On Thanksgiving

On this Thanksgiving, Struggle for a New World wishes to extend our solidarity to the Indigenous peoples of the U.S. and their ongoing struggle against settler-colonialism. We recognize that one of the foundational acts for the global hegemony of capitalism was the invasion of this continent and the genocide carried out against its diverse inhabitants. We recognize that this invasion and genocide is still ongoing. We recognize that the U.S. is stolen land and that its decolonization is a central task in the struggle against the imperialist U.S. and the struggle for socialism. We recognize that the descendants of the original settler population and those who have been integrated into the nation they built still have a settler-colonial relationship to the colonized peoples, and that this contradiction does not only implicate the ruling classes, but even the working class of the colonizing nation, who benefit from the ongoing oppression of Native Americans and the theft of their lands. We recognize that this land mass, Turtle Island, is home to countless struggles of Indigenous peoples that cross the borders imposed by capitalism-imperialism. In the final instance, it is these anti-imperialist struggles which will play the decisive role in winning socialism, not the trade unionist bargaining of the settler-colonist working classes, which must be united with the liberation struggles of the colonized. We recognize that victory will only be won by uniting and subordinating the struggle of the settler proletariat with the struggle of the proletariat of the oppressed peoples:

“The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.”
–Karl Marx

In the national mythology of the settler-colonist nation which dominates the United States, Thanksgiving plays a significant role in how they imagine their early settlement on the continent. In the settler-colonial school system children are taught a whitewashed version of history in which friendly Native Americans welcomed the Pilgrims with open arms and taught them how to survive, with this supposed friendship being consummated with a great feast of “thanksgiving.” But the children are not taught what we all know, that from the very start the settlers carried out a campaign of genocide and land theft across the continent, that the hospitality of Squanto was rewarded with rivers of blood and torched villages. They are not taught that the first official day of thanksgiving in Massachusetts was declared in 1637 following the massacre of over 700 Pequot men, women, and children.

What is taught is the Squanto narrative, a narrative that makes the Indigenous sound like a disposable set of characters who exist only to advance the plot of the settler heroes, a plot in which the settlers’ Christian god gave them the Indigenous peoples’ aid in various forms to help them survive during the rough years of early colonization, and then helpfully cleared them away, out of sight, out of mind, to grant the settlers all the lands of all Indigenous peoples, a destiny made manifest.

As Thanksgiving is celebrated this year, most states across the Americas, and in particular the settler-states in North America continue to perpetrate atrocities against Indigenous peoples. Forced sterilizations of indigenous women, a tool of genocide, continue to this day. Indigenous women in Canada who were coerced into the procedure under threats of having their children taken from them are suing the Canadian state, citing cases as recent as 2017. In the United States, the U.S. government prepares to revoke a Mashpee Wampanoag land trust, in the very region that is now central to the Thanksgiving myth. Water Protectors who struggled against the Dakota Access Pipeline are incarcerated, facing decades in prison for defending their lands and cultures. Celebrating Thanksgiving is not celebrating a myth. It is not celebrating a centuries-old past. It is celebrating crimes like this. It is a celebration of settler-colonialism itself as a system.

What do the Indigenous have to be thankful for? That they can, after centuries of genocide bringing them under the domination of Euro-Christian settlers, practice what remains of their own faith without being “corrected” by colonial authorities? That after years of having their languages destroyed by the market and colonial schools, if they still remember some words of their own language, they will not be beaten by nuns for this? That they can walk on their own land without being brutalized or murdered, provided they do not attempt to claim this land, or exercise meaningful political sovereignty on it? With these being the best case scenario for the colonized Indigenous peoples, no wonder that on Thanksgiving 1969, they occupied Alcatraz, the prison island symbolizing the prison the United States is to their peoples, in protest of all that had been stolen from them, not given to them. No wonder that Indigenous people have called for Thanksgiving, like Columbus Day, to be declared a countrywide day of mourning. No wonder that all across the country Indigenous people and progressives from the settler-colonial oppressor nation hold their own events to teach the true history of Thanksgiving. We encourage all comrades to participate in or organize such events.

