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

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

On petty tyrants

Rarely does the proletariat interact directly with members of the bourgeoisie. Instead, the bourgeoisie assigns various subaltern classes² the job of imposing its will on the proletariat. An obvious example of this is the police, who play the direct repressive role of keeping the proletariat “in line” and punishing them when they fall out of line, with all the violence that goes with that. Beyond that repressive role, there is also the ideological role played by, for example, teachers, whose job it is to inculcate the proletariat in bourgeois ideology, while teaching them the skills that the bourgeoisie needs them to have to be effectively exploited as laborers but keeping them from developing skills, intellectual and otherwise, that could be used against the bourgeoisie. (As workers in the bourgeoisie’s ideological state apparatus, the role of teachers is more contradictory than that of the police, and fortunately lots of teachers do try to play a different role than the one prescribed to them.)

A particular role-type among the subaltern classes that has been under-theorized by communists but is widely despised among the proletariat is the petty tyrant. Petty tyrants occupy various class and social positions, and include:

• At the workplace, low-level managers who love to lord it over their subordinates even though they only make a few dollars more an hour than their subordinates.
• In proletarian housing complexes, the tenant union president who serves as an intermediary between landlord(s) and tenants and practices blatant favoritism in how they respond to tenant grievances.
• Nonprofit agency employees who dispense charity in ways that breed competition for resources among the masses.
• Government employees, from child and family services case workers to public welfare agency employees to public housing managers, who treat the masses with utter contempt and make their lives miserable.
• The small business owner who squeezes the masses to make a profit and treats their proletarian customers with disdain.

These are, generally speaking, class or social positions slightly above the lower and deeper proletariat, ranging from upper strata within the proletariat to lower and middle echelons in the petty-bourgeoisie, but many of the people occupying these positions come from or have social connections to the masses. Playing the objective role of a petty tyrant involves a definite ideological disposition characterized by pettiness, contempt for those “below” them, and taking delight in making the masses’ lives hell. Some people occupying these objective positions choose not to embrace, or even rebel against, this ideological disposition, and they can be won over as strategic allies of the proletariat (though they might wind up having to lose their jobs to stay strategic allies). Others thoroughly embrace this ideological disposition and play the role of petty tyrant with great zeal; they act as enemies of the proletariat. The point is that to play the objective role required of them by the bourgeoisie, those in the objective position of petty tyrants over the masses must embrace the subjective position of a petty tyrant, or they probably will not last long at their jobs.

In our mass organizing efforts among the proletariat, we have found a widespread hatred for petty tyrants, and found that when even a few masses stand up to a petty tyrant, it resonates deeply with the masses broadly. By contrast, attempting mass mobilizations politically targeting specific members of the bourgeoisie, who are far more responsible for the problems of the masses than are the petty tyrants, has not had the same immediate and palpable resonance among the masses broadly. Strategically, we will have to find ways to bridge the gap—uniting with the masses’ immediate anger at the petty tyrants in their midst and using that anger to mobilize them in class struggle, while diverting that class struggle towards the big-time class enemies (members of the bourgeoisie). Without enshrining this in a “stage-ist” way, it might be necessary, in leading class struggle, to pass through an initial stage of struggle against petty tyrants before moving to a higher stage of struggle directed against members of the bourgeoisie (from a manager at a fast food chain to the heads of the corporate chain; from tyrannical tenant union president to big-time landlord).

In uniting with the righteous anger of the masses against petty tyrants, a danger we must be aware of is for that anger and the struggle that flows from it to degenerate into pettiness. In US proletarian culture, there is a widespread problem of pettiness, which the grotesque me-first social relations generated by imperialism and the conscious ideological work of the bourgeoisie have inculcated in the masses. While the advanced among the proletariat find ways to resist and transcend this pettiness, it has deeply infected the culture and daily lives of the masses. Concentrated expressions of the culture of pettiness among the masses were curated on television shows like the Jerry Springer Show and the Maury Povich Show. More recently, they have been given the aura authenticity and normality of daily life on many reality TV shows and become “self-generated” on social media platforms whose algorithms promote the worst displays of pettiness. In whatever form they are broadcast, public performances of the worst social relations among the masses conduct important ideological work for the bourgeoisie. But the outrageous scenarios watched by millions have their roots in the more widespread culture of pettiness among the masses—plenty of proletarians we have interacted with are only a few steps away from the scenarios on garbage television shows like Maury Povich. In taking up the struggle against petty tyrants, we need to do so in ways that take the class instincts of the masses and move them towards class-consciousness, thereby militating against the immediate struggle (against petty tyrants) fortifying the culture of pettiness among the masses.

