OCR Leadership
May 1st, 2025

The first phase of the OCR’s development lasted up until 2020. Seeing the spread of proletarian rebellions, a new generation entering into political struggle, and sharpening contradictions in society during the 2010s, a few comrades with years of experience in prior revolutionary work, especially via the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, began discussing the need to form a new communist organization. From our own individual attempts to relate to the protests, rebellions, and political discourse, we could see that there were no revolutionary organizations in the US capable of seizing on and leading the waves of mass struggle erupting in society. We hoped we might be able to find some promising organizational shoots among the new generation and perhaps some old heads with revolutionary fire still in their souls. But we knew we had to take some responsibility for developing the political line, organizational form(s), and strategic thinking for a revolutionary movement to emerge.

We spent a few years developing contacts, undertaking some small practical efforts among proletarian masses, and discussing what should be the foundations for a new communist organization. During this period, we benefited from a collaborative relationship with Revolutionary Initiative in Canada, which resulted in launching the journal kites with them in Winter 2019–2020. From our more informal beginnings, we consolidated into the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, with our Manifesto and Membership Constitution, published in 2020, articulating our ideological and political unity and democratic centralist functioning. We had solid foundations to build on based on our past experience, training in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and direct connections to the communist tradition. But arriving at the unity of our Manifesto and Membership Constitution involved no small amount of internal struggle, rupturing with training and ways of thinking that were outdated and stale and reshaping our lives around our ideological commitment to the masses and subordination to democratic centralism. From the initial group of comrades we gathered together, only about half stuck through this process. Nevertheless, we emerged firmly committed to communist revolution in principle and practice, with the political line and organizational foundation to begin recruiting a new generation of communist cadre.

Phase one of the OCR’s development ended right as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and we were in no position to play any real role in the Summer 2020 rebellions other than via editorials published in kites. As the embers died out from the rebellions and some people involved in Leftist activity became aware of the limitations of the Left, kites became an attractive force, albeit on a small scale, by way of clarifying the difference between revolutionary communism, in outlook, political line, and strategy, vs. Leftist and postmodernist politics. We fought hard to make going to the masses a dividing line between getting serious about revolution or fucking around within the Left. We won over a small number of young people to that dividing line, who have been crucial to building activist and mass organizations under our leadership. So began the second phase of the OCR’s development in 2020–2021.

This second phase was marked by recruiting and training a small number of young comrades, who have been on the frontlines of our mass organizing efforts, broad agitation work, and political interventions. Those efforts, small as they may still be, have resulted in mobilizing proletarians in class struggle and taking a few bold initiatives around key contradictions in society. This practice helped sharpen our understanding of the strategic challenges of revolution in the US, as articulated in the training manuals we have published and other writings. The key achievements of the OCR’s second phase were:

• The recruitment of a few young cadre, the constitution of a few units of the OCR, and the beginning geographic spread of our Organization.
• Initiating several spheres of political work and their accompanying organizational forms under the OCR’s leadership.
• The publication of eight issues of kites as a joint effort with Revolutionary Initiative in Canada, with important works of theory, analysis, strategy, and social investigation/class analysis.
• The production of a summation of the communist movement in the US—The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today (published as kites #8)—which is a laboratory of strategy and tactics by virtue of drawing out the positive lessons from the past while being unsparingly critical of the mistakes made by our tradition and the errors in thinking and political line that led to those mistakes.

In the last year of phase two, 2024, we were ready to undertake bolder initiatives on a few fronts, albeit with limited forces under our leadership. Our practical achievements in this year went far beyond anything we had accomplished prior, and we now have dozens of activists under our leadership, hundreds of proletarian masses we have built connections with, and growing numbers of potential recruits into our Organization. However, pushing out in this way also revealed weaknesses within our Organization, from the leading levels to newer recruits, and some disunity emerged in the face of both the challenges and opportunities before us. To some extent, weaknesses and disunity will inevitably emerge as the revolutionary movement advances, and we have initiated rectification efforts and line struggle to move through this process while also bringing fresh blood into our Organization to overcome our shortcomings. Both the internal struggles and the new and perspective recruits mark the transition from phase two to phase three of the OCR’s development.

Another marker of the transition from phase two to three was our deeper clarity, based on our collective experience on multiple fronts, that the OCR would have to “go it alone” in developing a communist vanguard party. The mass struggles we entered into proved the thesis, argued for in kites, that the Left is an obstacle to revolution and postmodernism is a reactionary ideology and politics. We have sharpened our understanding of the latter by analyzing postmodernism not just discursively but also as part of the formation of a reactionary class in society—the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie—that is hostile to the masses and bitterly opposed to revolution.

Along with our clarity on the Left and the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie as enemies of proletarian revolution, we also had to conclude that no other revolutionary organizations emerged from the last decade of mass struggles, and revolutionary organizations established in prior decades, of communist, revolutionary nationalist, and anarchist varieties, have all degenerated to the point where these is little left to salvage from them. Consequently, the following line from our Manifesto is not applicable in present circumstances, as there are no revolutionary organizations in the US besides the OCR:

a communist vanguard in the US will not come about solely through the work and quantitative expansion of the OCR, but also through dialogue and a process of unity-struggle-unity with other revolutionary organizations.

