Going Against the Tide: A journal charting a path for communist revolution in the US

Self-righteous woke capitulation or revolutionary resolve?

Going Against the Tide journal

June 2024

Any mass movement, radical organization, or mass organizing effort inevitably confronts challenges, setbacks, and even defeats, as well as moments when the energy of mass participation gives way to a low tide of little mass activity. When faced with these difficulties, which sometimes have no immediate solutions, those involved in the mass movements and organizations in question have a choice to make: give up, or figure out how to persevere and eventually advance again. In decades past, when people decided to give up, they generally did so quietly and more or less honestly, admitting that they did not see a path forward and were unwilling to persist in trying to find one, and moving on with their lives. But over the last decade, those who decide to give up on the masses and the struggle usually do so with arrogant self-righteousness, condemning the ones who remain committed with accusations of violating the ever-shifting rules of woke politics. Capitulation is now painted as an act of virtue, and staying on the revolutionary path is condemned with vitriolic contempt.
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Make Way for the Defiant Ones

A statement from the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US), May 1^st, 2024

On April 18, 2024, Columbia University students discovered America. Their university takes its name from the supposed discoverer of the Americas, but a much more profound discovery was made by the over a hundred Columbia University students arrested on April 18 by the NYPD, on the orders of Columbia University president Minouche Shafik, for protesting the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza. Through their defiance, they discovered that America is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a class whose wealth and dominance is fueled by, and who is willing to defend with vicious repression, its imperialist exploitation and domination of the world.
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Introducing Going Against the Tide, and picking up where kites left off

By Kenny Lake
May 2024

We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance, almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighboring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us and don’t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are “free” to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!

-Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902)

Lenin’s words from over a hundred years ago are no less true today. Charting a revolutionary path, in the US of all places, means a persistent struggle to not get stuck in the marshes of capitulation and reformism. Since Lenin’s time, those marshes have gotten ever more murky, with the institutionalization of the Left as a dead weight on the masses, a growing morass of careerists and opportunists posing as radicals and revolutionaries, the obfuscationist and obscurantist language of postmodernist theory, and vague abolitionist politics pretending you can get rid of state violence without overthrowing the bourgeois state.
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Spread the Steadfast Spirit of the Palestinian Struggle

By OCR Leadership
November 2023

Despite the Nakba, despite 75 years of occupation and apartheid, despite repeated wars of aggression and land thefts, despite betrayals by Arab governments and Arafat and Abbas, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in US funding for Israel, the Palestinian people have remained steadfast in their struggle for national liberation. No amount of US money and weaponry, no amount of settler violence, no amount of Mossad fuckery, and no amount of Israeli bombs has been able to extinguish the resistance of the Palestinian people, which has long been an inspiration to the exploited and oppressed around the world. Regardless of our differences with the ideology and politics of Hamas, the 7 October 2023 lightning raid on Israel from the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip was a powerful manifestation of the spirit of the Palestinian struggle, and it delivered a powerful blow to the Zionist enemy and the US-led imperialist bloc, demonstrating weaknesses in their supposedly invincible military power.
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Notes on our work among the proletariat

By OCR Leadership
August 2023

The following is more a beginning synthesis than a detailed summation of the lessons learned through the political work and organizing efforts of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR) among the proletariat in the US. Our experience is still quite limited given the small size of our organization, but we felt that synthesizing and sharing the lessons we have learned over the past few years in the OCR (and drawing on the past few decades prior to the OCR’s existence) would help orient our own membership and supporters, as well as new recruits and comrades outside our organization, in meeting the challenges of bringing forward a revolutionary, class-conscious section of the proletariat.¹
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Refining our mass organizing methods

By OCR Leadership
December 2023

The following manual was developed out of a training session in Summer 2023 for several new cadre in the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US). The aim of that training session was to synthesize the key lessons from our mass organizing efforts and to help comrades find solutions to the challenges that have come up in these efforts.

What is meant here by mass organizing methods?

