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

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.

Within organizations, self-righteous woke capitulation generally plays out along the following lines: Young, new activists, along with one or a few seasoned opportunists, join organizations when those organizations are at a peak of activity or in the middle of leading a mass movement. They enter those organizations with seemingly genuine enthusiasm and commitment, and profess agreement with the politics of the organizations they join. Then, when the activity of the organization ebbs, when there is repression against or slander of the organization, when being in the organization might lose you friends or social media approval, or when the political work gets challenging, those new activists, along with any seasoned opportunists, jump out to condemn the organization they joined. Their condemnation draws on whatever woke justifications offer the easiest insults and best show of self-righteousness: false accusations of “anti-blackness” or transphobia or ableism, playing identity politics to drag the genuine down and prop the opportunists up, or developing dishonest critiques of the organization’s politics. Sometimes their aim is to take over the organization they joined and make it serve their opportunist politics, while other times the objective seems to be to wreck and dismantle the organization. This chain of events has played out within, and led to the demise of, numerous organizations over the last decade, often in ways that seem utterly absurd to outside observers. Yet rarely, if ever, are the people responsible held accountable for their opportunism and destructive behavior, even as they themselves are likely to talk a lot about (some vague notion of) accountability.

Beyond organizations, self-righteous woke capitulation has weakened and even derailed entire mass movements. The most recent examples can be discerned in the movement against the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza. From the earliest protests in October 2023, opportunists in leadership positions opposed and tried to block any moves in a more militant direction with the justification that such moves could put Palestinians (or Muslims, Black people, “BIPOC”…insert whatever identity category makes sense for the situation) at the protests at risk of arrest or police brutality. Particularly hypocritical is the fact that these opportunists are often the ones most loudly trumpeting the actions of resistance fighters in Palestine, as though the brave souls who dared to cross Israel’s apartheid wall and take the battle to the Zionist aggressor were not putting themselves at grave risk. Those resistance fighters surely knew that the well-armed Israeli military would retaliate, with the utmost brutality, against the Palestinian population, but the Palestinian masses know better than anyone that it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

As the opportunists failed to block growing militancy in the antiwar movement in the US when Fall turned to Winter and the death toll in Gaza kept rising, they changed tact, started pretending their protests were militant (for example, using the phrase “shut it down” while not trying to shut anything down), and positioned themselves to get a few photo-op arrests, probably rehearsing their arrest faces in front of a mirror at home beforehand. Then along came the encampment movement on college campuses from late April through May 2024, which drew forward new layers of students, whose outrage had grown with each new picture of the death and devastation in Gaza, to protests that were far more militant in character. Some encampments refused to back down in the face of repression or give in when the university administration offered a few crumbs, and succeeded in mobilizing a larger mass of students to combat the repression and take the place of student protesters who had been banned from campus. Others quickly capitulated the self-righteous woke way, accepting the offers of university administrations to rename a room on campus and take in a few more Palestinian students next Fall, with the hollow promise of a dialogue about divestment down the road. The route of capitulation was almost always justified by appointing some people of the “right” identity (in this case, Palestinian and Black students) to carry out the capitulation, and sometimes with the claim that ending the encampment was necessary for protecting the safety of [insert identity group].

Indeed, “safety” has absurdly become the new mantra for justifying capitulation, as if staying safe should be our prime concern when we are trying to stop a genocide (or any other injustice). That is not to say every protest action must be the most militant, or that there is not a place for lower risk actions that children, grandparents, undocumented immigrants, etc. can take part in. But let’s be honest: the people using “safety” to justify capitulation are doing so because they are cowards, opportunists, or both, not out of any genuine concern for people more vulnerable to police repression.

It is not just in the antiwar movement over the last year that we find resistance derailed by self-righteous woke capitulation. If we examine the rise and fall of any mass movement over the last decade, we can see the same dynamic at play, especially in their moments of decline. For example, in Spring 2022, when the Supreme Court moved to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to ban abortion and restrict women’s control over their reproductive rights and their bodies, a wave of mass protest, initiated by the organization Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and drawing forward high school students as its leading force, swept society before quickly disintegrating the subsequent Summer. After the Supreme Court’s decision was formally announced and with no one in the halls of bourgeois political power willing to move decisively against this reactionary move, the youth who had been out in the streets en masse confronted the difficulty of how to advance the movement through their own independent mass action. Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights had no good answers for how to advance, relying on ever smaller disruptive actions coveting media coverage and mostly focusing its activity in liberal cities where abortion rights were not under threat, failing to come up with a plan for taking the struggle to the states enacting draconian laws against women.

