“Communisation is a struggle against capital by communism, that is to say that for it communism appears simultaneously as the means and the end.” [1]

An Affirmation of Our Previous Critiques

Communism itself is something often gestured at and clouded by fragments of the imagination, an obstacle to weave away from as soon as it approaches the horizon; this convenient obfuscation often leaves little concrete understanding of communist activity under capitalism, and the role of communists beyond propagation.

It can also be said that much of our current exists as a trend defining what capitalism is, and what communism is not; We argue this is not pendantic but an integral measure to adequately understand the movement of and for communism. This work seeks to define our image of communism as a negative movement to abolish what exists, as the negation of the negation, and therefore capital and its mediatory reins, i.e. politics, democracy, and class character among others. Only with an understanding of capitalist contradiction and these distinct products of class society, can we adequately elaborate on communist measures and action. Let us define each of these features.

Building from Hegelian thought, Marx professed a history that is both enthralling and limited by his historical site. Be that as it may, we can still find the origin for communism in capital today. Not as a mutually inclusive totality, but of as a negation of the social relationship itself. 

“The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.” [2]

Thus, for as much as we define communism by what it is not, Communism cannot be defined without its negation of capitalism. In genesis it can most accurately be described as “the negation of the negation”, through “the acquisition of the capitalist era”. As this era produced a social relationship that was and is untenable on the basis that it is in contradiction, it provides conditions by which communism can arrive. These conditions — the foundation of all social activity under capitalism — see unceasing valorization potentially brought to death by the declining rate of profit (and the obscuring of the individual worker in wealth creation) in capital itself.

Communism is of course a stateless, classless, moneyless society. But to further understand action as action, we have to define what is most sacred: Not mere property, but societal products themselves. Under capitalism every aspect of the social relation is under fervent critique and ridicule by all major players: Every bourgeois politician, FinTech spokesman and petit-bourgeois outwardly lambasts the system as much as every proletarian when they launch against abstractions. What is sacred are the mechanisms of our epoch which platform and intensify Spectacle. 

“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation…The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” [3]

Capital employs mediation to both obscure and intensify its own character in the quest to commodify and valorize every possible molecule of society. In doing so, in its management and governance, it creates weapons specific to its historical site, weapons that appear as they have always existed, that imply they are the great culmination of human history and to do away with them would be cardinal Sin. Thus we as communists often let them slip between the cracks in the embryonic visions of a classless society, while seeking to conquer and tame these beasts of the epoch for our own use. Let us continue.

Politics, at its essence, is the Spectacular mediation employed by capital to manage itself, by which after the intitial social relationship it must reinforce its character amongst its subjects. It is an attempt of those who personify capital as a social relation, the bourgeoisie, to legitimize and entrench this management within the working classes, through negotiation, bargaining, and tedious trial and error. Such that politics is employed as a tool of mediation we are necessarily against it, and thus define our work and outlook as strictly “anti-political”. In our previous works we have elucidated on several of the most common forms of mediation found in our current society, namely those named: “Democracy and Economics”.

If politics materializes as a formation of managerial expression, then we are against its imposition amidst the movement to abolish that very expression. Thus communism, and actions of communisation, materializes as a negation of the political form. This is where, in our anti-political battle, we depart from the majority of our contemporaries as we are not as willing to throw our time-energy behind political causes, irregardless of their popular support. Primarily among these causes would be the democratic and economic struggles that have been omnipresent in the capitalist epoch. On the topic of the democratic struggle, we have spoken at length in our previous work Critique of the Florence Program: On Democracy and Mediation [4] about the root issue of democracy and the issues that movements wanting to expand democracy bring, so while we urge our readers to go back to that specific piece we will briefly provide a synopsis. Democracy, as a system for the management of society, is not just a class collaborationist institution that places the proletariat alongside its oppressor, but that it is also a system designed specifically for capitalism. Universalization of political power, on an individual level, does little to liberate one outside the realm of capitalist social relations, on the contrary all it does is entrench these populations even further. When demographics, such as women or black people, were given access to the right to vote (in the united states) it accounted for little more than state permission for these specific sections of the population to accumulate capital and have a say on the matters of the state. Democracy, such then, becomes an omnicause that rivals the class struggle, and smooths over the class differences of capitalism. Often paired with the struggle for an “increased democracy” are the economistic demands, for example: an increase in wages, workplace protections, cheaper rent, etc. These fights in effect strengthen the place of the worker in society by reducing their emiseration just enough that they are willing to continue to play their part in the production and consumption of commodities, as well as give thanks to the state for handing out these paltry sums. In the same manner that we decry economistic and democratic demands, we would extend out this critique to any other demand that mediates the class struggle, such as (but not limited to): nationalism, racialism, gender and sex isolation, or otherwise any other liberal, egalitarian movements. 

