The Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US)
May 2026

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Round 1
  • Ideological struggle has to be thorough to stick
    Forging collectivities: A Maoist approach to people
  • Out of the safe zone, into the fire
  • Shying away from class struggle
  • Our discipline and relentlessness

Coming soon:

• Round 2
  • “I think that speaks to the dog”: Taking initiative in our work among the masses
  • Where activist organizations fit into our overall strategy
  • Eradicate the Daleks
  • Purging ego
• Round 3
  • We can’t make strides without four steps
  • “Going to the masses” vs. going to the masses
  • Death to the Get Real Brigade
  • On integrating with the masses
  • Lessons from phase one comrades
  • Supporting each other, accepting support
  • Getting our three communist chakras in alignment

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:

1. It prevents all of the work being concentrated in the hands of the person(s) leading,
2. It gives non-leading members an escalator of responsibilities to encourage them to grow, and
3. 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:

1. I didn’t allow my own emotional response to move me to push for bold collective action.
2. I didn’t see it as my personal responsibility to mobilize the masses in counterattack.
3. 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:

1. Desensitization to the suffering of the masses vs. integration with the masses
2. Carrying out day-to-day operational tasks vs. jumping on crises with urgency
3. 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.”