OCR Leadership
May 1st, 2025

As the OCR has grown and pushed our revolutionary work forward, we have come up against the many objective, difficult challenges that making revolution in the most powerful imperialist country in human history naturally entails, as well as our own subjective weaknesses in the face of those challenges. We cannot make the difficulties go away, but we can overcome our weaknesses and stop repeating our mistakes by summing up their causes and transforming ourselves through ideological remolding, political training, and rectification. The basis for that transformation is in the firm dedication of all our cadre to the masses, to the revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois rule, and to the communist future we are fighting for. Dedication alone, however, cannot make us fit to be a vanguard for proletarian revolution. We require a correct line and correct methods of leadership, as well as a variety of skills, to be able to play the vanguard role the masses need from us.

Over the last year and a half, our collective and individual shortcomings have come more sharply to the surface, precisely because we are rising to new challenges and making the furthest practical advances yet in the OCR’s five-year history. For experienced comrades, there are bad habits to shed and new roles to step into. For new recruits, there are fumbles the first time taking up a new task, the impact of a generational and societal shift away from self-discipline, and, to varying degrees, the influence of Leftist politics and ways of functioning. And for all comrades, there is an uphill battle against what communists call spontaneity: the way that living in bourgeois society drags us down and compels us to look for the easier way out.

The weapon we have to overcome our weaknesses is consciousness: in particular, becoming consciously aware of our weaknesses and mistakes through the process of summing up our political work, using communist theory as a dynamic force to get at the root of those weaknesses and mistakes, and then constructing, or firmly taking hold of, better methods and political lines than those that led to our mistakes. This process of conscious transformation has been going on inside the OCR since its inception, but especially over the last year and a half as we have stepped up and expanded the scope of our work, with comrades at all levels stepping into higher leadership responsibilities. Some comrades who did exceptionally well in one period or with one task stumbled or fell on their faces in a subsequent period or with another task, while others came to the rescue of political work that was faltering. Some opportunities have been squandered, while others have been seized. Since last summer, there has been considerable unevenness in different spheres of the OCR’s work and in different areas. In the face of both challenges and opportunities, some disunity has emerged within our organization, which has manifested in some fraying of democratic centralist practice.

Fraying of democratic centralist practice manifest principally in the form of cadre quietly disagreeing with, slow-rolling, or otherwise half-assing plans and tasks. For example, comrades might agree to a plan, sign off on a task, or even commit to a deadline and then not step up to get the task completed and not reach out and ask for help or raise concerns and contradictions. In virtually all instances where serious mistakes were made or plans were not really carried out, there has been a lack of summation, without internal reports written by the comrades in question. Lack of summation itself is a breakdown of democratic centralist functioning, as it prevents our organization from collectively assessing our work and making new plans based on a materialist analysis of our achievements and shortcomings. More generally, breakdowns of democratic centralist functioning flow from an ideological outlook of petty-bourgeois individualism and ways of functioning guided by it, putting oneself, one’s opinions, and one’s individual experience over the collectivity of our organization.

Our collectivity is our greatest strength, and at the center of that collectivity is collective struggle to make ourselves fit to be a communist vanguard. A central thread in our internal collective struggle over the last year and a half has been the insistence that our organization must put the professional in Lenin’s model of a professional revolutionary. We all must step up our game, especially when it comes to getting tasks done in a timely way and at a high level of quality. And we all have to take up a myriad of tasks to advance the revolution, not just content ourselves with going to the masses with revolutionary politics. Propaganda has to be written, we have to pay far more attention to ideological work with the masses, relatively new cadre need to train and recruit the next wave of cadre, new lines of political work require leadership, bold political interventions almost always necessitate navigating through complex situations full of contention with other forces in the field, and many organizational tasks have to be carried out in ways that are consistent with our strategic objectives. As we have joked internally, getting shit done is a Marxist-Leninist principle that must guide our approach to all tasks. There is an element of political training in becoming professional revolutionaries, but at the heart of getting shit done is the ideological question of taking initiative, taking charge of the tasks before us, rather than waiting for or relying on someone else to do something for us.

To guide the internal struggle to make the OCR and its cadre fit to be a vanguard, OCR leadership has put out a series of internal bulletins identifying weaknesses and errors and the correct methods and approaches to overcome them. These bulletins also served to unite our cadre around our strategic plans and help all members of our organization understand the relation of their particular assignments to our strategic plans as a whole, the latter an important counterweight to viewing ourselves through the narrow prism of “our own” political work rather than as communist cadre responsible for advancing our entire strategy. Below, we present excerpts from these internal bulletins, edited for public consumption with some (more specific) information redacted for security reasons. Our aim, in publishing these excerpts, is to draw the wider mass of people working under the OCR’s leadership or engaging with its politics into the process of strengthening our work and making us fit to be a vanguard party, in dialogue with comrades around the world figuring out how to make themselves and their organizations fit to be a vanguard.