While we can criticize Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights for this failure, rooted in the degeneration of the Revolutionary Communist Party (commonly known today as the RevComs) that led it, we have to condemn the opportunist attacks that derailed it. The organization NYC for Abortion Rights, led by Trotskyites who used to be in the International Socialist Organization,¹ started the derailment process by leveling accusations of transphobia against the RevComs, drawing on the Revolutionary Communist Party’s bad former position on homosexuality that it renounced over twenty years ago.² Those accusations dovetailed with a broader trend of woke capitulation in the protests for abortion rights: elevating the inclusivity of language above the rights of women, insisting that the word “women” be downplayed or not spoken at all so as not to exclude people who do not identify as women but are biologically capable of getting pregnant. This reactionary woke capitulation failed to explain why we cannot recognize that abortion is principally a question of women’s rights while also including, in the struggle, the reproductive rights of people who are not women but can give birth. The result has been widespread resignation to the reactionary overturning of Roe v. Wade, leaving people in places where Christian fundamentalism holds sway in state government to fend for themselves.

While it was seasoned opportunists who led the charge to derail the movement for abortion rights in 2022, the bigger problem was that their reasoning for capitulation quickly won over the mass of youth who had been on the frontlines of the protests. That critical mass quickly quit the movement, with no small degree of smug self-righteousness, convincing themselves they were quitting to distance themselves from transphobia rather than consigning women to forced motherhood and medical nightmares. Opportunists gonna opportunize, and if we could just chop down some poisonous weeds to solve the problem, that would not be so difficult. But the entire soil is polluted, so we need to conduct a deeper excavation if we are to prevent the whole garden from being overtaken by poisonous weeds.

How did the soil get so polluted? Why do so many people who join mass movements and radical organizations quickly become opportunists, or at least start acting like opportunists? The paradigm for self-righteous woke capitulation was set by Black Lives Matter. The three grifters who started Black Lives Matter—Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi—inserted themselves into the 2014 rebellion and protests in Ferguson, Missouri against the police killing of Michael Brown. They came from the nonprofit-activist sector, were trained in postmodernist politics, and had no significant prior involvement in protests against police brutality. They did not seek to make substantive connections with the masses of Black proletarians in Ferguson who rose up in rebellion and get to know their lives, struggles, and desires. They used the families of people killed by police to bolster their credentials when they could, and snubbed and disrespected them when they couldn’t.³ They arrogantly asserted themselves as the leaders of the mass movement, coveting protest photo-ops, media appearances, and corporate donations, while failing to do anything to advance the struggle to stop the police killings of Black and other oppressed people. In fact, rather than advancing the righeous demands of the masses, they imposed postmodernist politics on the mass movement and used it to advance their own narrow class interests as members of the Black postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie. They used their identities as queer Black women to covet the support of the woke white petty-bourgeoisie, who, together with members of the liberal bourgeoisie, elevated Black Lives Matter as the leadership and politics of the mass movement. In the process, the mass movement against police brutality and the oppression of Black people has been derailed, the masses have been left with cynicism and despair, and a generation of activists has been trained to arrogantly assert themselves and their postmodernist politics of capitulation over and above the masses and their righteous resistance.

While Black Lives Matter provided the paradigm, there are broader dynamics at play that have facilitated self-righteous woke capitulation. At the top of the list is social media, which has trained people to covet social acceptance above all else, albeit sometimes in the form of being edgy online in order to gain a niche following. Social media has inculcated people in a fear of stepping out, of taking a bold stand, and been used to tear down those who dare to defy algorithm-driven acceptance. It provides those who wish to derail mass movements and radical organizations with an easy means to do so from the comfort of their homes, where they can instigate Twitter takedowns of people and organizations who do not have the time to respond to pile-ons in the comments because they are out in the real world doing real shit. While criticisms of “cancel culture” are often cover for right-wing politics, there is certainly truth to the groupthink and mob mentality behind attempts to “cancel” people and organizations by Leftists.

The politics of postmodernism that have dominated liberal academia and nonprofit organizations are also a big part of the problem. Postmodernist politics train people to elevate “proper” terminology above actions, teach people in the art of being contrarian for performative purposes rather than cultivating genuine and productive critical thinking, and offer a buffet of justifications for capitulation and false accusations to level at those who do not capitulate. Moreover, postmodernism’s ever more obscurantist terms of discourse make it impossible to have sincere discussions and debates over the path forward for liberation.

Finally, from 2011’s Occupy Wall Street down to today, there has been a succession of mass protests that seemingly came out of nowhere, got large numbers of people involved in them, and then dissipated as quickly as they developed. While those waves of mass protests have given the youth involved in them some valuable experiences, they have not provided the experience of protracted, hard work to win people over to join a mass struggle. Consequently, the conception of political resistance they have left behind is one of immediate, quick results rather than persevering through difficulties and relying on an at first small but growing dedicated core of people. That conception dovetails with the short attention span that has been cultivated more broadly in American society. The result is that it’s become normal to dump things, including political movements and organizations, that don’t achieve the desired results within a short time span.