Finally, it is worth remembering that in the revolutionary people’s war in Peru, while the revolution was directed at the ruling classes, secondarily, and especially in its initial stages, it involved a civil war among the masses. Revolutions do not transpire by way of all the (proletarian) masses lining up on the side of the revolution against the bourgeoisie and its die-hard supporters. Instead, revolutions involve and pass through conflicts among the masses, albeit ones that represent the conflict between the class interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat, on the path towards the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. While we are unfortunately not waging a revolutionary people’s war today, we must apply the political lessons from the people’s war in Peru to our situation, and recognize the important and necessary role of the struggle against petty tyrants among the masses in the revolutionary process. But we must also be conscious and conscientious that the class struggle does not stay within the limits of, or worse yet degenerate into, a struggle against petty tyrants.

Squid Game

In his exemplary 1845 work of social investigation, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels showed how the conditions of capitalism created a social war among the masses, where proletarians in slum conditions are pit against each other in a battle for survival. As Engels summed up,

Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules modern civil society. This battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes. Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and put himself in their place.

Today this social war continues, but with the added dimension that the bourgeoisie has learned well how to exacerbate contradictions among the masses, with deliberate policies pitting one section of the masses against another. In our efforts to bring forward a class-conscious section of the proletariat, we must understand how the battle lines of the social war among the masses are drawn and find ways to contend with the reactionary ideology and politics and the practical antagonisms they foster. Our aim must be to convince the masses to refuse to play the capitalist game of competing with each other, instead developing their understanding of the system behind that game and embracing a communist attitude towards their class sisters and brothers, here and around the world.

In our political work, the principal social war battle line we have run up against is that between Black proletarians and immigrant proletarians, principally immigrants from Latin America. Practically, there is often competition among these sections of the masses for resources, whether from government agencies or from nonprofit organizations, both of which use clientelism, dispensing charity to gain the allegiance of one or another section of the masses. The recent practice of dumping newly arrived migrants in impoverished proletarian neighborhoods has not helped matters, often provoking a reactionary but understandable response from US-born proletarians (including, in some cases, Latinos³) who have been deprived of government assistance for decades and perceive government assistance to migrants as unfair “handouts.”

In terms of class position and class-consciousness, while Latino immigrant and US-born Black proletarians are both part of the international proletariat, they have different histories and often occupy different positions in relation to the production process. The most extreme example of these differences in social conditions is the way that Latin American immigrants are in demand as agricultural and food production workers (in the fields of California and in Midwestern meatpacking plants, for example), and as service workers in the global cities (such as New York and Los Angeles), while Black proletarian youth, especially males, are often locked out of any stable employment and forced to hustle in the illegal economy. We have some serious propaganda work to do to bring the masses an understanding of the particular histories, exploitation, and oppression their class sisters and brothers face so that they no longer look at each other as competitors, or, worse yet, enemies. There are more advanced sentiments among the masses that can be put to use in this work, such as an older Black proletarian who once described to one of our comrades how Mexicans had been brought “from the meadows to the ghettos”⁴ to be exploited workers when the system decided to throw Black men in gangs and in prison. But we need to produce propaganda materials that show, and be good at explaining to the masses, how they are all part of the international proletariat with a common class interest. In this respect, the Leftist and postmodernist mantra of talking about “communities” must be opposed for the way it divides the masses by postmodernist, essentialized identity categories and consigns them to fight for their narrow interests. Identifying with the international proletariat is a subjective position a million times more advanced than identifying with “my community.” But that more advanced subjective position has unfortunately receded with the loss of proletarian state power and the decline of the international communist movement—it is our responsibility to rekindle it.