The internal struggles within the OCR have not risen to the level of a two-line struggle, wherein two coherent ideological and political lines emerge and must be struggled out to a definite resolution that will determine whether a communist party is on the revolutionary road or not. Instead, these internal struggles are about shoring up all our cadre around correct methods and stepping up to fulfill the many needs of a revolutionary movement. Where specific, more stubborn difficulties have emerged among some cadre, the OCR has assigned some units rectification tasks, with a definite timeline to complete those tasks and emerge stronger and better able to carry out our organization’s line.

To those comrades outside the ranks of the OCR who have noticed—and, thankfully, criticized—our weaknesses and mistakes, we extend our gratitude, and know that we’re listening, even if we don’t always agree with your criticisms and cannot always rectify our weaknesses as quickly as we would like to. We also challenge you to take the next step and join our organization, and become a dynamic force for strengthening its revolutionary character from within. Come on in, the water’s choppy, which is exactly what it needs to be if it is to flow in a revolutionary direction. With that in mind, here are some of the challenges the OCR has been struggling over internally, as presented in internal bulletins over the last year and a half. As with most of our writing, the seriousness is sometimes conveyed with an irreverent sense of humor, so we hope you can take a joke in addition to some ideological struggle (if not, OCR membership is definitely not for you).

Asserting our leadership and authority

Especially but not only among our young comrades, a common problem is not asserting our own leadership and authority. We can point to many examples of this in our work, including allowing opportunists and unreconstructed Leftists into organizations under our leadership and lowering our standards in how we conduct our political work. Our experience has made clear that we cannot have democracy with Leftists and postmodernists, and we need to decisively set the terms for organizations under our leadership and our political work while welcoming people to participate on the basis of the terms we set. With proletarian masses, we can practice much more democracy, but even there we need to set terms and challenge backward ideas.

How do we overcome hesitations to assert our leadership and authority? On the personal level, it’s a matter of developing confidence in ourselves, our collectivity, our line, and the masses’ ability to change themselves as they change the world. On the social level, it’s a matter of navigating the personal ties that are entangled with our political efforts, including being willing to strain or break friendships when necessary without doing so recklessly. On the ideological and political level, it’s a matter of embracing the role we are called on to play: the vanguard of the revolution that is going to bring down the greatest monstrosity known to humanity, namely US imperialism. Those are big shoes to fill, and they only grow comfortable the more we step into them.

Without being arrogant, we need to confidently assert the politics we know to be true, the experience we have gained through practice and perseverance, and the bold ambitions we have, not for ourselves, but for humanity to live a different way. If we don’t assert these politics, no one else will. And if we do, we’ll find better, more serious people while turning away those who would be a waste of our time. Furthermore, we shouldn’t underestimate what setting different terms—in how we do things and how organizations under our leadership function—will mean for bringing forward new layers of revolutionaries and a broader sense that something else is possible than the Left.

A properly Stalinist approach to (external) organization, and a properly Maoist approach to people

Flowing from the previous section’s point, our activist organizations and mass organizations need to be well-structured organizationally, move the people who come to them through a process of political education and deepening involvement, cultivate a strong sense of collective political identity, and radiate a get-shit-done-ist way of functioning. Meetings should be well-prepared so that they enable the people who attend to understand our politics and take part in our efforts. Decision-making should be in the hands of people who have united with the politics of the organization in question and committed to carry them out—not just our cadre, but not anyone who shows up either. (It’s proven difficult, if not impossible, to involve people who have been infected, even a little bit, by the Left and postmodernism in any decision-making.)

All this is what we have metaphorically (and a little jokingly) called a properly Stalinist approach to (external) organization. The metaphor itself emerged as a corrective to our leadership of a proletarian mass organization, and that corrective has born fruit in the way that consistent political education and ideological struggle have become much more a part of that organization. Within a more organized approach to leading organizations, we should continue to avoid titles and formality for formality’s sake (in that respect not be so Stalinist) until titles and formality become more necessary.

A properly Stalinist approach to (external) organization, however, should not get in the way of us taking a properly Maoist approach to people. The purpose of all the organizational forms under our leadership is to bring forward the masses as a conscious force determined and able to make revolution. Our thinking and energy should always be principally devoted to how we are bringing forward people, as individuals and en mass, around our politics and under our leadership, and in turn making them leaders themselves. Organizational forms should serve that purpose, but we should keep in mind that the formality of, say, recruitment processes and political education sessions is a structure for the dynamic ideological and political work we need to do with people. In other words, we need to be properly Maoist—not Stalinist—in treating people, not things, as decisive.

