist as the organization’s objective is to engage in electoral maneuvering (specifically through the Tucson City council and county board of supervisors) to beg the ruling class to not build a particular construction project. Reformism is to us not merely reform without communist aesthetics or words grafted on top.
This is the beginning of a trend in this text where the author seems to not understand the meaning of certain words.
that precludes them from supporting most worthwhile movement projects. In addition, we fear our comrades are less interested in building Communism than they are in providing critique from the sidelines, where their ideas cannot be tested and they are off the hook for actually solving difficult organizational problems.
History is the primary testing ground of strategies for our class movement. Our positions come from an analysis of the history of proletarian revolutions as well as our own experience in these exact kinds of leftist groups that we now critique from the outside.
If all knowledge had to start at square one, instead of learning from the past, then we would also ask that you stop washing your hands until you can prove miasma theory to be incorrect.
In fact, we formed this organization because of our previous experiences in these kinds of reformist organizations. The lesson we learned from the foundational failures of those groups was that reformism itself was a complete pitfall, and we have gone on to engage in our activity with this new understanding.
There are criticisms to be made of our past writings and actions, and we have made those criticisms ourselves as part of our process for discovering how to be an effective Communist organization. We do not need to take a step back into the swamp of leftism to see once again the failures of these ideas.
If we have already learned the lesson, what reason do we have to repeat the mistake?
In their first article, the Internationalists argue that the data center in Tucson is one part of a larger worldwide increase in demand for computing technology, which is driven fundamentally by the profit motive and subsequently by capitalist competition. As a result, stopping the center in Tucson will require its construction elsewhere, because it is driven by these powerful economic forces.
They argue that even the best possible case for the anti-datacenter movement –.i.e. stopping the datacenter in Tucson – simply condemns some other community which is less capable of resistance.
In this criticism, we agree wholeheartedly!
Immediately the author has to concede that the entire existence of this organization (to stop one particular data center by appealing to local government) is a pointless endeavor. This should be beared in mind later when the author will then chastise us and repeatedly ask that we waste our time engaging in this same movement with the same useless objective.
An approach to this process wherein communities battle city governments and corporations to end data centers everywhere is impossible. We believe over-extraction and waste of resources is a fundamental facet of capitalism, and the only solution to over-extraction is Communism.
Next, they argue that instead of fighting the datacenter, “we can use this understanding to criticize the entire system as it stands, as an example of why we need something fundamentally different” (our emphasis). Their alternative is to organize a Socialist society based on worker’s council government,
While councils will exist during the transitory stage towards socialism, communism (which we use interchangeably with socialism as marx did) will not be a society of committee but something much more organic. Further, there will be no governance but rather coordination or resources.
We understand that this runs contradictory to our original article, (for which you are stating our stance as such), and we levy this criticism not against you but against our past selves. We merely wish to proceed with the furthest and most honest version of our current stance.
which confers with experts to properly govern society and organize the economy without competition and over-extraction.
“What is the problem”, says the Internationalists? Capitalism. “What is the solution?” A complete rupture of our capitalist society by a revolutionary moment which transitions society to total workers’ democracy.
Democracy is no more important to us than the right of kings.
As with the previous note, this is something that contradicts our original article and as such it is a criticism against our past selves in the spirit of honesty.
And, in terms of practical steps to build this world-historic moment and drive it to completion? Our comrades simply say, critique! All our friends can muster is a proposal that we critique the situation.
We believe that this sentence showcases the grand programmatic and theoretical error underlining TRAG. That they take our position of the only role of communist organizations and militants towards reformist organizations being to critique them to mean that the only role of communists in general is criticism shows that to them the entire theatre of militancy is limited entirely to intervention within such opportunist avenues.
As if the options are “join in this useless movement” or “do absolutely nothing”. We have rejected this false dichotomy that seeks to coerce us into joining an organization which does not share our principles or objectives.
Very good. Their criticism is well-received. And where is our revolution?
This is to us a disingenuous criticism. We could certainly ask the same of TRAG. If your strategy works so well why haven’t you started a revolution, or at least turned the NDDCC away from its reformism?
The fact that a revolution has not occurred right now is to us not an indictment of either of our strategies, and is an argument befitting only of someone who wishes to say that revolution is impossible, which we certainly hope TRAG is not; despite the fact that all of their organizing may point to the opposite.
Our argument is not that if all the “uneducated and infantile proles” (as TRAG may consider them as part of the “masses”) of the NDDCC simply joined our organization and became geniuses like us we would achieve revolution today, but rather that in times of the revolutionary cataclysm of capitalism such organizations will be inherently counter-revolutionary; and further that participation in them in times such as now will only lead to a lack of clarity within the communist movement when such a situation occurs.
This is where we take issue with the Internationalists’ conception of revolution. Revolution is not a long process, which we must work all our lives to build together. It is not a process which we must join together with the global working class in over a lifetime, in the hopes that one day, life on our world may live in harmony.
The revolution is certainly a long process, however; communism is not built piecemeal. The socialist movement grows not consistently and step by step, but rather in leaps and bounds; and it can do so only via possessing the clarity of mind and singleness of structure to be poised for the moment.
The basis of our work is a shared commitment to the revolutionary programme. We organize and act according to this principle. As such, despite geographic distance we are deeply embedded in the international Communist movement.
This organization on the other hand, spends its time organizing for local crosswalks and volunteers in any other cause that they believe can be used to make them look good.
Then, of course, they turn around and say we’re the ones doing useless non-work, because their emphasis on involvement in bourgeois politics as a poorly disguised recruitment drive, is obviously much superior to our activity.
The purpose of their “work” is to convince more and more proletarians to join up and then get involved in ever more bourgeois causes. They measure success in quantitive terms, how many poor wretches have been convinced to join the group and pay their weekly membership due for the right to vote.
Communists measure success not in terms of quantity of members, but quality. After all, it’s not as if we will reach some magic number in membership and then we will have the strength to carry out revolution. Rather, as exemplified most by the exponential growth of the Bolshevik party in the period of crisis in 1917, the revolutionary Communists of our class will always be a minority, but more and more proletarians will realize their own self interest lies with the Communist cause as the choice becomes either revolution or death by capitalism.
This is something which the tacticalism of groups like TRAG is ultimately counterproductive towards. It is ironic considering their charge against us, but we would in turn charge them with holding the positions they do because of their own impatience towards the revolution.
It is through an understanding of the revolution as a long drawn out process which is not necessarily built, but rather which is prepared for that we base our activity.
Revolution doesn’t require us to engage with the imperfect political situations in front of us in attempts to have our ideas adopted and our aims furthered. Instead, it is an idea which we can appeal to as we watch movements pass us by on Instagram.
Our comrades have valid criticisms, and we believe they should be taken seriously. In terms of immediate implementations, we think the local struggle to stop this datacenter must issue these criticisms as well, to avoid folks getting false illusions about the finality of their local project. In addition, we argue Marxists, Anarchists, and other revolutionaries should get involved as quickly as possible and begin building ties between this movement and other radical movements,
Something which runs completely counter to their supposed agreement on our criticisms. Perhaps they have understood our argument to be that we believe the NDDCC has certain flaws which we wish to see solved. Rather, we believe the NDDCC is itself inherently counter-revolutionary, and that any participation in it by “Marxist,” “Anarchist,” or “other” revolutionaries will itself be counter-revolutionary, drawing them inevitably into its gravity.
in the hopes of converting this mass practice into real movements for Socialism.
The problem arises when we ask our Internationalists for solutions. When we do this, we are left with much to desire, to say the least.
Likewise to before, this stems from their inability to see the whole picture of society. They see that we do not have solutions to their question because the problem they wish for us to solve is insolvable, that being what is the “correct” way to intervene within such organizations and make them revolutionary. Which we of course can not answer, in the same way as they could not answer from an even more plainly liberal organization: “How do we make the police revolutionary?”
Our “solution” is the one we have always maintained, although we are happy to restate: Abandon all reformist activism and opportunist organizations. Instead, start or join organizations that exist for the explicit purpose of unifying the proletariat towards the ultimate world Communist revolution, and not only in name. These organizations should engage in political education, connect and discuss with revolutionaries across borders, and at all times advocate for nothing short of International Proletarian Revolution. We are currently engaged in that work, despite the multiple accusations in this text stating otherwise.
We are given appeals to revolution, to the establishment of worker’s democracy, and at best we are asked only to issue critique. Our friends are idealists, meaning they have ideas of revolution, but no interest in practical transformation of the world according to these ideas.
This is a blatant misrepresentation of the definition of idealism, which we would encourage readers to look up on their own. Idealism is a philosophical conception of the world which says that ideas are what shape the material world and our consciousness. Rather than the material world shaping our ideas and consciousness, which is what Marxism is predicated on. Who knows what that has to do with this baseless accusation stemming from the author’s ignorance of both our real activity and positions.
What is more idealist than to believe that simply by injecting communist ideas into a bourgeois movement it will somehow evolve into a genuinely radical one?
Our refusal to involve ourselves in such a movement stems from the fact that we see it for its material and class character, and not just what it calls itself, and further because we understand that no amount of proselytizing will be able to turn an inherently reformist organization into something revolutionary.