In the practical struggle, where we can bring different sections of the proletariat together in class struggle, we absolutely should, and follow that up with ideological work that moves the masses from a practical understanding to a class-conscious understanding of their common class interests. The Revolutionary Communist Party’s Los Angeles branch in the 1990s used to hold picnics that brought Black and Latino proletarians together to discuss their histories, life experiences, and aspirations, a practice we can learn from. From one neighborhood to another, we have found substantial differences in the degree of favorable objective conditions for bringing together different sections of the masses in common struggle, with the material strength and ideological hegemony of city government and nonprofit clientelism impacting those objective conditions in a negative way. While postmodernists would have it that “anti-Blackness” among Latinos is the principal problem, we have found the reverse to be true: reactionary sentiment by Black proletarians against Latin American proletarians has been a greater obstacle in our organizing efforts. That is not to say that some Latino immigrants do not harbor racist views towards Black masses that need to be fought against, but that we need to make an objective assessment of the principal reactionary ideological trends through concrete social investigation and struggle against all reactionary outlooks among the masses while identifying and focusing our attention on the principal ones.

Another battle line in the social war among the masses is between semi-lumpen proletarian youth and more conservative, often church-going, parents and elders. This battle line has been hardened in the wake of the 2020 rebellions, with the police consciously backing off from hands-on patrolling in many neighborhoods and the news media pumping out a narrative of rising crime (which has some basis in reality). For the youth, being “upstanding citizens” has little appeal when they have no prospects for steady jobs or a stable future. For the parents and elders, there is a legitimate fear of getting robbed or caught in the crossfire mixed with reactionary sentiments that blame the youth for their lack of a future under this system, and for every perceived (and often petty) thing wrong with the neighborhood, from trash on the sidewalks to loud music. The more advanced elders find ways to call out the youth for harmful behaviors and even mediate conflicts among them while having real compassion for their struggles. Like these elders, we need to find a way to “cut through the middle,” criticizing lumpen outlooks among the youth and conservative, “blame the youth” attitudes among parents and elders, explaining how the blame is squarely on the system for any of the real social problems in proletarian neighborhoods. Ultimately, it will take the assertion of revolutionary authority in proletarian neighborhoods and finding some collective solutions to the immediate problems of the masses to mitigate this contradiction among the masses. Developing communist youth organization and bringing forward politically advanced elders as revolutionary leaders in proletarian neighborhoods are the key steps to move in this direction.

There are myriad other battle lines in the social war among the masses we will need to understand more deeply and recast as battles against the bourgeoisie, but a thread that runs through all of them is the problem of me-first ideology in capitalist-imperialist society. This is an ideological poison we need to actively and practically contend with, getting the masses in the “collective mode” (to quote the refrain and title of an excellent Asian Dub Foundation song). While the more backward among the masses embrace me-first ideology, it also weighs down on the advanced who reject it, as they understandably point to the pervasiveness of the me-first mentality as preventing the masses more broadly from coming together in class struggle. We need to find ways to move the advanced from pessimism to optimism, to see the ability of the masses to transform themselves as they transform the world, starting by binding together the advanced as a force that can contend with me-first ideology.

The chaotic lives of the masses

One major barrier to involvement in collective class struggle is that the workings of capitalism-imperialism have made life chaotic for the masses. While the idea of a proletariat working stable 9–5 factory jobs has always been mostly a myth, the structure of employment in recent decades has shifted increasingly to erratic hours, long commutes to and from work, multiple jobs, temporary and informal employment, and lots of hustling, including scraping together income through numerous side hustles (often involving selling homemade goods, cleaning or other informal service jobs for the wealthy, and multiple single-event gigs). Outside of employment, accessing welfare services, healthcare, and education is often a chaotic hustle in its own right, with countless hours spent making appointments, dealing with capitalist bureaucracies, and being treated like dirt in the process. On top of these structures of chaos that dominate the daily lives of the masses, only a lucky few find solace in supportive social structures. Ties binding family, neighbors, and friends have significantly eroded, whether through large numbers of Black proletarian men being thrown in prison, neighborhoods of the oppressed, such as Chicago’s high-rise housing projects, being demolished to make way for gentrification and their residents scattered, or immigrants leaving their social ties in their countries of origin. Furthermore, the grotesque me-first social relations of imperialism pit romantic partners, family members, and intimate friends against each other in a competition to maintain advantage over each other and preserve self-interest, forcing those who do not want to relate to people in this perverse way to build up protective walls rather than foster bonds of mutual support.