So how do we take away the smug self-righteousness and woke superiority complex with which capitulation proclaims itself as virtuous today? How do we expose capitulation for what is is and deny those embracing it the moral high ground? Our starting point must be firm revolutionary resolve and a willingness to go against the tide. Anyone not joining the woke herd and taking the exit ramp of self-righteous capitulation will inevitably be subjected to insults and slander, and our response should be something along the lines of “do your fucking worst.” The insults shouldn’t phase us, no matter how ugly they get, as we should be confident that the revolutionary path is the right one, and the woke alphabet soup and shifting identity claims that justify capitulation are utter nonsense and the desperation of cowards.

Our revolutionary resolve must then guide us to make solid arguments against capitulation that tear the veil off its self-righteousness and draw out the limitations of postmodernist politics. These arguments should be well-reasoned and walk people through the differences in political line between us and the capitulators, but they should also not hold back from ridicule where warranted. We have to explain the politics of capitulation to those we can win away from it while not treating capitulationist politics as worthy of legitimacy. And we have to prove not just that the capitulationist path is wrong, but also that we can forge a revolutionary path forward, with a solid program for struggle and with our actions.

To make those arguments, we should disengage from forms in which self-righteous woke capitulation has the upperhand—social media comments and groupchats—when necessary. These forms allow empty phrase-mongering and unfounded accusations to carry the day, and are not conducive to well-reasoned, evidence-based argumentation. They encourage “pile-ons” in defense of capitulation, and give people with unlimited time to spend on their phones, rather than on organizing efforts, the opportunity to dominate the conversation. Perhaps most importantly, you cannot carry out the communist principle of “if you talk shit, you’re gonna get hit” on social media or text message—only in person. Since self-righteous woke capitulation often first rears its head on social media or groupchats rather than in the real world, a best immediate response within organizations is to call a meeting so that the questions and controversies can be debated out in person. Exercising self-discipline and not letting our (justifiably frustrated) emotions to guide us is imperative. When social media comments or groupchats go off the rails, it’s better to shut them down and offer a unified, thoughtful but timely response rather than individual knee-jerk reactions.

Within organizations, we must construct solid safeguards to minimize the eruptions of self-righteous woke capitulation. First and foremost among them is to not allow opportunists into organizations, and to check any opportunist behavior hard and fast. Second is to lay down clear standards for how an organization should function to ensure open and honest debate. Third is to have no qualms about setting terms within an organization rather than letting influxes of new people dictate how they function. Even with strong safeguards, however, the presently strong winds of self-righteous woke capitulation cannot be entirely blocked from blowing into organizations that invite mass participation, so leading such organizations will inevitably involve navigating through these winds, keeping as many new members on board as possible without hesitating to kick people out who start playing an opportunist role. Revolutionary organizations need much higher standards for membership that effectively keep opportunists and opportunist behavior far outside their ranks (see the Membership Constitution of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, available at ocrev.org, for an example of such higher standards).

One important reason to take a firm stand against self-righteous woke capitulation within organizations is that the playbook of woke capitulation is indistinguishable from actions that undercover cops use to derail radical and revolutionary organizations. This makes it more difficult today to recognize and expose undercover cops, as there are so many Leftists who act just like them. Undoubtedly, the FBI has recognized how the woke playbook gives police agents lots of opportunities for entering into mass movements and radical organizations and disrupting them, and it would be no surprise to find out that some instances of self-righteous woke capitulation were initiated or egged on by police agents. Consequently, when self-righteous woke capitulation rears its head within organizations, a “zero tolerance” policy is necessary to deny police agents maneuvering room to swim within a sea of self-righteous woke capitulation.

Since self-righteous woke capitulation has become a scourge in all mass movements and radical organizations over the last decade, normalized as acceptable behavior through its repeated victories, we will need to fight battle after battle against it to set a new standard and put it on the defensive. While defeating it politically is principal, to really win, eventually there will have to become consequences for opportunism. The Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path demonstrated the importance of doling out such consequences for the advance of any revolution. As long as opportunists have nothing to fear, and much to gain, from their opportunism, they will continue to thrive. For now, however, our focus should be on denying self-righteous woke capitulation the moral high ground and isolating opportunists from mass movements and keeping them out of radical organizations without letting them distract us from the real work of revolutionary struggle. Have confidence that real sees real, that our revolutionary resolve will attract the right people, and that over time genuine revolutionary politics will prevail.

ENDNOTES

1 The International Socialist Organization collapsed in 2019 because of its gross mishandling of a rape within its organization. Its leaders, including Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, chose to wash their hands of their organization so they could go on to successful careers in academia, activism, and labor unions. Fuck them.

2 For an account of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s strengths, weaknesses, and decline, see the lengthy summation of them written by the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, published in kites #8 (2023).

3 See the numerous critiques of Black Lives Matter by Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice.