An introduction to Issue #8 from the GATT Editorial Board
For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, each day in this decrepit empire brings new cracks and tremors to the surface. Unencumbered by liberal democratic norms, the Trump government has unleashed new waves of repression against people protesting its anti-immigrant ethnic cleansing efforts, from spying on protesters to using a southern-cracker kangaroo court in Texas to lock up activists for more than 50 years for crimes like possessing zines and deleting people from group chats.1 After dumping the jackbooted US Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, that ethnic cleansing campaign has only ramped up, dumping the headline-grabbing military stunts in favor of using the normal functions of the bourgeois state to terrorize migrants.
Internationally, US attack dog Israel is increasingly off the leash. Despite open criticisms of Israel from the top levels of the US bourgeoisie (criticisms that would have been unthinkable under Joe Biden), Israel has not stopped its bloodletting in Lebanon, nor its continued genocide in Gaza, and is now openly perpetrating a new campaign of pogroms in the West Bank. While the Trump government has been, thus far, successful in its inside-job coup in Venezuela, it’s more or less failed elsewhere across the globe. In Iran, the creative resistance of the reactionary bourgeois government has proved once again that US imperialism is a paper tiger.
Domestically, US politics are being shaken up by the unpopularity of the current administration and chaotic changes in the economy. As the cost of living continues to rise in the heartland, people are questioning the wisdom of Trump’s war on Iran. New forms of opposition to the tech bourgeoisie, particularly around the ubiquity of AI chatbots and their effect on the mental and emotional health of children, are emerging in unexpected forms and regions of the country that aren’t easily mapped onto a traditional left-right axis. Widespread hatred of data centers and Flock cameras point to new potential fault lines in bourgeois rule, and therefore opportunities for class struggle, against all that is represented by the Silicon Valley bourgeoisie, from the deepening exploitation of oppressed nations and imperialist wars supercharged by AI, to the ecological destruction and legalized mass surveillance of the US.
All of this begs the question: where are the revolutionaries? Without intervention by the revolutionary proletariat, the crises and contradictions endemic to the imperialist system will inevitably be resolved on terms favorable to one or another section of the ruling class. The far-too-small but growing revolutionary movement in the US is working every day to bring forward a class-conscious proletariat and the other subjective forces for revolution that can mount the interventions needed to force open those surface cracks and tremors. For those dedicated to the revolutionary movement, and to those who aspire to become revolutionaries, we offer this journal as a weapon to train ourselves and others.
People who want to understand political and class dynamics as they are unfolding in the US today should go back and study our editorial from GATT #3, “The reactionary repudiation of a restorationist program and the ongoing tantrums of two reactionary petty-bourgeoisies,” which laid out the overarching political situation in the US in the wake of the 2024 presidential election and called for readers to conduct social investigations among strategic sections of the masses. “The reactionary repudiation…” should be read alongside our collection of reprints from the past six years of kites and GATT, titled Unraveling Empire. Flowing from those analyses, in GATT #6 we published a number of social investigations submitted by readers, along with communist analysis of some key conflicts raging in US society over immigration, state power, and the right to abortion.
In this issue of GATT, we continue navigating the shifting terrain we’re fighting on with two longer pieces of communist analysis, one addressing recent multi-faceted attacks on social welfare programs, and the other focusing on massive changes in the higher education system in the wake of the short-lived pro-Palestine campus movement. To help address questions from the masses about the war on Iran, we offer a new pamphlet for wide distribution on Iranian history and the current US imperialist war of aggression. A social investigation of workers in the transportation and distribution industry from readers in New England continues our work of going to the masses to learn from them about the contradictions in everyday life shaping people’s political consciousness. And for revolutionaries grappling with how to live according to communist morality even as patriarchal oppression finds insidious expression in personal life dysfunction, an editorial on dating and relationships traces some common expressions of dysfunction and abuse to their roots in the objectification of women.
Our aim is that readers will see the contradictions in US society today that this issue interrogates as opportunities to relentlessly exploit, rather than obstacles to be avoided.