This manual codifies and explains our methods of organizing the proletariat into mass organizations waging class struggle, though these methods could also, to some extent, be applied to efforts among other sections of the people. By mass organizing methods, we are not talking about mass work in general; we are more specifically addressing how to bring forward the mass element of the organized subjective forces for revolution. This is in part a recognition of the fact that making revolution is, to some degree, a numbers game, a matter of the communist vanguard accruing the necessary mass following that puts it in the position to precipitate and seize on opportunities for launching revolutionary warfare. That “numbers game,” however, must be properly, not pragmatically, understood as a quality—namely a revolutionary line—taking expression in a definite quantity. And we must also keep in mind that quantitative developments will not just happen incrementally, but also through leaps when we are able to marshal our forces to seize on sharpening contradictions in society.
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Drawing Blood: A Guide to Communist Agitation

By the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries
February, 2021

During his struggle with the economists (those Marxists who restricted their political work to struggles over the immediate conditions of exploitation at the factory), Lenin, in his seminal work What Is to Be Done?, wrote:

A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political agitation is the organization of comprehensive political exposure. In no way except by means of such exposures can the masses be trained in political consciousness and revolutionary activity.

This manual will serve as a political and technical guide to communist agitation. Agitation is the process by which communists systematically lay bare the instances of oppression and exploitation that the masses face on a daily basis and point to their source in the system of capitalism-imperialism. Communists distinguish agitation from propaganda, the latter being a lengthier examination of an issue or question in an all-around way, paying attention to the history as well as the motion and development of a contradiction. (This communist definition of propaganda differs from the more general and usually negative usage of the term propaganda as any political text or art that aims to persuade or manipulate its audience.)
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Looking Back to Face Forward: The Role of Summation in the Revolutionary Process

By the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries
February, 2021

The great helmsman of the Chinese Communist Revolution, Mao Zedong, elaborated a four-step method for guiding revolutionary practice:

1. Make a plan.
2. Carry out the plan.
3. Sum up the experience.
4. Make a new plan.

This didn’t just spring from the grand intellect of Mao, but was forged through the tremendous sacrifice of millions of Chinese peasants in revolutionary struggle. It’s what communists lived by when they were engaged in revolutionary warfare against feudal warlords, the Japanese imperialists, and the Guomindang comprador-bourgeoisie for two decades. It’s a crucial part of what made the Chinese revolution victorious.
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All Roads Lead to Revolution:

On agitprop, organizations, and mass struggles under the leadership of the Organization of Communist

By OCR Leadership
August 2023

To accumulate the subjective forces for revolution—the organized forces in society consciously struggling for revolution—the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR) must initiate and lead a wide variety of vehicles for carrying out agitation and propaganda and developing concentric circles of organization and waves of mass struggle under our leadership. Our Manifesto gives a basic vision of this process, and our work of summation of the history of the communist movement in the US (published as The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, the Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today in kites #8) has further enriched our understanding of the various components of the subjective forces for revolution. In this document, we explain and categorize these forms more systematically, if abstractly.
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Correcting an over-correction:

On the weapon of exposure, the role of all-around agitation, and prioritizing recruitment

By OCR Leadership
December 2023

In the section “Strategy for Revolution in the US” of the Manifesto of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, we outline a multifaceted approach for building the subjective forces for revolution. Building mass organizations under our leadership is presented as a “crucial starting point” in that process, and our Manifesto lays out a communist approach to building such mass organizations. The emphasis our Manifesto gives to mass organizations was an important correction to the line and practice of recent revolutionary organizations in the US. The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) had no clear strategic doctrine on building mass organizations, though it certainly did important work mobilizing the masses in struggle and building organizations to serve that struggle.¹ The most well-known revolutionary organizations of the Sixties, such as the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, were generally characterized by a combination of revolutionary agitation and bold and badass revolutionary heroism, on the one hand, and social programs aimed at meeting the immediate needs of the masses, on the other, lacking a clear concept and practice of building mass organizations waging class struggle under their leadership. It is not since the 1930s, when the Communist Party (CP) had several impressive and large mass organizations of proletarians under its leadership, that revolutionaries in the US have had a clear plan and practice for building mass organizations.
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On agitprop, organizations, and mass struggles under the leadership of the Organization of Communist