The following is the text, modified for publication, of a “prop”¹ given in and around the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries in early 2026.

There are two reasons why this prop is being delivered at this time. The first is that the moves of the Trump administration over the last year have brought various classes into motion, with no shortage of spontaneous resistance but a dire shortage of subjective forces for revolution that can divert that spontaneous resistance towards revolutionary objectives. The pace of political events upending the “normal” atmosphere of relative class peace in the imperialist US has accelerated and is sharpening various social antagonisms. Comrades in and around the OCR have taken great initiative to mount bold responses to various moves by the Trump administration, and proven themselves as valiant fighters standing with the masses. However, those same comrades also lack much in the way of experience in leading broad mass movements, and we need to develop our collective ability to do so. Furthermore, amid great initiative, wrong lines have emerged within the OCR that essentially argued for conservatism in the face of the rapid pace of events and the shifting mood of the masses rather than recognizing the greater possibilities for communist leadership to command a mass following by seizing the moment. Those wrong lines were quickly overcome within the OCR, but this prop is in part a corrective to wrong lines within our organization and a way to bolster all our comrades’ ability to step strong into the political situation we are confronting and make the maximum advances towards our revolutionary objectives.

The second reason for this prop is to give a corrective to misinterpretations of our OCR’s critique of grand crisis theory in our summation of the communist movement in the US.² We have strenuously argued, against a lot of conventional wisdom in the communist movement, that the dynamic, determining factor in proletarian revolutions is not changes in the objective situation but the actions and strength of the subjective factor. Our strategy places greatest emphasis on developing the subjective forces for revolution, qualitatively and quantitatively, and we have invested substantial resources (leadership, personnel, development of strategic doctrine) to step-by-step mass organizing efforts among the proletariat. Those step-by-step efforts, however, have been carried out not divorced from objective class contradictions we didn’t create, but in relation to them, with the greatest advances in our efforts made when we jumped hard into a crisis created by our enemies.

Our emphasis on the development and dynamic role of the subjective factor and critique of grand crisis theory has been used by some of our comrades to argue for not seizing on dramatic changes in objective conditions, both at micro levels and at the macro level. Whenever we have thrown our subjective forces decisively into a sharpening up of contradictions we did not create, we have made substantial advances and/or made a good splash that caught the attention of the advanced. Moving decisively in this way has been uneven throughout our organization, meaning we have missed lots of opportunities. Furthermore, some of our comrades have been a bit oblivious to sharpening contradictions in the larger world, not following the news and making sense of it with a communist world outlook, not clocking shifts in the mood of the masses, not noticing divisions among our enemies, and not being grounded in the strategic analysis published in the journals kites and Going Against the Tide.

The corrective we need to make is that the dynamic, determining role of the subjective factor does not find expression apart or separate from objective conditions, but in a dialectical relationship with them. And when objective conditions present us with opportunities for bold subjective intervention, we need to seize the moment, with urgency, as the moment generally passes quickly. So with those two correctives in mind, let’s get into how communists can make bold interventions and lead mass movements when we have opportunities to do so.

The correct line is “let’s fucking go”

Lenin said you need three things to launch an insurrection: audacity, audacity, and more audacity. While unfortunately we’re not talking about launching an insurrection yet, mounting bold interventions and leading mass movements are important practice for doing so, with similar ideological and political principles to launching an insurrection. The most important principle is you have to be bold, you have to have triple audacity. The correct line when there’s an opportunity for mounting a bold intervention and leading a mass movement is “let’s fucking go.” The masses need to see us moving, and moving decisively, in such a way that invites their participation, and we need to grab up the masses who want to move with us and recruit them into our efforts right away.

To move decisively and draw the masses into our moves, we have to put out bold calls to action that are straightforward and simple, easy to join in on. We have to make a call, pick a day, pick the slogan(s), and move on it—no bullshitting around, no over-complicating things. Any vagueness in our calls to action will blunt our intervention and fail to galvanize the masses around our political line. And our political line needs to be stated in the most clear, straightforward way possible—no verbose prose, just brevity and bite.

There’s an attitude to all this that’s essential, and if you have a “correct” line in the intellectual sense but you don’t have the attitude, you’re going nowhere. A good example of the kind of attitude we’re talking about comes from a story from a Maoist of the 1970s generation, who we’ll call Lenny. Lenny was a leader in the student antiwar organization at his college. A friend of Lenny’s was running freshman orientations, and invited Lenny to come speak to the entering freshman and give a pitch to them about joining the antiwar movement. Instead of giving a pitch, Lenny showed up at the appointed time and, after being introduced to the group of freshman by their orientation leader, Lenny took his draft card out, lit it on fire (which was quite illegal at the time), announced when and where the antiwar group’s next meeting was, and left. Burning a draft card made the point much better than any speech, even a short fiery one, ever could.

On the basis of that attitude, we need to develop not just specific calls to action but a larger strategic plan for leading a mass movement that can mobilize all positive factors among the masses, put our politics in command, and bring to bear the subjective forces we’ve built up. The strategic plan should be geared towards building momentum and doing consolidation along the way. The positive factors among the masses should most certainly include a militant edge on the frontlines (usually youth), broader layers of support from sections of people who are not likely to take part in the militant edge but can buttress it with broader activity, and class-conscious proletarians asserting their political authority and lending their support for those on the frontlines. Fighting repression needs to be built into our plans. And we have to combine militancy and breadth all along the way, with some mobilizations geared towards the former and others to the latter, with the militancy and breadth becoming a push on each other in a messy, dialectical relationship.

To implement our strategic plan, we need to make it simple for people to take up and take out to others, and we need to go all out to promote the various calls to action. Having materials on hand at every mass meeting, at every interaction with the masses, is critical to enabling people broadly to take up the mass movement practically and expand our bold intervention throughout society. Those materials need to radiate audacity and confidence while deeply connecting with people’s advanced sentiments. Overall, every attempt needs to be made to promote our strategic plan as widely as possible, using all means, including ones we might otherwise detest (these days that usually means social media), and drawing in new political allies to these promotion efforts in addition to our existing ties.

For the duration of a communist intervention in a mass movement, there needs to always be a mass meeting coming up where people can get political and organizational direction, and there needs to always be next steps. Whenever someone asks us what are we doing next, we must have a definite answer, and an answer that can captivate and mobilize them. The strategic vision we project must be bold and practical.

When we make bold interventions and assert revolutionary leadership within a broader mass movement, we’ll find that many new, inexperienced people step up, take up our politics and our plans, and bring an electrifying energy to them, often outstripping experienced activists, including ones who are supposedly communist cadre, in the process. We should quickly bring up the dynamic, most active elements in the mass movement as leaders and spokespeople, and any of our cadre who are dragging their feet cannot be allowed to get in their way. We will, of course, have to keep organizational keys in the hands of trusted, experienced people, and we will have to start the process of ideological work with new leaders by way of study and discussion of communist literature. However, the correct line of “let’s fucking go” needs to be applied to enable the most dynamic, audacious elements in the mass movement—the most advanced in this particular context—to become mass leaders, and to put a lot of responsibility in their hands. Some of our normal operating procedures must be suspended to bring forward the initiative of the masses with the quickness.

Navigating the twists and turns

One of the reasons that some of our comrades fear intervening and asserting leadership within a broader mass movement is the messiness of it, the fact that it is far less “controlled”—by us or anyone else—than building organizations, doing propaganda work, or step-by-step mass organizing. The correct answer to this fear is to welcome the dynamic of a lot of initiative and a little bit of chaos, while using our strategic smarts to navigate through it towards revolutionary objectives. To that end, we have to know how to set the right dividing lines, come up with the right actions to do to push the mass movement forward, and carry out all-around exposure and analysis and give political guidance that addresses the key questions coming up in the mass movement. To do all that well, we have to have the right combination of firmness of communist principles and a correct and dynamic application of the mass line. We have to treat the development of a mass movement as a moving process, a process we’re trying to move in a definite direction.

