The Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US)
May 2026

Table of Contents:

Introduction

In the last half of 2025, the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US) was engaged in an internal rectification and revolutionization campaign. What prompted this internal struggle was the progress we had made over the previous five years towards building a vanguard party. When the OCR published our Manifesto and Membership Constitution in 2020, we were a small organization with strong roots in the communist tradition and a correct line, but without the cadre needed to have a practical impact on the sharpening contradictions in US society. From 2021 on, we recruited a small but growing number of young cadre on the basis of our Manifesto and Membership Constitution and produced theory, historical summation, analysis, and training manuals (published in kites and then Going Against the Tide) to guide those cadre and plant a red flag. Consequently, the OCR became a force sinking roots among proletarian masses and leading localized class struggles on a number of fronts. By 2024, we were ready to scale up our efforts, mount bold interventions with some national impact, and make leaps in developing the organized subjective forces for revolution.

However, as the OCR stepped out in bolder ways, weaknesses among our still small number of cadre, bad methods of leadership, and poor decisions emerged that hampered our ability to make advances. Our operations were significantly out of sync with our revolutionary line; our political work was uneven in its quality, with several failures to seize on opportunities for advancing the class struggle; and some new recruits, as well as activists under our leadership we had not yet recruited, were stepping ahead of many of our existing cadre. We worked to get to the root of errors and missteps and rectify emerging weaknesses, critically summing up our practice, struggling over questions of method and line, assigning some units and cadre of our organization rectification tasks, and using disciplinary measures when needed. From late 2024 through Summer 2025, none of those attempts to transform the OCR enabled our organization to round the corner, and we were stuck in a stalemate against no shortage of stubbornness in various internal struggles, unable to break with increasingly entrenched bad habits and make a leap forward in our work among the masses.

OCR leadership summed up that, given the impasse, we needed an organization-wide internal struggle that encompassed all units of the OCR and identified the commonalities of various wrong operational lines, bad habits, and erroneous methods. Since those wrong lines, bad habits, and erroneous methods were manifesting within the then formal leadership body of our organization, the Leading Core (LC), the LC constituted a parallel leadership body to lead the internal struggle, which came to be called the Shake-Up Crew. Modeled after the Cultural Revolution Group that was constituted to lead the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China, our Shake-Up Crew included continuity with the LC and new comrades stepping forward to play advanced roles within our organization and capable of addressing our internal problems with fresh eyes. While we are reticent to draw too many parallels between our internal struggle and the GPCR, we were consciously seeking to operationalize lessons from the GPCR in making line struggle and ongoing ideological transformation central to the construction and operation of a communist vanguard party.

Our internal rectification and revolutionization campaign—what we called the shake-up process—unfolded through three rounds. To initiate the first round, the Shake-Up Crew was assigned to write internal papers addressing errors, weaknesses, wrong lines, bad habits, and bourgeois methods across our organization. These “shake-up papers” drew on the criticisms of the advanced close to but not yet in the OCR, as well as the insights and collectivity of the Shake-Up Crew. The “shake-up papers” then became the basis for discussion and struggle within each unit of the OCR, with members of the Shake-Up Crew attending unit meetings where possible. The second and third rounds of shake-up papers solicited contributions from members of the OCR beyond the Shake-Up Crew, summed up the positive advanced shoots within our organization and its practice, and dug further into the questions of line that had come up along the way. Throughout the shake-up process, the Shake-Up Crew summed up how the internal struggle was going and how to lead it forward, contributing shake-up papers to each round of the rectification and revolutionization campaign.

The fundamental question of the shake-up process was whether we are going to truly function as communists in the world and build a vanguard party on that basis. That fundamental question took shape around several key issues:

How do we relate to the masses?
How do we lead our work?
What kind of discipline and dedication is required of us?
How are we training ourselves to think?
Are we casting off petty-bourgeois baggage or holding on to it?
Are we eager to advance the class struggle against the enemy and advance our position among the masses, and taking initiative to do so, or are we holding ourselves and the masses back?

Struggling over all of these questions required deep soul-searching and rigorous critical thinking, individually and collectively. Overall, most of our comrades rose to the occasion, some stepped up to become leaders in the shake-up process, and while the internal struggle was advancing, our external work transformed for the better, qualitatively and quantitatively. The shake-up process forced our cadre to confront corrosion of principles and practices, and as a result of being shaken up by line struggle, the OCR began to relate to the masses and lead class struggle far more like communists with a “conquer the world for the international proletariat” spirit.

In addition to leading the internal struggle, the Shake-Up Crew was also tasked with overseeing recruitment. While we worked to transform our existing cadre, we knew that we needed to bring fresh blood into the OCR to unclog its arteries and reinvigorate its internal life and external practice. And we had the basis to do so in the number of people who had stepped up in our organization’s work over the previous year, who devoured the political line put forward in our writing and worked to make a material force of it in the world, often outpacing our own cadre in doing so. We can confidently say that the crop of recruits we’ve brought into the OCR from the launch of the shake-up process until now holds a lot of promise to enable leaps forward in our work on multiple fronts, and to push our organization to function on a higher level. Like all recruits, they need training, experience, and collectivity, and will run into their share of mistakes and missteps. Nevertheless, the “fresh blood” principle has been working, as demonstrated by the advances in our work since last Fall. From the start of the shake-up process until now, the OCR’s membership has increased by approximately 75%.

Between the quantitative growth and qualitative transformation of the OCR, we decided to hold an election for a provisional Central Committee to sublate and supersede the existing leadership body of our organization. All OCR members, including new recruits, submitted nominations for the Central Committee, as well as writing up their thoughts on what their role within our organization should be moving forward. This bottom-up democracy encouraged all members of the OCR to think, critically and strategically, about questions of leadership within a vanguard party. The bottom-up nominations for the most part correctly identified the advanced within our organization, even as the need-to-know principle and some inexperience led to an overemphasis on direct, personal interactions guiding some nominations.

We concluded the shake-up process with substantial progress made in rectifying serious problems and weaknesses in our organization, several comrades having stepped up to play advanced roles within our organization and developing their leadership capacity on that basis, comrades who had been stuck in bad practices and lowered sights moving beyond what held them back, and a new crop of recruits bringing dynamism and determination into the OCR. The progress made by the shake-up process was, of course, uneven, and not all comrades were sufficiently shaken up to break out of bad habits.

As the shake-up process was ending and the OCR was preparing to shift its attention from internal struggle to external practice, unfortunately, another parallel with the GPCR emerged in the form of an ultra-left line. Finding its strongest expression in the newly elected Central Committee, this ultra-left line advocated continued focus on internal struggle and a purity standard for integrating with the masses, with no small degree of postmodernist identity politics replacing the shake-up process’s correct emphasis on the principles and practices by which communists must relate to and lead the masses. The ultra-left line played a disruptive role by fixating on internal purity at the expense of rising to the responsibility of figuring out how we advance the class struggle and our work with the masses, especially as moves by the Trump administration sharpened up antagonistic contradictions within the US and drew the broad masses into political life and struggle. Left-opportunism within the OCR quickly turned into right-opportunism when the ultra-left line advocated shying away from new openings for leading class struggle at a higher level than the OCR has previously been able to. Consequently, the bankruptcy of the ultra-left line became obvious when it was identified as such within the newly elected Central Committee, those who had been pushing, or wavering in the face of, the ultra-left line were won over, and the disruption caused by the ultra-left line was brief.

However, given the weaknesses that emerged on the newly elected Central Committee, we decided to modify the OCR’s leadership by replacing the Central Committee with an Expanded Leadership Body (ELB), combining the strengths of experienced cadre and the dynamism and some newer cadre, and consisting of all the viable candidates for the Central Committee in the internal nomination process. Developing a Central Committee of comrades who have proven themselves capable of making the right decisions and leading our organization to make the maximum advances possible in the revolutionary process at each step of the way is a difficult task in an organization of mostly young, relatively inexperienced comrades. The modification that the OCR made to its leadership body is the best solution to this problem at the present, and the ELB will be responsible for developing the Party Center that our organization needs to become a vanguard party. To our credit, the OCR has never made false claims about ourselves, and has consistently avoided donning titles, internally and externally, that we have not yet earned.

Through all our internal struggles, leading up to, during, and after the shake-up process, a revolutionary line has consistently managed to win over the leadership and cadre of the OCR and set our organization on the path to make further advances in the class struggle. The only guarantee that this will be the case in the future is building the vanguard through continual rectification and revolutionization, and developing a wider, more collective revolutionary leadership on that basis. In that respect, the shake-up papers that follow are not just a summation of a past struggle within the OCR now made public, but living line struggle to be taken further.

The shake-up process was a leap forward in the OCR’s mission to build a vanguard party, a mission we invite those in the US yearning for revolution to join. To readers outside the US, we hope that by making our shake-up process public, we can inspire aspiring revolutionaries to get serious about building communist parties around the world that stand on solid ground and are determined to move through the challenges of making revolution. With that sense of purpose in mind, we present to you the OCR’s shake-up papers in the three rounds in which they were presented internally in the second half of 2025, with author names and identifying information redacted, but with no attempt to hide our weaknesses and errors. We hope that our internal process of confronting our weaknesses and errors, struggling with each other lovingly and unsparingly, and rededicating ourselves to revolution and the masses can touch your souls the way it touched ours.

Round 1

Ideological struggle has to be thorough to stick

More than once, Mao explained (or summed up or better yet insisted) that the experience of the Chinese Communist Party from its early days to the seizure of power showed that it took about a decade of involvement in intense class struggle and integration with the masses for revolutionaries from petty-bourgeois class backgrounds to ideologically remold themselves. For some, that remolding clearly stuck through the socialist years, while for others, it atrophied or even degenerated when they were removed from the simple living and arduous struggle that was protracted people’s war.

The OCR presently consists of cadre mostly from petty-bourgeois class backgrounds, and we live in the United States, the country that inculcates petty-bourgeois outlooks in even the most proletarian of masses. Few of our cadre have a decade in the game, and for those that do, their years as revolutionaries are broken by years during which there was no real communist organization to be part of. Moreover, as we’ve painfully learned, intense class struggle in this shithole country is difficult to get going and even more difficult to sustain, so our ways of life, even as committed communist cadre, are far more leisurely than those of our comrades in Dandakaranya. All this provides a strong material basis for the growth of petty-bourgeois outlooks and habits among our cadre and throughout our organization—to pretend otherwise would be idealist, wishful thinking.

Consequently, whatever ideological leaps we made to join the OCR, whatever experiences we’ve had integrating with the masses and in intense struggle with the enemy, will not stick without a continual process of further leaps and deeper experience, and conscious attention to combating petty-bourgeoisification in our outlook, habits, lifestyle, and relationship to the masses. Sorry, but the process of becoming a communist hasn’t ended for any of us. It might have—it should have—been completed in its initial phase through the recruitment process that brought us into the OCR, but not in the sense of being settled for eternity. Being a communist is a continuing, ongoing process of becoming. To make a terrible analogy, we’ll need to become born-again communists several times throughout our lifetimes.

To find our way through that process, it’s helpful to think through what is this thing called ideology. This is one of those concepts that I feel more than I know, and ideological struggle is one of those concepts our recruitment manual doesn’t (and maybe can’t) explain with the same level of exactitude as other questions. The past communist movement in this country adopted a rather idealist conception of ideology as basically the ideas in people’s heads. Louis Althusser’s 1970 essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus is a helpful corrective to that idealist conception, and the OCR has fully integrated Althusser’s distinction between ideological and repressive state state apparatuses. That distinction, and Althussser’s theorization of how ideological state apparatuses function, has been tremendously productive for our analysis of the ways that class dictatorship operates in specific contexts. It would be well worth it for many of our younger cadre to study Althusser’s essay, which I think could be called a foundational text for the specific path of the OCR’s initial development.

Althusser took a very Maoist/Gramscian approach to understanding how ideology works. He presented the development of ideology as not just adopting ideas, but cohering by way of the whole set of institutions, interactions, and habits with which we function through ideology. In other words, ideology is very much a material thing, developed and reinforced through rituals and social practices. It’s not just thoughts in your head, but thoughts put in your head through repeated experiences and ongoing application to the material world.

When we understand ideology as Althusser explained it, we can appreciate more deeply how powerful is the force of habit. Habit is more unconscious or subconscious than conscious. It’s ways of thinking and doing that are automatic and unquestioned…unless those habits become untenable for our ongoing material existence or we consciously decide to question them. Luckily for us, the Maoist tradition provides us with methods for bringing our unconscious (habits) to the surface of our conscious understanding (as does Freudian psychoanalysis, in a different context), for subjecting them to critical analysis, evaluating their effects, and replacing them with new habits. Those methods, however, have proven some of the most difficult for communists to commit themselves to, precisely because habits become comfortable to us at the deepest level of our subconscious. Alternately, there’s a bad history up to the present day of bastardizing these methods, making them into dogmas that guide cultish behavior; when you turn criticism/self-criticism into a formal ritual, it gets empty or scary.

In trying to understand this thing called ideology, besides acknowledging the force of habit, it’s also helpful to distinguish between thoughts and ways (or methods) of thinking. Thoughts are relatively easy to change—you realize that what you thought about some particular thing was wrong for one reason or another, you develop or embrace a different, more correct thought, and problem solved (more or less). But thoughts are more like an endpoint of a process, and that process only took shape through ways of thinking. As everyone remembers from their first time reading Mao’s On Contradiction (unless you’re a nerd who read Hegel in college), thinking dialectically is both a breath of fresh air that rewires the way your brain works and also a great difficulty that challenges the force of habit in your ways of thinking. Ways of thinking—intellectual methods—have to be worked at, transformed, questioned, renewed, reinvigorated, and even overthrown, far more importantly and with far greater difficulty than thoughts.

In our struggle to ideologically remold ourselves to serve the masses, it won’t do just to change our thoughts. We’ll need to change our ways of thinking, overthrow our old habits, and build something new in their place, again and again, with habits and ways of thinking that served the revolution in one phase becoming obstacles in a later phase. It’s only through continual, thoroughgoing ideological struggle that ideological transformation can stick.

Forging collectivities: A Maoist approach to people

Here are some of the ways that the problem I’ll be addressing unfolds in our work:

When we think of ourselves as having all the answers, so we do all the talking at meetings
When we don’t take the time to assign reading and writing to our people and discuss/ workshop with them
- When we repeatedly postpone ideological work in favor of getting other tasks done
- Overall, when we treat the ideological development of our people as a secondary task
When we don’t put tasks in the hands of the masses, or when we do things for them
When we throw tasks at the people under our leadership without taking the time to teach them how to do them
When we don’t follow up up aggressively with people we meet in our political work—often only making one follow up call, if that.
When we make plans then invite people to them, rather than making plans with people!
- Making plans with people often means getting our time wasted when people flake. But we absolutely need to stop doing stuff that will happen regardless of whether or not the masses are a part of it. It’s better to get our time wasted.
When only leadership takes initiative and members of our organizations abdicate leadership. Which happens when we’re not treating those members like potential future leaders.

Why take a Maoist approach to people?

As we scale up quantitatively in every region, we need to create people who can not only replace us, but surpass us. We also need to create strong collectivities that can function well, without ongoing intervention from the people who initiated them. There’s a practical, objective need here to take a Maoist approach to people—we simply won’t be able to function past a certain point if all the tasks and politics remain concentrated in the hands of a small number of people in each region while we continue to grow in size and to take on increasingly ambitious mass organizing projects. It would be nearsighted, arrogant, and frankly out of touch with reality to think that we can achieve any of the things we set out to do without putting in the work to get the people under our leadership operating on the same level as us, and trusting and relying on them to lead in their own right.

But more important than the objective necessity is the political and spiritual necessity to take a Maoist approach to people. Our love for the people is the beating heart that pumps life into every part of our work. Without people, our work is completely empty of content.

I have to emphasize that it’s not enough to have an abstract love for the people, or an abstract concern for the lives of the masses. I mean that we need to see every single person we meet as being worthy of hours of our time, even if it doesn’t result in immediate benefit to us or to our work, because that’s just how we treat people. I mean making plans with people, and staking those plans on those people, even if we know they might not show up and our time might end up being wasted. I mean struggling things out with people in principled ways, without being dismissive or condescending, treating people as our intellectual equals every time, even if it’s a conversation we’ve already had a hundred times with a hundred different people. I mean thinking deeply about the people around us, about the contradictions inside them, about how they see themselves and the world, not primarily because that will have a positive effect on our work (although it will), but primarily because we see the need overall to focus our attention outward rather than inward, on others rather than on ourselves, and on people rather than on concepts.

That said: the other side of this coin is when we spend way too much time trying to win over the intermediate by talking, talking, talking. This error also shows a lack of a concrete, immediate love for the people because we are indulging our own desire to talk and debate ideas, putting that over doing what needs to be done to generate actual struggle around the problems affecting people. We have a world to win, people’s lives are at stake, and our focus should always be on finding the advanced and leading them in class struggle, over talking about our ideas with people who have no desire to put them into practice. We have to do both things well: on the one hand, treating everyone we meet with dignity and attention because we recognize their intrinsic value as a human being; on the other, not choosing the “exit ramp” of having long, dead-end conversations over the harder work of forging close relationships with the masses and taking bold action with them.

On a more specific political note: do we see the masses as the makers of history or not? We might be tempted to automatically respond, of course we do! But are we actually putting that belief into practice, or are we treating the people around us as disposable, as replaceable, as overall secondary to our work, as objects rather than subjects?

Ideological reasons why we might fail to take a Maoist approach to people:

Individualism, ego, and paternalism

I think I know better than other people, so I don’t see it as a problem that I talk more than I listen. I don’t think what other people have to say is as important as what I have to say.
I don’t think other people will do as good a job leading something, but I think I would, so I would rather just lead it myself.
I don’t trust the people under my leadership to do a good job, so I need to either do everything for them, or micromanage them so that they don’t make any mistakes.
- (and if I don’t trust the people under my leadership to do a good job, it’s probably because I know I haven’t taken the time to train them politically or in our methods.)

A mechanical understanding of our work that fails to understand that the primary purpose of everything we do is to consolidate people under our leadership and bring new people up as leaders and as communists, and that all our tasks and plans serve that purpose, not vice versa.

I know that this task needs to get done, and it will take longer if I have to teach someone else to do it, so I’ll just do it myself.
If I stake our plans on this person and they bail, the time we spent planning will be wasted. I would rather make a plan that I can carry out myself without relying on the other person so I know that it will happen no matter what.

An antisocial, dogmatic understanding of Maoism that is divorced from an emotional or spiritual attachment to other people and their well-being

I don’t have patience for people or interest in talking to them beyond the narrow focus of my work because I see them primarily as side characters in the revolutionary pageant I’m starring in.
When I’m out talking to the masses, I feel that I’m carrying out the steps that I believe will lead to success in our work. I’m not immersing myself in the emotional experience of really hearing what people are telling me, and I’m not thinking deeply about who they are and what their lives are like, outside the narrow focus of how they relate to my work.
- Here I want us to pay special attention to how we treat people who are probably never going to contribute directly to our work, like homeless schizophrenics for example, or anyone who for non-antagonistic objective or subjective reasons just will probably never be a communist, leader, or even a reliable contact. Do we still respect them? Do we still care about their well-being? Are we still generous (within reason) with our time and interest?
I’m dismissive of activists who come around us off rip because they’re “not proletarians” or because they’ve been influenced by postmodernism or by popular incorrect ideas, and not because they’ve shown themselves to be antagonistic toward us or our work.
In my personal life, I don’t have deep interdependence in my closest relationships. OR how I operate in my personal life is walled off from how I operate in my political work.

I’m going to give some practical suggestions as to what it looks like to take a Maoist approach to people, which I would break down into two components: developing strong people and developing strong collectivities. These two components are in relationship to each other such that when we strengthen one, we strengthen the other. A strong collectivity is what facilitates developing our people well as individuals, and the contributions of solid people create the foundation for strengthening our collectivities.

Developing strong people

The first thing that’s required is that we take the time and invest the emotional energy in understanding all of our people on a deeper level. What are the contradictions within them? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What is holding them back from being a revolutionary? This intimate understanding of a person is the foundation that enables us to work well with them.

We need to be making time for one-on-one meetings with all of the people under our leadership. These should involve reading discussions that are specially designed to expand that person’s political and historical knowledge and to hit on the political and ideological things holding that person back. In these one-on-ones we should also check in on the person’s responsibilities and discuss the people under that person’s leadership, in order to provide guidance, support, and accountability, as well as to solicit feedback and criticism. We should also discuss our overall campaign/organizational strategy in the one-on-ones as another opportunity for line struggle, solicit their ideas, and encourage them to take up increasing responsibility for setting the collective strategy.

We should assign tasks and responsibilities to the people under our leadership in a way that has the maximum positive impact on the relationship between what they’re currently able to do well and what they’re not yet good at. To be more specific, we should be assigning people “reach” tasks, that we think they have the potential to do well at, but that require them to stretch their abilities or grow in a new direction. At the same time, we have to provide them with the support they need in order to become the person that can succeed in the role they’ve been assigned. We should pay particular attention to assigning out tasks that promote ideological development—like writing summations or social media posts, running our meetings, and leading reading discussions.

Lastly, we need to give each other pep talks. This is something that the person who trained and mentored me when I first came around the OCR said to me almost a year ago that I really took to heart because I recognized immediately that it was true, and applying it since has had a positive effect on my work. I knew it was correct because I know that i wouldn’t be who I am today, and I wouldn’t be able to do what I do, if the people leading me hadn’t seen potential in me that I didn’t see, told me they believed in me, and pointed out my own strengths to me.

Of course, they also criticized me vigorously, but I think we’ve all read that book before and seen the movie, too.

I remember one time someone else in a leadership position was planning a reading discussion with a newer activist I had personally been mentoring. Before they scheduled the discussion, I briefed them on her—”these are her strengths, these are the contradictions I’m worried about” type thing. After I finished giving the download, the person making plans with her said, “See, this is why I’m not worried about you taking over leading things: you’re a brilliant political commander.” (Yep that’s verbatim!) It was so funny to me because of how melodramatic it was compared to the pretty mundane conversation we were having, but I also think it’s the perfect example of the kind of leadership people need from us in order for them to have the confidence to become both leaders and communists. What we’re asking people to do is hard and scary, and people need to believe in themselves enough to feel like not only are they capable of taking that leap, but also that it actually matters whether or not they as an individual do so.

The point is, do you believe in your people? Are you proud of your people? Do you love your people? Have you seen your people grow and transform throughout the course of our work? If so, tell them!!! (And if not, there might be something wrong with you!!!)

Developing strong collectivities

Collectivities are the basic units of our organization and of our political work. They’re the vehicles through which we transform ourselves and carry out our work. We like to say “our collectivity is our strength” because it’s an obvious fact that we can achieve things together that we could never achieve as individuals.

In my opinion, a strong collectivity comes down mostly to a functional chain of command, an effective division of labor, and cultivating sufficient political unity and social harmony.

A functional chain of command is important because:

It prevents all of the work being concentrated in the hands of the person(s) leading,
It gives non-leading members an escalator of responsibilities to encourage them to grow, and
It helps people understand what’s expected of them and what they should expect from others.

For example, imagine a nine-person team being led by one person:

A	B
	C
	D
	E
	F
	G
	H
	I

If the person leading the team doesn’t delegate leadership tasks, then none of the other people on the team will get enough direct political or operational leadership. For all eight non-leading members, this would likely result in an almost total lack of reading discussions and focused ideological development. When teams are set up this way, many of their members are essentially left “floating,” meaning they aren’t really receiving direct leadership at all. This state of things is obviously an ideological problem first and foremost. Flowing from that ideological problem, the team will only become more and more operationally dysfunctional as it grows over time.

Now imagine if that same nine-person team had a division of labor that included a second layer of leadership.

A	B	E
	C	F
		G
	D	H
		I

The person leading overall could be responsible for things like setting an overall campaign strategy and making sure the team is on track in carrying out that strategy. That means having eyes on things like summation, planning calls, meetings, outreach, and changes in the objective situation that need our attention or deserve a response. The person leading overall would also have a particular responsibility to the second layer of leadership, to invest in their development as individuals by, for example, meeting with them to check in on the people they’re responsible for and to talk through any problems that have come up with those people and what the next step looks like for all of them. Both the second layer of leadership and the non-leading members would also have specific people outside of the team itself who they’re responsible for leading, and each member could get support and guidance in building those relationships from the person directly responsible for leading them. In this way, the second layer of leadership learn how to do what the person leading overall has to do to eventually be able to replace them (like develop individuals, manage a team, and develop and carry out strategic plans). Eight people are getting effective leadership and individualized attention, which wouldn’t be possible if just one person was trying to be personally responsible for all eight.

Division of labor has a practical aspect and a political aspect. The practical aspect is that not everyone on a larger team can be responsible for everything, and there are certain ongoing tasks that will be better taken care of if a specific person is responsible for them. The most pressing need that I’ve seen is for one team member to be responsible for contact management. This entails:

Making sure that contacts are uploaded to a shared master contact list.
Keeping eyes on the contact list, keeping it generally organized and up to date.
Hitting up people when they need to reach out to their contacts and prepping them on what they should say.
- This is because each contact should be assigned to a specific “point person.”
- For example, if we have an event coming up, the contact person should tell every member to text their contacts about it, and should provide a text script and event flyer.

Another specific role that’s generally needed is 1–2 people per team who can be responsible for the bulk of the graphic design needed. And lastly, the team lead should strive to delegate responsibilities to the maximum extent possible. Their primary role is not doing tasks, but leading the team: setting the strategy, investing in people, giving oversight, and only stepping in to help with other tasks when needed.

That said, we should go beyond these three general categories and be very dynamic in thinking about how we can create an effective division of labor within each team that is customized to the area of work and to the individual people on the team.

This brings me to the political aspect of division of labor, which is that it’s important to give each member of a collectivity specific responsibilities that play to their strengths and either mitigate, or challenge them to overcome, their weaknesses. Beyond getting the work done, this is how we encourage our people to take personal responsibility, show initiative, learn new skills, and develop self-awareness around what they do well and where they need to improve.

Lastly: political unity and social harmony, also known as generally keeping our group dynamics healthy. We need in-person meetings where we can update each other, hash out disagreements, and make decisions. We need to keep stuff like groupchats in check and recognize when it’s time to take the conversation offline. We need to criticize each other and give each other pep talks in every direction (not just from leadership to members, or vice versa, but horizontally as well) and not just in relation to our political work, but on personal questions, too. Roomateships and romantic relationships, for example, can create interpersonal dynamics that impact our collectivities, and we should strive to be honest with each other about the good, bad, and ugly. We should also have fun with each other and do shit like celebrate each other’s birthdays, not because of a political or moral obligation, but because we like each other, we’ve become close throughout the course of our work, and we see each other as important and worth celebrating.

I don’t want anyone to adopt the above practical suggestions without asking themself the deeper question: Why didn’t I see the need to do this all along? Capitalism teaches us to see other people as objects and to see relationships as transactions. This alienation has fostered a profound brokenness in all of us on a spiritual, emotional, and social level, and we have to contend with that in ourselves first and foremost, before we can begin to apply operational solutions.

I’ll end by quoting my favorite line from our Manifesto. If we’re gonna say we believe it, we have to look deep inside ourselves and make sure we’re really about it.

“As communists, we serve the people and we love the people. There is no higher love than that.”

Out of the safe zone, into the fire

The advances that the OCR has made over the last year have taken us beyond relatively small, localized efforts of a dedicated few to leading growing numbers of people, in organizational forms that demand their involvement in decision-making, in struggles that put our efforts up against the repressive state apparatus and in contention with the Left and the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie. We have crossed over the threshold from the safe zone of somewhat self-contained, relatively stage-managed political work to the expansive flames of chaotic class struggle, with different forces in the field and a growing mass of people under our leadership to varying degrees who have to be won over to and invited to be part of determining our line of march.

Against the repressive state apparatus, our cadre and activists have overall displayed great courage in the moment and tactical smarts. But after the confrontations, we haven’t always done well with the follow-through. We haven’t yet brought our A game to fighting repression, from exposure to dealing with lawyers to projecting our fight broadly and proudly.

Against the forces of opportunism, we’ve made headway in confidently hitting back against the appropriate enemies when they hit at us or when it’s time to contend with them. However, two errors continue to crop up. The first is to try and dodge a (political) fight with opportunists, failing to hit back hard when opportunists attacked our actions and politics, not having confidence that our small forces had the moral and political high ground and could win people to our stand, and instead fearing postmodernist identity politics tactics (and maybe believing a bit in them). This error led to many of our comrades internalizing defeat, thinking we can’t break out of political encirclement and suppression, that since we’re outnumbered by the Left (by a longshot) we can’t defeat them. The error of trying to dodge a fight with opportunists is typically justified with a “why bother to focus on these opportunists, let’s just go to the masses” that masks a lack of confidence in our ability to destroy any shred of legitimacy opportunism may have and win the masses over to us.

The second error is to want to get in fights with opportunists far too much, especially on social media rather than with fists, and to want to hit at all opportunists instead of well-chosen targets that we can strike strategically meaningful blows against. As one comrade put it, there’s a world of difference between responding to nasty comments on social media because you have to vs. responding because you like to. Behind this error is a perception of ourselves as in competition with the opportunists on their terms, and a desire to win over rather than eradicate Leftists. Instead, we need to have strategic contempt for opportunism and confidence that our politics—which are incomprehensible to Leftists on social media and should stay that way—can prevail over opportunism.

In opposition to these two errors, we need to recognize that as our work advances, it will come in greater contention with opportunists and grifters, who will come at us in ways that are both more vicious and more pathetically desperate. We need supreme strategic confidence that our political work will stand on its merits, our ideology and politics are in the class interests of the masses, and those masses can be won over to our ideology and politics if we keep them in our hearts and move correctly through the twists and turns of the class struggle. And we need to confidently put the smackdown on opportunists and grifters who get in our way, with exposure and, as soon as possible, other means. The fact that we’re surrounded by enemies on all sides should not frighten us, but we should be wise about which enemies to pick fights with at any given time, employing the strategy of eliminating our enemies one by one, Nepalese style.

Where we’ve done worse than our errors in the face of our enemies (whether opportunists or agents of repression) is in how we relate to our friends, most especially the people working under our leadership in various ways. There have been failures in various lines of work and organizational forms under our leadership to bring those friends into collective decision-making and positions of responsibility. Often, those friends are left to do secondary tasks and kept out of writing agitation and propaganda, tactically leading events, being in on making strategic plans, and determining our response to new developments. We’ve taken a Stalinist approach to organization without a Maoist approach to people. We’ve held the political questions and decision-making too close to our chests, afraid that if we invite our friends into the process of figuring shit out we’ll lose our position and identity as leaders. Worse yet, as those friends have begun criticizing these bad methods of leadership and the mistakes that result from them, our cadre have often met those criticisms with defensiveness, arrogance, and condescension.

Mao had no patience for the problems I’m criticizing here (see his 1958 “Talks at the Chengdu Conference”). He had supreme confidence in the process of unleashing the masses, welcoming their criticisms and critical spirit, even if it sometimes went in wrong directions. He knew that if we’re really a vanguard, we can stand to get our feelings hurt, to get wrongly blamed sometimes, and to have our weaknesses and errors exposed. We need to embrace and internalize this Maoist spirit of welcoming criticism, of seeing the masses we’re trying to lead criticizing us as a sign that they’re taking history into their hands, whether or not their criticisms are correct. And no, we don’t have to be swayed by all their criticisms, but we do need to listen to them and lead them to strengthen their critical spirit and their ability to aim their criticisms at the essence of the contradiction.

Lenin once wrote to Zinoviev that if you get rid of all the smart but not very obedient people and keep all the obedient but not very smart people, you won’t be able to get very far in our revolutionary objectives. While there’s a strength that people who quickly accept and assimilate our line bring to our organization and our work, the recruits that bring the most dynamism and revolutionize our work and our line the most are usually the obnoxiously stubborn ones who take a lot of convincing. If you’re not down to convince them, if you’re not enthusiastic about what they can bring into the OCR, then you’re bound to stick within the safe zone of what we can control rather than jumping into the fire of what we can forge.

Our mission is to not only overthrow this system but to be the leading force in a new society, and not a society frozen in place but one that is going through all the chaos and cataclysm of continual revolutionization. To do the former but even more so the latter, we’ll need to get comfortable with leading not by having control over everything, but through the contention, debate, and the growing involvement of a greater mass of people in deciding the way forward—a lot of initiative and a little bit of chaos, to quote an old Hintonite friend. Embrace the chaos, find the right amount (not too much!) order to bring to it, and learn to build collaborative relationships that transform ourselves and the masses (a Maoist approach to people) as we ride the dialectic of order and chaos that is a vanguard party leading revolution.

Shying away from class struggle

Months ago, there was an especially depraved attack on the masses by the enemy’s repressive state apparatus in a particular neighborhood. Comrade x and I, who were leading work in that neighborhood, called an outing to the neighborhood the next day. We found that many people in the neighborhood had heard what had happened and were agitated, and those who hadn’t heard were very upset when we told them. On this outing, beyond talking to the masses about what had happened, we just hit ’em with an upcoming event we had already planned. A protest against the depraved attack came not from us, but by an opportunist, and we didn’t bother to go to it.

A week later, when comrade y called me and comrade x and tore us a new asshole over how we stepped into the crisis situation, I was totally baffled… like what else were we supposed to do other than an outing, investigation, and inviting people to the event we had already planned?

In retrospect, that’s fucking insane. We call ourselves revolutionaries, but we don’t know what to do when the ruling class’s footsoldiers commit a terrorist attack against our class, besides wringing our hands and continuing to toll the bell? My ignorance and naivete on this question was part subjective: a result of my own lack of vision and urgency, and my own sense of hopelessness or nihilism. But more importantly, it flowed from bad habits and incorrect lines that I was trained in doing political work under our organization’s leadership. I was disturbed by what had happened, but:

I didn’t allow my own emotional response to move me to push for bold collective action.
I didn’t see it as my personal responsibility to mobilize the masses in counterattack.
I didn’t believe in my heart that we had the ability to impact the objective situation. This hopelessness is at its root anti-masses sentiment with two component parts:
- I didn’t see our role as mobilizing broad masses, but as “doing something” ourselves, which I knew would be ineffectual, and
- I didn’t believe that mobilizing masses around this crisis moment would result in meaningful change.

Many individuals and collectivities under OCR leadership have been suffering from this problem for a long time: shying away from class struggle. It’s become more acute with time and a malaise has set in that has stifled our mass organizing on the one hand, and caused disunity and communication breakdowns within our activist organizing on the other. I’ve been hearing reports that this problem is running rampant throughout our entire organization, and that means that it needs to be stamped out immediately. These are some of the symptoms of this disease:

Wavering when we’re presented an opportunity to jump into struggle alongside masses, even pushing for waiting rather than doing something immediately, or pushing to do something that is more than doing nothing but falls short of leading the masses in class struggle.
Being reluctant to jump into heightened struggle beyond our usual routines of outings, phone calls, and meetings. For example, when we call an emergency protest, members sometimes don’t step up to the plate, or they seem to do so out of a sense of obligation rather than genuine desire to confront the system head-on.
Talking to the masses over and over about the need for struggle, the need to confront oppressors head-on, etc., meanwhile the masses rarely see us actually do it. Not only does this undermine the trust we want to build with people, but it does nothing to challenge the nihilism among the masses that there’s “nothing we can do to change things.” If we never fight, we’ll never win.
People who were initially attracted to our politics drift away from us because we talk about the politics over and over again without actually putting them into action.

Where does this disease come from? I can identify a few key contradictions at play here:

Desensitization to the suffering of the masses vs. integration with the masses
Carrying out day-to-day operational tasks vs. jumping on crises with urgency
Repression vs. resistance (and a general fear of winning)

Desensitization to the suffering of the masses vs. integration with the masses

We’ve identified through a lot of collective discussion that part of the reason our people are reluctant to initiate a more intense period of struggle is because many of us understand the oppression of the masses intellectually or abstractly, with that understanding primarily having been developed through broad, superficial mass work and investigation on the one hand, and study and discussion on the other. This creates a comprehensive intellectual knowledge of the conditions of the masses, which is a good thing for all of us to have, but it can also result in desensitization to the suffering of the masses when we’re hearing the same stories over and over again from strangers—stories of inhumane living conditions, chronic illnesses, police harassment and brutality, incarceration.

The crucial component that’s missing is real, holistic integration with the masses. For example, it’s one thing to hear from a stranger that they suffer from multiple severe chronic illnesses due to extended exposure to toxins like arsenic, asbestos, and mold in their home. Yes, it’s horrible, and we can experience a surface-level empathy for that person whether or not we are “integrated with the masses.” But it’s another thing to have a close friend who has become sick due to their living conditions, to care deeply about them, and to have to watch them struggle day in, day out with their landlord, doctors, health insurance, government services, and the other forces they’re up against, just to try and have the bare minimum they need for a dignified life. When it’s someone you’re close to, you have an inside look at how deeply they’re affected, and you’re also affected much more because the emotional stakes are that much higher for you. Not to mention, it’s certainly another thing to go through something like that yourself, and know firsthand how horrible it is.

Only deeper integration with the masses can counteract the desensitization that many of us experience from hearing the same tragic stories over and over. When we lead lives that are insulated from the horrors of capitalism and imperialism, and relate to those horrors on a theoretical level alone, it doesn’t matter that much whether we’re “going to the masses” or not. If we don’t feel a deep, emotional sense of urgency to make these things stop, because our lives and the lives of our loved ones depend on it in a very immediate sense, we’re not going to be sufficiently motivated to throw ourselves into motion against the system when the time comes, even if we can articulate on a theoretical level that it’s what our work asks of us.

Let’s be so for real with ourselves: if we don’t see the need to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into something like a protest against our local city government, how the fuck do we expect to be able to launch a revolutionary civil war?

Whether or not our members are integrated with the masses is not the root of the problem, and mandating further integration in a mechanical way is not going to solve the problem. This is just one concerning manifestation among our membership of anti-masses sentiment, a broader ideological package that has resulted in our failure across the board to jump into class struggle.

On what grounds do I say that it’s rooted in anti-masses sentiment? If we’re not going out of our way to integrate with the masses, it’s because we’re not comfortable among the masses (maybe due to reasons like petty-bourgeois class anxieties, postmodernist insecurities, or simply a familiarity with and preference for petty-bourgeois social relations) or because we don’t want to have to live how the masses live. (Sure, being poor isn’t great, but it’s really not that bad, either.)

I encourage everyone to think about your own lives, and your own class position, and reflect on whether or not you’re actually out of touch with the lives of the masses.

What job do you have? Where do you live? How much money do you spend per week on living costs?
Who do you spend most of your time with and what is their class position?
- Who are your friends? What problems do they have? Are any of them going through the type of stuff we do political work about, or have they in the past? And do you talk about it with them? Are you a part of trying to navigate these things with them?
  - (Homelessness, displacement, incarceration, police brutality, poverty, immigration enforcement, domestic violence, mental illness, lack of access to medical care?)
- Where do you usually hang out or what do you do for fun? What type of people are there?
How well do you know the leaders in your political work? Do you spend time with them “off the clock”? Have they been to your house? Do you talk with them about stuff that’s not directly related to your work? Do you share with them as much as they share with you, or is the relationship one-sided?
Most importantly, if, in your reflection, you find that you’re not integrated with the masses in your day-to-day life, why did you not want to be, or why did you not see the need to be?

Some OCR members are from proletarian backgrounds and remain integrated with the proletariat, and some of us are from petty-bourgeois backgrounds but have made significant efforts to integrate holistically with the proletariat. That’s great, and if that’s you, you probably don’t have the problem I’m describing to the same degree that others do. But in my limited experience, we make a lot of excuses for our petty-bourgeois members not being more integrated with the masses, the main excuse being, “it’s too hard.” We pat ourselves on the back for being the only ones out there going to the masses, but after the outing is over, too many of our comrades go home to petty-bourgeois homes and petty-bourgeois friends who don’t understand or relate to what we do at all. This needs to stop, and we need to be more honest with ourselves and critical with each other for failing to integrate with the masses, not just because it’s something Mao said we should do, but because it’s holding our work back.

Carrying out day-to-day operational tasks vs. jumping on crises with urgency

This isn’t an easy balance to strike. There’s often times when it feels like we’re erring toward the latter, responding to crises without doing the necessary day-to-day work in between that would enable those responses to actually benefit our work. However, the need to get our operational tasks done, or the sheer volume of those operational tasks, is sometimes used as an excuse to justify not jumping into a crisis situation when the masses are in motion.

It’s important that we understand that our day-to-day operations and our ability to mobilize with urgency need to reinforce each other. Being operationally strong and on top of our shit is what gives us the juice we need to jump into a crisis—our people are capable of making it happen, and the people in our orbit take us seriously and trust us. Meanwhile, responding to crises is what allows us to make leaps in our work, and gives the content to our organizational forms. We can’t have one without the other, and if we’re doing either poorly, both will suffer.

Sometimes we have overcorrected a bit for previous errors of not taking seriously the need to “have our shit together” operationally. It was the right correction to make (and if you haven’t made it yet, you should!!), but we also need to fight against our operations becoming too mechanical, and against our members becoming accustomed to doing tasks and then going home. We need to push all our people to be operationally excellent, while keeping in mind that the primary thing will always be having a heart for the masses, and the strength of our operations (form) and the strength of our ability to wage struggle (content) both flow from the strength of that basic conviction.

Repression vs. resistance (and a general fear of winning)

I put this section last because in my opinion, our “fear of winning” that causes us not only to back away from doing things that would bring repression, but also to back away from fighting back against repression when it does come, cuts to the heart of the issue more than anything else.

The bourgeoisie’s attacks on our class are both extremely frequent and extremely depraved, and the proletariat is aware of these attacks and generally feels outrage about them. Every time the bourgeoisie attacks our class, whether it affects millions of people (like in the case of overturning Roe v. Wade) or just one (like a police murder), whether it happens in the courthouses, in the media, or in the street, it presents us with an opportunity to get the proletariat into political motion and take a stand alongside them. But over and over again, we fail to seize on these opportunities. Beyond not being moved to seize on the moment due to emotional detachment and desensitization, beyond any operational or logistical concerns we might point to, I believe there’s something still deeper happening among us.

We know deep down that if we jump on these opportunities to wage class struggle and, through that struggle, make a leap in our work, our work will get harder. we’ll have more people under our leadership, we’ll be in a position to step into even bigger battles, and that means more responsibility and even more struggle. We also know that the more we wage class struggle and the more we advance our work—the more we win—the worse the threat (and reality) of state repression will become. We realize subconsciously, in these moments where we have the opportunity to decisively choose the path toward revolution, what lays ahead of us on that path, and we choose subconsciously to take the easier path, the path of less resistance, the path of tolling the bell.

Our reluctance to initiate class struggle creates a downward spiral where the more we choose not to wage class struggle, the less empowered or prepared we feel to do so. Furthermore, when we have faced repression, we’ve been reluctant in the past to respond to that repression by heightening the struggle—or, at worst, we’ve sometimes abdicated the responsibility to respond entirely. I was a major part of the problem in one case of this. I took the wrong line, and argued against fighting back against repression we had faced, and I saw firsthand how that decision dealt a blow to our mass organizing effort that took over six months to recover from.

How can we ask the masses, or anyone at all, to trust us to lead them in struggle against the forces of capitalism-imperialism if we can’t promise them that we’ll defend them when the repression inevitably comes down? And how could we make that promise to the masses in good faith, knowing that we haven’t even successfully defended ourselves when we’ve faced repression?

I was talking to a potential recruit recently, and one of the concerns they raised was: if I face state repression, what will the OCR do about it? If there’s a possibility that I end up going to jail for ten years, how can I be confident that my sacrifice will serve to advance the revolution, and that it won’t have been for nothing? They pointed out that, in the moment that one of our members faces something really serious, in the moment where we have to give 1000%, we won’t be ready if we haven’t already been giving 100% every time along the way that we or the masses have faced smaller-scale state repression. They expressed that our inability to meet state repression with even greater resistance has negatively impacted their confidence in our work overall—which I think is fair. And this is coming from someone who is very close to our work, so imagine how people who are just getting involved with us must feel?

Another detail I want to pull out about our relationship to repression is the class outlook that underlies the fear of winning. My experience in our public political work is that proletarians tend to be much more hesitant about getting involved with us in the first place due to fears of repression. They hear what we say and see where it’s going, and they know very well that what we do could lead them straight into police brutality, jail, or even an early death. They make the cost-benefit analysis of what they believe our work is capable of achieving vs. the potential consequences to their lives of being a part of it, and many times they decide that they’re better off steering clear. Petty-bourgeois people, on the other hand, tend to have a much easier time committing to activist organizing off the bat, because they don’t really understand the stakes on an epigenetic level. The problem is that when the time comes to go up against state repression, and shit starts to get serious, that’s the moment that people with this petty-bourgeois class outlook realize that they don’t actually want to take all that heat, and will (usually subconsciously, which can make it even more damaging) steer our work away from class struggle.

So this is the “fear of winning” cycle: we shy away from stepping out and doing things that would invite repression, and when we face repression, we shy away from meeting it with greater resistance, because we know that that would invite even more repression in turn.

Like I said at the beginning of this section, the masses are subject to constant, ongoing, brutal, and depraved attacks from the ruling class. If we don’t love the masses so deeply that we’re willing to throw ourselves into the path of those attacks, knowing that it has to get worse for us before it can get better for everyone—in other words, if we love our own comfort more than we love the masses—we have no right to call ourselves revolutionaries.

Our discipline and relentlessness

In the morning, I wake up to the rhythm of someone hammering on metal. When I go outside I find some squad members squatting in a circle making grenades. One person is cutting and carving small wooden pins; someone else is hammering away, breaking up a piece of heavy metal into small pieces of shrapnel. Another guerrilla is assembling the parts and adjusting the triggering mechanisms. The People’s Army has very few modern rifles—most of the guerrillas I have seen are armed with old muskets—so they have to rely on their khukuries, homemade hand grenades, and land mines.

Traveling and living with guerrillas is giving me a real sense of what their day-to-day life is like. They are constantly on the move, traveling for hours, mostly during the night. The squad gets support from villagers but they are also self-reliant. When we come into a village the squad gathers firewood and fetches water and they try to carry their own rice with them instead of always eating grains provided by the peasants. They seem to be on good terms with villagers, treating them with respect, and don’t take advantage of their hospitality. They’re always trying to engage people in political discussion about the aims and goals of the People’s War and telling them news about what’s happening in the war.

– Li Onesto, Dispatches from the People’s War in Nepal (2005)

Hard work is like a load placed before us, challenging us to shoulder it. Some loads are light, some heavy. Some people prefer the light to the heavy; they pick the light and shove the heavy on to others. That is not a good attitude. Some comrades are different; they leave ease and comfort to others and take the heavy loads themselves; they are the first to bear hardships, the last to enjoy comforts. They are good comrades. We should all learn from their communist spirit.

– Mao Zedong, On the Chungking Negotiations (1945)

For us to become a vanguard party, and for us to be serious about what it will take to initiate and spread a revolution in the US, there is a set of traits and habits we will have to cultivate in our political work and personal lives. The purpose isn’t self-improvement, but rather to live up to our collective responsibility to the masses to wipe “United States” off the world map.

When you read anecdotes of communists in the midst of people’s wars, you get a sense of the discipline, selflessness, and tirelessness among cadre who won respect (and recruits) among the masses. These traits were part of what catapulted them to momentous victories. In Li Onesto’s travels throughout Nepal during the people’s war that started in 1996, she joined members of the People’s Liberation Army in 10+ hour hikes through the tallest mountains in the world in the middle of the night, without any flashlights and at a breakneck pace to avoid detection. During the Long March, communists in China’s Red Army escaped annihilation by marching for over a year, traveling about 5,000 miles, or twice the width of the US. They averaged 24 miles of marching per day, with the majority of days they weren’t marching spent fighting in skirmishes with the Guomindang. In tsarist Russia, Bolsheviks spent years underground conducting clandestine work and facing the constant threat of imprisonmnent and exile. At times they had to endure starvation to maintain security measures. In the decades after the victories of revolutions in China and the Soviet Union, millions of people mobilized to embark on socialist construction, amassing countless hours of hard struggle and harsh life conditions to build new societies.

What’s most important to pull from these remarkable physical feats is recognizing the depth of dedication and sacrifice it will take to seize power in this country, which starts today with all of us, not at the initiation of armed struggle. The stakes of armed conflict enforced discipline and focus in each of these past revolutions. In people’s wars, to be lax or reckless with security, or to loosely carry out an ambush, has immediate deadly consequences. Our stakes are no less life-or-death when we consider the ongoing daily death toll of US imperialism and all imperialism around the world.

In contrast to the people we look to in our tradition, our political work has often been held back by a thorny persistence of laxity and lack of discipline. This has included loosely-organized outings to the masses and demonstrations in which we’re reliably late, ill-prepared, and not taking seriously the work that needs to come after. This has hampered strategic advances and recruitment.

We’ve spilled lots of ink criticizing and trying to correct this laxity; to quote an internal paper from December 2024:

Since August, our Organization in [city redacted] has been plagued by significant disunity with and lack of confidence in our line. This is not expressed by way of a consciously articulated oppositional (revisionist) line, but mainly by lots of feet dragging, failure to take initiative, lackadaisical, uninspired going through the motions, being intimidated by Leftist and postmodernist lines (or not wanting to contend with them), and the creeping in of a corrosive culture of liberalism in how we carry out our political work that has infected people under our leadership, though there have been arguments against our line—internally and externally—here and there by some comrades. Flowing from this disunity and lack of confidence, there has been substantial reneging on our responsibilities to the masses, to the people under our leadership, and to our own comrades, and breakdown of accountability.

Where this characterization focuses on disunity and lack of confidence in our political line, it also gets at the methods of work symptomatic of the deeper problems, which were later summed up as three “I’m okay with’s” in an internal paper:

I’m okay with not getting a task done
I’m okay with mediocrity in our work
I’m okay with plans and practice that don’t go anywhere, that don’t achieve results

I quote extensively here to highlight how we’ve begun to address the deeper problems first raised in December, but we need to go further to rip up the roots and turn over the soil in part by fighting to overcome our worst work habits.

Wrapped up within the lack of discipline is a failure to recognize the pernicious consequences if we allow it to persist. We are not proving ourselves serious enough to the masses we’re meeting and working with. This is evident when people don’t return our calls or don’t show up to things they say they’ll be at. Beyond the broader lack of social commitment, and any chaos or difficulty those people have in their lives, I think a significant cause is also that people aren’t taking us seriously and don’t see how we’re going to get anywhere with what we’re calling on them to do. We all know the look when someone is sizing us up with skepticism. The masses can smell any hint of a lack of seriousness from any activist type who isn’t for real about the ideas they’re putting down.

All that in mind, I wanted to put down some thoughts for how we can start operating more as communists living up to the name, while also being frank that I’ve been at fault for all the mistakes listed in this document and have struggled to live up to the standards I’m arguing for.

Our reliability must also be our strength¹

In simple terms, we need to be able to count on each other more. To hit our deadlines. To follow through on the tasks we commit ourselves to. To maintain our commitments to masses we are close with. And to fight to advance the class struggle rather than balk at the challenges before us.

The corrosive effect of unreliability is how it seeps across our units and activist organizations. We set the precedent that it’s okay to not carry out a plan to the best of our ability, which spreads like a virus. We allow very real obstacles to slip into excuse-making. Where I’m based, we let the dysfunctional transit system be an excuse for being late to things that are important, rather than baking in some buffer. For the the people involved in our work who are stepping up, we are setting negative examples that we don’t have to be about what we’re putting down regarding our methods of work, whether that’s 18+ months without consistent summations, ditching collective plans soon after setting them, or backing down from chances to wage struggle with the masses.

Our word needs to count for something. We shouldn’t commit to a task when it’s unreasonable for us to get it done. Better to not commit than to set a near-weekly precedent of not doing the things we say we’re going to. And better yet, we should set impressive standards of commitment and follow-through for the people around us, as models of how people should relate to each other and our political work in a future society. People should see us coming prepared with meeting agendas and outing plans. They should see us tirelessly making efforts to bring the masses into our areas of work, with commitments to them coming above all else. We should have diligently organized stacks of materials, and not just rely on the uber-organized people to have everyone covered. Don’t ever get caught not having an OCR Manifesto when you need one.

Operationally and politically, the people around us and our comrades should be able to rely on us individually for being prepared, being on time, and being ready to throw down. Anything less is a failure to live up to our Membership Constitution and our tradition.

Our divisions of labor are not suggestions

Through periods of dysfunction and disunity, we’ve often moved frantically from one responsibility to another in our day-to-day. We’ve let spontaneity reign by involving too many people for things like weighing in on minor decisions, or reviewing a piece of writing. I’m not discouraging this when it’s actually important to involve others or have an extra set of eyes, but too often we seem to let things that can be handled by others suck in extra people and extra hours of discussion.

Recently in my city, we’ve wasted at least a dozen hours across two weeks debating what texts to use for an upcoming public reading discussion, allowing a crazy level of democracy get in the way of settling on a plan for a reading discussion. In another example preceding that, three of us had set plans for a public meeting, but after we set the plans, two people involved themselves to rewrite the meeting agenda. This led to hours more of debate and frustration over individual calls and group texts, only for the public meeting to play out similar to how we had originally outlined.

The point here is how straying from our established division of labor—the collective plan we’ve set for who is working on what—can quickly devolve into wasting time, especially over lower stakes tasks. There are those of us who have proven to be control freaks at times (…me), and we have to instead discern when our intervention is needed versus when we should step back to allow mistakes to be made and lessons learned. We must also encourage people to work independently where it makes sense, challenging them to think on their feet and have some grit to sort through problems without relying too heavily on those in leadership (while not abandoning them entirely).

At its worst, a breakdown of our division of labor is a breakdown in democratic centralist functioning. To swing into contributing to other areas of work, time after time at the expense of our other commitments, is to abandon our post. It’s not to say we shouldn’t be available and offering help to our people, but we must recognize when we consistently prioritize helpfulness and availability over our plans. Stick to the DOL, and stick to our plans.

Smartphones and algorithms are counterrevolutionary

We face the unenviable challenges of trying to get people to do shit about oppression in the era of the lowest attention spans and the lowest level of social commitments in the history of the human species (probably). Our devices, and screens in general, are a near-endless barrage of distractions and black holes of wasted time, and they directly cause depression, anxiety, avoidance, and terrible sleep. They pull us from having time for home-cooked meals, from calling and meeting up with people, from exercising, and from daydreaming.

It’s worth giving serious thought to the aggregate effects of screens and time spent on them. We collectively spend hundreds of hours a week in group chats and on social media. From what I can tell, we spend less time in sum reading books, writing articles for the one communist journal we have in this country, and even shooting the shit with the masses than we do on our phones. If your screen time was 5 hours per day in a week, that’s 76 days spent on your phone over the course of a year.

The tech bourgeoisie has colonized our neurotransmitters, and short of throwing our devices into sewers, we have to learn how to maintain or regain control over our attention spans and daily routines. As a matter of individual discipline, if we’re not getting assignments done because we’re distracted by text messages and Instagram notifications, we have to get it together. We should recognize the impulse of picking up the phone and lingering on our phone is feeding into a spontaneity where we’re beholden to algorithms more than we are committed to our responsibilities.

Beyond smartphones, managing diversions more generally is essential to advancing our work. We face crazy fires to try to put out almost every day. Many of our people are facing homelessness, don’t have money or consistent jobs, have recurring health crises, are lacking emotional support, or some combination of each of these. Stepping up to help people in these situations is commendable, but if we’re not careful, we can get in the habit of moving frantically each week to try to put out fires as they pop up, instead of staying above the fray at important moments to recognize how we need to form up to take on what’s causing the fires in the first place.

The takeaway here shouldn’t be simple as just watching your screen time, but to see how the tech bourgeoisie has cooked up and commodified distractions into insanely effective counterinsurgent measures. To someday spark mass rebellion against the tech addiction that we all see as turning us into goldfish, we have to first overcome the impulses ourselves and demonstrate a higher level of daily functioning. Shit, get a flip phone if that’s what it’ll take.

Being tireless and relentless with a good sleep schedule

We shouldn’t treat the tireless and relentless characteristics that we need as more quantitative things than as qualities in our consciousness. The hours we spend doing all our stuff certainly play a decisive role in making things happen. And at the risk of sounding really fucking mechanical in a Soviet way, it will take billions of hours of work and struggle to establish a communist society and vanquish capitalism.

But when we consider how revolution and communism come about, it won’t be from mere hours of inputs and outputs. It will be through the dynamism and ingenuity of individuals, moving together, consciously, with plenty of critical thought and study, careful assessments of how to stay the path, and, most importantly, an ideology at our core that functions like a fusion reactor—turning ideas and desires and motivations into recurrent waves of action, wholes that are more than the sums of their parts, outputs that revisionist Soviet economists couldn’t fathom.

How communists and revolutionaries have withstood the hardest challenges, like torture, isolation, and betrayal, has come through a stubborn and unwavering commitment to our ideas and vision for a better society. Our challenges today can feel small-time, whether it’s struggling it out for the 50^th time about why we shouldn’t blame migrants or other oppressed people, or why politicians won’t get us anywhere. We’ve recently assessed in my city how we’ve become too desensitized to the oppression and indignities the masses face, or the various ideas and outlooks they share, evident in impatience or apathy we’ve shown towards people we’ve met or even who we work closely with. We correctly pinned down how this has ideological roots, and it’s something for which there isn’t just a set of work habits that will help us overcome. We can recite Mao quotes about the masses like a good Catholic recites the Hail Mary during a Rosary, but we need to feel the weight of the ideas we’re encountering and revisiting, rather than allowing them to pass through our psyche like a phone notification.

We are fighting for a revolution. We need to carry that every day across every task and meeting and collective action. We want the dying and the generations of half-butchered lives to stop. Our commitment to the masses can only be replenished by struggling alongside them, and by having a deep empathy for what they must endure.

How we exhibit this tirelessness comes through in the aggregate of many small things done well. It could mean:

double checking our work every time
pausing to think through a decision instead of going along with something uncritically
spending extra time on the phone or in person with someone to try to spark an ideological leap
being painfully aware of when you’ve made a mistake a second or third time, and vowing that this will be the last time
taking the time to correct the mistakes of others with patience instead of taking over ourselves or letting the mistakes rock
thinking creatively to make our systems or approaches to different things stronger
studying closely the work of all of our comrades to identify weaknesses and learn from the strengths
reading the revolutionary texts on our bookshelves that are collecting dust with unbent spines
learning new languages the masses speak through self- and collective study

There aren’t hours in the day to do all of these things on top of our other political work, and our day jobs, and to spend time with loved ones. It can seem impossible when you factor in trying to get the sleep we all need and not eating takeout for every single meal. There will always be sacrifices and trade-offs. But we also need to function as people in our personal lives and in our personal commitments to be able to follow through on our commitments to the masses.

The flipside of making the effort to be tireless is clearly worse, where we have a malaise to how we approach our work, or capitulate to the difficulty of setting good habits and routines in favor of letting vices stick. This is letting individualism win out.

A document alone won’t overcome our challenges in carrying ourselves with more discipline. As we’re all aware, it will take conscious efforts to transform and remold ourselves as individuals, and for us all to offer criticism and support to each other when we’re lagging.

1A corollary to our mantra, “Our collectivity is our strength.”

Round 2

“I think that speaks to the dog”: Taking initiative in our work among the masses

There are two aspects to taking initiative in our work among the masses:

Seeing opportunities
Taking them

To the former: seeing opportunities.

Contradiction is the motor that pushes our work forward. We can identify opportunities to make advances in our work by considering every side of a given situation; understanding that situation in the context of the big picture, where we are makers of revolution before anything else; and adjusting our strategy accordingly to push forward the positive aspect of every contradiction and have the biggest possible impact at any moment.

What does it mean to consider every side of a situation rather than seeing it one-sidedly?

Say some comrades try taking out a new flyer in a neighborhood that they’ve identified as a potential site for mass struggle, and the masses have a lukewarm or even negative response. Seeing this situation one-sidedly would mean to focus on the negative aspect: that the masses didn’t care much about what we had to say, or didn’t agree with us. This one-sided view can lead the comrades to draw incorrect conclusions (“we thought this neighborhood had revolutionary potential, but we were wrong”) and become demoralized (“the masses don’t care about what we have to say”).

Seeing all sides of the situation would mean seeing the negative aspect in addition to the positive aspect, being that we’ve gained information and experience that can propel us into a better position to make more successful efforts in the future. Holding both the negative aspect (the reaction of the masses) and the positive aspect (the information we gained as a result) is what allows us to draw correct conclusions: “X is holding Y group back from uniting with what we’re saying, so we need to either find a way to overcome X or find a more receptive group of people than Y”; “When I said Z it didn’t resonate with people, but someone I spoke to said Z more sharply, so I’ll try saying it that way instead next time”.

We can see how moving through contradictions allows us to make advances in our work by looking at the path that one group of activists has followed in their work at a correctional facility:

The primary contradiction and the starting point for initiating an effort is between the repressive state apparatus and the surplus population being subjected to repression that is ripe for rebellion: also known as mass incarceration. We have some previous experience intervening in this contradiction, which taught us that when it comes to police brutality, impacted family members are a group of people worth organizing, because they’re already in sharper conflict with the state than almost anyone else.
So the activists began with outreach to family members of the people incarcerated at the correctional facility. A new contradiction emerged: these family members were being held back by fears of repression, both against themselves (and they have lives to live, and plenty to lose) and against their loved ones inside.
The activists had to resolve this contradiction, so they decided to start trying to reach inmates directly, through their family members on the outside, on the hunch that inmates wouldn’t be held back by the same fears as their families, and that their participation could help move their family members. They reached out to inmates about the conditions in the correctional facility, and offered court support or political support around inmates’ individual cases. Then the next contradiction emerged. The activists were putting the outside in leadership over the inside, so to speak, spending more time talking to families on the outside than inmates, and catering the content of their propaganda to the issues and concerns of family members, but this was in contradiction with the reality of the situation, which was that the inside was leading the outside, both politically and organizationally. Inmates had sharper political concerns than their families and more experience leading collective struggles such as hunger strikes.
The activists again changed tack and switched from propaganda focusing on conditions inside and news from outside to writing about ideological and political themes. Inmates started stepping forward, reading about and discussing communism and revolution, and calling for action. This pivot led to a major advance in the activists’ work at this correctional facility: namely, a successful protest inside (in addition to the circulation of communist propaganda inside, which is definitely an advance in its own right). The next contradiction that emerged from this step forward is that they may have bent the stick too far in the direction of inside organizing, to the point of neglecting their efforts with families outside.
In order to resolve this, their next step will be to double down on the outside organizing, hopefully leveraging the advances they’ve made inside to make advances outside, too. and so on.