Many in our millieu may find common cause and see their heads nod as they read through the non-exhaustive list we have laid out and previously critiqued, but find themselves trapped in their everlasting support for the proletariat, and thus their support for the continuation of class society. All of the previous social movements, strategies, and programs that we have derided has been because of their mediatory position in society, but we simply cannot forget the largest and most prevalent form of mediation: class. Valorization of the class recreates it, we have seen such in the previous experiments of our ideological ancestors. [5] We do not aim to uplift or give authority to the proletariat. We do not aim to create a society for, of, and by the proletariat. It is not enough to liquidate the bourgeoisie; the very idea of the proletariat must also be put to the sword. Communism is not proletarian Heaven.

Communism as a Verb, Not History

All this aside, capitalism is not necessarily destined to negate itself. Those that personify it, while expanding the contradiction, do not seem to hang themselves with succient elasticity. This is because, as Dauvé writes, “There is no tipping point when the wage-labour system would render itself null and void. Let us not expect capitalist contradictions to solve those of the proletariat, because the proletariat also is a contradiction…The proletarians’ fight against capital is based on their resistance to what the bourgeois turns them into: an activity bound in and forced into productive time.” [6] Or rather, that the proletariat itself is a capitalist-bound entity, and its supposed extinction might as well mean the end of the world as much as the end of capital.

What the bourgeois turns us into, how they utilize our life-time, measure our spirit into allocative practices, mutates and organizes our negative movement as such. This is the fundamental contradiction: That communism as liberation is defined and waged only through momentary reaction to our condition. It is dependent upon capital as an anti-proletarian movement, and to break with capital requires measures which shatter time itself. 

Therefore communism is not a world-historical moment, an impending period of time which we await, peering out from our window into an expanse of wageless productive labor (we are joking regarding the latter). It is however, a negating action that manifests as an assault on capital and its social relations. Communist measures are not prescriptions, formulas, or programs to acheive upon the sufficient development of the productive forces (sorry Marx), but the immediate attempt at social dissolution and rebirth.

“The production of communism is nothing but the multiplication and the generalisation of communist measures taken at this or that point in the course of the confrontation with capital; measures whose objective is precisely to make of the enactment of communism a means of struggle. Communism may not be immediate, but within the communist measure it seems to be so.” [7]

As a thought experiment, let us consider a simple building occupation. We have critiqued and still criticize the prospect of “autonomous zones”, and do not posit that communism can coincide with capitalism. The act of grazing on private property like a lost cow does not produce a microcosmic communist bubble; the physical seizure is but seizure itself, property in changing hands. What it provides, however, is an immediate attempt at the dissolution of the landlord-tenant relationship, should the imagination stretch beyond occupation and into all of life. This sole measure is not eternal, but its multiplication, across the street, around the block, stretching beyond the municipality, as a burgeoning wave of measures can rapidly deteriorate capital. Insofar as wage labor becomes general work, the upkeep and socialisation of life at such a site directly posits the abolition of capital. This is communisation in multiplicity.

The primary distinction between a communist measure and proletarian social reproduction is the reinforcement of mediation. Just as the socialisation of life breaths communism, under capitalist relations social work is but unpaid wage labor, striving to maintain the proletariat’s existence for another day. Consider abstract mutual aid, such as a soup kitchen or lumpen refuge. These projects are admirable and life-time consuming, yet their site within class society is plain to see: As the entrenching of wage labor keeping the proletariat, and say, the reserve army of labor, alive another day to mutate under capital. To continuously circulate amidst a sea of dead time. To mediate the class forever, proletarian Heaven in vertigo. 

This is not to say that the production of foodstuffs is not necessary for our species, but that a communist measure is not physical: It is definitively social. A riot sees looting to be made and commodities to be had, providing a midway string as the bourgeois is expropriated. If the shops can be completely repurposed socially, a series of measures can tumble far beyond a city block. As a sole measure: The single bourgeois’ dispossession of mere commodities, this must be multiplied with the expropriation-and therefore abolition-of time, only possible by complete expropriation of their means to mutate the proletariat, their means of production.