Political dividing lines, concentrated into slogans, should unite the broadest number of people and class forces without making any compromise of principle and, most importantly, move them in line with the class interests of the proletariat. Attempts at ultra-left posturing while trying to assert leadership in a mass movement are doomed to fail, and should be struck down anytime they rear their head within our ranks. At the same time, a lowest-common-denominator approach to dividing lines and slogans will sink the ability of revolutionaries to move sections of people in the right direction. We have to be just the right amount of crazy, the kind of crazy that masses of people want to follow because it’s the only rational thing to do in the given circumstances. It should not come as a surprise to us, when a mass movement arises addressing injustices that the bourgeoisie either cannot or will not remedy, that our slogans, our dividing lines, suddenly gain broad resonance. We need to seize on the favorable conditions and make those conditions even more favorable to revolutionary politics through our actions.

As the mass movement develops, we have to constantly be summing up the mood of the masses and synthesizing that summation via structures of centralized leadership. The mood of the masses can change radically from one week to the next, one day to another, when a mass movement is in full swing. Knowing exactly what that mood is enables us to make the right judgment calls for what to do next, what political and strategic leadership to give, based on what the masses are willing to do and how we can push them further. “Masses” here is meant in the broadest sense rather than the usual, more narrow sense of proletarian masses. Part of recognizing the mood of the masses means knowing how different sections of people are responding to the events unfolding around them and what they are willing to do, and the mood of the liberal petty-bourgeoisie of course will be different than the mood of proletarian youth. However, what makes us able to assert leadership in a broad mass movement is that the sharpening contradictions have created moods among different sections of people that correspond more closely to our revolutionary stand and our strategic plans.

Applying the mass line and knowing the mood of the masses should feed into another crucial aspect of asserting leadership, namely doing exposure and analysis and giving political guidance that addresses the questions of the masses, sharpens the speartip of the struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state apparatus, and polemicizes against bourgeois-democratic illusions cropping up in the mass movement. This exposure, analysis, and political guidance can come in different forms, but it can go beyond setting dividing lines for the mass movement to asserting a communist understanding of the contradictions that are unfolding, and yes, the fact that they can only be resolved by revolution. However, our assertions of a communist viewpoint have to be made by digging into the contradictions themselves and speaking in ways that resonate with the people who are looking for answers. Essentially, there as two interconnected but distinct tasks that our propaganda work must fulfill during a mass movement: developing a revolutionary consciousness among the people involved in or paying attention to the movement broadly, and addressing the immediate questions before the mass movement.

Having the right dividing lines, methods of leadership, and propaganda provide the basis for us to navigate through the twists and turns of a mass movement, but we have to move through each twist and turn correctly if we expect people to follow our leadership. And there will be challenges to people’s allegiances, to which leadership they feel they should follow, all along the way. The typical assortment of opportunists that is the US Left will be one challenge, as will the Democrat politicians who know how to offer a few paltry reforms or the hope for electoral change when a mass movement is straining against the limits of bourgeois-democracy. What makes our bold interventions able to gain a following is the fact that the usual bag of opportunist and electoral tricks doesn’t work so well in the face of a rising tide of mass struggle against an injustice that is increasingly exposed and has no resolution favorable to the masses forthcoming from the bourgeoisie. However, that ability to gain a mass following for a revolutionary line generally has a short window of opportunity, and that opportunity must be seized quickly and the window must be kept open for as long as possible by our actions. We have to be quick to provide answers when people are asking questions about what to do that only we can answer, and then we have to answer the new questions that arise.

How do we know when it’s “let’s fucking go” time?