I hope this example makes clear what it means to analyze the contradictions in every situation, and use those contradictions as a motor to propel our work forward. Every area of work consists of a massive web of contradictions, and every move we make to affect one contradiction will lead to other changes rippling across that web. We need to be sharp in our analysis of the contradictions, develop hypotheses about how we can push forward the positive aspects of each, decisively test the correctness of those hypotheses, and learn from our successes and failures to develop more accurate hypotheses in the future. This is essentially the four-step method, and this group of activists’ initial advances are proof that this method works if we apply it correctly and with enthusiasm!!

To the latter: taking them.

Taking initiative in our mass work means, first and foremost, cultivating and harnessing the initiative of the masses. Too often we get stuck spinning our wheels, trying to come up with ideas in our minds and carry them out among the masses, and it usually doesn’t end well for us: either we lose steam and eventually let down the people we had made big promises to, because we set up our initiative, independent of the initiative of the masses, to be the central driving force, or the masses never really take our idea up in the first place. (It might be safer and more comfortable for us when we’re squarely in control of the pace and direction of our work, but that doesn’t lead to good work.)

We need to be dogged about looking for new opportunities to foment struggle, jumping on news stories, finding the people who want to fight, following up persistently with those people, identifying targets (class enemies or petty tyrants and anyone in between who the masses can be mobilized against) and going after them (politically, of course).

At the same time, we can’t sustain that doggedness all on our own. As we make advances and face setbacks, the objective situation and our subjective forces change, and this all poses challenges to the dog in us that can only be overcome through relying on the initiative of the masses.

We’ve discussed the fear of winning in previous papers. One of the activists mentioned above rightly pointed out that if comrades are afraid of things getting bigger because we might not be able to “handle” it, that’s a sign that we’re not putting enough in others’ hands in the first place. We can try to instill bravery through our own actions and through proving to the masses that we’ll back them up, but at the end of the day, it’s up to the masses to actually do it. This is especially apparent in a setting like a correctional facility, because activists actually can’t get inside to make a protest happen—inmates have to make these things happen themselves.

Another thing holding many of us back is the fear of losing: we’re afraid that if we try something and it doesn’t work, we’ll be letting the masses down, or even that it will turn them against us. But we need to trust that the masses can see the big picture just as well as we can, and that they won’t feel betrayed by us if we can’t solve their immediate problems, because we’ve won them over to understand (or they already did understand) that these problems can’t actually be solved short of a revolution.

In all the work we do, we have certain immediate demands, such as jailing violent agents of the repressive state apparatuses. However, we can’t get caught up in the immediate demands without seeing the dual reason we fight for them in the first place, which is (1) to get the demands met, and (2) to win people over to our line, get them into motion, and get them leading others. If we fail to get any given immediate demands met (for example, if a killer cop gets acquitted), but we’ve built a solid relationship with someone and won them over to being more partisan to us through the fight for those demands, it would be one-sided and frankly delusional to call that struggle a failure.

In fact, we need to be upfront with people that fighting with us could always make their immediate problems worse. When we see the masses as the true makers of history, we realize that there’s no need to manipulate people into seeing the need for mass struggle and for revolution, and making promises that we might not be able to keep around people’s immediate demands is more likely than anything to lead to people feeling betrayed or wronged by us if we can’t win the immediate demands. Another way to mitigate the demoralizing effect of failing to win immediate demands is by showing people that we care about them and their well-being, so that the people around us will say proudly “I love these people for always sticking by me,” even when we try things that don’t work.

In other words, when we’re honest with the masses, when we show dedication to and love for the masses, and when we trust the masses, we have no reason to be afraid of taking initiative and failing. As one activist said, “failure doesn’t exist, it’s another contradiction that opens things up.”

Woofasté (the dog in me recognizes the dog in you)

We’re all a little fucking insane for doing what we do, and I don’t see any point in the sacrifices we’ve all made personally if we’re not going to take this all the way. When we fail to be dogged in our mass organizing efforts, we cut ourselves off at the knees.

Why do we do any of this? It’s to bring forward a revolutionary people.

So if there’s chances to do that, we should take them!

Where activist organizations fit into our overall strategy

We started activist organizations under our leadership as a way to take people in their twenties attracted to revolutionary politics and/or with a desire to go to the masses and give them training while leading them in waging struggle against the enemy and mobilizing the masses in that struggle—nothing more, nothing less. We didn’t start a “communist” organization for those twenty-somethings because being a communist is something you have to become, not declare, and because people with little experience shouldn’t be proclaiming themselves any kind of vanguard force. Developing mass organizations and recruiting proletarians as communist cadre are great things for activists under our leadership to aspire to, but they’re really the responsibility of the OCR and our cadre, not the activist organizations as such (which also explains why we don’t yet have many successes at developing mass organizations and recruiting proletarians as communist cadre). What we should expect of activists under our leadership is that they dive into struggle and get to know the masses, gaining lots of different experiences in the process, not that they develop solid and successful mass organizing campaigns in their first year.

That activist organizations have been the vehicle for our best practical efforts is a testament to some of the people in them becoming communists and those activist organizations attracting better waves of activists over time. It’s also a sign of our weaknesses. On the latter:

We have yet to develop mass organizations that can “stand on their own,” in the sense of being organizationally anchored and practically led by people brought forward through them and in the sense of not yet having recruited cadre from among the proletarians we’ve met with through our mass organizing efforts.
Some of our cadre have sunk their identities into activist organizations under our leadership in the wrong ways, holding the reins tightly and holding back the new waves of activists from taking the reins, treating activist organizations under our leadership as substitutes for the OCR, and viewing revolutionary strategy purely through the prism of those activist organizations’ politics and work.

Our cadre need to start treating the activist organizations under our leadership as we intended them to be: vehicles for people in their twenties attracted to revolutionary politics and with a desire to go to the masses to go to the masses under our leadership and contribute to fomenting class struggle. Our cadre who’ve been in activist organizations under our leadership need to either be pursuing “exit strategies” for themselves—handing over those activist organizations to new layers of activists so that they can focus on things like recruiting proletarians into the OCR, building mass organizations of proletarians, developing leaders on different fronts, and taking up tasks we’re not yet doing—or becoming Party leadership for activist organizations under our leadership. If you’re not already thinking about that, you’re not thinking like a communist. You’re not thinking about an overall revolutionary strategy, the overall subjective forces for revolution, the many tasks that a vanguard party has to take up, of which activist organizations under our leadership are only one part. An important part in the beginning of our development, but a part that must have less proportional weight as we bring forward proletarians as communists and mass leaders and as we move towards developing a vanguard party.

A symptom of this problem is that the proletarians we’ve brought forward as activists and mass leaders—and while it’s a small number, it’s a qualitatively significant one—have mostly just wanted to join activist organizations under our leadership rather than become the leaders and anchors of mass organizations of proletarians, and become OCR cadre. This means that we’re mostly limiting our ideological, political, and organizational work with such proletarians to the limited horizons of activist organizations. We’re hiding our association with the OCR from them, despite working with them for months or even more than a year—this is simply dishonest. In many cases, we haven’t done the obvious and read and discussed the OCR document “All roads lead to revolution” with them. And we haven’t made the challenge to them to think about the overall subjective forces for revolution and what they can uniquely contribute to developing them that a twenty-something activist, usually from a petty-bourgeois class background, cannot.

If we think that advancing our overall work mainly means building the activist organizations under our leadership and their work, rather than those activist organizations being eclipsed by other, more proletarian organizational forms, then we’re not thinking like communists, and are out of sync with the strategy put forward in our Manifesto and in our training manuals. And we’re—not coincidentally—neglecting ideological work, the basic course, using our pamphlets (and writing new ones!), and expanding our reach into and knowledge of the proletariat.

Some questions to help think about whether we’re relating to the masses as communists, or merely as members of activist organizations under our leadership: Do the masses you’re working with know that there’s a communist-led revolutionary armed struggle in India? If not, why not when there’s been a pamphlet about it out since May 1, 2025? Do they know about all the different spheres of our work, or just what the activist organization you’re a part of is doing? Do they feel the same passion for Palestine they feel for the struggle they’re involved in? Do they ask you questions—about politics, about struggles around the world, about spheres of our work they’re not involved with—that aren’t related to what we’re working on with them? Are they familiar with our literature? Do they know that what you’re doing is based on what our literature puts forward? Do you see our literature as purely for activists and intellectuals from mostly petty-bourgeois backgrounds, or something also for advanced proletarians (and, in the case of the pamphlets, the masses more broadly)? Have you been thinking about how advanced proletarians can take the reins of proletarian mass organizations, and are you working towards that goal? Do the masses you work with think that you’re a member of the OCR? Has the idea of “but what about clandestinity?” crossed your mind when contemplating any of the above questions (especially the last one)? If so, there’s a “Party” in Canada you can join.

That said, building activist organizations under our leadership, their role in training people in their twenties in revolutionary politics, getting to know the masses, and leading mass struggle, and the contributions of activist organizations under our leadership to our revolutionary strategy as frontline vehicles for fomenting class struggle make them important organizational vehicles in their own right. (Pause for a second and consider why the term “organizational vehicle” is being used rather than just “organization” (and definitely not “org,” of course)). Therefore, the OCR needs to give activist organizations under our leadership their due attention and come up with a plan for what role they will play in future, and what role our cadre will play within them. The latter will likely look like:

Some of our cadre continuing to carry out much of their political work through activist organizations under our leadership, but handing the reins of those organizations over to the newer crop of activists. Those cadre should be focusing on recruiting those activists and proletarians into the OCR and developing mass organizations among the proletariat.
Some of our cadre will become specialists and leaders in specific spheres of work from the perspective of the OCR’s full politics and strategy and use activist organizations under our leadership and other organizational forms as political and organizational vehicles for carrying out that work.
Other cadre will be reassigned to other tasks, sometimes naturally flowing out of their previous role in activist organizations under our leadership (for example, giving leadership and training to proletarians brought forward through their work) and other times in order to take up important tasks we’re not currently carrying out.

If you’ve been operating in activist organizations under our leadership as your principal political work for a while, you should consider how your role should change, whether your sense of identity is wrapped up with those activist organizations in the wrong ways, and whether you’re thinking, like a communist, from the perspective of our overall revolutionary strategy or from the perspective of an activist organization’s politics. Activist organizations under our leadership are not and cannot become the vanguard party; the OCR can. Let’s stop trying to substitute activist organizations for the vanguard, and let’s stop hiding our full communist politics from the masses. In the words of the Joan of Arc character in Schiller’s play Die Jungfrau von Orléans: “I may not come unless I bear my banner.”

Eradicate the Daleks¹

From: the censorship department

This “internal bulletin” from the censorship department is likely a one-off, joking way of making a serious point. We don’t actually have a censorship department (or any departments, for that matter), though leadership does have to step in at times and insist a social media post or a flyer be taken down or changed to eliminate Leftist language and politics, or simply a wrong line, from being articulated by organizational forms under our leadership. Another (related, in a dialectical unity of opposites way) problem is that sometimes things that were written by leading/advanced members of our organization have been blocked from being published or altered (“edited”) by others in ways that made them worse.

Those instances of literal censorship aside, the purpose of this “bulletin” is to get us thinking about the terminology and aesthetics we use and whether they’re in line with our ideology and politics and how we want to project that ideology and politics to the masses, or they’re stiff, stilted, culty, Leftist, posmo, etc. To put it another way: do we sound human, with the souls of real revolutionaries, or do we sound like Daleks? Here, we have to agree with the postmodernists that language is generative of ways of thinking. The terminology we choose is guided by, and trains us in, a world outlook and an attitude to the masses. And in the context of a tight-knit, communist organization, the common language we develop fosters a “normativity” (to go Foucauldian) that the people we bring around will pick up on, and, if they stick around us, likely get entrained in. With that in mind, here are a couple terms and an aesthetic that should be banned from the OCR, i.e., our members should not use them.

Mass contact. We’re not sure where this came from (it’s not in our mass organizing manual), but somehow it became part of the everyday lexicon of many of our comrades and it’s radiated out to activists under our leadership. What does calling someone a mass contact say about our relationship to them? Doesn’t it imply a separation between us and them, a class distinction, where we’re not part of or integrated with the masses? Isn’t it kinda weird to separate “mass” contacts from (non-mass?) contacts? How would your “mass contacts” feel if they knew you had a separation in your head between them and other contacts? Is this “mass contact” thing a Leftist way of thinking, a way of treating the masses like they’re pawns on our chessboard rather than the makers of history?

A related term that’s gotten thrown around more and more lately is “mass leader.” This is a term we use in our documents, so it doesn’t belong on the censored list. But many of our comrades have taken to calling any proletarian who’s involved in our work a “mass leader.” What makes someone a mass leader? This one has an easy answer: someone who is a leader of the masses. There are a few proletarians working with us who could rightfully be called mass leaders, even as their mass following isn’t particularly large right now. They’ve distinguished themselves as people who can speak in ways that resonate and turn heads, they’ve run mass meetings, they’ve put themselves out there publicly in class struggle, they can strategize the path forward in the struggle, and/or they know how to work a crowd (we need to add “they’ve written compelling agitation and propaganda” to that list). There’s also some of our cadre and activists who have done those things, and we can call them mass leaders, whatever their class background. The point here is that mass leaders are something the revolutionary movement needs, and needs in growing quantities. That’s all the more reason we shouldn’t just start calling any proletarian we’re working with a mass leader, but instead cultivate the kind of qualities that can make someone a mass leader.

Org (and its plural form, “orgs”). This is a 100% Leftist term, and can only mean a Leftist organization. It’s 100% part of the cultish way that Leftists talk and write. No one who’s not a Leftist would understand what the fuck you’re talking about if you say “org” when you’re having a conversation with them (without having to do a mental “oh that’s an abbreviation for organization”), whereas Leftists would immediately understand it to mean a Leftist organization.

We should avoid sounding culty and in-groupy, even when we’re talking among each other. We do need specialized terminology, such as proletariat, bourgeoisie, motions of capital, etc. Some of that specialized terminology should be reserved for when we’re having deeper theoretical discussions. Some of it we should make a point of popularizing among the masses (proletariat for sure), but to do that, we have to explain it and use it in ways that sound normal and natural. And sometimes it’s entirely appropriate, when speaking to or writing for a more general audience, to use some specialized terminology because it’s necessary, but in that case you have to explain it well. However, abbreviations like “org” and inappropriate use of specialized terminology separate us from the masses, and bring us into the Left, for Leftists are the people who would understand it. If a term or way of talking puts us within the cultish culture of the Left, it should make us so uncomfortable we can’t bear saying it or talking like that. Which brings us to:

Occupy Wall Street-style “people’s mic” chanting, where the chant leader says the first phrase of the chant, everyone repeats that first phrase, and then the chant leader says the second phrase and then everyone repeats the second phrase. Why should this be on the censored list? Why should our members be bound by democratic centralism not to chant this way?