Rebellion boils up and the bourgeoisie just turns down the heat
Trump’s promises of mass deportation and open, terroristic deployment of ICE agents provoked waves of mass resistance across the country, including student walkouts, “rapid response” networks, spontaneous confrontations with ICE/CBP kidnappers, and mass rebellion.2 This wave of protest peaked during the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, exemplified by the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis and the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Both the size and scope of the Minneapolis occupation and the murders of two American citizens provoked reactions on the part of the masses and various factions of the ruling class. In Minneapolis, the protest movement against ICE reached its peak in militancy, size, and scope. People in the Twin Cities developed the largest and most sophisticated of any of the “rapid response” networks, and the masses confronted the Bovino boys directly, in continuous mass protests, in sub-zero temperatures.3
Nationally, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti provoked waves of protests, exemplified by militant confrontations at Federal buildings and a series of high school student walkouts, all of which seemed to be, and could have been, a catalyst in building a struggle against the imperialist deportation machine. Instead, the bourgeoisie made a series of moves to gain the upper hand and stuff the genie back in the bottle. In the opening months of the Bovino boys’ terror, the liberal bourgeoisie had largely been impotent, verbally criticizing elements of the deportation regime and occasionally using the judicial system to push back on the Trump administration, such as Democratic Party governors in Illinois and California suing to block the deployment of the National Guard against their wishes. But those Democratic governors and “blue city” mayors refused to use their executive power to halt the deportation machine. Instead, they allowed their police departments to repress protesters, prevent people from disrupting ICE kidnappings, and even escort ICE and its various operations, all while never seriously investigating ICE actions that blatantly violated local laws.
The Minneapolis occupation, and especially the Good and Pretti killings, broke that pattern. Suddenly, the demand that killer ICE agents be indicted was a mainstream demand, and the state of Minnesota made moves to investigate the killings. Meanwhile, the forces gathered around the Trump government made their moves to cool down the situation while maintaining the integrity of their ethnic cleansing and mass deportation efforts. Gone were the spotlight grabbers Bovino and Kristi Noem, the former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who were removed from their positions and replaced in Minneapolis with White House Border Czar Tom Homan, a more standard reactionary bureaucrat. The Trump administration was able to deftly pivot from its strategy of “surges” in blue cities to using its network of nightmare detention centers and other ramped-up-but-standard immigration enforcement techniques. This has resulted in a situation now where more people than ever are being rounded up and deported, with the mass protest movement completely absent from the scene.
As communists, we should expect that the bourgeoisie will continually refashion its regime of preventive counterrevolution in response to crises, with various actors and factions using those moments to jockey for positions within the established boundaries. And we should expect that this refashioning will dampen mass resistance, bringing some rebellious people back under the wing of one or another section of the bourgeoisie (to paraphrase Lenin). But we also should expect more from people within and without our ranks than to be shaken or demoralized by these maneuvers.
Nonetheless, it is a maddening problem in the imperialist countries, especially here in the belly of the beast, that so many atrocities perpetuated by the imperialists are met with little resistance (the US war of aggression against Iran, for another example), and that when there are moments of mass resistance, they are often fleeting, leaving the ruling class the freedom to reconfigure their system. We can point to dozens of causes, from the Left being an impediment to revolution to social media rotting peoples’ brains. But one problem of making revolution in this imperialist shithole rises to the top: too many of us lack the audacity and discipline to seize on these moments of mass resistance and make qualitative advances toward revolution.
When revolutionaries give up in the face of difficulties
Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God’s heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?
– from The Foolish Old Man Who Removed The Mountains by Mao Zedong, 1945
In 1970, Huey Newton, co-founder and Minster of Defense of the Black Panther Party, was released from prison, where he had been trapped for the previous two years. In that time, the BPP had grown exponentially in numbers and political influence. The Panthers were so overwhelmed with member applications that they had to temporarily close their member rolls. They finally had some resources to wield thanks to funds donated by a growing number of wealthy supporters (including some celebrities). Most importantly, the BPP had become genuinely important to the masses, especially with Black people but more broadly, too, with people across the US reading and discussing Panther literature.