On this Thanksgiving, let us redouble our efforts to finally bring down settler-colonialism and the U.S. Empire. Let us redouble our efforts to unite in struggle with the Indigenous and struggle in unity with them for their concrete liberation. Let us redouble our efforts to decolonize Turtle Island and build a new world.

WORKERS AND OPPRESSED PEOPLES OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Transgender Day of Remembrance Statement

Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. This day is observed every year to remember all those murdered because of transphobia and the oppression of trans and gender nonconforming people. This year, it is observed following 23 reported murders of trans people, primarily trans women of color, in the U.S. and countless more around the world. It is observed as trans people continue to face a disproportionate level of violence at the hands of the state and society in general and a disproportionate level of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, lack of access to healthcare, and harassment on the job and off. It is observed following the Trump administration’s move to redefine gender solely on the basis of biological sex, an official act of delegitimization of trans people’s very existence. This is all evidence of a rising tide of transphobia and anti-trans violence that is part of a general rising tide of fascism and attacks on all oppressed and marginalized peoples.

On this Transgender Day of Remembrance, Struggle for a New World extend our solidarity to all our trans siblings and comrades and their struggle. We not only condemn the presence of transphobia within society in general, but especially its presence within our own movement. Transphobia within our movement cannot be tolerated, indeed, to tolerate its presence would be the greatest act of betrayal we could commit. The struggle for trans liberation is an indispensable and inseparable component of the struggle for socialism and the liberation of all the exploited and oppressed. Without socialism, there will be no trans liberation, and without trans liberation there will be no socialism. We call on all comrades to not only speak out against transphobia, but redouble their efforts to unite with trans people in their concrete struggles, and to struggle with them in unity to win their liberation, just as we must unite with all oppressed in struggle for our common liberation.

WORKERS AND OPPRESSED PEOPLES OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

After the Election: Where Do We Go From Here?

A week has passed since the midterm elections that occurred last Tuesday. The results are in, and although we still live in the same “Trump’s America” we did a week ago, there were a small number of hope-instilling wins, such as the social democratic DSA candidates (despite whatever criticisms we may have of them) who made it past the DNC’s money and then their GOP challengers with the help of their real grassroots support; additionally there was the passing of Amendment 4 in Florida, restoring voting rights to the formerly incarcerated, and the passing of Amendment 2 in Louisiana, removing a Jim Crow law from the state constitution. Both of these formerly inconceivable wins fly in the face of the Democratic Party establishment, who cannot tolerate even the most moderate reformism by the DSA elements in their midst, and who practically refuse to organize in the south, as consistently pointed out by Bernie Sanders, who condemns their lack of a “50-state strategy”. Yet, what wins are achieved on their ballot line will be used by the DNC and their cheerleaders as we plunge forwards into the 2020 Presidential Election campaign which will inevitably come to dominate the discourse in the coming months.

How do we regard such elections? We know that young people in the U.S., as elsewhere in the world, engage in both electoral and extra-electoral politics on a more critical basis than their elders who constantly scold them and fear their radicalization. But taking a bird’s eye view of this process, is the more radical option to try to draw them away from elections, or to try to win elections in the name of the most radical trends in the youthful left?

In fact, if we draw an analogy to another sphere of legal left organizing, we can see that this is a false choice: we do not ask whether young people engaging with strikes more critically than their elders should kick older people out of their unions, or should be told to leave unions, because they are reformist. We know that all of these reformist spheres are part of the totality of class struggle which is objectively taking place in our society at all times, whether we subjectively grasp this fact or not. To conscious communists, all political activity is subordinate to the bigger picture of class struggle; to the unconscious whom we organize among, however, this activity helps reveal this totality to us, to awaken their consciousness.

A formalist fetishization of elections and a formalist fetishization of boycotts are both wrong, because what matters is the content, as Vladimir Lenin pointed out in his book “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. While this text is frequently used by electoralists to justify the very parliamentary cretinism he so adamantly rejected and criticized, the actual point that Lenin and other revolutionaries have continually stressed is that we must intervene in every site of struggle and continually try to revolutionize them. In as much as elections can be used, in certain circumstances and when they have not yet become obsolete for the masses, to fight the powers that be and win real gains for the masses while educating them through their own political experience about their power and the nature of the capitalist system, then elections should be intervened in.