Our Membership Constitution states that “Communists must respect people’s cultures, especially the cultures of oppressed people.” In the US, Black culture includes a rich tradition, by way of Africa, of “call and response” that permeates music, worship, social life, and (according to Samuel Floyd’s book The Power of Black Music) larger historical and ontological ways of being. Occupy Wall Street-style chanting goes against the aesthetic beauty and collective ownership involved in call-and-response phrasing and performance, and honkifies protest aesthetics. On style grounds alone, we should be embarrassed to be part of Occupy Wall Street-style chanting, and should view it as an affront to the masses, their culture, and their aesthetic capabilities (and note that while this style of chanting has made its way down to the masses, it’s not natural to proletarian masses who are going to protests for the first time).

If the cultural and style explanation isn’t sufficient for you, consider the political associations of Occupy Wall Street-chanting with:

direct democracy fetishization by the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie (which, in this case, ironically results in a sheepish follow-the-leader aesthetic)
capitulation to NYC’s law against the use of sound amplification, including bullhorns, at protests without a permit
the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie asserting its leadership over protest movements (no one chanted like that before Occupy Wall Street—and this we can assert as an absolute truth even though we don’t really believe in absolute truths).

So let’s reject the impact of Occupy Wall Street and the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie on protest aesthetics and insist that when chants need to be led, the chant leader does the “call” and everyone else does the “response” (like it was church), and that proletarian masses, who by and large have rhythm, are capable to chants with greater style, complexity, and syncopation. (On that last point, consider the way that Black Lives Matter changed the meaning of and honkified “We gonna be alright” by eliminating the syncopation and the ascending melodic inflection at the end.)

While the above “bans” might come off as a little petty (and maybe they are), the deeper problem being addressed here is that our members aren’t always thinking critically about language and stylistic choices, both the politics behind them and the aesthetics. Language and aesthetics, and social approbation for falling in line with them, are the principal ways that people learn Leftist and postmodernist politics—it’s damn sure not through practice, or even through contemplation of political theory. To defeat and destroy the Left and the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie, we need to puncture the uncritical, cultish manner in which people adopt their politics by way of terminological inundation and adoption (“the community,” “sex work is work,” “abolition,” “decolonize,” etc.) and force people to confront why they’re using the language and aesthetics they’re using, what class interests it serves, what view of the masses it articulates. If our own members aren’t thinking critically in this way, and, worse yet, are using Leftist and posmo language and aesthetics, we can’t expect others to make this break. Our members who are responsible for training people in our activist organizations should pay extra attention to this, not principally by way of censorship, but through explanation of why we don’t use certain words (usually best done by first asking people why they chose to write “org” or “the community”).

Beyond the corrective element here, as comrades do more writing and speaking (which we should all be doing!), it’s important to become more intentional (to intentionally use a word with a lot of posmo associations) about our word choices and formulations. Does what I’m saying or writing convey what I want it to? Do the word choices have associations or meanings I don’t want, and if so, what do I do about that?

One way to develop your ability to articulate communist politics (and no other politics) is to think critically about the word choices and formulations in our documents and in journal articles. Why do we capitalize Leftists when referring to Leftists in the US? Why do we hyphenate capitalism-imperialism? Why have we selectively used and reframed some posmo terminology? Why do we use formulations that put emphasis on subjective agency and avoid mechanical, determinist characterizations of cause and effect? How come, in contrast to the MLM tradition going back to Marx and Engels, we never use the term “laws” in the context of economic and historical materialist analysis? These and other questions are worth thinking about as you develop your own style of writing and speaking (which really should be your own style with your own unique voice, but without even a hint of non-communist ideology) and purge yourself of Leftist and posmo ways of writing and speaking, and the (often unconscious) ways of thinking behind them.

Eradicate the Daleks!

Down with Leftist lingo and (lack of) style!

Long live proletarian culture, slang, and style!

If the music ain’t a little lumpen, it ain’t bumpin’!

1For comrades who are not nerds or nerd-adjacent, the Daleks are alien robots in the British television series Doctor Who. Their mission is to wipe out humanity, and they speak in robot voices.

Purging ego

Being a communist means always staying humble and constantly learning from our mistakes and from the masses, including their criticisms of us. Ego, arrogance, and careerism have no place in a communist organization.

– Membership Constitution of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US)

At one protest recently, a communist was arguing it out so hard with the opportunists, and so much hate swelled up in them, that they got tunnel vision on fucking with this guy in particular. Their hate at the enemy was justified, and it’s commendable to tell enemies of the people to get lost. But the hate did not come from the need to accomplish our revolutionary objectives, but from an individual’s self-interest.

People who want to become communists almost never wake up in the morning and consciously decide to put their ego first. Yet, the people who dedicate their lives to make revolution and serve the people constantly find themselves tripping over their inflated heads, and picking up the pieces after making a mistake that was made out of selfishness.

There was one time where two comrades, one of them being me, disagreed over an issue so intensely that it became personal. Both people felt disrespected and began to make political decisions on that basis. Instead of ensuring that the masses were being led, and actually listening to each other’s criticisms, they made their self-respect their top concern. They wanted to dominate each other and prove they were the most superior. Because of this, they almost made setbacks in the struggle that would have taken months to recover from. There was another time when a group of comrades were making a political decision over something that affected them all individually. They started their reasoning by first wondering how it would impact them personally, and only after that did they consider how it would impact the struggle. It was only weeks after making these decisions that the comrades realized they were, regardless of intention, objectively acting like opportunists.

Class society so deeply penetrates every aspect of life that the class struggle literally plays out in our heads. Bourgeois ideas, habits, and ways of thinking are constantly battling it out with the communist world outlook. It makes sense that communists would, living in a class society, subconsciously choose to advance their position in society, or in their clique, at the expense of others. But revolutionaries do not have the luxury of making mistakes that take months or years to fix. And we cannot relax our revolutionary muscle so that bourgeois ways of thinking can become default again. What’s required, to accomplish our goals of overthrowing the most evil empire in human history, is to be very conscious and deliberate in our mindset, because this shit is real.

Lenin said that small-scale production engenders capitalism. To stress this point one-sidedly would be mechanical materialism. We must recognize that people’s thinking can just as easily lead to capitalism. In William Hinton’s 1972 book Turning Point in China, he quoted an American participant in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution who said:

It is impossible for things to go exactly straight. “Left” and right deviations of one kind and another are always cropping up and it is in the fight against these that one’s consciousness is raised. They occur in the revolution at large and also in our own thinking… The fight against the bourgeois ideas in our own heads, the fight against “self” is much the same. The “self” within us is like this omnipresent glue which persistently tries to twist each of our thoughts into something useful to it. Only by continuous struggle against this glue and constant vigilance as to its tricks can we ourselves keep moving forward on the road to revolution. The enemy knows very well it is the “self” in us which is our Achilles’ heel, and they will try in every way they can to use this “self” in us to trip us up and lead us astray. This is one of the big lessons I have learned in the Cultural Revolution. To rid ourselves of our own “self” is not merely our own personal task, but also our responsibility to the revolution… Wherever our subjective thinking starts from self-interest we are blind to the real objective world.

There are very few lines of work where people are consciously rejecting their bourgeois “self.” This is probably because putting ego in command is not so noticeable or impactful, unlike in the examples above. Stepping with ego is usually a series of hundreds of small decisions throughout the day, or at a meeting, or while in the streets. And the hundreds of thousands of individualist decisions we’ve all made throughout our lives have been rewarded by bourgeois society. The masses have learned, one way or another, that the only way to live a better life is to step over people, and communists are not immune to the effects of living in bourgeois society. We need to consciously reject these ingrained habits and demonstrate a different way of living life. Some examples of putting the struggle first, and ego second, could look like this:

Choosing to not hand wave away criticism, even if it’s wrong, because it hurts your feelings,
choosing to wage a political struggle, even if it’s “bad” for your individual interests,
not considering yourself a big bad communist leader like Lenin or Mao,
making “security” the number one priority when it doesn’t make sense, i.e., not cosplaying as ninjas (to the three letter agencies, the wannabe communist ninjas are their smallest concern, because they’re too busy thinking about themselves to actually do shit in IRL),
silencing the part of yourself that wants to act tough, macho, and show bravado,
accepting that you will die without a Wikipedia page written about you,
and remembering to tell yourself “damn I’m tripping right now.”

Does this mean that communists should lose their spines, not care about their self-respect, and allow themselves to be dominated by others, and even their close comrades? Does this mean that communists should allow themselves to get walked over, or that they should allow themselves to fall behind in the race? These objections and ways of thinking keep people trapped in the individualist framework. Unless communists realize that these questions have their roots in bourgeois logic, little progress can be made in rupturing with the ideological problem of putting ego in command. Bourgeois questions have bourgeois answers, and silly questions have silly answers. If comrades are not ready to get disrespected sometimes, and take a hit to their ego, they could surely not survive the greater challenges that the class struggle will throw at them. Getting rid of ego is only a small hurdle compared to the Sagarmatha¹-sized mountain of problems that are up ahead.

Putting ego in command is only one type of individualism. Another kind is putting others first. We have all known comrades who abandon critical tasks for advancing the revolution to help another person with their tasks. Another kind is to try to act so revolutionary, and be such a good little communist, that their activity becomes a self-serving, navel-gazing exercise of being the reddest in the room. What these problems have in common, whether it’s “me first” or “you first,” is that they don’t put revolution first. All of our reasoning must start from the question of “how is what I’m doing accomplishing our revolutionary objectives?” When decisions are made from this basis, we can be better protected against our individualist mistakes.

1Sagarmatha is the name for Mt. Everest in Nepal.

Round 3

We can’t make strides without four steps

For the most part, members of the OCR have a great dedication to doing a lot, spending countless hours taking our politics to the masses and organizing all kinds of different activities. If anything, we’ve had to struggle with our members to scale back the level of activity and attend to the tasks that feel less urgent but are no less essential, such as writing projects, spending time with our contacts in discussion without utilitarian purposes, doing prop sessions, or summing up our work and thinking through the next steps. Those tasks all fall on the consciousness end of what we do, and that’s the end that revisionists have always neglected, downplayed, and even ridiculed. The result of not doing the consciousness end of our work, or doing a lot of stuff without strategic thinking and consciousness guiding us, is always a lot of missteps. A telling example of this fact is that without exception, wherever our political work has faltered or failed, there was a lack of summation going into it.

We’re not alone in that problem. Even in Shanghai in the late 1960s, where the GPCR arguably went deepest in all of socialist China, leadership called attention to the lack of summation. On September 13, 1968, the Shanghai newspaper Wenhui Bao published the following admonishment:

Some comrades often neglect and slacken the seeking of advice and making of reports under the excuse of their being busily engaged in work. This is incorrect. Being busy is a normal phenomenon in revolution. It is precisely because we are busy and the work is complicated that we should all the more strengthen the system of seeking advice from and making reports to a higher authority. In this way, we can be busy without getting confused and we can do all our work in accordance with Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line.

Then the editorial concludes that “each report should be limited to 1,000 words or so” and, in special cases, “it should not exceed 2,000 words at the most.”¹ As we’ve said before, summations don’t need to be long, they just need to be done. Well, they should be done well too.

What makes a summation done well is when it gets at the contradictions involved in the political work in question. Summations are about critically analyzing our practice, and we need dialectics to do that. We need materialism too—an accounting of what’s been accomplished, including quantitatively. But we should avoid writing summations that are little more than “work reports,” recounting what has been done with little attempt to synthesize the lessons or think through the contradictions. If you’ve ever watched the movie Office Space, you know how oppressive and unproductive the mechanical practice of writing a report in order to check off a box and keep a higher authority off your back is. Summation should be among the most exciting things of our process, and it becomes that when we have a constant restlessness to figure out the challenges, an omnipresent critical spirit, a desire to synthesize what we’re learning for all our comrades’ benefit, a search for clarity about how we move forward, and a conquering spirit that insists we not leave the figuring out to someone else.

Our Organization’s obsession with summation is, among other things, a corrective to a lot of bad practice in the communist movement. On a deeper level, it’s an attempt to address the problem of separation between thinkers and doers that has dumbed down many communist parties and resulted in antagonistic class contradictions developing within the Party and between the Party and the masses in socialist societies. With that problem in mind, our Organization is committed to developing cadre who are critical thinkers able to function independently in their political work while (in a unity of opposites) being a part of a collective, democratic centralist structure in which “our work” is never our (or, more precisely, my) work. When we look at democratic centralism and our individual and collective roles that way, the purpose of writing summations is, in the following ranked order from first to last:

For the person writing the summation to theorize the practice and political work they are carrying out and/or that is under their leadership. The process of writing a summation forces us to assess our practice and methods, to engage in criticism/self-criticism, to think about what line is being carried out, to consider the results, and to figure out how to move things forward at a higher level from where we’re at.
For the broader collectivity responsible for the practice and political work being summed up, both members of the OCR and people under our leadership taking part in that work. Writing a summation, whether individually or collectively, is an important method of leadership, of arriving at a collective assessment of our work and struggling out questions of best methods. With people who are not in the OCR, we should be finding ways of sharing much of the content of our summations, even though that mostly means in conversations and oral prop sessions rather than disseminating written (internal) documents.
For higher leadership to learn from all our practice and political work as a whole, give critical feedback, and have a full picture of what our organization is doing. The back and forth between summations throughout the OCR and higher leadership is how we synthesize important lessons (best methods, the questions and mood of the masses, difficult challenges and contradictions, etc.) and share those lessons throughout the OCR and with the masses.

In other words, summation is about developing our individual and collective capacity—collective including the masses—to master all the challenges of making revolution.

That said, summations should give quantitative markers, and bimonthly unit summations in particular should start doing good accounting for what literature was distributed. And if some questions about organizational/logistical/detail matters need to be asked, it would be best for unit chairs to collect them all into a series of straightforward questions. An outline for a bimonthly unit report might look like:

literature distributed and any other straightforward quantitative data
any internal unit life that merits summation (a report on discussion of the shake-up documents, some life changes the unit members are making to better serve the revolution, etc.)
summing up the advanced and our ideological work with them: people we’re working with, recruitment prospects, recruitments in progress, conducting the basic course, etc.
as needed, 4-stepping specific campaigns or political work under the unit’s leadership in a way that doesn’t duplicate summations outside internal channels (or, alternatively, giving brief updates on internally relevant aspects)
if it doesn’t come through already, what we’re learning from the masses, what questions they’re asking us, etc.
if there’s any outstanding questions or little stuff remaining, compiling a list at the end is probably a good idea

But again, form should serve content, and the content should be focused on the contradictions.

If we’re doing the kind of summation we’ve been advocating since the summation manual came out years ago, we’ll be recognizing where there are problems and shortcomings in our work, and, more importantly, thinking through how to overcome them. Our plans will become much more grounded in the contradictions we’re confronting, and we’ll get much better at following through with our plans because we’ll get used to measuring our work by whether our plans succeeded or not. Moreover, sitting down to write a summation will have a ripple effect on the whole way we function, and we’ll become more critical, more relentless, more materialist, and more able to confront problems head on. We can’t make strides without four steps, we can’t skip over summation, if we expect to get anywhere in our work. And consistently practicing the 4-step method will get us thinking in terms of process and help us overcome static thinking, static thinking that makes us perceive contradictions as obstacles rather than engines for transformation.

1As quoted in Victor Nee, “Revolution and Bureaucracy: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution,” in China’s Uninterrupted Revolution, From 1840 to the Present, edited by Victor Nee and James (Pantheon Books, 1973), 389.