Now that we have explained the audacity and methods of leadership required for mounting a bold intervention and leading a mass movement, let’s go back in time and address how to know when it’s warranted for us to devote the leadership and personnel necessary to do so. Mass movements come and go in the US, often in ways that are fleeting and never really push against the limits of bourgeois-democracy. For that reason, it is imperative that when a mass movement arises either involving sections of the proletariat, as main protagonists in the mass movement or as people deeply affected by its outcome, we do not hesitate to mount an intervention. In addition, when mass movements arise that are likely to hit hard against the limits of bourgeois-democracy even if they do not directly involve the proletariat much, such as, for example, a student-centered resistance against an imperialist war, we should strive to get to the head of them if we are able to.

While mounting a bold intervention usually involves some degree of scrambling to come from behind, we should be anticipating how the unfolding of class, social, cultural, and political contradictions in society could generate a mass movement ripe for our intervention. We can do this by making periodic analyses of the motion and conflicts of different classes in society, and in between such analyses following the news closely and observing, through our all-around political work and social life, how different sections of people are thinking and moving. This kind of analysis and ongoing observation should keep our finger on the pulse of what contradictions might explode and how different sections of people will likely respond.

Once a faultline contradiction does explode and generate mass struggle, hopefully with us in the mix mounting bold interventions, we should make an assessment of the class and political forces in the field, their strengths and limitations, and the shape of public opinion throughout society. Such an assessment will tell us whether and how different sections of people are willing to move, what kind of broader support the ones moving can count on, and what impediments will be in their way. The inability or weakness of opportunist or reformist leadership to shape and constrain the mass movement is an important sign to us to step in hard with revolutionary leadership and be confident that our leadership can galvanize the masses.

In his typical use of sarcasm to draw an important lesson, Mao Zedong once remarked that “we should thank the Japanese for invading China.” Of course, Mao was not making light of the incredible violence, brutality, and suffering that Japan’s invasion and occupation brought to the people of China from 1937 to 1945. He was, however, drawing attention to the fact that the Japanese invasion united a broad array of classes against foreign occupation and neutralized the leadership of bourgeois and opportunist forces who were unwilling and unable to resolutely fight Japanese imperialism, giving the Chinese Communist Party an opportunity to step to the forefront and unite broad sections of the people in a war for liberation. Prior to the development of the war of resistance against Japanese imperialism, the Chinese Communist Party was geographically isolated in Yan’an and depended, for mass support, mainly on the poor peasantry, and was outgunned and overpowered by the bourgeois-led Guomindang’s army. The 1949 victory of the Chinese Revolution depended on Communists mounting a bold intervention and proving themselves capable leaders of the broad masses in the face of a dramatic change in the objective situation—the Japanese invasion—before going on to defeat the Guomindang with the broad support of the masses.

A translation of Mao’s sarcastic remark for the US in 2026 would be that “we should thank the Bovino boys for invading Minneapolis.” That’s not to make light of the immense brutality and even murders that the people in and around Minneapolis are facing at the hands of the violent immigration enforcement surge in their city. But it is a strategic recognition of the fact that the Trump administration’s specific moves against immigrant masses and Democrat-run cities exposed ICE and CBP brutality before all of society and drew wide swaths of the US population into a mass movement against that brutality. That mass movement brought forward both militant defiance and broader support. And the Democrats in power in Minneapolis, the state of Minnesota, and elsewhere proved that, despite all their bluster, they were not up to the task of resisting the Bovino boys, leaving it to people who may ordinarily put their faith in politicians to take independent mass action. Consequently, the increasingly unhinged ICE terror targeting the immigrant masses has become precisely the kind of antagonistic contradiction where it is not only the moral duty of communists to step to the defense of the masses, but also an opportunity for asserting leadership of a mass movement far beyond the small following we can usually gather. It is an antagonistic contradiction to dive into wholeheartedly and with every intention of seeing the struggle through to the end and emerging from it with the subjective forces for revolution dramatically expanded quantitatively and far stronger ideologically, politically, and in strategic sophistication due to gaining unique practical experience.