In their second article, the Internationalists respond to a protest which was organized at the construction site last week. In an even more abrasive rhetorical style,
We appreciate your compliment on our writing style!
“Ruthless criticism of all that exists” – Karl Marx
the SI calls the demonstration a result of the movement’s failure. They call the protesters Live Action Role Players and bask in their correct analysis.
As we pointed out previously (and this author went on to agree with) even if NDDCCs objectives were somehow met, demand for data centers would not be changed, merely the supply. Another community would in turn have to bear this burden. By pointing out that this activity ultimately doesn’t benefit the overall environment and only shifts burden onto others, we believe it is fair to say that protesting despite this fact amounts to larping, acting for no real material purpose.
Of course, they don’t do anything in the material world about it.
The author seems to misunderstand what “the material world” actually is, as if our own activity takes place on another plane of existence. This is clearly another stint of TRAG’s idealism.
Since it is clear they do not know what idealism actually means when they throw it around in bastardized form and are clearly sufferers of it, we would like to recommend some good pieces for beginners to Marx on the issue.
Theses on Feuerbach is perhaps the most concise of Marx’s pieces on what materialism is and is not, as well as how it is unified in the Marxist tradition with consciousness, which TRAG has seemingly failed to comprehend.
For a longer piece on the issue, we wholeheartedly recommend the Feuerbach section of Marx’s “The German Ideology”
We were of course not brought onto this Earth in the form we are now, and many of our members have a storied history of making many of the mistakes that TRAG now makes prior to reading Marx in depth, so we hope that his works can be as enlightening to them and their practice as they were to ours.
What the Sonoran Internationalists might not know (because they don’t go into movements and talk to their activists) is that the demonstration had multiple strategic purposes. One major goal was to bring more people into the movement,
What TRAG might not know (because they lack critical thinking), is that we are aware of the fact that the NDDCC wishes to bring more people into its counter-revolutionary movement, which is precisely why we oppose joining it ourselves!
We would like to remind them also that a movement being large or based on “popular action” does not immediately make it of a proletarian character. Take for example the National Socialists of Germany, who took power via the popular mandate of the people.
Would TRAG critically support the Beer Hall Putsch for meeting the workers where they were at and having multiple strategic purposes including bringing more people into their movement?
Our goal as communists should be to sway people towards revolutionary movements, and away from counter-revolutionary ones. Why TRAG would defend the cancerous growth seeking opportunism of an organization they themselves admit as being “impossible” in its aims is beyond us, unless they themselves wish to see the growth of counter-revolutionary abstractions.
We do not go into these movements because we do not share their principles or objectives. Instead, we observe their activity from afar and provide them our analysis.
We were once in the same boat, in similar kinds of groups. We believed in these same ideas which we’ve come to learn are flawed. Our dialogue is intended to point out those shortfalls, to have a real effect on these activists who want to build a better world but are doing so with a flawed outlook.
in the hopes of mobilizing people to act on the world around them. The major aim is to convert this issue movement into a mass movement based in popular action.
The ultimate goal of Communism requires the entire masses to learn to govern themselves. To do this, the masses must start by developing organizations where they can act on the world as political agents.
With this, we wholeheartedly agree, although the specifics are of vital importance, for their is no single universal metric of capability to act as “political agents”.
We proudly admit that we are much worse at being political agents within the governmental system that currently exists than the Republicans, Democrats, or Tucson Red Action. This is because we seek not to influence the democratic system, but to subvert it.
What the history of the workers movement has taught us is that in revolutionary situations, the lessons learned via engagement in non-revolutionary politics become maladaptive rather than helpful. Perhaps the best example of this was during the revolutionary wave of 1917, where the German social democrats, who by far involved the most of the masses into their structure compared to the other parties of Europe, and yet insidiously used this control over the workers to smother any real chance at revolution while it was still in its cradle.
“When the time came for the armed insurrection against capitalism, however, it was seen that the only party to engage in that insurrection was the party that had the least experience “working among the masses” during the years of preparation, the one that more than any other had worked to preserve Marxist theory. It was then seen that those who possessed a solid theoretical training marched against the class enemy, while those who had a “glorious” patrimony of struggles shamefully choked on their own words and went over to the side of the enemy.” -Amadeo Bordiga, Activism
We feel that now the movement needs to pull the broader masses into a struggle
And this is precisely the issue. These great thinkers feel that it is necessary for “the movement” to pull the broader masses into a struggle; without remembering that the movement we are discussing is an electoral one built on class collaboration and the subservience of the proletariat to the interests of the organizations’ NGO backers.
We stand uncompromisingly for class independence, not class collaboration. We refuse to equivocate the self organization and revolutionary militance of workers with the NDDCC.
where they can organize together and learn how to be political and democratic. We feel engagement with this datacenter issue has the potential to create new Communists, new activists, and new organizers which our movement desperately needs. It will require us to work on organizational problems and not just theoretical ones, which is necessary to build revolution. We cannot wait for this process to happen on its own, we must make it happen by training ourselves and as many people as possible how to organize.
This is the utility and value in engagement with the datacenter movement. It is a movement that people are organizing together,
Every movement is one where people organize together, that’s the definition of the word.
This bizarre claim seems to say that anytime proletarians are gathered is an opportunity to “convert” those people into Communists, regardless of the movement. Why draw the line at this one, because of aesthetics? One could replace “datacenter movement” with “blue lives matter movement” and the argument here would be the same.
The underlying assumption here is that leftists are somehow closer to Communism than other groups like the democratic party, conservative groups, etc. We reject this idea because we recognize that Communism is a fully distinct political philosophy that cannot be compromised with the existing bourgeois society and the poltical strains that come from it.
This conception makes sense for TRAG as a Stalinist organization however, because their politics are not rooted in class struggle but rather the bourgeois battle of left (wing of capital) versus right (wing of capital).
where people have interest, and where people are cropping up who can organize. This is where Communists may grow. Activists from movement scenes like this are the most valuable recruits, because they care to work in the real world and when discussing theory, they can actually apply it to the experiences of organizing.
Like a tree grows fruit, the failures of such movements do in fact grow a more radical sect of workers. We do not deny this, if we didn’t feel it as such we would not put in the work of publishing our critiques of them.
What you mistake for us believing that there is not the capacity for communists to come out of this movement, is our refusal to pick these fruits while they are still unripe; which would both stop them from ripening, as well as poisoning ourselves.
Such a strategy has historically proven to be quite successful for various counter-revolutionary parties such as the PSL and yourselves, we do not deny this. We simply value our revolutionary nature above becoming the most powerful of the counter-revolutionary forces within bourgeois society.
We understand that you have started your organization because groups like PSL, FRSO, and the RCA are for whatever reason not to your liking. We will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that it is not merely because you wish to be the ones in control of the hierarchical structure.
We must ask you, how is it that you believe you will implement what is ultimately the same strategy as the lot of these groups and have an outcome which is any different? None of them started as blatantly extractive, reformist, or opportunistic as they are now. Yet it was the entropy of their practice which led them down the path they now have reached the end of.
Is it because you have uniquely pure ideas sent down from the heavens that guarantee your revolutionary character? Is it because you’ve read Settlers? We have no idea.
What we suspect is that it is because you have not critically thought about why these groups are the way that they are. You take their surface level failures at face value, and tell yourselves that you will be different because you aren’t like them. Perhaps because they started with as little programmatic discipline as they have now (they didn’t).
These people make the best materialists and the best Communists. We should find them as quickly as we can, and work to become them.
The problem with this, for the SI, is that it is very hard, much harder than reading books and writing articles.
We are communist first and foremost because we wish to achieve a communist world. Perhaps the most important step in doing so, is to be serious militants whose actions are based wholly on programmatic questions of the furtherance of revolution. As part of this seriousness, we believe that an honest reflection on our weaknesses and realities is important.
We do not believe ourselves to be supermen, capable of sending ourselves into a wholefoods parking lot with a bag of mangoes seeking to bring class consciousness to hustlers selling stolen candy.
Our time is limited, such is the result of living under capitalism. We understand as much as you that everything is linked to capitalism. Where we perhaps differ, is that we take this reality to mean the opposite conclusions that you do. We do not have infinite time to deal with the infinite aspects of capitalism.
Society is already full of individuals who realize that capitalism is at fault, yet they lack the clarity necessary to fight against it in a productive way. There is no need in the class struggle for an organization which traps people at this early plateau.
TRAG does not realize that it is in fact quite easy to thrash around aimlessly to “do the hard work” of organizing with and helping our class enemies. The entire political system has been engineered to make it so.
We do not feel insulted when you claim that we are afraid to get our hands dirty as you stick them into the honey pot placed in front of you by the system because we know better than to fall for such tired tricks.
Much harder, is to have the restraint, patience, and singleness of mind to see past these opportunistic traps. To apply a revolutionary theory in revolutionary action; rather than allowing it to be inverted through the system as it has been for decades.
Capitalism has been able to fool its adversaries and their structures into supporting it not because its adversaries are idiots, but because it makes them believe that they are in fact the ones subverting the structures of capitalism towards their own goals.
