Ramón Mercader

April 1^st, 2025 GATT special online-only issue

Amid growing frustation since Fall 2023 with the plethora of protest marshals populating pro-Palestine protests and preventing them from turning in a more militant direction, calls have begun to circulate for forming a protest marshal review board. One proposal suggested that a protest marshal review board, made up of anarchists, Palestinian youth who aren’t in Leftist organizations, actionists, and other arrestees from anti-war protests, would hold hearings on the increasing number of incidents in which protest marshals have assaulted protesters, collaborated with the police, and failed to defend protesters who were assualted by the police. The review board would also poke fun at the dorky-as-fuck fashion choices of protest marshals. While, like all police review boards, the protest marshal review board would have no formal power to punish, it might suggest possible consequences ranging from doxxing the identities of protest marshals on social media, to flogging them, to reserving a spot for them in the labor camps after the revolution.

Everyone with a militant bone in their body has welcomed the idea of a protest marshal review board, or at least thought it would be funny. But many nonprofit organizations and several Leftist organizations, such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), whose members make up the bulk of protest marshals, were incensed by the proposal. They worried that if the actions of protest marshals were put under independent review, that might reveal why protests in the US tend to be so lame and ineffectual, and that could in turn hurt their recruitment and fundraising efforts. Furthermore, they wondered whether they could keep up the facade of being abolitionists, revolutionaries, opponents of the police, etc. if the review board investigated how their protest marshals collaborate with the police. PSL and FRSO were especially outraged at the suggestion that since protest marshals act like cops, they should wear badge numbers so that the public can hold them accountable.

Spearheading opposition to the protest marshal review board is the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR). While CAARPR has spent years championing a toothless civilian review board of the Chicago police department, it insisted that unlike the Chicago police, protest marshals—among whom are CAARPR members—should not be held to any form of accountability, toothless or otherwise. CAARPR leader Frank Chapman defended the use of protest marshals as an application of FRSO’s guiding ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Dengism-Jacksonism-Xiism-Johnsonism to the specific conditions of the US, where the mission of socialists is to make sure that progressive politicians like Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, don’t look bad. Chapman exclaimed “if we didn’t have protest marshals preventing things from getting out of control, protesters might be fighting the cops—Brandon Johnson’s cops!,” and then regretted that he said the last part out loud.

While the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression’s adamant opposition to a protest marshal review board made many protesters in the US question whether CAARPR lives up to its name, CAARPR did receive a boost from abroad. The Communist Party of the Philippines’ International Department expressed its support for CAARPR, stating “black cat, white cat, whoever has the organizational capacity in the US to organize boring protests that claim anti-imperialism while doing nothing to threaten imperialism is cool with us, no matter what their principles are.”