The ability of communists to exist under capitalism, or rather the question of what is the nature of our anti-political acts, is still one that weighs heavy on the shoulders of many a communist. While we cannot definitively give any proscriptive measures or templates on what one should do, such as the programmatism and historical progression of “escalation” found in tradtional Leninist organizations, what we can provide is the essence and goal of what any potential action should be. If we return to our previous thought experiment of the building occupation, we reiterate that it is simply not enough to merely occupy the property, however we also recognize the limitations imposed upon us (those being the State and its forces). When occupying private property it may not be possible to fully break down the capitalistic social relations while they exist just next door, to this we say then the goal shifts to exercising to those around you what is possible and what can exist. If we are to admit that permanent occupation is not feasible, then we would put up temporary expropriations of property as our next course of action. Any number of social activity can occupy this space: an underground rave, an illegal art exhibit, a communal space to cook and eat, etc. This social activity may not burn down the existing social relations as we might want, but it can plant the spark in one so that they may begin to deconstruct the society in front of them. Property, which was once thought to be material, is understood to be an abstraction enforced by the State. Consciousness rises. Through the expropriation of private and public property, we can show the wayward proletariat that a different world is possible, even if for one night only.

Conclusion

Communism is not an impending historical site to be had, but a negation of the means through which the bourgeoisie continuously re-establish wage labor and time. Therefore as a negative movement, we must collectively revoke our subscriptions to bourgeois tedium, including the sweeping hills of politics, economics, and democratic regimen. Our future, if only through a recurring immediacy over immediation, is dependent upon the complete negation of the bourgeois world.

Communist measures allow us to poke at the social relation until even forces produce a stabbing bleed. For once we must consider communism as the means by which we escape Hell.

References

de Mattis, L. (2014). Communist Measures. SIC Volume II. libcom.org. https://libcom.org/article/communist-measures-leon-de-mattis 

Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume I. marxists.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf 

Critique of the Florence Program: On Democracy & Mediation. Avant Journal. (2025, August 12). https://avantjournal.noblogs.org/2025/08/12/critique-of-the-florence-program-on-democracy-mediation/

Debord, G. (1971). The Society of the Spectacle. libcom.org. https://files.libcom.org/files/The%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacle%20Annotated%20Edition.pdf 

Dauvé, G. (1972). Value, Time and Communism: Re-reading Marx. libcom.org. https://libcom.org/library/value-time-communism-gilles-dauv%C3%A9  

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[1] de Mattis, L. Communist Measures (SIC, Vol. II.)

[2] Marx, K. Capital Volume I, Chapter 32, p. 538

[3] Debord, G. The Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 1 p. 11

[4] Critique of the Florence Program: On Democracy & Mediation. Avant Journal.

[5] Even in the most “noble” and libertine of the the Communists in the early 20th century could not imagine a world without the existence of value, more can be read in section 5 of Dauve’s Value, Time and Communism.

[6] Dauve, G. Value, Time, and Communism: Re-reading Marx, Section 7

[7] de Mattis, L. Communist Measures (SIC, Vol. II.)

A PDF of this piece can be found at the bottom of the page.

This article is not, in the first instance, an argument for revolution. Neither is it a critique of electoral politics as such. I have no wish to tell my friend that his evenings of canvassing were wasted, or to confirm my partner’s suspicion that I have reasoned my way into paralysis. The question I want to pursue lies between reform and rupture. If a given social order reasserts itself regardless of who administers it, then the interesting question is not whom we should elect but what kind of order possesses this strange capacity to survive its own  elections. What are the structures that make such persistence possible? Why is capitalist  society so difficult to govern out of existence, even by those who sincerely wish to? These  are questions about domination, and they are the questions of this article.

To pose them properly, one has to set aside a familiar picture. In ordinary speech, and in much of the press, capitalism names a set of policies or a cluster of institutions: private property, the joint-stock company, the firm, and the market understood as a place where things are bought and sold. In this reformist picture, to change capitalism would be to change the policies and reform the institutions, and the reason this proves so hard is simply that powerful people resist it. There is truth in this, but it remains on the surface. It mistakes the symptoms of a relation for the relation itself. Capitalism, in the sense I mean to develop here, is not primarily an institution or a body of law. It is a social relation, and more precisely a relation governed by the self-valorization of value, by the compulsion that money be advanced in order to return as more money. Value that valorizes itself [sich verwertender Wert] is the master of this society in a sense that no minister can be, though this mastery is the form of an inversion [Verkehrung] and not the rule of a subject standing behind the process. Institutions and laws are the forms this relation assumes and the channels through which it moves, but they are not its basis. One can rearrange them considerably and leave the relation untouched, which is precisely what the alternation of governments tends to do.