The lower and deeper sections of the proletariat in the US tend to live chaotic lives, not by their own choosing, but by virtue of the workings of capitalism-imperialism and the bourgeoisie’s dictatorship over them (by design). The chaos in their lives militates against their participation in collective class struggle, as they are constantly responding to crises in their lives. On a practical level, who can be a member of a mass organization, let alone become a communist cadre, when life is one crisis after another?

We need to find the ways to cut through the chaos—to attend to this very real problem among the masses without getting sucked into it, without becoming social workers. We must be clear to the masses that the only real way to solve these problems is through revolution, and present them with vivid propaganda on how life was different for the masses under proletarian rule in socialist China and the Soviet Union and in base areas during revolutionary people’s wars. On the path to revolution, we need to establish revolutionary authority and discipline that can set different terms among the masses and solve a few of their concrete problems. This includes developing strong collectivities among the masses that take some of the burden off of individuals and demonstrate how it is possible to live a different way, to trust and rely on each other, develop revolutionary social relations based on mutual love, respect, and equality, and to find ways to get ahead of personal crises. But there is no way around the fact that as long as capitalism-imperialism exists, life will be a chaotic hell for the masses, and our main task is to expose why that is the case and mobilize the masses for revolution, not temporary fixes.

“Dem Bobo”

The great Nigerian Afrobeat musician Femi Kuti (son of Fela) has an excellent song called “Dem Bobo,” the title of which is a Nigerian expression meaning something to the effect of “they fool you”—listen to the song for a deeper sense of its meaning. Malcolm X used to tell the masses that they’re being “bamboozled” by the ruling class to accept their oppression. “They playing you” is probably the best version of that message in the language of the proletariat in the US today. Whatever vocabulary we choose, there is a need to struggle with the masses to cast off all the ways the bourgeoisie fools them into accepting this capitalist-imperialist nightmare as just the way it is. That struggle needs to be conducted with real heart for the masses, not treating them as fools but pulling no punches about the ways they’re getting fooled.

Historically, religion has played a key role in convincing the masses that this society is just the way it is, and all we can do is look forward to the kingdom of heaven in the afterlife. Many of the most backward masses have adopted this view, while large numbers of intermediate and even advanced turn to it as a sort of default when confronted with the difficulties of revolutionary change. We certainly need to challenge this politically, making practical arguments revealing the potential power of the masses when they choose to fight their oppression, and challenge the ideological hold of religion more generally.

Over the last 200 years, bourgeois-democracy, and the specific form of bourgeois elections, became the religion of the liberal petty-bourgeoisie and cast its shadow over the masses, functioning as a mechanism to channel the discontent of the popular classes back into acceptable means of passive political participation that ultimately serve to reinforce bourgeois rule. Like religion (that’s a double entendre), we need to move the masses away from electoral activity while challenging the philosophical foundations of bourgeois-democracy. However, in this document we wish to turn our attention to some of the more recent ways in which the masses get convinced they cannot change the world.

In the US, there has not been an organized, class-conscious section of the proletariat in substantial numbers in decades, perhaps not since the 1930s. Revolutionary organizations of the Sixties tended to act more as heroic groups of young revolutionaries fighting the oppressors or organizers of social programs intended to provide for the immediate needs of the masses, and sometimes both at the same time. The concept of truly mass organizations of the proletariat under communist leadership largely eluded the Sixties generation. Furthermore, over the last several decades, a decreasing portion of the proletariat works in conditions of direct socialized, large-scale production, and unions have been thoroughly brought into the bourgeois order, giving the US proletariat far less experience in collective organization and militant class struggle than it had in the early 1930s. Consequently, the US proletariat today has little direct experience or living memory of being part of mass organizations that bound them together in common class struggle. The notable exception, in our work, has been Latin American immigrants, who often have such experience from their countries of origin and are more receptive to our efforts to mobilize them in collective struggle.