You are not uniquely vulnerable to such tricks, but you are certainly not immune. Nor was Lenin, nor any other revolutionary.
It is easy to believe that the revolution is simply a question of working hard enough, we in fact wish it were so. What must be realized, however, is that it is not. It requires most principally the ability to plant our feet on the ground, and to look analytically at a reality which is inverted to us. Failing to do this, you will look back to realize that all the blood, sweat, and tears you put into organizing; was done not to destroy the system, but to reinforce it.
It requires us to work with people, to argue, to participate in movements which might fail. It requires us to show that our ideas are correct and therefore risk being wrong.
Given TRAG believes (falsely) that our entire activity is comprised by writing strongly written statements about our ideas, it feels a patent absurdity that they would accuse us of being uncomfortable with doing just that. By publicly releasing texts we are asking people to engage with them, and in that process we are very much at risk of being proven wrong.
It is likely that what they intend is that because we do not ourselves repeat the mistakes of the past (both our own and of our movement) that we are not allowing our ideas to be proven correct or not. This is the same ideology as that of a toddler who fails to comprehend that the stove is hot until they themselves touch it, rather than listening to their parents who have already learned the lesson for them.
Our mandate becomes action, guided by revolutionary ideas. It is much easier to live in texts and articles, where one may never have to prove themselves and they can forever point out problems they don’t care to work on. When the world brings forth to us an imperfect reality, we can decide that any kind of organizing which does not result instantly in revolution is simply making appeals to reforms, and therefore it is devilish reformism which only plays into the hands of the bourgeoisie.
Again the author makes the utterly bewildering argument that a group that is actively begging the ruling class to enact a reform (canceling a single construction project) is somehow not reformist.
We are not trying to magically enact a revolution next week, we are rightly (by your admission) pointing out that this activity is not revolutionary, therefore we should do activity which is revolutionary since we will need as much preparation as possible towards this end.
Such a misrepresentation of our argument would be respected even by the likes of Bernstein and Ebert. Our refusal to support such measures stems not from their failure to produce the revolution now, but from the fact that doing so would hamper the revolution during the crisis of capitalism.
It is expected that TRAG is incapable of seeing anything that isn’t right in front of them, and further of stepping outside of the historical moment to see the development of history in a Marxist sense. Without an understanding of the history of the workers movement, TRAG is doomed to make the same mistakes of the past over and over again, doomed to be capital’s left.
“it is characteristic of opportunism to suddenly set all its hopes on the great revolutionary deed. Its essence lies in always considering the immediate questions, not what lies in the future, and to fix on the superficial aspects of phenomena rather than seeing the determinant deeper bases. When the forces are not immediately adequate for the attainment of a certain goal, it tends to make for that goal by another way, by roundabout means, rather than strengthen those forces. For its goal is immediate success, and to that it sacrifices the conditions for lasting success in the future.” -Anton Pannekoek, World Revolution and Communist Tactics
We recommend TRAG read “The Past of Our Being” by Barbaria, as it is in our eyes the best analysis of their historical current of Leninism.
This is embarrassing behavior for so-called Communist militants.
We can no longer be satisfied with hefty books and lofty theories. We can only be satisfied by real Communist politics.
We agree! Our satisfaction only with real communist politics is precisely why we denounce this liberal schlock.
It is a disgrace that to these pseudo-revolutionaries, “Real communist politics” means begging our ruling class to cancel a data center, inflating leftist organizations, defending the infiltration of these organizations despite admitting their goals are pointless, and begging our ruling class to build a crosswalk.
Communist politics does not mean thinking the most correct ideas
You should consider yourselves lucky that we agree!
, nor does it mean constantly doing action again and again without thought. It means merging thought and action dialectically with comrades in struggle, and building real power by acting upon the world.
And yet, building “real power” within the capitalist world that they allude to is in reality the building of capitalist power.
Because TRAG is not guided first and foremost by militance, they see being a power within capitalism as the foremost goal of the workers movement; quite similarly to a trade union.
We agree with this sentence in principle, however it is clear that the thought they are merging with their action is not that of Marxism, but of opportunism. Which is itself the reason why the actions they choose to merge it with are of the same character.
This struggle is not perfect, it has many problems in idea and in practice. This we will concede to our comrades. Unfortunately, we are on the back foot. We suffer from a lack of organizers and a lack of a Communist movement. We can only build that movement by engaging with the world strategically
Are we supposed to treat this statement like it’s serious?
While arguing that we are failing because we aren’t engaging in the specific form of counter revolutionary activity (that you yourself admit is pointless except for use as a recruiting tool) you’ve inexplicably gone on to say that we don’t engage in the real world at all in the pursuit of our own goals.
If you want to argue that your form of engagement with bourgeois movements is good, alright, but why add a ridiculous and totally random claim which can be easily contradicted by asking anyone in our circle about our activities.
to further our ideals. We believe that this struggle is not hopeless, that this organization has the possibility for radical directions,
It seems as though you contradict yourself, arguing both at the same time that it is a movement which is indeed doomed to reformism, (in your fifth paragraph) but that we must engage to bring communists out, as well as saying that there is still potential for this reformist movement to somehow become radical.
We are sure that you will call this “contradiction” “dialectical” or perhaps “nuance”. We call this a lack of direction and failing to have an actual argument. Even middle schoolers learn that such waffling is lackluster, and we hope that in the future you will be able to create an internally consistent critique which has a point it builds towards.
We also understand however that this lack of direction comes not just from a general lack of skill in writing; but as a direct consequence of your lack of class independence. You must muddy the waters, play both sides, and lie to yourselves because its what your bourgeois masters require of you in order to stay in their good graces.
We are free in this way as you are not. Because we do not chain ourselves to entryism; we are able to stand unabashedly by our communist program and the truthful analysis of our world.
and that real wins for Communism can be made through engagement with this group.
Our Internationalists believe they can use their minds alone to prepare for the right moment in proletarian consciousness, wherein a revolution will occur by virtue of their preparation of mind.
A complete misrepresentation which could be cleared up through reading our previous works, or actually engaging in our real viewpoints in a serious capacity at all. This is a straw man argument, and not a convincing one at that.
This is simply ahistorical.
Regardless of our actual views on the above statement. Exactly how is it ahistorical? Based on what history? The decision to just throw this in here with not even one specific example is very obviously an attempted insult rather than a chance to argue logically through a real historical analogy.
You may not have learned this from reading settlers, which fails to cite any of its sources, but in the real world of polemics, it is generally advised to give historical backing and examples to elucidate and prove what you say, rather than simply uttering baseless claims.
To be militants, our comrades must go into the world as soon as possible. They must take their admirable zeal for liberatory Communism and put it into projects that attempt to realize this beautiful ideal. This means taking criticisms to the movement and applying them in practice.
We wrote an article criticizing a movement and explaining our divergence with the purpose of opening dialogue and encouraging members of this organization to think about their activity and goals. We are being condescended to because we:
1. Made criticisms of a movement we disagreed with, and made it clear we were willing to discuss our criticisms with them.
2. Live by our own principles rather then misrepresenting our full worldview when encountering others.
It seems the absolute only thing that would make the author happy would be for us to fall in line and spend our organizing time larping alongside them. Anything aside from that is “doing nothing”. What they really accuse of is “doing nothing to assist in our non-Communist organization”
If you want to end capitalism, then you must start the Socialist project. That means taking on tasks and pushing for Socialist directions. If you want to end capitalism, you should fight a datacenter with your comrades.
You are welcome to fight the data center with your other liberal, class collaborationist, bourgeoisie allies on the battleground of the state. We do not consider these people our allies nor our comrades.
This is not just out of a sense of moral purity as you may accuse us, but because as opposed to you; we see the counter-revolution not just as an idea but a material reality.
In the game of unity between classes, it is always the proletariat who must submit their will to the bourgeois; and who stand to lose not only their revolutionary aspirations but their lives.
It was the social democrats who in Germany called most for unity, who accused the radicals of having unrealistic and untempered expectations for the revolution to happen “right now”, and it was those same social democrats who ordered the Freikorps to kill those revolutionaries, among them Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknicht, who you now opportunistically put on your posters as if you would not have followed the strategic order of your “organized” party to kill them for being ultra wreckers.
It is not surprising to us, not any more so than you praising Lenin while harboring within your ranks self described Stalinists; who historically killed any vestigial remains of the revolutionary militants within the bolshevik ranks following Lenin’s death in his own name.
History is full of examples of genuine militants being slaughtered wholesale by counter-revolutionaries in the garb of the revolution.
We make no claim as to whether or not you will go along with the democratic discipline of the “imperfect” organizational structure you aided in the creation of and kill those genuine revolutionaries; or whether you will eventually come to fight that structure when it is already too late. However we can confidently say that this lane of organization leads to only those two choices.
We refuse to kill our fellow revolutionaries, and we also refuse to throw our lives away for a meaningless cause; not because we fear death, but because we have important work to do ahead of us.
We will be fighting capitalism. When you are ready to get off your merry go round and join us on our seemingly stationary bus of revolution, we will be waiting.
Perhaps we can enlighten these Marxist Leninists with the actual words of Lenin, who had the correct stance on this issue:
“There can be no unity, federal or other, with liberal-labour politicians, with disruptors of the working-class movement(…) There can and must be unity among all consistent Marxists, among all those who stand for the entire Marxist body and for the uncurtailed slogans, independently of the liquidators and apart from them.
Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.” -Lenin, Unity
The revolution will take work or the revolution will fail.
Every critique of ours is based in the real activity and objectives of the organization we were discussing. All of these accusations appear to come out of either an egoistic desire to insult us, or a full misunderstanding of what we both believe and do.
By “work” we can only understand that you mean reformist activism, your specific brand of larp. The revolution does require active organization of the revolutionary minority of the class, but this activity must be towards our revolutionary end. It does not require engaging in everything and anything that seems vaguely left wing just because it involves painting slogans on cardboard, and is therefore “real”.
The Tempest Collective sees the activity of the vast majority of the world’s population whose ability to work is their only means of survival as the crucial factor in building the socialist movement and winning reforms. The socialist movement is the movement of the international working class orgnaized against the present state of things. Its commitment must be always to stand for abolition of capitalism and the establishment of communism. Reforms of capitalism directly support the continued existence of capitalism. The working class is the agent of social transformation – of ridding our society of capitalism, addressing the existential environmental catastrophe, and building a socialist society – if we can organize ourselves.
Struggle is the key vehicle through which the balance of class forces can shift and on which working class demands like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Defunding the Police, Gender Liberation, Open Borders, etc, Even if any of these reformist demands are met, they will come at the cost of reducing the radicalism of sections of the US working class. The system cannot be abolished by advocating these measures, so this amounts to continuing the existence of Capitalism and the innumerable horrors that are part of it. will be won. We support running socialist candidates for office, but we do not believe that amassing more socialist officeholders is the way we are going to win. People cannot be understood by the labels they claim or the words they say, they have to be understood by their role in the class struggle. Whatever else they may do, anyone who holds office in bourgeois government is someone who is taking part in the operation of that institution, which exists only to manage bourgeois control over the working class. It is good you dont see this measure as the main path to socialism, but it has to be understood that it is not even a stepping stone. It is a tactic that history has shown time and time again to actively harm socialist movements. However popular policy reforms are, historically these have not been won without a mass-based movement that involves millions of ordinary people.
Mass struggle would also be the key to a revolutionary break with capitalism that starts a transition to ecosocialism. By ecosocialism we mean a classless and stateless society of freedom in which people democratically plan production to meet their needs and repair humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature. This is literally just Communism. We have to assume that this choice in language was chosen deliberately so that the scary word “Communism” could be avoided. Efficiently, this confuses and waters down the meaning of a word that has a definition and centuries of precedent behind it, just for the purposes of recruiting those who would be scared off by the word “Communism” but not “Ecosocialism”. A transition to ecosocialism would have to be a liberatory process carried out by ordinary people themselves, running society through new radically democratic institutions.
Antiracism & Abolition
We are antiracists and abolitionists. The US working class has moved most forcefully and consistently when it has confronted racism, in particular anti-Black racism. We take this lesson seriously and prioritize antiracist struggle even when it is unpopular or appears to detract from broader ‘class-wide’ interests. The priority of anything above the class struggle is a fundamentally non-communist position. If the working class was especially interested in climate change activism at this moment would you then prioritize that struggle over the class struggle as well? If the socialist movement does not center the primacy of anti-oppression inside the working class, in all its diversity, it is not going to be effective. The George Floyd uprising was an important reminder of the power of Black-led resistance and how forcefully it can assert itself as a political actor, demonstrating the absolute necessity of systemic transformation. We seek not a transformation of the system, but its complete overthrow. The George Floyd uprising was indeed a key reminder of spontaneous working class power, but it is also a reminder of what happens when there is not a strong communist party capable of focusing that energy into the class struggle and towards the overthrow of capitalism. This is what allowed capital to co-opt and destroy that movement. Our response to this as communist is not just to blame the system, but to organize around the demand of revolution, something the system can by its very nature not co-opt. We see the anti-racist rebellion that took place in the summer of 2020 as the most important development of the current radicalization. Even with a movement still in development, its potential should not be underestimated.
Crucial to the politics of abolition is the recognition that the state under capitalism is a means of violent repression wielded to ensure the domination of the ruling class. In the U.S., prisons and police are indispensable tools of racist oppression. As socialists, we fight for the full abolition of the cops, the courts, the prisons, and the capitalist state.
Feminism & LGBTQ Liberation
Internationally, the feminist and gender justice movement is the leading edge of working class resistance. Structural gender oppression under capitalism shapes life and resistance in myriad ways. It has shown itself to be a potent vehicle for social transformation.
Standing against sexual violence, domestic violence, and femicide are questions of principle that socialists must develop ways of addressing – politically, but also organizationally, as very few groups can point to processes that have helped address grievances inside left organizations.
We demand full equality and liberation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and unequivocally oppose the attacks against transgender people, especially transgender women of color. The resurgence of trans-exclusionary feminism on the Left must be challenged. The project of revolutionary socialism aims to build a world based on sexual and gender freedom and self-determination.
Disability Justice
Capitalism both creates the category of disability and discriminates against the disabled on that basis. Capitalism privileges bodies that can labor in ways optimal to the production of profit for employers. The fight against oppression based on ability is thus inherently a struggle for working-class liberation and against the capitalist system. It is also tied to the abolitionist project of destroying the carceral state. Yes, however, this is included in the struggle against the capitalist system. By separating this into a separate category, even if unwillingly, you allow for argumentation and organization to the contrary of this fact.
In the short term, we support reforms that can break down the systematic marginalization, impoverishment, and oppression of disabled people. While these are undoubtedly good things that would help the lives of disabled people, how exactly should such support of reforms be done? If this entails working within the capitalist state that was just rightly denounced, then it is an utterly anti-socialist statement. If terms besides working within the state apparatus are meant here, then this quote is generally acceptable.
But because disability oppression is endemic to capitalism and implicated in the carceral state, overcoming it requires a revolutionary abolitionist program. Tempest stands with the disability justice movement and its calls for intersectional, anti-capitalist politics and full equality and liberation for disabled people. In practice, we are committed to making spaces for meeting, organizing, and protesting fully accessible.
Electoral Strategy
Elections are a crucial tactic of working class organization, Yes, elections within independent mass assemblies, worker councils, the International Party of the Working Class, Communes, etc.
Elections as are meant here, elections in a bourgeois republic where one member or party of the ruling class is given years to enact their plan for what is best for capital, are inherently a tool of capitalist class domination and must be opposed alongside the rest of this rotten system. but they are not the motor-force of change. Elections can help develop and spread demands, contribute to concessions from the ruling class, Concessions from the ruling class do not come from electoral success but militant action of the working class. When they feel sufficiently threatened, reforms are given out to appease the masses and stablize their domination. Reforms are a tactical decision made by the ruling class when they deem it helpful, they are not a goal communists should aspire to enact. and project a socialist worldview. However, we do not believe that winning elections is the same thing as winning power or changing the balance of class forces. The capitalist state is an anti-worker apparatus that cannot simply be taken over by workers. For that reason, elections are a vehicle towards the development of struggle and independent working class institutions, not an end in themselves. Why would any worker trust a group who infiltrates the capitalist state, enganges with its archaic procedures, and involves itself in the active repression of the working class. You cannot expect any worker to support this party just because it claims, as all other bourgeois parties do, that the other parties are bad but this one is good.
Independent Working Class Institutions
We believe the Democratic Party cannot be reformed or realigned. Every previous effort to do so has weakened and undercut our ability to build the type of struggle organizations that could transcend the choices on offer under a two-party system. There are bourgeois democracies with 8 parties, 10 parties, even more. Is this what Marxists advocate for? The problem with capitalist government is that it is capitalist; it represents the interests of the ruling class. This fact has nothing to do with there only being two bourgeois parties to choose from.
We are for an independent working class membership party and we are open to different tactics and roads to get us there. However, we insist that this strategy and process cannot be deferred down the line to a more favorable moment. A new party can come together as struggle rises, Yes, an International Party of Communists working to help organize the working class towards an international revolution. Not another electoralist party, that history has shown will never be able to participate in or support revolution. we need to prepare for that now. Even people who support the Democrats over the Republicans in elections are more ready to criticize them and advocate a new party than ever before. Socialists should never be the people telling anyone who wants to break from the Democrats that they should stay inside. The socialist movement should be the home for those who yearn for political independence. Political independence must mean from bourgeois politics itself not from one or the other bourgeois parties. If a successful social democratic party were created in the US tomorrow it would follow the path of the various leftist electral parties from history. It would fade into irrelevance or be absorbed again into a larger party. This is because all capitalist parties have the same goal, win elections. Representing the actual interests of the working class is and must always be secondary.
The key ingredient in the formation of new working class organizations and parties is heightened working class self-activity and struggle that raises expectations and makes millions feel that change is possible. The growth of working class organization should go hand in hand with the growth of all wings of the movement, including a revolutionary one. This is the pole of the movement we aim to contribute to building, with the goal of a strong and vibrant revolutionary current, front or organization.