These quantitative-to-qualitative advances opened up new contradictions for the BPP to work through. As the Panthers grew in influence and increasingly won over the sympathies of the masses, they faced intense repression and surveillance from the government. Repression escalated from beatings and harassment carried out by local cops to assassinations, raids on Panther homes and offices, and infiltration by informants, all coordinated by the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program). Though repression did not deter young, rebellious Black people from joining the BPP in droves, it terrorized the Panthers by forcing them to live under constant threat, and it tore at the social fabric of the BPP, sowing paranoia over potential informants and turning comrades against each other. In turn, the flood of new members swelled the ranks of the BPP faster than the Panthers could give people the political education they needed to engage in ideological struggle, help develop and then collectively carry out a political line, and steel themselves with the discipline and clarity needed to withstand such severe repression. Instead, the BPP had a large rank-and-file willing and able to carry out day-to-day tasks like selling the newspaper, but unable to navigate the twists and turns of the volatile but promising situation at hand. Finally, with money, property, and support beyond their base of the Black proletariat, the BPP now had resources to lose. The Panthers stood to risk the material support of influential individuals, and of large sections of the petty-bourgeoisie, if they made the bold advance toward revolution that was possible at the time.
Many Panthers hoped that Huey Newton would now be able to lead the BPP in struggling through these new problems. Newton’s bold vision (especially his focus on Black people’s right to armed self-defense) and willingness to take risks had given the BPP its momentum since the early days. The Party had emphasized the campaign for his release, mobilizing virtually its entire membership in one way or another over the course of his two-year imprisonment. But Newton had been cut off from the life of the Party, and from ideological struggle, for those two years, fighting for his survival as a political prisoner and frequently held in solitary confinement. Thrust suddenly back into leadership, he faltered in the face of what must have seemed like overwhelming obstacles rather than challenging opportunities.
As Newton and his allies began stressing the importance of the Panthers’ survival programs, most famously the free breakfast program for children, factions of the BPP politically grouped around Eldridge Cleaver argued that the moment was ripe for open armed struggle, resulting in a split in the BPP, egged on by COINTELPRO. Panthers and other Black revolutionaries on the East Coast launched the heroic Black Liberation Army, which unfortunately lacked the mass support and strategic vision of the Panthers. Meanwhile, the group allied with Newton quickly consolidated around a full-blown opportunist line, with Panthers who disagreed with Newton purged from the organization and the remaining membership ordered to close up shop nationwide and move to Oakland, California, where they would run a series of bourgeois-democratic electoral campaigns. The small percentage of Panthers who stuck around for this revisionist turn found themselves in a cult-like organization rife with drug abuse and interpersonal violence, and with Newton commanding beatings and procuring prostitutes while styling himself as “Supreme Servant of the People.4”
The BPP’s degeneration is soberingly instructive for revolutionaries today, but Huey Newton was not uniquely flawed among history’s revolutionary leaders. Moments that present the greatest opportunity to advance revolution are a test of our commitment and seriousness, maybe even more so than times of harsh repression or those years that roll by with little interest, let alone revolutionary initiative, from the masses. When our numbers are small, the enemy is closing in, and the masses seem ambivalent, audacity can come easily to us because we have little to lose and nowhere to go but forward. But when our numbers gain momentum, our political line is reaching and resonating with our people, and the masses are fired up in united outrage, we have something to lose, and historically, we often falter and retreat from the revolutionary path.
Do we really want to win?
Moments of great opportunity require revolutionaries to interrogate our motivations. Do we really want a revolution? Or do we want to be in a cool rebellious organization? Do we really want to struggle through tough ideological questions and make breakthroughs? Or do we just want to have the hottest takes? Do we want to bring forth a revolutionary people and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat? Or do we want to preserve whatever small power or platform we’ve built for ourselves that capitalism-imperialism will allow us to have? In these moments, it’s time to take a fearless self-inventory (as our sisters and brothers in the 12-Step Recovery Programs would say). It’s easy to take a well-intentioned opportunist line, because it’s simple to justify retreat or capitulation. Without a fearless self-inventory, truly digging at the roots of our collective motivations and our feelings for the masses, opportunist retreat can be passed off as common sense, tactical, realistic, or concerned with the well-being of comrades.