But all action taken in this site of struggle, as in all legal, bourgeois-democratic struggles, should be taken with the ultimate goal of exposing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie masked by bourgeois democracy and the fundamental necessity of revolution to overthrow this dictatorship. Similarly, when elections have become an impediment to revolutionary struggle, or obsolete not just for revolutionaries but for the broad masses, elections should also be rejected. What is needed is a concrete analysis of the concrete conditions of the election in question, and the time and place in which they take place.

This, briefly stated, is our view on the participation of revolutionaries in elections. But whatever debates we engage in and whether or not we participate in elections, they will continue to take place. And despite the fundamental lie of bourgeois democracy, they have great social significance in the current political climate. So we must examine them.

Trends

First off: in general, what happened?

The GOP increased its majority in the Senate from 51 seats to 54. The Democrats broke through Republican control of all three branches of the federal government and won a majority in the House of Representatives. While the much-touted “Blue Wave” proved to be more of a Blue Trickle, the Democrats did win a majority, flipped districts in “red states”, and even in a Republican stronghold like Texas came only a couple of percentage points short of winning a Senate seat. Such closely contested races have been particularly discussed, and are the subject of much controversy. The bourgeois media has been making much ado over all this, with many attempting to claim them as evidence of the exacerbation of the U.S. urban-rural divide, a much-heralded supposed desertion of college-educated suburban white women and moderates from the GOP tent, the opposition that Trump is supposedly bound to face come the swearing-in of the new congress, increased partisanship and polarization, etc.

But do we believe all this? And what does all this actually mean for the workers and the oppressed, the poor and exploited, of the US and the world?

A midterm shift away from the President’s party is normal, but we do not live in normal times. Yet one thing that is striking about this election is how normal it seems. The GOP increased its Senate majority, but most of those races were in “red states”. The Democrats won the House, but they are the (so-called) opposition party and two years into a new presidency voters tend to be dissatisfied with the party in power and swing away from it. This is a favorite tactic of U.S. imperialism, which is able to take popular dissatisfaction and pin it on the rule of whichever of the twin parties of capital is in power, channeling discontent into support for the other party. Like clockwork, the Republicans and Democrats switch off and engage in just enough shadowboxing to keep up the illusion of actual opposition while working in concert to maintain the rule of Wall Street. This is not to say that there are not real differences between the two parties, stemming from inter-bourgeois disagreements and their popular bases, but in the long run these differences are of little consequence. This has been proven with Pelosi’s immediate and now notorious tone of cooperation with Trump, setting a fine example for the DNC-loyal hashtag resistance.

Voters are taught that the only meaningful form of political activity is voting, that voting is the only way to take part in “democracy”, and that any and all problems under this democracy can be found not in shortcomings of our democratic culture, popular decision-making, or, God forbid, social contradictions, but in the idiocy of those who voted for the other party. Party identification becomes another form of identity and partisanship a means of dividing and conquering while capital laughs all the way to the bank. Those who are not hyper-partisans are disgusted by the whole thing, becoming apathetic and “apolitical”.

This state of affairs is not at all harmed by the fact that for the majority who tend to vote Democrat, the political identity of the Republican Party at present is one of open chauvinism towards women, LGBT+, and of course, immigrants and oppressed peoples. But the Democrats’ own weakness in defending these peoples, limited only to the class interests of the ruling classes which control the DNC, means that despite being implored to “for the love of God, VOTE!”, outside of the party faithful, even a great many oppressed peoples feel apathetic about voting. Even more damningly for the Democrats, their historical refusal to fight against voter disenfranchisement in “red states” means that even those oppressed who want to vote for them are unable to do so. But 2018’s midterm revealed a significant increase in turnout, despite a lack of change in the Democrats’ overall strategy. And as Sanders has many times pointed out, it is in fact the Democrats who benefit from this, despite their lack of a “50-state strategy”.