Democracy
Flowing from the centrality of struggle and working class self-activity is an insistence on democracy. Democracy is relevant in multiple ways – from ensuring that our organizations are run by the membership, to the need to defend and expand democratic rights, to the threat of far right authoritarianism. If this involves collaboration with the left wing of capital against the right wing of capital, then this is betrayal of the working class in the worst form. The only way to prevent fascism and other reactionary movements is with the abolition of the material conditions which create them and their rise to popularity, that is, the abolition of capitalism. We believe that the weakness of the organized left goes hand in hand with a lack of organizations through which working class people can participate in political, workplace and community decisions. Whether it is a tenant group, a labor union, a BLM organization, etc, democracy and participation is a crucial factor to the development of working class institutions. The lifeblood of socialist organization, in particular, is a thriving democratic culture.
Labor Strategy
We see working class self-activity and democracy – both inside and outside of the existing trade union movement – as the key roads to winning working class demands and power. Trade unions, which exist to mediate demands between the proletariat and bourgeoisie under the capitalist system, are at this point of capitalist development purely counter-revolutionary and anti-communist organizations similar to social democratic parties. The goal of socialists is not to win working class demands under capitalism, but to overthrow capitalism. We look to workers in their workplaces to organize themselves for their own interests, a rank-and-file labor strategy, which is a political and organizational orientation on the self-activity of workers inside the workers movement. We believe this will facilitate the creation of our goals more than a strategy of building influence through the labor bureaucracy or staffers in the existing unions. For us, the rank-and-file strategy is about much more than simply having socialists inside strategic sectors or getting union jobs. It is about building a socialist wing of the workers movement, fostering bottom-up organizing, and continuing to reverse the 40 year isolation that socialist politics have had from working class institutions. These all absolutely have to be done, but the reasons behind the current state of the socialist movements across the world are not really addressed anywhere in this text. It is not because of a lack of trade union activism (mistaking a symptom for a cause) or a random decrease in self organization. The period of counterrevolution that is only now ending is due to many factors including the large scale bastardization and conflation of Communism with state capitalism perpetuated by the USSR, China, etc, the lack of widely known and mature internationalist communist organizations, and the relative luxury that has up to now been enjoyed by workers within the imperial core, especially in the West. Without understanding the cause of the past failures of communist movements we cannot hope to rebuild as these sentences call for. Through the development of a socialist wing of the workers movement, a strategy for class power can become a reality by overcoming the strategic impediments that have hamstrung the organized labor movement for decades.
We are internationalists. We support working class self activity in every country and oppose the borders that physically, violently, and ideologically divide workers from one another. We are always on the side of ordinary people in their quest for democracy and self-determination and liberation against authoritarian rule. While we are not opposed to these per se. It is another selection of language that sows more confusion than clarity. The quest for Communism involves the establishment of the only form of true democracy, the only end to authoritarian rule, the only possibility for real self-determination free from the control of capitalist society. We must clearly and consistently call for only workers’ democracy, in a system of workers councils with delegates representing a specific mandate straight from the workers who elected that delegate. Specific language when talking about these concepts is necessary to avoid moralist or idealistic claims that rely on vague concepts rather than material aims.
We are principally opposed to imperialism, which we understand to be the manifestation of capitalist relations at the level of the nation-state. Imperialism is not an abstract concept, it is the inevitable outgrowth of a system built on profit and competition between capitalist states. As the economic crisis intensifies, so too will ramped up rivalries between different countries. Military activity is part of the package of attacks on working class people internationally.
We vehemently oppose US imperialism, which has destroyed the lives of our brothers and sisters across the world and has served as the justification for amped up islamophobia and xenophobia. We also hold a principled opposition to all imperial interests that are competing for international power. Instead of choosing sides with one imperial bloc over the other, we look to the strengthening of working class solidarity internationally as the central opposition to capitalism.
As socialists in the world’s biggest imperial power — in a country founded on settler-colonialism — we see our support for the struggles of indigenous, colonized and occupied people as a cornerstone of anti-imperialism. From Turtle Island to Palestine and beyond, our internationalism is inextricable from national liberation. If your internationalism “is inextricable from national liberation” than it is not worthy of the word. National liberation is the support of class collaboration within an “oppressed nation” as a means to uplift that country as a stronger actor on the bourgeois international stage. That is to say, rather than support of international revolution, this is the promotion of bourgeois nationalism, backed up only by a misplaced desire to assist particularly oppressed people along nationalist lines. By perpetuating this understanding you are doing a disservice to the working class of the nation/s at hand who will be brought from under the rule of one ruling class into the rule of another. The brutal legacy of imperialism can only be truly addressed when the working class of the whole world is free as one, and thus able to collaborate freely for the building of a new just system for all (communism). You are at the same time misleading the international working class into organizing around individual struggles that ultimately amount to reshuffling the capitalist world order rather than doing the essential work of preparing its downfall and replacement with communism.
We want DSA to free itself from the Democratic Party The Democratic Party is not itself the reason that capitalism cannot be reformed into socialism. It’s own capitalist character is only a symptom of the necessities of entering the electoralist system. To assume that this could be in some way changed is entirely Non-Marxist. and all other capitalist influences.
Marxist Unity Group strives to transform DSA into an independent socialist party. That is, to transform an apparatus of the bourgeois state into something revolutionary. Independence means establishing a distinct public profile for DSA with our own platform, branding, and rhetoric. It also means building our own institutions and our own party discipline in the halls of power. “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” -Marx Communist Manifesto. The ruling class has put all of its energy into ensuring that class struggle is relegated to their bourgeois electoral system. The halls of power are exactly where they want us. We would stand with unwavering confidence in our cause, never watering down our socialist vision or subordinating our interests to those of a capitalist party. Any party operating within the capitalist system with the goals of achieving electoral success under capitalism is in effect a capitalist party.
Together, we would cultivate a popular mandate for revolution Support for revolution comes not from idealist notions or belief in the supremacy of socialism, but from the realization brought upon by material conditions in the proletariat that they must either overthrow the system, or die. by running militant socialist candidates for public office—while simultaneously organizing grassroots institutions of working class power. We would create party-affiliated media, community services, mutual aid and defensive organizations. Within the labor movement, we would fight the existing labor bureaucracy, build militant and democratic unions, History has demonstrated that unions have become organizations which by their vary nature can no longer be progressive or helpful to the socialist movement. and strive to win these unions to socialist politics. As we nurture a vast ecosystem of socialist-allied institutions, our socialist party will simultaneously become a mass movement: a party-movement. Together, we would cultivate a popular mandate for revolution by running militant socialist candidates for public office—while simultaneously organizing grassroots institutions of working class power. We would create party-affiliated media, community services, mutual aid and defensive organizations. Within the labor movement, we would fight the existing labor bureaucracy, build militant and democratic unions, and strive to win these unions to socialist politics. As we nurture a vast ecosystem of socialist-allied institutions, our socialist party will simultaneously become a mass movement: a party-movement.
Marxist Unity Group calls for immediate steps towards political independence. We become a party by acting like one. For us, the ‘break’ with the Democrats The DSA and electoralism* is a continuous process that must begin in earnest right now. This will require courage and faith in our ability to succeed as an independent movement, but we believe that the socialist movement is worthy of that faith. We support a transition towards independent campaigns wherever ballot access laws make this readily achievable In other words, wherever the ruling class finds it useful to vent class tension with symbolic wins that do not threaten the base of their control. —even if this causes a temporary decrease in our number of electoral victories. Which is to say the end goal is continued and further venting of class struggle into the dead end of electoralism. Building a distinct socialist constituency is the paramount task of our political era, and independent campaigns help us cultivate loyalty that is completely disconnected from loyalty to the Democratic Party.
2. Programmatic Unity
We want a program to guide DSA’s political work.
To achieve political independence, we must learn to act with greater unity and determination. This is an idealist notion that pits the failures of reformism to progress humanity towards socialism, not on the inherent characteristics of reform (IE, a materialist understanding), but rather on the failure, ineptitude, and foolishness of previous reformists. We want a disciplined, self-reliant organization that is run democratically by its rank and file members. What holds parties together is agreement on final goals, not minor immediate tactical concerns. Let us take for example that one of our goals is, through the abolishment of capitalism, the end of homelessness. Given this goal, should we work with those that also wish to end homelessness, but rather than through revolution, by killing all homeless people. By the Marxist Unity Group’s own logic, such minor tactical concerns should be ceded in the name of programmatic unity. As non-idealists and communists however our answer is no. Reformism kills proletarians. This approach is called programmatic unity: unity based on common struggle for essential political goals, rather than on dogmatic purity That is to say, reforms over revolution. Unity of theoretical revolutionary final goals means nothing when the immediate actions taken by a group lead to the destruction of the class struggle. or vague slogans that obscure our true objectives. Acceptance of a political program with specific demands on the state is how the first mass socialist parties succeeded in winning the working class of their countries by the millions. This refers to a specific history of which only some is told. Here is the full story: The social democratic movements being referred to did indeed achieve popular success and win reforms, but when those same movements were faced with an imperialist world war (World War 1) they were so integrated into the bourgeois system that they shamefully supported the war as a means to preserve their movement’s credibility within the system. This led to 17 million people dying in the war which helped cause the Revolutionary wave starting in 1917. In response to this spontaneous action of the working class the social democratic parties aligned with the state to suppress the revolutions at every turn. They slaughtered revolutionaries, subverted class autonomy, and empowered the reactionary militias that would become a bulwark of early 20th century fascism. To evoke this movement as an example for the modern era is extremely distressing. A program provides direction on the political demands that will establish socialism and democratic rule by the working class without prescribing a narrow tactical route.