Consciously working against bringing the proletariat into class struggle mass organizations are local politicians and nonprofit organizations. Both will make direct interventions when the masses start to come together to resist when their oppression reaches a boiling point, working to bring the boil down to a simmer and divert the masses back into the official political channels. But beyond bourgeois diversion tactics, city government officials and nonprofit organizations have inculcated in the masses the idea that to affect any change in your conditions of life, you must find someone in a position of power to do it for you. In that framework, the principal form of activity for the masses is to go to a meeting, complain about the problems in the neighborhood to the politicians or nonprofit activists leading the meeting, and then expect them to do something about it. This form of activity has become so ingrained that when our comrades have succeeded in mobilizing substantial numbers of masses to one of our mass meetings, which are aimed at mobilizing those masses in class struggle, many of the masses in attendance approach the mass meeting as another complaint session (understandably, they have a lot to complain about) rather than as an opportunity to get organized for collective struggle. Furthermore, the masses often call every form of activity, even street protests, a meeting—“when’s the meeting?” has become a familiar refrain our comrades hear from the masses.

What the politicians and nonprofits have inculcated in the masses is that they have no real agency to act outside of the official bourgeois channels, and that they must rely on those in power rather than themselves taking collective action. The furthest the nonprofit organizations go in mobilizing the masses is their familiar routine of holding a press conference at which a few of the masses speak, wearing T-shirts with the nonprofit organization’s logo, which is always nothing more than a public spectacle and a pressure tactic that never goes beyond the acceptable limits of bourgeois politics. There are few among the masses who have strong allegiance to the local politicians and nonprofits or their way of doing politics, but in the absence of an alternative, even many of the advanced among the masses have come to accept that “this is the way things are done.”

Our mission must be to create a compelling alternative to the local politician and nonprofit organization regime of preventive counterrevolution, exposing the bankruptcy of the politician/nonprofit methods to clear a path for that alternative. Concretely, this means:

• Compelling and persistent argumentation for the path of mass action and class struggle, wielding historical examples to prove our argumentation with concrete experience.
• Relying on and mobilizing the advanced who do understand the role of mass action and mass organization—for example, Latin American immigrants with positive experience from back home to draw from—to win over the intermediate and set a new model in motion.
• Learning how to run mass meetings in a way that draws the masses into collective class struggle and commitment to mass organization. Employing the time-tested Maoist tactic of speak bitterness sessions⁵ that unleash the masses’ anger and direct it towards the source of their oppression is a powerful alternative to politician- and nonprofit-led complaint session meetings. Developing group identity with communist-led mass organizations that proudly reject the official channels of bourgeois politics is crucial to developing the masses’ collective strength. Conducting well-led political education sessions can raise the masses’ consciousness at each mass meeting. And training the masses in a different way of operating, as members of communist-led mass organizations taking responsibility for waging class struggle and finding collective solutions to their common problems, will be a crucial means of asserting revolutionary authority and transforming the people.
• Developing bold and creative tactics for mobilizing the masses in class struggle that put the masses’ righteous anger and literal voices in the forefront, and step up the level of struggle as we go.
• Wielding the weapons of exposure and agitation to reveal the capitalist-imperialist system behind the exploitation and oppression of the masses, and training the masses in these weapons.
• Exposing the local politician and nonprofit organization modus operandi. This will require hijacking their complaint meetings and turning them into a mass rejection of waiting for someone in power to solve the masses’ problems. It will require sharply contending with those nonprofit organizations and politicians who have some sway among the masses, concretely exposing their political programs and sources of funding. We must not shy away from this struggle even though we are up against well-funded enemies who have been operating with a free hand for decades, and we should have confidence that our ideology and politics represent the highest aspirations of the masses and correspond to their class interests.

Overall, we must not be afraid to tell the masses that “they’re getting played,” and that the lies they have come to accept, whether from preachers, politicians, or nonprofits, are holding them back from joining the struggle to end all exploitation and oppression.