“Going to the masses” vs. going to the masses

Over the past several months I’ve had the privilege of being pretty much at the epicenter of the make-or-break internal struggle happening in the OCR as we attempt to reach the next phase of our existence. All of the writing, reading, and long meetings struggling out ideological questions has clarified a lot for me—where before I had instincts and intuition about what was happening and what we needed to do to advance, I now have a more hardened knowledge of our subjective conditions based on the data we’ve gathered and the hours on hours we spent analyzing it. So this paper will have some overlap with the other papers you’ve all received as I revisit some of the topics we talked about in the past in light of this new knowledge.

One of the things I’ve learned during this process is a different way of looking at the contradictions that held the OCR back during “Phase 2.” When we first began this process, one of the things we talked about (and this was also reported in an internal bulletin from OCR leadership) was that no two-line struggle had emerged in our organization, despite there being clear line disagreements among membership and even leadership. We identified breakdowns in democratic centralism, slow rolling of tasks, operational dysfunction due to personal difficulties, and a narrow focus on our respective spheres of work as some of the problems holding individuals back and therefore holding our organization back as a whole, but we didn’t have a systematic understanding of where those problems came from or why they were able to persist.

It became clear to the shake-up crew that these apparently minor but endemic issues actually were spillover from two lines contending within our organization: “going to the masses” vs. going to the masses.

There was a two-line struggle happening right under our noses, but none of us were really aware of it (and I think many of us still aren’t) because it wasn’t open—more on that later. The incorrect, revisionist line here is, “we go to the masses.” And I promise I’ll explain why, because I know that’s a big claim to make, especially against my own beloved comrades!—but first, let me paint the picture of where this line has taken the people who followed it.

Groundhog day-esque outings every week, that are essentially the same outing over and over again, with no advances being made over periods of months or even years.
Not summing up our failures to make advances, in effect abandoning our methods of work, while making the excuse that we’re too busy “going to the masses” to sum up.
Slinging mud at the Left, patting ourselves on the back because we’re “going to the masses” and they’re not, and feeling superior to them, even if we’re not really doing something better.
Expecting the masses to join in on these schemes that start and end with “we just need to get people together then something(???) will happen,” and when the masses see through that, becoming cynical about the potential of the masses, while continuing to go to them every week with a halfhearted pitch we don’t even really believe in ourselves.
Having dozens, even hundreds of surface-level conversations with the masses and only single-digit (if any) real relationships result from all that.
When our class is attacked, holding a routine outing or meeting to check the box of “we went to the masses about it,” rather than responding with a genuine political counterattack.
Carrying out almost all of our work (planning meetings, leading reading discussions, meeting up with contacts) without the direct involvement of the masses, beyond us repeating the advanced ideas we heard from the masses. For example, hearing “the police are the biggest gang in town” then going back out and saying that to people.

Sound familiar?

(I hope so, these are weaknesses we’ve spent a lot of time talking about over the past few months.)

The incorrect line that underlies these errors in our work is that our work starts and ends with “going to the masses.” The fact is, the motion itself isn’t enough, what matters is what we’re able to create with that motion. Or in other words, our primary task is making revolution. Going to the masses is a crucial component of that, but it’s still just one component of many at the end of the day.

I think the revisionist line took hold in our organization during phase two out of genuine necessity and usefulness. During phase two, our numbers were smaller, the Left was a much more direct existential threat to us, and we needed to draw a hard dividing line that would alienate the counterrevolutionaries among postmodernist activist crowd and challenge the best among that crowd to become revolutionaries. In that sense, this line served its purpose.

However, things (famously) become their opposites. Rather than continuing to push forward with making revolution when this line’s expiration date rolled around, many comrades clung to it and allowed it to drag them backward. Taking “we go to the masses” as dogma and carrying it out mechanically, over and over again, is more comfortable than making revolution. Talking politics with the masses is fun—personally, it always makes me feel better when I’m down. And it allows us to justify our feelings of superiority to other organized forces who hypocritically call themselves revolutionaries (the fact is, almost no one else will do even the shallowest of “going to the masses”; the bar is in hell) while at the same time allowing us to avoid having to continue down the terrifying path toward overcoming our personal and collective limitations, a process which Hegel described as “the spirit experiencing its own death,” in order to make revolution. It also allows us to remain safely in control because we never reach the point of putting things in the hands of the masses, and it allows us to be lazy in our work because we never reach the point of being truly responsible to the masses, who would undoubtedly demand more from us. So this line is rooted in a revisionist view of the masses that leads us to treat them either as window dressing or as receptacles for our politics, like we do during “going to the masses” outings, where we hand out flyers and debate a bunch of people we’ll never see again.

We never saw open two-line struggle within our organization where this line was fully articulated by the people pushing for it. Instead, many comrades were carrying out this line while professing to be following a different one, especially saying “the masses are the makers of history” while treating them like anything but that. It probably would have felt embarrassing to try to make the case that all the OCR has to do, in a neighborhood we’ve chosen to focus on, is go knock on doors once a week and put on an event once a quarter, and that we don’t need to worry about doing anything beyond that. So the people who were operating with this mindset obscured what was really going on by pointing to secondary factors (like life chaos, objective obstacles) other than the political line leading them as the cause of the errors and failures in their work. Many of us contributed to that misdirection, myself included, probably because we also didn’t want to face the strength of the hold that this revisionist line had over our organization and over our comrades.

But what’s more embarrassing than fighting for a bad line via principled two-line struggle? Carrying it out anyway but without having the courage to really stand on it.

Looking back, this organization-wide shake-up has been successful in pushing the new guard, and phase two recruits who were functioning well to begin with, to break away from the bad habits and ways of thinking that were holding them back, and make some really impressive leaps forward as individuals and as a collective. This was our hope going into the shake-up process, considering we were looking to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution for a model of how to advance in the face of internal contradictions, and in that sense I’m very proud of what we’ve all been able to accomplish. What the shake-up crew has struggled to do is to bring up the level of the older guard of the OCR, particularly those whose level of functioning was already low or degenerating before the shake-up. In other words, the sinking boats weren’t lifted with the rising tide in the way we’d hoped.

Pretty much all of the OCR’s members have been influenced by this “going to the masses” revisionist line to one degree or another. In particular, though, I suspect that a deeply-held commitment to the wrong line of “going to the masses” against the correct line of building the subjective forces and creating the objective conditions for revolution is a common denominator for many comrades who might be feeling lately like they’ve been left behind by our organization, or who are seeing themselves being rapidly outpaced by the new guard.

I’ve wrestled a lot with what to do to bring the comrades who are falling off back into the fold, and the only thing that occurs to me is that it’s not within my control—everyone has to make the choice themself between following the revolutionary line and the revisionist line. Anyone who just wants to “go to the masses” should just say that point blank and stand on it. There’s no shame in that, and we will always need people to do that, but we can’t allow this line to continue to have a foothold in our organization. The only resolution that I can see is, if you’re committed to “going to the masses” over going to the masses, you need to ask yourself whether you’re really on track to be communist cadre, to be the vanguard of the revolution. And if you’re already operating as a non-cadre activist or as an organized tie, then the primary contradiction to resolve here is between your operational and your formal role in this organization.

Death to the Get Real Brigade

Can we win over some of the most militant students in the Gaza protest movement by directly speaking to the most pressing questions holding back resistance? Get real.

With the (New) Communist Party of Canada fully embracing opportunism, can we launch a new journal when we have little experience in layout and publishing? Get real.

When dusty revisionists make baseless accusations against our political interventions, can we turn those around and knock those people on their asses? Get real.

These are all things that I’ve thought at various times in the last years, and certainly acted upon, even if they were the creeping thoughts in the back of my head. I’ve developed and practiced a kind of operational view and practice that the best we can accomplish in this thing of ours is assembling a crew of radical Maoist activists, going among the people, confronting the enemy, but not really moving beyond taking a moral stand against imperialism. At the junctures when we really had an opportunity to qualitatively advance our work, I’ve found myself blinking. Afraid of the consequences of winning, afraid of the responsibility, afraid of the confrontation, content with staying small and on the sidelines.

What I’m calling this phenomena, as it manifests in myself and I think in a few other experienced comrades, is the get-real brigade.¹ That is, even as our organization is starting to move beyond the last communist vanguard party in this country qualitatively and theoretically, there are a few of us with valuable past experience who are still operating as if we are some small potatoes thing trying to get its footing, not only being lapped by younger comrades, but also in some ways holding them back.

So let’s break it down: those of us who started the OCR bring previous experience and a lineage to the past that is valuable: the connections to revolutionary China, the legacy of proletarian militancy, the training in MLM. We also bring baggage: the weaknesses of our past training and our own trauma responses to our past experience, which included shitty methods of struggle and lack of strategic vision and horizon. Past bad experience of jumping from one effort to another with minimal summation and grand plans that never came to fruition while one-sidedly emphasizing the objective situation and downplaying the transformative role of the subjective factor naturally inculcated a kind of get real attitude that I know some of us, at least me, have stubbornly held onto.

The way this attitude manifests in me is in the acceptance of mediocrity and the unwillingness to push forward at key moments. On a psychological level, I’ve prioritized thinking about what can’t be done versus why things need to be done and how I can contribute and get collective support. When comrades asked me to contribute to figuring out how we could put together Going Against the Tide, my thoughts stayed on the difficulties, on the unknowns, on a fear of fucking it up, not on the absolutely essential role that a journal could play in training a new generation of communists. Contrast any of this thinking to the woofasté paper (“Taking initiative in our work among the masses”), to what’s being described in internal reports about the advances being made by our comrades in other cities, and it becomes all the more pathetic.

This get real attitude extends beyond the examples I’ve given here: Can we bring forward proletarians who are, at present, religious as communists? Is it right to take big personal risks to confront the enemy? Can we turn our prior political connections into serious donors and solid supporters? Can we resolve the real objective difficulties and logistical contradictions, or are we going to be slaves to them?

I think the answer to eradicating the get real brigade starts internally. We have to see ourselves as the dynamic makers of revolution that the OCR Membership Constitution calls us to be. We need to train ourselves to see contradictions all-sidedly, instead of focusing on the negative aspects. And frankly, if we can’t do that, we need to get out of the way of the comrades who are stepping forward. Ultimately, we need to grasp, internalize, and keep returning to the fact that consciousness is what guides material transformation. Our role in that can’t be fucking trudging along; it has to be more dynamic than that.

To the extent that every change is a result of both internal and external processes, we also need collectivity and criticism, without bogging down other comrades. I’m writing this in part to initiate that process of being accountable to the whole organization and asking for help in accountability. But also because I think the problem extends to some other comrades as well, and to challenge all of us to live up to our responsibility.

Death to the get real brigade!
Fear nothing, be down for the whole thing!

1Credit where credit is due to whoever originally coined this phrase.

On integrating with the masses

When I was recruited into our organization I remember being told I was someone who had already integrated with the masses, which surprised me because I didn’t do it intentionally or as a communist. Downward economic mobility and frankly some chaotic life choices had set me down in a proletarian neighborhood very different from my petty-bourgeois upbringing. But once I was there, I quickly put down roots because I realized I did not want to return to life in a social structure that was hostile to my neighbors, friends, and loved ones. On an emotional level that I would not have been able to articulate at the time, I decided that I was going to abandon the class I had been raised in.¹ The people around me were going to be “my people” now; I would take their side and not hold myself apart from any of our struggles. After several years, once I began the process of transforming into the kind of person who could honestly claim to be a communist, I started changing how I lived my life and related to my loved ones.

Before this, I still could have checked off every item listed in the paper “Shying away from class struggle” to illustrate what it looks/feels like to be integrated with the masses, but although I called myself interested in changing the world, I wasn’t really trying to do that. In hindsight, it’s like I thought loving and living with and among oppressed people, and working proletarian jobs, was a substitute for living with a purpose. At the same time, living this way and loving the people that I do is what drove me to become a communist and it’s what fuels me now. I look at the faces of the children in my life and I know that unless there is a fundamental overthrow of this empire, they will be condemned to brutal exploitation or cast off as surplus population to struggle and starve, and I can’t let that happen. At every funeral of a young person who should still fucking be here, I feel the urgency of the tasks we’ve all committed to, to change this world for real.

I definitely felt that urgency as a kid, in response to my own pain and the injustices I couldn’t help but witness, but even if you’re experiencing real injustice personally, the petty-bourgeois lifestyle trains you to become desensitized to it, at best to view it with detached concern. It took the intensity of being immersed in proletarian life to become alive to injustice again, to respond like a human. It took learning grit and determination from the people I came to love, especially the elders, to let go of my cynicism about whether change is really possible.

I’ve been thinking about comrades who might now be taking steps to intentionally integrate with the masses, and what might be helpful to hear. I thought about how petty-bourgeois behaviors get replicated across classes, particularly individualism and social isolation, and how we can fight this disconnection.

Most people in this nightmarish society are suffering from serious social isolation, including the proletariat. I know we’ve all talked to probably hundreds of masses at this point who lament the way everyone is so disconnected. When we take intentional steps to integrate with the masses, this is what we’re up against. If you get a low-wage job and act like all your coworkers act, that means you’ll likely clock in, do some work and engage in some interesting conversations, clock out, and go home to your private life, having earned some valuable experience, and having fulfilled the “I integrated with the masses today” mandate, but not actually having been changed by the experience or changing anyone else. We need to be more open to people than people generally are these days, and even in certain situations be the person who brings other people together, which might be a very different role and way of relating to people that you’ve ever had before, whether or not you come from a proletarian background.² We can learn a lot about how to do this from those elders who are still trying to hold their people together.

Another way I had to learn to live as a communist was by learning to draw a clear line between being down with people and crashing out. Getting sucked into the chaos that capitalism sows into the lives of the proletariat is real, and this is where I self-criticize that I have not historically had great boundaries there, and have involved my comrades in some hairy situations. My comrades here have suggested that I had a little bit of a “martyr complex,” and there are definitely times where I put my physical safety in danger unnecessarily. There was some survivor’s guilt at play here (why am I still alive when so many of my loved ones have died by violence or succumbed to drug addiction? Maybe it doesn’t matter if I live or die) and also some necessary sacrifices that I stand by (like having to move because I intervened in a violent situation and then began getting threats). However, we just cannot, on a personal basis, get sucked into substance abuse and crime, or allow our personal information (like where we live) to catch the attention of anyone who, for example, robs people or breaks into houses. The line I would draw here is that sometimes you become close with someone who is involved in some fucked up stuff, but by no means should you ever start doing the same fucked up stuff. If saying this seems extreme or unnecessary to say, I urge you to revisit the life stories of many 1960s revolutionaries and the ways that the enemy exploited their vulnerabilities.

We also have to practice revolutionary discipline, even when that looks like going home early to work on writing tasks, make phone calls, or just get enough sleep to be functional doing political work tomorrow. And from experience, people DO object to that. It’s strange behavior from someone who’s not in school, and it can seem like you’re setting yourself apart from people. I’ve had so many proletarian friends tell me I’ve changed, or express disappointment that I don’t have as much time to sit around smoking weed anymore, or that I always leave the function early, or that I’m not down to cruise around the city looking for ways to blow off steam. But it can have a powerful and positive effect if, for example, instead of saying, “I don’t smoke/drink anymore,” you explain “I’m not gonna smoke/drink right now cause I want to have a clear head for the meeting/action/street team tomorrow, I think it’s really important.”

I can think of a lot of concrete suggestions for opening up to people, really getting to know them, and holistically integrating into a new environment; previous papers have touched on some (ask people for help and advice, invite them to your home, volunteer to organize coffee hour or whatever at your place of worship). They’re all suggestions for fighting social isolation in general, and the fact that they come to mind when I’m thinking about integrating with the masses says to me that all of the above, and a large chunk of the shake-up papers we’ve discussed so far, speak to our need to rediscover, over and over, what it means to be human, to rebuild the human connections that capitalism robs from us.