When there’s an opportunity to seize the moment and be bold, but we hear a little voice saying, “This is crazy, you’re risking too much, you’ll alienate your supporters, the really principled thing to do is to keep everybody safe,” that means it’s time to re-align our three “communist chakras”: the gut, the heart, and the head.5 Consider what your gut is telling you, and whether your instincts are being informed by your love for the masses and your conscious, rational understanding of how the system we live in works and how we can change it. Lay your fears out on the table with comrades, acknowledge the risks we must take and how much they could cost us, and reaffirm that it’s all worth it for the world we need to bring forth. Only then can we decide on the best strategic course of action, with nothing less than the revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois rule as our goal.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions… or careerism
Often, people fear revolutionary advances because they understand the real cost of those advances. For example, if you know someone who is rotting in prison and you intimately understand their conditions, you may understandably shy away from taking risks that could end in prison time for large numbers of the masses and comrades alike. Older Black proletarians who viscerally remember the effects of COINTELPRO on a whole generation of revolutionaries are often the first to remind us of the sacrifices we are asking people to make. It’s important to learn from this perspective, and seek to avoid unnecessary sacrifices while remaining relentless.
Revolutionaries faltering in the face of advances and taking an opportunist line usually reveal their opportunism in the way they talk about protecting whatever power they’ve managed to accrue, as though being in leadership or having an influential political organization is one and the same with fighting toward revolution. Though we can’t really know what historical revolutionaries were “really thinking,” it’s reasonable to assume that much of the time, those who took an opportunist road had the best of intentions and genuinely believed that capitulating on revolution was the best or most responsible path forward. This is important to note so that we can avoid casting every revolutionary who ever became an opportunist as an evil, Machiavellian schemer, discarding their contributions and depriving ourselves of learning from their mistakes.
On the other hand, die-hard opportunists usually have careerist motivations for their capitulationism that can be clearly seen in hindsight. It’s easy to spot careerism in the trajectory of postmodernist activists whose radical rhetoric is carefully curated to land them a lucrative job at a nonprofit or social-democratic politician’s office. But it’s more helpful, and more sobering, to consider genuine revolutionaries who have sold out the revolution to their own careerist benefit. One example is that of Pushpa Kamal Dahal (known better by his nom de guerre, “Prachanda”, or “the fierce one”), a leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) during the zenith of the Nepali revolution in the 1990s and early 2000s. Prachanda was known for his innovative military leadership, and he had an undeniable role in the Nepali People’s Liberation Army’s success. As Mohan Baidya, better known as Comrade Kiran, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal (Revolutionary Maoist), recounted to kites journal in 2021,6
Reactionaries all over the world conceded [in the early 2000s] that the Maoists exercised power in about 80% of Nepal. In this challenging situation it was natural that the whole party, in general, and the main leader in particular, were under extreme pressure. Because of his eclectic way of thinking, petty-bourgeois instability and spontaneity, and quick-victory mentality, Prachanda failed to withstand the challenge. As a result, he underwent an ideological and political deviation in his attempt to find new ways to complete the revolution.
Citing “reasonable” justifications for capitulation, such as that Nepal, as a small, landlocked country surrounded by two powerful countries, China and India, would not be able to hold its own against military invasion even if the CPN(M) was able to take power and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, Prachanda betrayed the revolution. In 2006, he united with bourgeois political parties against the monarchy, signing a peace agreement that surrendered the PLA’s weapons before disbanding the PLA completely. While leaders like Comrade Kiran (who refused to capitulate) were imprisoned in India, Prachanda became the Prime Minister of Nepal. Prachanda and his allies began their lives of bourgeois luxury while the Nepali people continued to suffer and Nepal became increasingly subservient to India.7 In 2012, Padam Kunwar, a young Nepali peasant whose older sister and brother suffered life-altering injuries fighting for their people in the PLA, stood in line to meet Prachanda and then slapped him hard across the face in front of the assembled crowd, a fitting symbolic gesture of the Nepali masses’ contempt for his capitulation.
Relentlessness is how we serve the people
Understanding opportunities for advances means understanding the mood of the masses and recognizing when the current situation is moving them toward rebellion. It does not mean waiting around for a “grand crisis” or bowing to petty-bourgeois spontaneity; rather, it means taking our tune from the most advanced among the masses to inspire and activate everybody else. When proletarians we know and trust to be straight with us tell us that we’re crazy and that revolution will cost lives, that’s not our cue to back down, it’s our cue to struggle through those very real and prescient observations with them, learn how to win over the broader masses through those ideological struggles, and come out on the other side.