We need a Stalinist, not a Gen Zist, approach to timelines

Perhaps the biggest problem in how we function is that, in contrast to the first five year plan getting finished in four years in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership, timelines for getting shit done often get stretched far beyond deadlines, and some tasks get dropped when comrades can’t figure out their way through the difficulties. We could cite many examples of this problem, and it is especially pronounced with tasks that have more long-term value but are not immediately pressing for some short-term reason. Not completing these long-term value tasks frequently comes back to bite us in the ass—not doing them leaves us unable to seize on short-term opportunities.

When it comes to getting shit done, we need an organization of professional revolutionaries rather than professional crastinations. We need a conquering spirit that vanquishes the petty-bourgeois habits of obsessing over difficulties, staring at screens unable to get started on a task, or not relying on our collectivity when we’re having trouble individually. In order to move to functioning with 3-month, 6-month, and year plans, we need cadre who can finish tasks in a timely way.

Secondarily, if a proposed timetable for finishing a task is unrealistic, it’s important to say so, including pushing back on any un-materialist goals put forward by leadership. Doing so is much better than just not doing the task.

For planliness

Much as we hate to use a term Trotsky liked and might have invented, the OCR has suffered from a lack of planliness since the summer in some areas and in some spheres of work. Where there has been a lack of clear direction and objectives, with defined steps along the way, our comrades have either kept themselves busy without adequate results to show for it or moved without much initiative or follow-through. This stands in contrast to where we have made solid and measurable advances in our work, where we proceeded with a definite and clear plan, united the cadre and activists assigned to it around that plan, summed up along the way, and followed through with whatever the end goal of the plan was.

Moving forward, we need more planliness throughout the OCR, and plans need to increasingly become the responsibility of units to develop. Our organization has outgrown the ability for its top leadership to construct plans for each unit and sphere of work, and we don’t want to function that way anyway. As the communist leader Dimitrov put it in his concluding speech to the Comintern’s 7^th Congress, “cadres develop and grow best when they are placed in the position of having to solve concrete problems of the struggle independently, and are aware that they are fully responsible for their decisions.” The word “independently” here should not be interpreted to mean autonomously, however, and plans should be submitted to leadership for feedback and approval. The purpose of writing out plans is to force us to synthesize our strategic thinking, commit ourselves to tasks and objectives with clear timelines, enable us to better articulate the plan to those under our leadership, and give us a yardstick with which to measure our work.

Written strategic plans do not need to be long—probably two pages is the ideal length—and a sense of the contradictions and how we are moving through them should guide writing them. Generally at this point six months is the right timeframe we should be working with—shorter than that isn’t adequate to see a plan through, and longer gets us into unpredictable futures. Ideally, plans should have a major goal they are working towards at the end (such as a significant event), with smaller goals along the way and ideological and organizational consolidation work built into the plan itself. After the plan has been completed, a thorough summation should be written to assess our achievements and shortcomings and draw out the strategic and tactical lessons from our work so that our whole organization can learn from the experience. And, of course, the work of summation should lead to writing a new strategic plan.

“Jump on it! Jump on it!”

Part of being a communist is the ability and desire to jump into class struggle and seize on opportunities for advancing the revolution, within the context of a clear strategy, not just jumping at whatever’s hot in the moment. Overall, the OCR has gotten better at taking this approach over the last year, with good initiative coming from many of our new recruits. However, we are still sometimes slow to move on certain opportunities, and not always clear on what we are trying to accomplish when we do move. There’s certainly an organizational component—we need more of a division of labor with less tasks in each comrade’s hands—but there’s also a matter of orientation and of developing the ability to figure out how to intervene in the moment. One specific area that needs improvement is getting social media posts up “hot on the heels” of events, whether exposure based on our social investigation and/or larger events, or projecting our own actions (agitation, mobilization, etc.).

Hot on the heels or slow on our roll? The intersectionality (or lack thereof) of WITBDism and GetShitDoneIsm

One important skill that is currently uneven and inadequate in our organization is the ability to do “hot on the heels” exposure, to quickly respond to the latest outrage with short, hard-hitting exposure. Since we’re not doing all-around media work right now, our hot on the heels exposures should principally be done via our activist organizations, in the form of social media posts and fliers (the latter when we can distribute them the day(s) after the outrage), for the most part related to our ongoing political work and specific campaigns. Accomplishing this task requires taking initiative, and cannot be done by top-down methods of leadership in most cases (the gears of democratic centralism don’t turn fast enough for that). But too often, in the face of the latest outrages in our spheres of political work, we are deer in headlights rather than sharks smelling blood in the water.