Because we are trained to think that the be-all and end-all of political activity is elections and voting, when people become politically active it usually shows itself first in increased electoral activity and voting. Clearly, in the Trump era politics is becoming an increasingly significant part of life for people. And this is evident in the increased turnout numbers. But unfortunately, this increased turnout has not been restricted to engagement by anti-Trump masses who are more or less forced to identify with the Democrats. There was also an increased turnout on the Republican side, thanks in a large part to the campaigning of Trump and his fascistic base, who are rallying around their leader in the polls when they are not terrorizing innocent people for their identity. As Trump continues to tighten his grip on the GOP and draw his base closer together, the disunity of the anti-Trump forces contained largely within the tent of the conciliatory Democrats is disheartening.

This increased turnout has both a positive and a negative side. The positive side is that it is a sign that more and more people––still dominated by white petty bourgeois liberals, but also increasing numbers of the working class, and in particular oppressed peoples––are becoming politically active and engaged, motivated by opposition to Trump. The negative side is that this political engagement is largely confined to support for the Democrats, in spite of the Democrats fundamental role as the “soft” version of the Republicans. The Democrats are unabashed supporters of capitalism and imperialism, and wage war without qualm on the poor and oppressed at home and abroad. Even when they offer hand-wringing appeals to “decent” “democratic” values, with the vast majority of reactionary proposals the Republicans put forth, they concede and lay the groundwork for our further slide to the right, election cycle after election cycle. The fascist wave that Trump stands at the head of finds its breeding ground in the class war that the Democrats have waged without apology for as long as any of us can remember. Trump and the Democrats have the same end goal: to reinforce the declining U.S. Empire and maintain its murderous reign. If opposition to Trump leads to nothing more than support for the Democrats, then the reign of capital will only be strengthened, and more Trumps, worse Trumps, can easily follow.

With this in mind, we must take note of the victories of the social democratic DSA candidates under the Democratic banner, like that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, both of whom were elected to the House of Representatives. This reflects the huge increase in popularity of at least the vague notion of socialism among the youth over the past five years, but their immediate moderation on issues of imperialism shows the strong ability of the Democratic Party mainstream to co-opt and drain of any ideological character activist movements in a way the UK Labour Party mainstream was unable to do with Momentum. They reflect both the growing fightback of the workers and oppressed, but also the timidness of this fight so far. Though overall this trend is positive, so long as the movement remains inside the Democratic Party and without a broad framework for opposing the ruling classes which have built the Democratic Party, it will be stripped of vitality and militancy, it will be reduced to being nothing more than the extreme left wing of the program of the imperialist bourgeoisie, timidly fighting for a modest redistribution of the wealth stolen by US imperialism and failing to win even that while providing cover for the continued oppression and exploitation of the rest of the class outside the borders of the US state.

Other races that should be taken note of are the governors’ races in Georgia and Florida. Both of these races feature blatant election stealing tactics on the part of the GOP. While the Democratic establishment and its media defenders have been literally calling people to the streets for Jeff Sessions, what happened in these states that can be viewed as politically normal and unworthy of mass protest?

In Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams (an Afro-American woman) ran against Republican Brian Kemp. Kemp, as Georgia’s Secretary of State, was able to manage his own election, despite calls to step down and even a legal challenge on election day. During his tenure in office, Kemp purged over 1.4 million registered voters from the rolls, including 53,000 immediately prior to the election. These purges overwhelmingly targeted Afro-Americans, in an effort to suppress their political participation. Many polling places were closed prior to the election. Georgia voters also reported malfunctioning voting machines and polling places with too few voting machines on election day, as well as prohibitively long lines.

In Florida, Democrat Andrew Gillum (an Afro-American man) is running against Republican Ron DeSantis, in a race that has not been called, and that has now entered a recount. DeSantis is currently ahead, but less than half a percentage point separates the two candidates, and Gillum has retracted his concession. Florida, like Georgia, has restrictive voting laws and voter roll purges that target Afro-American voters. The outcome of the election has not yet been determined.