To use an example from a socialist transition period after communists seized state power, in the early 1950s, just prior to the Great Leap Forward in socialist China, the Chinese Communist Party was proceeding slowly with agricultural collectivization.8 Economic planners for the CCP assumed that rural life in China would have to remain at the “cooperative” stage for a long time, with peasants retaining individual land ownership rather than pooling their resources and working and living communally, putting off the transition to communism until China’s industrial development was at the level where agriculture could be fully mechanized. However, the Chinese peasantry, especially the poorest people, had been the backbone of the revolution during the civil war and had gotten a thorough communist political education. Many peasants were eager to put their hard-won ideology into practice and were already forging ahead with collectivization. Mao, famously attuned to the conditions and consciousness of the masses, recognized this and argued that the CCP was holding back the “socialist spark” in the countryside. The Great Leap Forward that followed was a period of fast-moving, bold experimentation and intense political struggle, drawing virtually China’s entire population into production and into building a truly new society from the bottom up.
Not all peasants were enthusiastic about collectivization. Rural CCP cadre had to win over middle peasants; some wealthier ones even slaughtered their livestock rather than hand them over for communal use. What if Mao and those cadre on the ground had only listened to the reluctant peasants, or been swayed by the relative comfort of a newly attained petty-bourgeois lifestyle and those in CCP leadership who insisted that communism could and should be put off for the distant future? Would we have lost the experience of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that grew out of the Great Leap Forward? Would the revisionist camp within the CCP have gained power and overthrown the revolution much earlier than 1976?
It’s up to communist revolutionaries to create the subjective factor that moves a promising objective situation into a revolutionary one. If we content ourselves with riding the waves in the high tide of struggle, we’ll come crashing down after the wave crests. To swim against the tide of wavering petty-bourgeois consciousness, not to mention our own doubts and risk-aversion, we have to be strong, well-trained, disciplined, and yes, a little crazy. We have to pay attention to how we can use the strong undercurrents, those sections of the masses who are more than ready to rebel but need revolutionary leadership.
When our seriousness and level of commitment to revolution are tested by moments of great opportunity, we can be judged by the measure of our relentlessness. When opportunists claim that the people are best served by charity or by throwing cold water on any talk of actual rebellion, we say the people are best served by our stubborn refusal to back down from the fight for a better world. This stubbornness, this doggedness, is what shows the masses it might be worth it to stand up and fight for that better world. And if the masses are ready to stand up and fight, how can we fail them by doing any less?
1For a summary of key details from the Prairieland case, see Steven Monacelli, “How the Prairieland ‘Antifa’ Verdict Threatens the Anti-Trump Resistance,” texasobserver.org (March 19, 2026).
2For a deeper understanding of the communist approach to resistance against ICE, see “Whistles Won’t Stop This” by Pat Grant in GATT #6.
3Our observations about the size and sophistication of the “rapid response” networks in Minneapolis shouldn’t be taken as a negation of the criticisms in “Whistles Won’t Stop This.” It’s also notable that the federal government has, as of this writing, indicted a number of activists in the Twin Cites, using participation in those networks and chats as “evidence.”
4This account is primarily drawn from Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press, 2013).
5See “Getting our three communist chakras in alignment,” from “This is the way,” GATT #7.
6The kites Editorial Committee, “Against the Tide of Counter-Revolution: An Interview with Comrade Kiran (Mohan Baidya), General Secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal (Revolutionary Maoist),” The Legacy of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement: a collection marking forty years since the founding of the RIM (Going Against the Tide, 2025).
7Hinton Alvarez, “Exceptionally Serious Responsibility: Some notes on the history of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement and prospects for unity in the international communist movement today,” The Legacy of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement: a collection marking forty years since the founding of the RIM (Going Against the Tide, 2025).
8See Part 2, “Blazing a New Path for the Socialist Transition to Communism,” from The Socialist Transition Period Study Group, Continuing the Revolution After the Revolution: Socialist China, 1949-1976 (Going Against the Tide, 2025).