How can hot on the heels exposure advance our overall work? On the level of consciousness, consistent and persistent exposure hammers home the need for revolution (whether or not the word “revolution” is stated in the exposure). In relation to our specific efforts and campaigns, exposure is a way to build momentum for our calls to action, and this is one instance where Instagram as a form is actually helpful (first slide(s) exposure, last slide call to action, often pasting in a call to action we’ve already put out—learn from the advertising industry!). And finally, it projects us as a vanguard force in the struggles of the masses, as we’re able to call out the enemy, articulate what the masses are feeling, and call the masses to action.

The only way to get good at hot on the heels exposure is to take every opportunity to do it, and get better as you go. This is not unlike agitation: most comrades are unsure of themselves as agitators the first time they do it, but build confidence and skill the more they do it. The particularity with hot on the heels exposure is that it’s the art of timely response. The ideal comrades must strive towards is:

• Timeliness: Since we’re talking about topical events, the exposure must be done within hours, and no later than a day after the event, to be relevant and to have its strongest effect.
• Brevity: Hot on the heels exposure should generally be short (usually no more than a paragraph, and sometimes two sentences is enough), to the point, and hard hitting. You can write a long article to explain things more thoroughly the next day if you want, but let’s get the hot on the heels exposure done first within hours.
• Specificity: Use of statistics and concrete facts—not a lot, but some very well-used damning evidence. Specificity is far more powerful than sloganeering and revolutionary rhetoric.
• Style: Hot on the heels exposure should be done with an authoritative voice and powerful language, conveying urgency and moral outrage and moral certitude without sounding shrill. Where appropriate, hot on the heels exposure should roast our enemies with biting humor and irreverent contempt, especially when those enemies are opportunists posing as champions of the masses and their struggles.
• Riveting: The best exposure should make its audience feel like time has stopped when they’re reading it, tuning everything out to take it in.

All of our ongoing campaigns should make more effective use of hot on the heels exposure to create momentum for those campaigns, always ending with whatever the specific call to action is at the moment to the point where we’re a broken record about it.

Comrades should pay attention to all the hot on the heels exposure being done under our leadership, push each other to do more of it (or, unfortunately, to start doing it), and learn from best practices. If we’re thinking like communists and in the thick of a specific campaign, hot on the heels exposure should not take long—this is part of taking command of the political work we’re doing. We have to want to make advances bad enough to take time out of our routines (staying up late, getting up early) to respond to the latest outrage with hard-hitting exposure, recognizing that doing so is part of how we lead.

A little socialist competition and some Korean parenting would be good

The correct approach to advancing our work is lots of bottom-up initiative within an overall strategic plan—comrades taking the ball and running with it—and that should include a little bit of socialist competition. Where advances are made, they should be celebrated, with comrades elsewhere striving to learn from and outdo them in an upward spiral of perfecting our methods and making further advances. And where we’re lagging, we should feel a little shame, maybe get a little shamed by our comrades (but with love of course—that’s the Korean parenting reference), not to wallow in our shortcomings but to get our asses in gear.

Besides advancing our work, a little socialist competition will also help indicate how we strengthen the leadership of the OCR. We’re not going to play musical chairs or take a one-sided view of any comrade, and doing well in one sphere of work and in one period of time is not the same as being ready to be in a position of higher leadership. But it does indicate who’s stepping forward and who’s ready to take on more responsibility, and part of the point is to get everyone hungry with a “conquer the world” for our class, not for ourselves as individuals, spirit. To put it bluntly and in bourgeois careerist terms, we’re talking about a bit of a merit-based system for determining who can step up into higher leadership roles, combined with an all-sided assessment of comrades and a lot of ideological and political training.

We’ll also learn more about the strengths of different comrades—some comrades might be great agitators, while others are excellent propaganda writers, and still others train new comrades systematically and quickly. Those strengths will certainly inform what responsibilities comrades can take up, but we must also be mindful not to pigeonhole comrades based on their strengths. We are striving to train up multi-skilled comrades who can take a bird’s eye view of the revolution and can fulfill multiple needs, albeit some better than others, but with a conquer the world spirit to mastering any task required of us. And that will put us in a much stronger position to fulfill the purpose of the OCR: to build a vanguard party that can lead the masses to take down the most powerful imperialist beast in human history. Make revolution or die trying.