Furthermore, even where Republicans were not running against Afro-American candidates, they still engaged in the most blatant and egregious forms of election stealing, as the Florida Senate race between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Bill Nelson. While Scott has claimed victory, the race is currently undergoing a recount.

State officials—and Trump himself—are engaging in racist talking points about Democratic “voter fraud” and “illegal voting” when discussing the possibility of counting every vote. Their (historically justified) hope is that their legal election-stealing tactics will, in fact, ensure that the outcome of the election is in their favor: decades of voter disenfranchisement even worse than that seen in this election have convinced them that this is a winning strategy. The Democrats, who in the name of rule of law were the first to raise the alarm against Radical Reconstruction in the Black Belt South (one of the least “democratic” parts of the United States), were silent on decades of voter disenfranchisement in the south almost every election since then, so why, the Republicans reason, should it not work this time?

Election-stealing tactics are not limited to the South either. Porter County, Indiana was subject to flagrant negligence and/or sabotage by officials that resulted in 50% of the precinct being left out. This is Porter County’s first year of holding elections run by the County Clerk’s office. They were formerly run by an election board, but there was a vote to transfer that responsibility to the Clerk’s office and the County Clerk was one of the deciding votes which made this possible.

This flagrant sabotage of America’s already highly undemocratic bourgeois democracy is morbidly fascinating to observe. Why are the Republicans engaging in such antagonistic actions toward the Democrats? Is their imperialist partnership nearing an end? Could a sort of “war” between them be on the horizon?

Rather, what this reflects is a growing internal split within the bourgeoisie about how best to repress the rightful demands of the masses for a change to their oppressive living conditions. As the U.S. Empire declines, capital is increasingly confronted with the problem of how to maintain its rule in the face of crisis and the possibility of popular revolt. One section takes the route of fascism. In the present era this section finds a popular base among the openly chauvinist petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy of the largely white (and openly white-supremacist) “Yankee” nation, and its discontent with the project of neoliberal globalization. This is the faction represented by Trump and his forces within the GOP, who are becoming increasingly dominant. As the GOP has become “Trump’s party,” the “mainstream” Republicans have been pushed out, or, after a very mild fight, capitulated entirely to the Trumpites. And we should not mistakenly think that this began with Trump, even in terms of the structure of the Republican Party: following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the Tea Party began to lay this groundwork, gaining widespread influence within the GOP.

The other section of capital, the mainstream one of “bipartisanship” currently led (and perhaps in the future only represented by) the Democrats, is the faction still committed to the project of neoliberal globalization and the world as presently ordered. So this is our rock and our hard place: on the one hand there is the increasingly fascist-dominated GOP, and on the other there are the Democrats, who are still committed to the old rules of civility and propriety. But the GOP, with its ever-stronger fascist tendencies and disregard to any notion of fairness within their class, is quite willing to impose its program by any means necessary. And those means include election stealing. The Democrats do nothing but wave their hands, file lawsuits, and mildly grumble about unfairness (while pursuing similar undemocratic methods against the mildest reformism as they did with Sanders).

The GOP, with its committed base and willingness to be ruthless in pursuit of victory, stands at the head of a growing fascist tide. Their first-time-a-tragedy-second-time-a-farce would-be Führer Trump is its embodiment, and indeed the embodiment of the most nakedly reactionary elements of the U.S. state of affairs. The Democrats, with their reclamation of the House, have gained a temporary victory of the conditions which give rise to fascism over fascism itself. While the GOP stands ready to slide further and further down the fascist path, the Democrats stand ready to capitulate. As already mentioned, in the wake of their reclamation of the House Nancy Pelosi’s first move was to make bipartisan overtures and assurances that they would not pursue impeachment.

While such statements are normal, the conditions that we face are not. The stakes are high indeed, and it is the Democrats unbreakable adherence to normality that will usher in their inevitable capitulation to fascism. Maybe not now, and maybe not in 2020, but when the time comes, fascism will be too powerful for the Democrats to stop it even if they were willing to, which they aren’t. When fascism comes the Democrats will greet it with cheers if they aren’t imposing it themselves.