Mobilizing different types of advanced

Identifying the advanced among the masses is a crucial prerequisite to building organization and mobilizing class struggle among the masses, as the advanced are the ones capable of being the leading element in this process. The advanced, however, are not a monolithic bloc, but come with different strengths and weaknesses and can be reached in different ways. Broadly speaking, there are two different types of advanced:

1. Advanced in the realm of action: those who are itching to fight their oppression, who are the first to speak out, who embrace the opportunity to wage class struggle immediately, who have strong class instincts that manifest in action, and who exemplify a fighting spirit and refusal to put up with the way the bourgeoisie makes the masses live.
2. Advanced in the realm of ideas: those who have thought about the nature of the system we are up against, who understand, on some level, the need for revolution, who are usually well-read and know how to think historically, but who might be skeptical about the prospects, or effectiveness, of immediate class struggle. A common manifestation of this type of advanced is someone who spent time in prison and hit the books while they were locked up, reading broadly and studying revolutionary politics, but had little opportunity to put those politics into collective practice in the repressive conditions of the bourgeoisie’s dungeons.

These two types of advanced have different strengths that need to be fused in order to neutralize their respective weaknesses. To put it in practical terms, we need to unite the chess guys with the irate working mothers. The first type of advanced will best be reached with direct organizing efforts aimed at mobilizing the masses in class struggle around their immediate exploitation and oppression. The second type of advanced will best be reached with revolutionary agitation, propaganda, and political education that focuses not on their immediate oppression but on an all-around analysis of the workings of capitalism-imperialism and larger questions of revolutionary strategy. However, what best reaches different types of advanced should not become a recipe for pragmatism, and we should conduct a variety of political work among all of the masses, challenging their weaknesses in the process. Indeed, in the neighborhoods and workplaces we intend to turn into sites of class struggle and bastions of revolutionary authority, we need to approach the masses from the perspective of our full politics and strategy, and develop a variety of specific forms of political work that are all part of and subordinate to our overall politics and strategy. Doing so, we can draw forward the strengths of different types of advanced into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Conclusion

Much of this document has been focused on stating the problem, outlining an orientation for overcoming it but without all the specifics figured out. On the one hand, this is a statement of where we are at, having gained some initial experience and a few small successes at bringing forward the proletariat in class struggle and raising their class-consciousness, but not any large-scale victories, decisive consolidation, or a breadth of experience. Where we do make breakthroughs, their lessons should be summed up and applied more generally. On the other hand, this is an important statement of method: if you are looking for pat answers and easy solutions, perhaps you are not up for making revolution, for making revolution is about identifying, analyzing, and finding a way through the contradictions. Much of our purpose with this document is to identify the contradictions and draw our membership, the advanced around us, and comrades outside our ranks into the process of figuring out the solutions. Along the way, we need to keep our humility, be willing to admit when we are wrong, and transform our approach to meet the challenges before us. This is the communist process of criticism and transformation, which must be the lifeblood of any communist organization. The masses need nothing less from us if we are to bring them forward as a class-conscious, fighting contingent of the international proletariat.

ENDNOTES

1 To understand our conception of the proletariat, see our Manifesto. For a deeper explanation, see the four-part series The Specter That Still Haunts: Locating a Revolutionary Class within Contemporary Capitalism-Imperialism by Kenny Lake, published in kites.

2 To those who went to grad school or have experience in Leftist movements, we are using the term “subaltern classes” not in the way you learned it, but in the sense that Gramsci meant it, in opposition to the misinterpretations of his work by professors intent on purging revolutionary politics from his writings. In his class analysis, Gramsci used the term subaltern classes in a way analogous to its dictionary definition: junior officers in the British military.

3 For example, when in Spring 2023 the City of New York made moves to house migrants bused in from Texas in schools, parents in the Latino neighborhood of Sunset Park protested the requisition of their children’s gym for migrant housing.

4 Say it slow with a pause after meadows and an emphasis on the rhyme to fully get the brilliance of this proletarian observation.

5 On the Maoist tactic of speak bitterness sessions, read Bill Hinton’s Fanshen, which paints a vivid portrait of the efficacy of Maoist methods in the revolutionary transformation of a Chinese village.