This is why Marx insisted that what has to be explained about such a society is not only how it produces things but how it reproduces itself. A society does not persist by accident. The worker who sells her labor in order to live, and who in living renews the need to sell it tomorrow, reproduces in the same motion the relation that compels the sale. Capital, for  Marx, presupposes the conditions of its own existence and reposits them through its own movement, so that the result of the process is the restoration of its premise. As Søren Mau puts it in Mute Compulsion “capital presupposes its own presuppositions”. A social order with this character is not held in place by a single institution that one might capture or destroy. It is held in place by the ordinary continuation of social life, by the fact that to live within it is already to renew it. In this sense the Leninist demand to smash the state names a necessary moment and not the whole of the problem. A relation reproduced through the ordinary continuation of social life is not abolished by the capture or destruction of any single institution, the state included. This is why the language of domination is pertinent.

So I want to ask the question directly: In what ways does capitalism dominate? The phrasing is deliberate. My argument in what follows is that capitalist domination is not the work of a single mechanism. It operates on several interconnected levels at once, each with its own logic and its own mode of compulsion, and to see this clearly we will have to descend below the level of the visible contest, to the relation that the contest presupposes, and from there trace the forms in which that relation makes itself felt as a power over those who live under it.  

Most critiques of capitalism that reach a wide audience are critiques of exploitation, of  inequality, or of ownership. Think of the sort of comments such as “the issue is not that the  Sweden Democrats and the right keep winning, the issue is that the 1% own basically  everything.” They are not wrong, but they leave the question of power untouched. A person  can grant that capitalism exploits workers, that it concentrates wealth in few hands, and that  the means of production belong to a small class, and still have said nothing about how  capitalism exercises power over those who live within it. Exploitation names a transfer, the  appropriation of surplus labor by those who do not perform it. But exploitation so understood  remains a category of classical political economy. Ricardo too could state the appropriation  of surplus labor as a magnitude. What classical political economy cannot state, and what the  concept of domination is needed to name, is the command and constraint through which that  appropriation is secured. Domination names the capacity to direct, limit, and compel the conduct of others. The two are inseparable in practice, since the capacity to compel is what makes the transfer possible, and the brief I am following throughout treats them as moments of one process.(1) But they are not identical, and the difference is consequential, because a society could in principle redistribute the proceeds of exploitation while leaving its structures  of domination intact. To ask how capitalism dominates is therefore not a roundabout way of  asking how it exploits. It is a separate question, and it has a layered answer. This answer is  crucial in how to construct a definitive break with capital as a whole.  

Here Bruno Leipold’s reconstruction of Marx offers a useful point of departure. In Leipold’s reading, capitalist domination is not one thing but three. There is the personal domination that the capitalist exercises over the worker. There is the structural domination secured by the background of property that leaves the worker no master-free option. And there is the impersonal domination of the market, to which capitalists and workers are alike  subordinated.(2) I take these three not as a list of separate evils but as moments of a single social relation, each presupposing and reinforcing the others.(3) Setting them out in sequence is a matter of exposition. In the world they are never apart, as the model set out below is meant  to show. 

 Personal Domination  

The first and most visible form is personal domination, and its natural home is the workplace. Capitalism presents itself, at the point where worker and employer meet, as a meeting of equals – which they really are. Two owners of commodities confront one another in the market, one with money to spend and one with labor power to sell, and they conclude a  contract that the law treats as freely entered by formally equal persons. Nothing in the  transaction looks like subjection. At the threshold of production this equality does not lapse.  It is realized. The freedom and equality of the exchange are not a surface that the hierarchy of  production then belies. They are the form in which that hierarchy is contracted, and they remain in force precisely as the worker is set to work under command. The worker who has  signed the contract walks into a space organized as a hierarchy, in which managers and  owners issue instructions and the worker is obliged, by the terms of the very agreement that  established his freedom, to obey. Marx marks the passage with some irony. We leave the noisy sphere of exchange, where everything happens in the open and on the surface, and  follow the two parties into the hidden abode of production, where the former money owner  now strides ahead as a capitalist and the possessor of labor power follows as his worker.(4) This is the form of domination that common sense recognizes most readily, because it  appears as the direct rule of one person over another. It has a long catalog of concrete expressions: the surveillance that tracks keystrokes, badge swipes, and bathroom breaks; the managerial authority that assigns, reassigns, and reprimands; the disciplinary procedure that formalizes the power to punish and dismiss; and the performance target that converts the open-ended obligation to work into a measurable quota whose failure carries consequences. None of this is incidental to capitalist production. The employer who buys labor power for a stretch of time has bought the right to set it in motion and to determine the manner of its use, and the apparatus of command exists to make that right effective.  