Having taken note of all this, what are our tasks?

Our Tasks

Our continuing task is to support every struggle against the existing order of things, to unite our theoretical leadership with the practical leadership of those struggles and prove that our theory is worthy of this leadership with word and with deed, Our theory is the theory of uniting all struggles, revolutionizing them, and leading the oppressed to bring down the old order and usher in their new order.

More concretely, this means that we need to intervene in the struggles of workers, of women, of Afro-Americans and other oppressed nationalities, of immigrants, of LGBT+ people, the struggle against Islamophobia, against anti-Semitism, the anti-fascist struggle, and form a united front against Trump, against fascism, and against Wall Street. This can mean working with anarchists, and it can mean working with people like Sanders, but in the final instance it must mean breaking from the ruling classes and their political order, the Democrats.

As revolutionary communists, to facilitate this process and as part of it we seek the rebuilding of a revolutionary communist party which can play the necessary vanguard role. We seek to unite with all forces which share our vision in this historic mission.

The building of a broad anti-fascist front, in legal electoral terms represented by a party of labor and the oppressed, which will have the means not only to theoretically expose the Democrats but practically overcome them, this is our answer to the problems posed by this election.

Announcing Struggle for a New World

WHO WE ARE

Struggle for a New World is a new revolutionary communist intervention in U.S. politics. We are composed of members and sympathizers with various organizations and traditions who have come together around a common vision of theory and practice in the current conditions of the U.S. and the world. As an editorial collective, we seek to build a publication which will provide a theoretical framework for political and social developments across the U.S. and the world, drawing on our collective and personal experience and contacts with diverse social movements which constitute particular parts of the whole of the revolutionary struggle which we are committed to.

We take our name from a line of the Russian version of the Internationale, the hymn of the international working class. It reads, “Мы наш, мы новый мир построим, – Кто был ничем, тот станет всем,” which translates to “we’ll build our new world, he who was nothing will become everything.” We unite behind this publication in the hopes of making some small contribution to the struggle to build this new world.

WHAT WE BELIEVE

We uphold the heritage of the revolutionary theory and practice of Marxism, in its three sources and three constituent parts. We affirm that the power of Marxism is in its ruthlessly critical, dialectical, and materialist method that grasps the totality of human social life and experience. We believe in the revolutionary power and will of the toiling proletarian masses, divided into diverse national, gender, and other identities which in the first instance are trapped in a daily struggle for survival in the inverted logic of class society and in the final instance have the potential to overcome these relations and build a new society and a new world.

Our critical approach both appropriates and criticizes our diverse heritage, particularly that of the 20th century. We believe that the revolutionary waves of the 20th century, both in their successes and failures, are our heritage, our teachers, and our ancestors in struggle. We believe in the fundamental right and historical necessity of the people to seize control of their own lives and apply our criticisms to our society and our own existence as progressives and revolutionaries in our society with the aim of bringing together diverse trends of popular struggle to bring about a socialist way of life which will make this self-liberation, this control of our own lives, real.

We believe in socialism, which means the control by the proletariat over the means of producing the material wealth which springs from their labour, of women and the gender oppressed over their bodies and identities, of all peoples over their own culture, land, and destiny. We believe in a struggle against all forms of oppression, exploitation, and alienation; both now, in our immediate struggle to unite the forces to bring down the capitalist state, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and further after the revolution, when the proletarian masses are in power. The alienation of which we speak is not only from the economic product of our labor but from our environment which is under assault, from our social lives which are becoming atomized, and from our very own identities, which we cannot develop under this inhumane and suicidal system.

We believe that through this struggle we can break the rising tide of fascism, overcome the capitalist-imperialist world which lurches from crisis to crisis that spawns the arch-reactionary forces known as fascists, transcend the nation-state and class society and pass from necessity into freedom: a communist way of life where each individual will contribute to the collective according to their ability and develop themselves freely from our collective human wealth in accordance with their needs.