The vanguard has to move like it means business

Don’t pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang
Don’t even bang, unless you plan to hit something

– Outkast, “Bombs Over Baghdad”

For a communist vanguard to take up the responsibility and opportunity to mount a bold intervention and lead a mass movement, it has to move like a steamroller driving sixty miles an hour. Without significantly diminishing its existing lines of work or reneging on its overall responsibilities, a vanguard has to put its full weight behind mounting the intervention, flatten any obstacles in its way, internally or externally, and do so with speed and urgency. There can be no hesitation, no fucking around, just a relentless push forward, finding quick fixes for any problems that come up and never over-complicating the practical implementation of unified plans. Unified is key here, as the vanguard must act as a disciplined force moving as one, with each role in the division of labor being fulfilled without hesitation or mistakes.

Since vanguards are not monolithic, cadre who are lagging or who don’t understand the need to move decisively should either be moved out of the way or struggled with to rupture with whatever is holding them back, with the quickness. Cadre who do have audacity, audacity, and more audacity need to be quickly brought into the forefront of the vanguard’s intervention. While acting with great discipline to carry out a unified plan, individual comrades also need to take great initiative—on the basis of, not in opposition to, the unified plan—to fill in the gaps, solve problems, and push the plan forward. Creating facts on the ground is far more important than pontificating our politics, as our intervention needs to become a material force exerting itself on the political stage in order to gain momentum. Secondarily, facts on the ground and advances in one area force the wavering ones to get with the program.

As our bold intervention turns into leadership of a growing mass movement, the vanguard needs to refine its methods and develop greater strategic and tactical sophistication for navigating through the twists and turns of the struggle. Lessons learned one place, be they positive or negative, need to be quickly summed up for the vanguard as a whole. Corrective measures concerning any mistakes need to be taken immediately and decisively, by leadership and by the comrades responsible for the mistakes, with no room given for errors to infect the vanguard’s collective actions. Finally, regardless of which class and social forces are in the forefront of the mass movement at any given time, the vanguard needs to work to bring proletarians into the mass movement and make the mass movement have the best impact possible on our class. Furthermore, and because we know the high tide of any mass movement will not last forever, it is imperative to transform the best fighters in a given mass movement into revolutionaries committed to bringing their fiery enthusiasm to the proletariat and fusing with them.

Collective discipline, applying the mass line, strategic sophistication, quickly fixing mistakes, and bringing the mass movement to the proletariat and vice versa are all essential to the vanguard’s work within a mass movement. But the most important thing a vanguard has to have to move decisively when there is an opportunity for mounting a bold intervention is ideological: faith and confidence in the masses. If you don’t have that, you can’t mount bold interventions and lead the broad masses in struggle. If you waver on that, you’re not going to make bold plans, seize the initiative, and welcome the broad masses in.

Our faith in the masses is a lot like religious faith in God. People pray to God, pray for God to intervene, to stop the suffering, and God doesn’t do anything. The suffering people pray will stop continues. But then when believers get a sign from God, it renews their faith in God, and God delivers a miracle (in their perception). We pray to the masses everyday, we pray for them to step forward and take history into their hands, to end the system that delivers suffering to them every day. And most days, the masses are like God, failing to step in and stop the suffering through their intervention (from below instead of from above). But then, some rare days, we get a sign from the masses that they are ready to move, and if that sign renews our faith in the masses, if we go from an everyday stubborn faith in the masses to deep religious fervor about their potential, then we can seize on that sign and the masses can make miracles happen. Revolutions are miracles that come out of the stubborn faith in the masses of a small number of revolutionaries. Bold interventions that draw the broad masses forward in mass struggle are the small miracles along the way. Let’s make miracles happen.

Strongly suggested further reading:

Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder

Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power

The Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, Building the United Front Under the Leadership of the Proletariat, in Steps and Leaps

1In communist parlance, “prop” is short for propaganda, and giving a prop means delivering a talk to cadre and/or close supporters that is followed by discussion. The talk and discussion constitute a propaganda session.

2See the OCR’s The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today, first published as kites #8 in 2023 and republished by Going Against the Tide in 2025.