1To clarify, I didn’t cut off my family or make any big performative gestures. By “abandoning” I mean that I dropped out of the life trajectory expected of someone from my class and social background.

2Note that I’m NOT saying you need to assert yourself as having experience that you don’t have, or even necessarily carry out political work in your workplace. If you’re trying to live life in an unfamiliar environment, you need to be humble. You also need to be yourself. If you’ve had markedly different life experiences than the people around you, don’t hide that or try to cosplay as someone you are not.

Lessons from phase one comrades

I joined the OCR with very little prior political experience. This made for a steep learning curve, which had to be rapid as I was stepping in during a whirlwind of struggle. Over time, through successive waves of upsurges and ebbs, I had the benefit of listening in and absorbing some fundamental lessons from more experienced comrades as they oversaw our Organization’s expansion and mass organizing efforts taking root.

These lessons were never served up in a neat and tidy Buzzfeed listicle: “Here’s the ten most important things for how to build a vanguard.” But since I’ve found a handful of key ideas relevant to my political work on a weekly basis, I thought I would relay them listicle-lite style, half-ironically. Take the list with one caveat, its own lesson that I’ve heard in maybe a dozen internal meetings: There are no pat answers or simple solutions to the challenges of proletarian revolution.

(1) We’re always recruiting

This is put more formally in internal papers as our principal task being to build a vanguard party. But to make this happen in practice, it means resisting the pull to prioritize basic organizational tasks, even to the point of letting these tasks get done slower or at a lower quality than we’d like. Put another way, if you find yourself sinking hours every week into more basic operational necessities—at the expense of giving the recruitment of promising people in your orbit proper attention—then you need to reorient your priorities. This starts with winning over others to take up these more granular responsibilities and investing time in training them up (you’ll probably learn a few things about how you can do something better from them).

It also means reorienting your mindset around doing what’s required to bring someone along to becoming a communist. We’ve had a strong recruitment drive in my city in the past few months in part after recognizing that we had people stepping up who were ready who just needed more time and attention from us. We had been too guarded and too comfortable with being small to take the steps well within our reach. And as time needed for recruitment started to pile on, we didn’t decide we were too busy for doing multiple recruitments at once—if anything it made for putting more needed challenges to people who were ready for them to fill in the gaps we were leaving. We’ve been telling people who are joining our Organization to treat these recruitment sessions as the most important things on their calendar, and certainly the flip side must be true for those of us leading them.

As for some nuts and bolts on launching your own recruitment drive, it starts with a regular assessment of your prospects. This should be a regular agenda item in unit meetings, discussing where your strongest people are at, what’s holding them back, and what specific steps you’re going to take in the coming weeks to push them forward. It also means having an eye towards whether you’re generating a wave of people to follow them. We should always aim to have, concurrently, a wave of new people joining the political work our unit is leading; people new and old stepping up into more leading roles; and people ready to be recruited, or at least steadily progressing on that track. We shouldn’t be content with only having one of these layers at a time, since that’s how we stay small.

On dedicating time to ideological work, we’ve had success with being flexible in how we group people in discussion circles. We haven’t had success with only doing big groups that meet infrequently at a lower level of commitment; instead we’ve done smaller groupings of 4–5 people (easier to manage the calendars) with stronger commitments to join every discussion, more democracy on what we want to read and discuss, mixing together people from different areas of work, and reconfiguring them every 2–4 months as needed. This has made them more dynamic and more conducive for pulling back from the nitty gritty and thinking about much bigger political questions (not everything needs to be applied to how we’re leading our respective areas of work).

For individual discussions and recruitment sessions, it’s good to develop a set of topics you wield regularly to make sure people are shored up. For us this has included the national question, our political tradition and the RIM, democratic centralism, taking a vanguardist approach to our work, dialectical materialism, and the socialist transition to communism. You can ask comrades for their notes on these topics when you’re developing your own prop sessions for recruitment (through internal channels, obviously), but you should also spend time to develop your own thoughts and lead the discussion in your own style. And this is by no means an exhaustive list of recruitment topics, or ones that should only be covered in recruitment. We always need to adapt to the key questions people have and do our own digging, usually in the form of making suggestions since people going through recruitment will hardly ever have their own sense of “here’s the four topics I want to make sure we cover.” Lastly, to some of the points raised above, the ideal two-person recruitment team will include a more experienced comrade alongside someone learning the ropes for how to lead recruitment. We all need to get good at it.

(2) We need to lead people, not just seek out what’s interesting or exciting to us

As we develop specialization in our political work, we naturally encounter parts that we’re more drawn to than others. It’s striking to hear from people leading our activist organizations how days spent with proletarians are the most energizing and life-giving. Many feel an unease slotting into organizational roles that remove us from this closer contact with the masses (it’s good that people feel this uneasiness).

But I’ve also had some conversations with our people about how leading others and contributing in a leading capacity feels like a slog in many aspects: people flake after we’ve invested a ton of time and effort; people don’t exhibit a motivation to fight injustice and make us feel like the crazy ones; and being the person or people who need to act decisively and steer the ship for a whole group is a constant, heavy burden (always needing to be “on”).

Being a part of our Organization means shouldering the responsibility to lead others around us, every day. When I recently cooked up a scheme to find employment related to the political work I’m active in, a comrade challenged me: “The principal thing in your head needs to be: how am I leading people?—not what am I doing? And you’ll have to continue to have other leadership responsibilities, there’s no way around that.” This helped clarify where my primary responsibilities lie, and that I can’t just solve a life challenge through reconfiguring my political work.

As we grow, more of us who aren’t seeking out higher commitment and responsibility will need to step into it. Again, it’s a good thing there aren’t really people around us right now seeking it out for opportunistic reasons. The individualism that has a heavy pull away from the responsibility to lead others will be one we need to constantly struggle against. We can’t let that voice in our head win out.

(3) We have to push for every advance

Every time our Organization has taken a significant step forward in our practical work, it has come through a massive collective effort of our cadre. In my first year after joining, I remember having a frequent feeling of slight dread when we would discuss the half-crazy schemes getting solidified into our strategic plans. Part of this was feeling incapable or lacking the skills needed to pull these off, more so in the things I was directly responsible for leading. We all know the feeling of “I’m glad XYZ people are leading that…”

But it was also, as we’ve identified in other shake-up papers, a hesitancy towards taking a qualitative leap in our work, that this would mean bigger challenges, more work, more bullshit from our enemies, and higher stakes. In every case, half-crazy schemes came from someone taking initiative to make a strong push, and often employing democratic centralism to coalesce our forces around a plan being set in motion. This came from repeated instances of going out on a limb and being confident that the masses and people in our orbit would unite around various pushes.

It’s worth paying attention to how our schemes sit with you individually and as we talk them through in unit meetings: If we feel hesitancy, why’s that the case? Where’s our imposter syndrome coming from? Have we been making strong enough pushes? Do we wait for someone to give us a push towards a new idea? Has it been too long since we banded together to do something a little crazy?

(4) We have to avoid getting caught up in the negative aspects of things

Put more simply: We have to be careful with being too negative. I’ve been guilty of this on numerous occasions (apologies and sincere thanks to the comrades who have had to talk me through repeated negative spirals). The positive side of being persistently critical of our work is it means we care to make things better, to push further, and to take concrete steps towards that. This often outweighs the negative part of negativity to help us improve ourselves and our work.

The negative part of negativity becomes too negative when it veers towards cynicism. We want more significant results from our work—particularly our mass organizing—faster than it’s happening. If it spirals too far, we arrive at a combination of some very negative conclusions: lack of faith or confidence in the masses, in ourselves, and in our political line. To give it an “ism” in the way that we’re so eager to, we’re falling into subjectivism when we trod down the path of negativity. We don’t need to thought-police ourselves to purge any negative thoughts from passing through our minds, although a Men in Black-style negative thoughts neuralyzer would come in handy. But we do need to recognize when the negative thoughts become a pessimism spiral, and to understand that we probably can’t individually pull ourselves out from the spiral.

So if and when you’re spiraling, call your buddies, take a walk, watch a 20-minute segment from How Yukong Moved the Mountains on YouTube—whatever it is, find what will help reaffirm and shore up a deep commitment to proletarian revolution.

Supporting each other, accepting support

A while ago, I expressed to comrades X and Y how grateful I was for the time they had taken me into their home and cared for me while I was recovering from a serious illness. I said I didn’t know how I would ever repay them. Comrade X clapped back, “well I expect you to take care of me when I’m sick!” That’s stuck with me because her attitude perfectly encapsulates the way we should support each other: not with a pitying or charitable attitude, but because we just have each others’ backs, plain and simple.

I’m someone who has received a lot of support with personal challenges from comrades in (and around) our unit, in ways that have both humbled me and raised my sense of self-worth. In my experience (though I would be interested in hearing anything about how this has worked in other units), we take caring for each other seriously and comrades are quick to offer both emotional and material support, practical advice, comradely intervention, and encouragement. One thing we’re not so good at yet is asking for and accepting that support.

We read a very moving paper about purging ego in the last series of shake-up papers. Another important way to purge ego is to ask for and accept support from your comrades in your personal life. Whether you are someone who has walked through fire alone in your life and think that means you shouldn’t need help now; whether you are embarrassed to admit you are struggling because you think you should “have it all together” at this point in your life or that you need to “just pull it together”; whether you feel like you’re constantly in crisis and it seems unbearable to admit that you’re in yet another precarious situation; whether you know you’re in a bad situation because you’ve made mistakes and you don’t want your comrades to know; whether you think there’s no real way your comrades can help you or that you’re the person everyone else always comes to for help:

Ask for help anyway. There is no way we can go to the masses with humility and empathy if we don’t admit in even our closest collectivities that we ourselves often struggle with personal difficulties (that are often largely political in nature, after all). On a more practical level, hiding our personal struggles from each other eventually destroys our ability to function, but I think at the moment that’s the level most of us are at: we admit we are struggling and (maybe) ask for help once it’s clear our problems are affecting our political work. We should be asking for help long before that happens.

We live in a society that conditions us to believe we can only find deep generosity, understanding, and care within the (often tightly hierarchical) nuclear family. Even if you didn’t grow up in that kind of family structure, or you are not close with your family, that’s the message we’ve all received and, for many of us, internalized. But in my opinion we need to be able to depend on each other in actually a much deeper and healthier way than most families operate. And we have a long and tortuous road ahead of us where we will all be struggling and need to lean on each other. That will come a lot more naturally if we build trust now, not just by being kind and helpful but by being vulnerable enough to admit we need help.

Getting our three communist chakras in alignment

(Or: another attempt to understand this thing called ideology)

When you give a prop session in our organization, unfortunately sometimes your comrades tell you that something from the prop session should be turned into a paper or a manual. During one such prop session last summer, on having a vanguardist attitude, I wound up explaining that if communist ideology consists of chakras, then there are three: the gut chakra, the heart chakra, and the head chakra. To give a brief explanation before getting into it further in what follows, the gut chakra is our instinct for waging class struggle, the heart chakra is our love for the masses, and the head chakra is our command of communist theory. All are necessary to be a communist, and they need to be aligned for us to stay communists. They all develop from something deep within our souls.

Our individual paths to becoming communists started with a gut feeling that something is horribly wrong with this world and the people we love are going through hell because of it. If we’re lucky, we find some ways to resist what we’re confronting, whether on interpersonal levels or through joining up with a mass movement that happens to address the horrors we’re confronting. If we’re not, our path might be a bit lonely, but our gut feelings drive us to find others like us and figure out what to do. Either way, if we’re persistent, if we’re willing to stay true to our gut feeling of hatred for the world as it is and love for the people stuck living in it, we seek to develop a more conscious understanding of that gut feeling we can’t shake even if we wanted to. We study, we discuss with anyone in the same boat as us, and we learn about the system behind the horrors we see around us and perhaps also some ideas about how to get beyond that system.

From there, the move to becoming communists involves:

developing that gut feeling into an instinct for fighting the system guided by strategic thinking
taking our love for the people we know personally that are being destroyed by the system and turning it into a love for “the people,” extending our hearts to all those the system destroys, and developing a faith that they can destroy the system
a conscious understanding that there is a system behind all the horrors that fill us with rage, that we weren’t crazy for thinking something was horribly wrong with this world, there’s a rational way to understand it, and there’s a rational way to change it.

None of that happens except through collective practice. Our love for the people gets deepened by our constant interaction with the masses, directly and indirectly hearing story after story of the hell that people have been through, and seeing—in people we know, and in people halfway around the world we’ll never meet—that the people are capable of refusing to accept that hell. Our gut instincts to fight take expression in collective efforts, and we start moving in ways that are smarter, more sophisticated, and better able to inflict blows on our enemy while advancing our own forces. Our conscious understanding deepens through hundreds, thousands, of pages of reading, constant restless searching to find answers and coming up with more questions in the process, and we lean into our collectivity to figure it all out together and sharpen our intellectual abilities to do so.

What develops out of this process is what we could call the three levels, or chakras, of communist ideology: gut, heart, and head. All are indispensable for us to be the communists the masses need us to be. If you know lots of communist theory but have no heart for the masses, you’re just going to become an arrogant, condescending piece of shit (we’ve all met plenty of those). If you’ve got lots of heart for the masses but lack the gut instinct to fight for them and with them, the best you’ll be able to do is be that tortured empath who devotes themselves to ameliorating suffering. And if your gut chakra is strong but your heart and head chakras are never developed, maybe you’ll make a good martyr, but you’ll never be able to bring the masses along with you to defeat the system.

Even if your three communist chakras were developed and well-aligned at a certain point, they can easily get out of wack, with one or two diminishing in comparison to their former radiance. Moreover, just like spiritual practices take ongoing work, our communist chakras have to be continually developed, with leaps at certain points in the process, if we are to stay in alignment with communism.

Our internal struggle over the last several months has revealed that for many comrades, our three communist chakras are out of wack. We’ve struggled a lot over how we relate to the masses, which at the core has to be driven by our love for the masses, how deep it really goes, and whether we’re really integrating with the masses or treating them as decoration with which to adorn our political work. We’ve identified a fairly widespread, gut chakra, problem of not jumping into class struggle in the face of the system’s attacks on the masses, or the enemy’s missteps that give us the opportunity to hit them hard. And while our comrades are all avid readers, albeit with unevenness, of our literature and the MLM canon, some can’t seem to distinguish between our intellectual approach to communism vs. dogmatic and mechanical materialist ones, or genuinely thought they were acting on our political line but practice proved otherwise.

Whatever particular problem we’ve identified in ourselves, the good news is that it’s possible to work on our communist chakras and bring them into better alignment. The flipside of the fact that one of the three chakras being weak can throw the whole alignment out of wack is that strengthening one can react back positively on the others. Zhang Chunqiao said that theory is the dynamic factor in ideology, and much of this internal struggle has been about using the dynamism of theory to transform the way we act in the world, to deepen our love for the masses, and to rekindle our gut instincts to fight hard and fight with strategic confidence. And it’s worked: our cadre have stepped strong into, and initiated, class struggles on a variety of fronts since the OCR’s shake-up process started.

Through study, discussion, and internal struggle, we can transform our head chakras in ways that react back on the heart and gut chakras. But as we all know from trying on others, we can’t make hearts beat for the people—that has to come from within each of us. So as we go through round three of our internal rectification and revolutionization campaign, we should do some further soul-searching, meditate on where our gut and heart chakras are at, and re-commit to being down for the whole thing. Everything we’ve learned intellectually about why capitalism must be overthrown, revolution, socialism, dialectics, etc. is all just so we can take the feeling, the instinct, that’s been in our gut and the love that’s been in our heart long before we became communists and allow that instinct and that love to find expression in the world, to radiate out from us, and to become part of the collective force that changes this world from top to bottom. We’ll go on learning, but that’s why we’re doing it.