WHY WE EXIST

We consider now to be the ideal time for putting forward a new publication for multiple reasons: internationally, the US empire’s decline and sharpening inter-imperialist contradictions have created many centers of intense struggle from the Philippines to Kurdistan to Latin America. From the super-exploited neo-colonies of Sub-Saharan Africa to the imperialist centers in Europe, from Korea to Mexico, the contradictions of this system are becoming ever more acute. In the United States, the failure of the Sanders campaign resulted in the most naked reactionary US presidency in decades, that of Donald Trump.

In the midst of this, revolutionary organizations are attempting to intervene in 21st century struggle using diverse means and are developing Marxist theory to higher levels. Here, the United States is in many ways sadly behind, and in spite of the continued or new existence of several sympathetic organizations, we consider it to be of vital importance to bring together diverse, critical voices to take up this task where other organizations are either too dogmatic, too clandestine, or both to intervene in the era of the internet as we see it.

It is of particular importance that we intervene in the United States, not only because of its continued status as the strongest imperialist power on Earth, whose politics must be reconnected to the revolutionary trends around the world, but because of the diverse struggles which already exist in the United States. As a settler-colony by birth, the United States cannot be discussed without reference to the national question, including not only the Indigenous nations on the US “mainland” (the so-called “lower 48 states”) and across its “legal” empire legitimized under various administrative schemes (Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, etc.), but also the Afro-American/New Afrikan people who struggle on the soil of their suffering and in the diaspora across the US (North), where they were driven by fascist KKK terror, and the various immigrant nationalities who still have organic connections to the social struggle in their homelands from which they were driven by war and economic circumstances brought about by imperialism. Further, even the “settler” proletariat is being drawn into struggle by the latest crisis, with thousands of youth joining the reformist organization, Democratic Socialists of America. The 21st century has also witnessed the popularization of radical gender politics in the form of feminism and queer theory, which has the potential to strike ideologically and materially at the social relations on which the family and class society is built.

We exist, as we consider the conscious vanguard must, to bring these struggles together. We believe it is possible to unite these struggles in spite of their diverse subjectivities by their objective common interests in the final instance: to weaken and ultimately bring down US imperialism and class society. While a culture of revolutionary solidarity in the US is weak, thanks to decades of FBI violence, particularly against oppressed nationalities, and modern revisionism in diverse (and sometimes hidden) forms which has sought to covertly divide these struggles in exchange for petty privileges for organizational leadership or for the labor aristocracy of the oppressor nation, we see signs that it can be rebuilt: Jackson, Mississippi is host to intense ideological and practical struggle by Afro-American proletarians, who have attempted to unite their righteous struggle for self-determination with the (still weak and largely social democratic) “white” left in the US (North), through Sanders’s visit, through correspondences, and through calls for solidarity and political interventions.

HOPE

We hope that in some modest way, we can play a part in rebuilding a revolutionary solidarity between these struggles. We hope that we can gather forces to intervene ideologically within our publication and guide the struggle of our comrades in material practice. We hope that we can engage with our international comrades on diverse historical, political, and theoretical topics. We hope that the various honest revolutionary organizations in the US will engage with us in an honest and comradely fashion, and that we can struggle together and draw closer, so that our resources may be directed towards our cause of liberation and socialism.

Most of all, we hope that our writers and readers will help build a culture of positive and revolutionary criticism. We hope to use our political subjectivity to intervene in the objective conditions which have shaped us and shape the masses from whom we come into a new political subject. We hope that the socialist movement of tomorrow will be built in the image of the diverse proletariat, whose increasing consciousness of itself and the contradictions it faces and in which it exists, will be the beginning of a new era of struggle for human liberation.

We hope that it is not already too late to save humanity from the mad, inverted world of class society and profits. Human need has been not only buried but sacrificed on the altar of this violent, rapacious system. The environment’s degradation has set a ticking clock on our struggle to overcome our alienation from ourselves and our history and to seize control of the future.

We hope that you will join in with this process, not by following us as some preordained leaders, but by criticizing us as comrades, by intervening in practice. Through this process, we hope that we will all grow together.

WORKERS AND OPPRESSED PEOPLES OF THE WORLD, UNITE!