On top of the lack of revolutionary forces in the US and the counterrevolutionary nature of the Left and the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie, there is not, at present, an international communist movement that can provide much assistance in the development of a communist vanguard in the US. We analyze this problem in depth in our document “Pageantry or plotting world proletarian revolution? On the state of the international communist movement today,” so we will not belabor it here. But we will add a specific dimension that affected the transition from phase two to three in the OCR’s development. We had benefited greatly from our collaborative relationship with Revolutionary Initiative in Canada, and had continued working with its better comrades on the journal kites even after Revolutionary Initiative ceased to exist as an organization. However, the formation of the (New) Communist Party of Canada in 2023 and its consolidation around the economist “workers centrality” principle and an eclectic conception of socialism meant we no longer had comrades north of the border to collaborate with. kites came to an end, and the journal Going Against the Tide, initiated in Summer 2024, became the theoretical and analytical home of the revolutionary movement in the US.

The OCR begins phase three of its development with solid practical experience under our belt, strategic and analytical sophistication refined over thousands of pages of writing, some young cadre with training and experience and a number of potential recruits, and well-established spheres of political work and organizational forms under our leadership. We also start phase three in relative isolation—not from the masses, but facing something akin to (political) encirclement and suppression from the Left and the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie wherever our efforts have made headway, the beginnings of state repression directed against us, and few firm comrades outside our ranks, in the US or internationally. OCR members will need to steel our resolve in the face of the these challenges, and overcome them by bringing forward new recruits, wave upon wave, to defeat repression and Leftist and postmodernist petty-bourgeois obstruction and plant a firm red flag to attract comrades outside our ranks here and internationally.

In phase three, public political work under the OCR’s leadership mainly needs to be expanded and consolidated at a higher level based on what we have already initiated. This does not mean there don’t need to be new lines of political work and mass organizing efforts initiated, but that these will largely be drawing on existing practice as models, using our training manuals and summations as guides. And, of course, we will need to be responsive to changing conditions and sharpening contradictions, without straying from our basic strategic approach and priorities.

The principal task in phase three is the quantitative growth and qualitative advance of the OCR itself, and our work among the masses and political interventions must serve this objective above all else. All comrades need to move heaven and earth to recruit and train as many cadre as possible, without lowering ideological standards. Dozens of comrades need to be recruited during phase three, units need to be established in several places where there currently are none, and a few branches need to be built in locales where we currently have a unit or two.

To accomplish this quantitative growth on a correct basis, we need to advance the leadership capacity of the OCR. Comrades recruited in phase two need to step up to chair units, contribute writing, and take responsibility for leading spheres of our political work. We need to establish a Party Center piece by piece, moving from our current Leading Core to a Central Committee with three departments under its leadership (propaganda, personnel and training, and international), taking responsibility for charting the strategic path forward with the organizational ability to move decisively on that path. And under this Central Committee, Local Leading Committees need to be established where we can build Party branches and teams need to be constituted to lead various spheres of political work.

We have always treated leadership, on all levels, as a capability we must forge and prove rather than as a position to proclaim, so slotting individuals into organizational positions is not the way we shall build our leadership capacity. Members of the Central Committee we need to forge should exemplify the following qualities:

• Taking responsibility for advancing our work as a whole, not just their own tasks
• Having a firm and dynamic grasp of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and having communist intellectual curiosity
• Being able to analyze the political situation
• Summing up and critically evaluating our work; being good at synthesis
• Coming to the table with strategic ideas
• Effectively communicating our leadership to others (in writing and orally)
• Knowing how to lead cadre and the masses well
• Effectively training up other cadre
• Not shying away from, but leading, line struggle, internally and externally
• And it goes without saying: commitment, honesty, care, hard work, etc.—all the core qualities of a communist

If we accomplish our phase three objectives—dozens of new recruits, the consolidation of units and local branches, and the construction of a Party Center—and these internal developments manifest in leveling up, quantitatively and qualitatively, our work among the masses and our political interventions, then we will have the basis to move to phase four of the OCR’s development. Phase four will be the transition from the OCR to a vanguard party. It will require continued recruitment and training of new cadre so that existing cadre can step up to the task of developing a Party Program. Writing a Party Program will involve a comprehensive process of social investigation and research, analysis and debate, on many facets of US society. Program commissions will need to be established on key questions, such as the national question; women’s oppression, gender, and sexuality; the class structure and production relations of US society; and the political, social, and cultural institutions of the US and what would replace them after the revolution. The Party Center would need to oversee the synthesis of a strategy for revolution in the US and the policies of a new socialist society. Finalizing a Party Program through a process of debate and line struggle, with hundreds of cadre committed to carrying out its strategic vision for communist revolution in the US and a Party Center capable of leading those cadre, will mark the end of phase four and the end of the OCR itself by establishing a vanguard party.

There is no guarantee that we get from phase three to phase four, or that we move from there to a vanguard party. There is only struggle. And that struggle takes place in a race against time, in general because capitalism is destroying the planet and its people, and in particular because our enemies and the bourgeoisie’s repressive state apparatus are becoming aware of the potential threat we pose to bourgeois rule. Whatever our individual strengths and weaknesses, whatever our accomplishments and failings, we must firmly bind together on this struggle. Our collectivity is our greatest strength, especially as that collectivity expands to include the best of our class and of revolutionary youth. Mao said to be bold and audacious, so let’s do just that when it comes to building the vanguard party that can lead the overthrow of the most evil empire in human history.