Marxist Unity Group works towards adopting a minimum-maximum program for DSA. We view both the ‘minimum’ and ‘maximum’ program as essential. The minimum program refers to the party’s comprehensive platform: the policies that it will immediately implement upon taking power to establish working-class political rule and place society on the path of a socialist transition out of capitalism. The maximum program refers to the results of this process: a world free of the market, borders, classes, and all other oppressive structures that exist under capitalism—in a word, communism. Centering programmatic politics will restore the sense of unity and purpose that socialists enjoyed during the Sanders campaigns. The campaign to elect a reformist social democrat to office. In otherwords an anticommunist movement. However, our program will have much more ambitious aims, and instead of belonging to a single candidate, it will be developed democratically by the entire socialist movement. They see the problem with this non-communist campaign not that it was non-communist, but that its strategy wasn’t extended to other bourgeois politicians as well.
We would like to make ‘program acceptance’ the basis of DSA membership. Acceptance does not mean agreeing with everything in the program. It simply means being willing to fight for the program as an expression of the movement’s democratically-elaborated aims. Members would have the right to organize for specific changes to the program at conventions. Members will be free to publicly voice disagreement with any majority decision, as long as they can accept the decision as legitimate and assist with its implementation. This is the true meaning of democratic centralism.
3. Electoral Discipline
We want socialist electoral candidates to represent the socialist movement Any movement involving electoral candidates in capitalism is by definition not a socialist one as socialism is the movement to abolish capitalism through international working class revolution.
Discipline and cohesion are another foundation of our political independence. If DSA candidates are truly dedicated to socialist politics, they should run together on a common DSA platform. Even if some are elected on a Democratic ballot line, they should form their own legislative caucuses, vote as a bloc, and refuse to join the Democratic Party caucus. They should also campaign for other socialists, refuse to endorse non-socialists, and only take the wage of a typical union worker. With these assertive political tactics, our candidates will rise as ‘tribunes of the people’: organized representatives of the socialist movement. DSA members have already implemented some elements of this approach in the New York state legislature, but we would like to formalize and universalize it. Horse-trading and spineless compromise have failed to truly advance socialist politics. We will always embrace the struggle for reforms, This passage speaks for itself. Reform of this system reinforces it, allowing its indescribable harm to all life on Earth to continue longer. but we want socialists to conduct that struggle out in the open and win concessions by acting as an intransigent opposition. Instead of cutting backroom deals as a junior coalition partner, socialist electeds can use their platform to raise the expectations of the working class and mobilize it to force concessions from the capitalists.
4. Nationwide Struggle
We want socialists to treat U.S. politics as a nationwide While this document acknowledges the international nature of imperialism, it is telling that no section takes the position that, at the very least, the primary focus of their group is within national confines, but the entire movement must be international. Rather than uniting with Communists around the world to form a unified party, MUG seeks to unite with liberals within the united states and fight US imperialism within national boundaries as the full extent of its so called “internationalism”. struggle for power
As socialists in the United States, we live in a reactionary political culture that encourages us to think small. Americans are taught to believe that all problems should be solved locally, and socialists often accept this logic by confining themselves to isolated local campaigns, assuming that this is where ‘real change happens.’ Yet despite our backwards federal system, the United States is not an alliance of city-states or a network of 20,000 police departments. It is a colossal empire propped up by the most powerful military on Earth. Even local police are armed, trained, and integrated by the federal government. If we ignore national politics, we will become blind to the true nature of our oppressors. We will obscure their nationwide abuse of the working class, not to mention their imperialist crimes in every corner of the world. Local organizing is an indispensable foundation of our movement, but it will be infinitely more effective when it is connected to a nationwide, pan-American, and global vision for working class revolution.
Marxist Unity Group will work to increase DSA acting as a nationwide organization. We will build nationwide collaboration and debate through DSA’s national committees and also through developing a lively party press. We support efforts to lift chapters out of parochialism by increasing member communication across chapter lines, maintaining staffing levels required to make member-led organizing possible at the national level while ensuring fair pay and working conditions, and by integrating locals into larger state-level organizations. It is also why we want DSA to run an organized slate of socialist candidates to contest the House of Representatives. By conducting principled agitation in the halls of Congress, socialists can deliver a common message to every corner of the country. While we use the federal government as a bully pulpit, our candidates could also use their public profiles to support state and municipal organizing efforts. Federal, state, and local struggles—strikes, electoral campaigns, and mass demonstrations—will all be fused together in one grand movement that demands nothing less than a working-class, socialist revolution.
5. Fight the Imperial Police State
We want socialists to challenge the repressive structures of the capitalist state.
U.S. socialists have a duty to stand firmly against militarism and police tyranny, beginning with a clear opposition to the imperialist designs of our own state. In the belly of the American empire, any socialist program must firmly oppose (neo)colonialism and advance the principles of national self-determination“the working class has no nation” -Marx, The Communist Manifeso. Capitalism in the 21st century entails a system where nation states form together in imperialist blocs which compete with one another for economic control, that is, who has the right to exploit the workers and natural resources of certain regions. National Liberation amounts to supporting the creation of a new national ruling class from that nation that will go on to join alongside one imperialist power bloc or another and will continue to exploit the working class of that territory.—that each country must be sovereign to decide its own affairs, free from military coercion or economic extortion. This means taking a defeatist stance against our country’s All*wars, including those engaged by proxies and through military alliances like NATO, as well as cruel economic sanctions and military and diplomatic cover for colonial occupation, police repression, and ethnic cleansing.
But a defeatist stance against U.S. imperialism must exist alongside a revolutionary commitment to politically-independent international action. A lasting transition to socialism in any one country is impossible, and the working class can only emancipate itself on an international scale. The decline of much of the socialist movement in the 20th century into variant forms of nationalism and popular frontism —from the official communist ‘national roads to socialism’ to the earlier capitulation of social democracy to ‘defense of the nation’ during WWI—have equally led to strategic dead-ends and tragic defeat. Though the working class of any country must first of all ‘come to terms with its own bourgeoisie,’ domestic reforms are only partial victories for an international class.
The socialist movement takes a leading role in expressing this international character in several ways, such as coordinated international strike action — like the historic May Day strikes —fiercely combating anti-immigrant chauvinism, and organizing to defend and extend the civil liberties of the migrant working class. Yet how does the MUG propose this is done? For them, this means engaging in electoralism for the defense of civil liberties. As actual communists, we do not organize to defend the civil liberties of the migrant working class (which are in reality only the right to be exploited more efficiently), but the migrant working class itself through the abolition of the very system that exploits them. As its far-reaching political objective, our party should commit to building fraternal ties with class-independent socialist parties towards the horizon of a new International.
With every tool available to us, we must erode the political, cultural, and physical hegemony of the U.S. police state. The affirmative votes of DSA-endorsed electeds for military and cop budgets, arms shipments to US vassal states, and the legal condemnation of anti-Zionism, all serve to weaken the socialist project for human emancipation. It is insufficient for socialist legislators to rhetorically criticize excessive military spending. They should be bound by our program to force a genuine public confrontation over the matter by refusing to vote for military, police, national security and intelligence budgets. By building a genuine and disciplined party infrastructure, DSA legislators and councilors would be on the forefront of a nation-wide confrontation with the imperialist state, exposing the interconnectedness of police and military brutality.
As we wage immediate struggles against repressive capitalist institutions like police departments and ICE, a socialist vision for abolitionism requires concrete, programmatic commitment to alternative, radically democratic political institutions, recognizing that abolition is impossible without the working class taking state power into its own hands. Agreed! The problem is that your definition of “seizing state power” is by playing by the rules of a system established by and for the ruling class. Rather than engaging within these systems (which has lead to failure over and over again) it is clear that the working class must overthrow and entirely supercede the ruling class and it’s governments that exist only to maintain its rule as a class. “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” Marx, The Civil War in France The racist militarized border regime will be replaced by an open border, Yes but to be more exact it would be better to say that borders as a concept would no longer exist. With the abolition of nations there are no borders, open or closed. with complete freedom of movement for all peoples and universal citizenship for residents. The armed forces of international capital—the prison industrial complex, police, and the military—will be replaced by a democratic and popular militia, flowing from the working class and the oppressed’s organs of self-defense established under capitalism—defined by the right to bear arms, the sovereignty of the people, universal service and training, and a rigorous community control coexisting with the democratic rights of members.
6. Fight the Contitution
We want socialists to fight to overthrow the Constitution This is still technically reformism. Why the Constitution? The constitution didn’t form capitalism, it doesn’t give the ruling class its power. It was created by the ruling class after it had established itself as such. We must overthrow the entire capitalist system and replace it with a Communist one. Destroying the Constitution will be but one part of this process.
Marxist Unity opposes a constitution that was written by a ‘holy alliance’ of capitalists and slavers to make the United States a perpetual oligarchy. Oligarchy is just one form that capitalist firms can take the shape of. This implies that capitalism without oligarchy is what we aim for or is at least preferable as a form of capitalism. As Communists, we simply cannot pick and choose which kind of capitalism is best, because we seek its abolition no matter its exact manifestation. There can be no question of submitting to a political order that exists to divide and conquer the working class, that slices up the government and divorces it from the will of the people—that is set in stone and almost impossible to amend. Black people cannot be free under a constitution written by slaveholders; Capitalism* indigenous people cannot win sovereignty under a constitution designed to facilitate their elimination; women cannot be free under a constitution written before they had the right to vote, Capitalism.* and working people cannot be free under a constitution that enshrines private property. Capitalism* No one can be truly free if they are forced to bow to a reactionary constitution written by the dead. We want socialist leaders to erode the popular legitimacy of the U.S. Constitution through combative political agitation: never bowing to the old order, and always acknowledging the need for a working class revolution in the United States.
The socialist revolution will not base its legitimacy on the laws of the slaveholder constitution. Capitalism is not bad because it had slavery at one point, and owning slaves is not the reason why the words of these bourgeois revolutionaries who we are taught are our “founding fathers” are illegitimate. They were bourgeois revolutionaries who established a bourgeois republic, which means it is inherently against the interests of the entire working class. It is because these institutions (established by people who owned slaves) stand in material opposition to our interests as a class that we oppose them, not because of their ethical character. We will base it on a democratic majority mandate for socialism. This majority may be expressed by the popular vote of an election, but it does not have to take that form if the state represses our ability to contest elections. We stand for the right of the working class to take power by any means necessary. To win a socialist republic, millions of working people must be mobilized in their workplaces, at the ballot box, Again, mobilization towards the left wing of capital only encourages radicalized workers to fall for bourgeois reformist lies. and in the street. We recognize that the capitalist class relies on the minoritarian rule of the U.S. Constitution, and they will not give it up peacefully. The working class will need armed self-defense to protect itself from the inevitable violence of reaction. We also recognize that we must fight for the democratic rights of enlisted U.S. soldiers. This piece speaks at length about the abolition of the very document that ensures these bourgeois rights, the constitution. Yet later it says we should fight for the “rights” of other proletarians in the hopes this will win them over, rather than class based organization around the fact that we must unite along our shared interest in abolishing all of capitalism and its false “democratic rights” along with it. As a section of the working class, soldiers share our inherent interest to overthrow the very system that guarantees these supposed “rights” (bourgeois ideology designed to placate the masses and uplift the property rights of the ruling class). To complete a successful revolution, we must win a decisive section of the military rank and file over to our side.
7. Demand a New Republic, Finish Reconstruction
We want to wina plurinational democratic socialist republic in North America. In other words, the establishment of a newer, larger, and more efficiently deceptive capitalist republic in the likes of modern china.
We fight the Constitution to win a democratic socialist republic in North America, to complete the partial overthrow of the constitutional order by the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and to finish the project of Reconstruction by establishing a multiracial and multinational democracy ruled by the toilers of society. Forged in revolution, this continental republic will strive for the global liberation of all working and oppressed people. We desire the widest possible geographic scope for such a state so that it can most effectively carry out this mission, but we also recognize the principle of national self-determination. To reiterate, nation states (which all counties are) are a method of social organization that inherently requires a ruling class to enforce their existence (borders do not exist without armies or checkpoints to enforce them). We cannot organize around the desire for any ethnic group, imagined community, or historical nationality to have a ruling class of its own. To advocate for this is to advocate for anti-communism. All indigenous and colonized peoples must win sovereignty, including those living within the current borders of the United States. No oppressed nation will be incorporated into the socialist republic against its will. In effect meaning that the subject that holds sovereignty is not classes, not even individuals, but nations. If a new nation with a new ruling class is formed within the borders of the current US, this document tells us we would have to accept their domination over whatever territory they could control through force. Should you find yourself as a worker on a native reservation or whatever other circumstance this quote applies to, you would simply be subjected to the rule of a new ruling class.
Alongside ecological and economic crises, the minoritarian and sclerotic constitutional order will contribute to massive political crises in the coming decades. This period of crisis will provide our class with an opportunity to topple the old order and convene a revolutionary Popular Assembly: a majoritarian constitutional convention elected by all the people. Again utterly infeasible given the history of bourgeois democracy in the US. This would take generations of effort to build towards and even then it could only achieve goals that are within the framework of the original government set up by the bourgeois centuries ago. Under the democratic leadership of a victorious socialist party, the Popular Assembly will proceed to construct the socialist order. It will dismantle the slaveholder constitution and write the founding documents of the new republic.
Immediately upon taking power, socialists will implement a sweeping minimum program to cement working class political rule. We will need to destroy every institution that denies the people an authentic popular democracy, abolishing the Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and the independent presidency. We will implement direct, universal, and equal suffrage. Supreme power will rest in the hands of a popular, unicameral assembly elected by proportional representation. All power must be held by workers councils and assemblies. The establishment of this system the only method for bringing about a truly socialist society. What they propose instead is simply a more progressive form of the bourgeois republic. A direct example of independent workers councils being replaced by the bourgeois form of government that republican assemblies are occurred during betrayal of the Communists by the Social Democrats in the 1918 German revolution.Delegates will be recallable at any time and will receive no more than a skilled worker’s wage. This implies two problematic elements, first, that we retain wage labor. Second, that the members of the governmental bodies of socialist society (the councils) are not also workers themselves. All parties that accept the laws of the new revolutionary order will be free to operate. Local organs of government will have a wide degree of autonomy. Unrestricted freedom of speech will be guaranteed to all. To make good on the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction, our republic will launch social programs of targeted wealth redistribution, striving to eliminate all racial inequalities. The socialist republic will put political power and economic resources into the hands of all racially oppressed and colonized people.
Our broader economic program will include unimpeded labor and union rights, a massive reduction in working hours, and a truly universal welfare state that provides for all citizens from cradle to grave. We will create programs to reduce the power of bureaucrats and teach administrative skills to all workers. Worker self-management will be encouraged to the greatest extent achievable in every industry. Large industry will be placed under collective ownership early on, and we will progressively socialize the rest of the economy as we build our capacity for democratic economic planning. We will pursue crash course programs to address the ecological crisis and establish resilient forms of production, distribution and habitation. Climate refugees will be welcomed into our republic with open arms.
With the shackles of the old order broken, the working class will finally have the power to remake society on egalitarian lines. In cooperation with the global socialist movement, we will move closer with every passing year to a fully liberated classless society: communism. Communism abolishes money, class distinctions, racial discrimination, patriarchy, national boundaries, oppressive gender roles, the mental/manual division of labor, and all other forms of social oppression. It is a society truly based on the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” where humanity collectively plans its economic activities through a free association of labor. Communism brings freedom to both society and the individual and will be the true beginning of human history.
Click to Expand MeThis is an explanation of our critique.
For a Communism for the 21st century
Our emergent strategy draws fromglobal liberation movements(By which you actually mean national liberation movements)whileadapting to present circumstances.(By which you actually mean abandoning the class struggle and instead advocating for reforms on the premises of possibilism).
Our framework:The need for working class revolution in our lifetime is urgent. Our world’s resources should be used for the wellbeing of all people — but instead,
oligarchsBy focusing on oligarchs specifically, you fail to see that it is not the people in charge that are the problem but the system of capital as a whole. As a result, you simultaneously allow for the argumentation that it is preferable to have a large class of smaller capitalists instead of a few large ones and as such open yourself to alliance with and cooption by capital.
enrich themselves at the expense of our lives and the planet. As the working class is exploited by the capitalist class, so too is the Global South by the Global North. Imperialism and colonialism continue to appropriate the bodies and ecologies of the peoples of the world to develop the
excesses of Western society.This argument pits the struggle as the oppressed workers of the global south against the indulgent workers of the global north, many of whom are themsevles impoverished. This is in contrast to an actual class struggle which nessecitates the organization of the whole proletariat against the bourgeious system of capital.
Our moment: At home and abroad, liberation movements resist the poverty and war the U.S. governmentImperialism is practiced by all capitalist power blocs, with the US and its allies simply being the currently strongest of them. Furthermore, the state is itself merely a sympton of the class distinctions present under capitalism, which exists globally. By focusing critique on one of many imperialist blocs, you open yourself to collaboration with the interests of the other capitalist sects. imposes upon them. The world system ruled by 20th century capitalism is ending. If we are going to take a meaningful role in that transformation, we must engage in a parallel struggle, stitching together diverse social forces to organize a mass front against global imperialism and domestic carceral fascism. To construct a world-changing solidarity, we organize locally, identifying where class confrontation is already happening — in the street, at the ballot boxThe state is not an unaligned mediator between classes but an instrument of bourgeois oppression and control against the proletariat. As such, elections are not a grounds for class struggle but a tactically conceded propaganda tool to justify bourgeois society and rule., against prisons and detention centers, and in our neighborhoods. Our organizing aims to erode relationships of domination and build collective power, so that we may chart our shared destiny in unity.
Our inspiration: To ground our principles and inform our tactics, we look to Marxist theory and liberatory projects around the world. We study how communist parties operated in the Russian , Chinese, and Cuban Revolutions Neither the Chinese nor Cuban revolutions were actually socialist revolutions, but rather national liberation struggles. To quote Lenin: In calling the Chinese and Cuban revolutions Communist, DSA “was guided by their name, that is, by a word, and not by the actual place they occupy in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. What a wonderful understanding and application of Marxism!”, and how anti-colonial movements fought for liberation in Algeria, Vietnam, and Burkina Faso.The liberation of the nations and national bourgeoisie of Algeria, Vietnam, and Burkina Faso, not the liberation of workers (who’s conditions and relations to production remained ultimately unchanged). We look to historical struggles in the U.S., like Reconstruction (A series of liberal reforms), the rise of the Black Panther Party (A national liberation movement), and the American Indian Movement (A national liberation movement), and reflect on the gains and challenges faced by recent projects like the Palestinian resistance movement, the Latin American Pink Tide, and the George Floyd uprising.
Our implementation: We are partisans of this global tradition, analyzing, criticizing, and continuing the work of generations before. But we also intend to transform along with our conditions. Thus, we emphasize deliberation, democracy and diversity as keys to our adaptive method. We are proudly a multi-tendency communist caucus. We view our diversity of ideologies, roots and lived experiences as a tool in the synthesis of developing new strategies for our present circumstances.
For the Abolition of Domination and Exclusion
Liberation requires prison abolition – which we fight for in solidarity with the oppressed on their own terms, against expansion of the carceral state and in pursuit of transformative justice.
Our present society rests on division of the working class through identity-based oppression, upheld by the carceral state. Incarceration, criminalization,and police violence are tactics forged from slavery to visibly keep the marginalized in line, disproportionately targeting Black and brown people. Therefore, we stake our struggle for a communist horizon in abolition, as it unites those whose oppressions intersect: Indigenous, Black, and brown people; women; trans and queer people; disabled people; immigrant, undocumented, and colonized people; sex workers and others outside of the formal economy; and the currently and formerly incarcerated.For a supposedly communist program that says they “struggle for a communist horizon” it is telling that especially oppressed minorities are mentioned here but there is zero mention of the fact that all members of the working class have an inherent interest to work together as a class. This is the essential basis for Communist revolution and it cannot be substituted by any other means, including intersectional alliances between minority groups.
Our practice of abolition centers solidarity. We show up in the streets to combat the criminalization of Black life, houselessness, and poverty. We rally for bodily autonomy for women and all trans and gender non-conforming people. We mobilize against police brutality; we train ourselves and others in harm reduction for drug users. We defend our neighbors against ICE and agitate to demilitarize our borders. We call for reparations for chattel slavery and Jim Crow Under capitalism, such reparations (morally good as they may be) will never be feasibly possible. Under communism, the conditions that nessecitate them will themselves be abolished; for land back and sovereignty to indigenous peoples That is, sovereignty for an indigenous ruling class to oppress indigenous workers. Additionally, not including the entirety of the proletariat in the communist struggle is not a winning strategy for overthrowing a system as powerful as global capitalism.. By committing to abolition, we confront the ideology that justifies the carceral state Firstly, the job of communists is not to confront the ideologies of the ruling class, which are at all times the ruling ideas; but to overthrow the economic conditions which create them. Secondly, by committing to the overthrow of the police state within the confines of capitalism, you are in fact reinforcing the liberal ideology that positive change can be fought for and won under capitalism. and conceals its true function: as a machine of domination and violence, in service of nothing other than capital.
For Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism
Unequal exchange binds workers of the world together in an exploitative hierarchy, which we must help topple from withinthe empire There is not only one singular empire under global capitalism, but many. Each of whom will use any weakening in the other to advance their own position.
Our place in society is largely determined by where we are born. For the same labor, workers in the Global South are paid a fraction of what workers are paid in the Global North, all to fuel development in Western nations at the expense of their own livelihoods and security. The U.S. and its allies, such as NATO Again what about the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian states who also leverage economic, political, and military power for their own interest at the expense of both the global and their national working class., use their militaries and global financial institutions to maintain this unequal worldsystem and violently smother socialist states and liberation struggles all over the world. As socialists in the imperial core, we must oppose all interventions that uphold the empire There are several competing empires around the world. — military, economic, or otherwise — and fight for a world economy which is planned to allow all humanity to flourish.
Accordingly, Emerge seeks to incorporate anti-imperialism in DSA’s labor activism and legislative campaigns Reform of the current system is an anti-communist activity. Rather than enabling the unequal dynamics of world trade to benefit U.S. workers alone, we must grow the militancy and solidarity of our labor movement so it opposes oligarchy Again, by focusing on oligarchs specifically, you fail to see that it is not the people in charge that are the problem but the system of capital as a whole. and colonialism everywhere. Likewise, we must advocate not just for “green growth” for the West, but for ecosocialist policy built on principles of just global transition and respect for all life. Beyond working to improve the lives of Americans, our elected officials should publicly oppose the endless warfare and sanctions the U.S.-led regime exports around the globe. They would be powerless in challenging the material realities of our system which make imperialism necessary and would instead vent frustration and radicalism into electoral dead ends. To combat capitalism we must confront imperialism.
For Democratic Working Class Organization and Movements
The working class is not an existing force waiting to be awakened. It must be actively built and unified through local organizing work, street movements, electoral projects, and coalition building. This is a complete rejection of the basic materialist fundamentals of communism. The working class is “awakened” as a political force neither by the actions of great men of history nor by the actions of political parties, but by the economic conditions of the system they live under.
Given our strategic position between movements, labor, and the state, (A tool of bourgeois domination over the proletariat) DSA should be a connective tissue of the left ecosystem By which you mean an alliance of the proletariat with the left wing of capital. and a strong collaborator and leader. This means forging broad coalitions and developing new DSA members by organizing at existing and emergent sites of working class struggle. (Coopting working class struggle into liberal reformism) Emerge members work in their local communities within organizations like labor unions (Which are inherently counter-revolutionary organizations that seek only to mediate between capital and the proletariat), tenant unions, and community safety networks, building avenues for working class autonomy and class struggle independent of the nonprofit industrial complex. Emerge also builds with street movements to practice security culture and self defense, both to stand our communal ground and to prepare for direct action in crisis. We believe antifascist organizing (which entails siding with the left wing of capital against the right wing of capital and has always ended horribly for the working class) is fundamental to building bonds in ongoing collective struggle and keeping attuned to possibilities for revolutionary breaks.
Electoral work is a critical site of such collective struggle. Electoralism reinforces the capitalist system.When socialists are elected, they can popularize demands, legislate to increase working class power, and expose the repressive mechanisms of bourgeois democracy from within. In doing so, their offices can become sites of community organization. When social democrats are elected as a last resort to curb independent class struggle, they ideologically and materially disarm the working class and allow for capital to institute fascist counter-revolutionary practice. However, in Emerge, we do not equate a seat at the table with actual power in an inherently hostile state. To actually transform society, we need independent movements that can open space for our electeds to operate That abolish the bourgeois electoral system and the system of capital itself.*, through applying external pressure and bolstering defense from reactionary forces.
For Collective Care, Equity, and Democratic Culture
To sustain our movement through lifelong struggle, we prioritize equity, practice accountability, and enshrine democracy in our internal culture.
The struggle to abolish all forms of oppression begins with our own organizational practices. Aware of our upbringing in patriarchal, chauvinist mores, we strive to maintain gender and racial parity in our caucus membership, to evenly spread reproductive labor, and to guarantee shared ownership of our decisions through transparent processes. Because we view democracy as the means of building socialism, The democratic workers councils will be the fundamental organizational organ by which decisions are made under socialism, but this form of true democracy is not to be conflated with the system of bourgeois dictatorship that the electoral system resides within. It is plausible that you could be discussing either here, but that is in and of itself an indictment of your failure to distance the class struggle from reformism. we check the tide of majority rule and actively foster consensus, which sets the foundation for taking nimble action “at the speed of trust” when circumstances require it.
As disability is a feature, not a failing, of the human experience, we work to dismantle ableist attitudes and infrastructure. We prioritize making our caucus more equitable, and develop practices to ensure our spaces are safe, accessible, and nurturing. We esteem mutual aid as an essential form of political work and a critical element of caucus life, grounding our collective care efforts in its principles. Mutual aid is morally good, but not socialist in and of itself.
We consider debate an important tool to develop our collective thought, and value disagreement as a sign of good faith engagement. We work to meet each other where we’re at with patience and a learning mindset, acknowledging harm when it occurs and seeking opportunities for growth. In doing so, we deepen our politics, our practice as organizers, and our bonds as comrades that will sustain us in the long fight we face together.
