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

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.

There are moments when uprisings of the people—especially the proletariat, but also sometimes other sections of the people—temporarily cut through the mist. But without the clarity of revolutionary theory and the bastion of revolutionary organization, those uprisings fade away with the system they fought against intact, and many of their participants wind up in the marsh, beckoning others to join them there. We have seen that dynamic play out over and over again for more than a decade in the US, from Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to the mass protests inspired by the 2014 Ferguson rebellion, to the mass movement in opposition to Trump’s presidency in late 2016 to early 2017, to the 2020 uprisings against police brutality and the oppression of Black people, to the 2022 protests for abortion rights. It remains to be seen whether the Spring 2024 student revolt against the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza will go a similar route, but wherever this revolt winds up, the defiant ones going up against riot cops on college campuses are a great inspiration and display great clarity of purpose.

The journal Going Against the Tide exists to chart a path out of and away from the marshes. Its title is taken from a quotation from Mao Zedong—“going against the tide is a Marxist-Leninist principle”—that adorned communist publications during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. At that time, Mao had in mind the tides of contentment with what socialist China had achieved by the early 1960s, as well as more overt calls to turn to capitalist methods to modernize China. Those powerful tides ultimately prevailed in China in 1976, but not without a hard fought struggle by communist revolutionaries in China going against the counterrevolutionary tide.

To be a communist today—in the real, not the internet, sense—means going against the tide. It means being impervious to the enticements of careerism and clout chasing. It means rejecting the safety and sterility of postmodernist politics. It means not joining the Left. More positively, it means going to the masses, learning about their lives and struggles, taking revolutionary politics to them, and organizing them in class struggle. It means joining with outbreaks of mass struggle in society, not just to ride the wave, but to divert them towards revolutionary objectives. And it means subordinating yourself to the collective discipline and strategic plan of a communist organization, bringing all your creative energy into something much higher than yourself: the struggle to overthrow, through revolutionary civil war, the present order and create a whole new society on its ashes.

If you are up for that, then this journal is for you. The purpose of Going Against the Tide is to train people how to think and act like communists. Towards that end, it will feature training manuals from the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries that will get you thinking strategically and explain the methods of communist political work. It will provide summations of such political work, from the present and from the past. It will analyze the events and processes shaping the world we are seeking to radically transform, as well as the history behind our contemporary conditions. It will feature social investigation and class analysis that keeps our hearts and our minds on the lives of the masses, what they are thinking, and how we can organize them for revolution. It will polemicize against capitulationist calls to abandon the revolutionary path and join the Left in the marsh. And it will do all that and more with style, featuring the revolutionary artwork of Ruby Lois and an occasional revolutionary song.

Going Against the Tide will be the platform that publishes statements and documents from the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR) in the US. While the overall politics of this journal will be informed by the ideology, politics, and strategic direction of the OCR, not every article should be taken as the official political line of the OCR, and there will be some room for individual comrades, inside and outside the OCR, to develop their views, analysis, and expertise on particular questions of importance in the pages of this journal. Going Against the Tide is open to submissions, even some with substantial differences with its politics, so long as those submissions meet its standards and advance its revolutionary objectives. We welcome correspondence and critical feedback, and we especially want to hear from those with a desire to join up with others dedicating their lives to revolution.

Picking up where kites left off

Going Against the Tide will be a continuation of the politics of the journal kites, which published eight issues from 2020–2023. While that journal was a collaboration between communists in the US and Canada, Going Against the Tide is produced solely by comrades in the US. As such, it will principally focus on the challenges of making revolution in the US, the most powerful and most evil empire in human history, though it will also pay attention to events outside the US and strive to engage with revolutionaries around the world.

Why start Going Against the Tide rather than continuing with kites? Practically speaking, a journal attempting to chart a path for communist revolution in two different countries, even ones that share a lengthy land border, would have become too unwieldy, especially as there are organizations in both countries, with their own democratic centralist structures and strategic plans, which need their own platforms. Politically, with the formation of the (New) Communist Party of Canada (hereafter (N)CPC) and the publication of its program in January 2024, it became clear that there are substantial differences between the (N)CPC and the OCR that would make collaborating—not just concerning the general need for communist revolution, but on the specific political direction of a communist journal—impossible. To understand those political differences, interested readers can study the (N)CPC’s Program and the OCR’s Manifesto.

Going Against the Tide will pick up on and extend the political direction of kites #1–8. There is no interest here in filling the pages of Going Against the Tide with a debate over the political differences between the (N)CPC and the OCR, as those differences are already clear from existing published material and that debate is unlikely to be productive for anyone. However, if the politics that defined kites #1–8 need to be defended against incorrect criticism or unprincipled attacks from any corners, Going Against the Tide may be used for that purpose. In any event, the focus of this journal will be on charting a path for communist revolution in the US. We might have to drain some marshes along the way, and maybe even get a little muddy in the process, but our sights will remain on the revolutionary future we are fighting for.

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Going Against the Tide is currently nailing down a publisher and finalizing content for our first print issue, which we expect to release in the coming months. Until then, new content will appear on our website, goingagainstthetide.org, and you can get in touch with us at goingagainstthetide AT proton.me. For some important selections from kites #1–8 and important documents from the history of the international communist movement, you can check out the “library” on our website.