It would be a mistake, though, to let the analysis rest here, as if capitalism were essentially a regime of petty workplace tyranny that could be cured by gentler managers and better human-resources policy. The authority of the manager is real, but it is not the ground of the relation and not what reproduces it. The worker submits to command not because the  manager is personally stronger but because the alternative to submission is the loss of access  to wages, and the loss of access to wages is, for someone who owns nothing else to sell,  tantamount to starvation. Personal domination, in other words, rests on a condition that lies  outside the workplace and precedes the contract.  

Structural Domination 

 Why does the worker present himself at the factory gate or the office door at all, ready to accept terms he did not write? The answer returns us to the condition that the labor contract presupposes but does not itself create: dispossession, the separation of the mass of people from independent access to the means of subsistence and the means of production. Marx tells the story of how this separation came about in the chapter on so-called original accumulation, the historical process by which producers were severed from the land and the tools through enclosure, expropriation, and a body of bloody legislation that criminalized the dispossessed and drove them toward wage labor.(5)

It is tempting to read this as an origin story, a founding act of violence now safely behind us. That reading misses the point. The decisive fact is not the brutality of the founding but the structure it left in place. Once the great majority hold no independent means of life, they can obtain the means of life only by selling the one commodity they reliably possess, their capacity to work. This is the sense in which the worker under capitalism is doubly free. He is free in the legal and welcome sense that he may dispose of his labor power as his own and is bound to no particular master. And he is free in the bleaker sense of being free of property, free of any object through which he might support himself without entering the market at all.(6) These are not two freedoms, one real and one nominal, but one determination read from two sides. The liberty to dispose of one’s own labor power and the compulsion to sell it are given in a single stroke, so that the form in which this society grants the worker his freedom is identical with the form in which it delivers him to the market. What presents itself as the liberty to choose an employer is the necessity of choosing one. No individual capitalist holds  a whip over the worker and drives him to the labor market.(7) The worker arrives there on his own feet, under a compulsion that issues from his situation rather than from any person’s command, and finding the gate already open is precisely what makes the compulsion so easy to mistake for choice.  

What gives this structure its durability is that it is reproduced by the very activity it compels. Capitalist production does not merely make commodities. As Marx observed, it produces and reproduces the relation itself, on one side the capitalist, on the other the wage laborer, and it does so continuously, as an ordinary outcome of its ordinary operation.(8) Mau captures this self-sustaining quality in a compact formula: capital presupposes its own presuppositions.(9) The conditions capital needs in order to function, above all a population that owns no means of subsistence and must therefore sell its labor, are not supplied once at the beginning and then consumed. They are produced again and again by capital’s own movement. The wage the worker earns is spent on the means of subsistence (and today, spent on various other things – which is beyond the scope of this here article) and is gone, and the worker returns to the market the following day in the same condition of dependence that sent him there in the first place. People reproduce, through the prudent and unremarkable activity of earning a living, the very separation that obliges them to earn it. Structural domination is not imposed on social reproduction from outside. Instead it is the form social reproduction takes when the means of life are reached only through the wage.  

Impersonal Domination  

There is a third level, which might be the most distinctive thing about capitalism as a form of social power. Mau gives it the name mute compulsion, a phrase he draws from Marx’s remark that the mute compulsion [stummer Zwang] of economic relations completes the worker’s subjection so that direct extra-economic force becomes the exception rather than the rule.(10) What is striking about this level is that domination here increasingly appears without a visible dominator. No individual capitalist controls the market. The owner of a firm is not a sovereign who legislates prices, sets the rate of profit, or decrees the pace of technical  change. He is as much a subject of the market as anyone, and yet everyone within the market  becomes subject to its imperatives all the same. One could say that the sovereign head has  been struck off. The personal ruler who once stood at the summit has no counterpart here, and  capital is in this sense an acephalous monster.(11) 

Those imperatives have familiar names: competition, the pressure to raise productivity, the discipline of cost reduction, the drive to accumulate, and the demand for growth without which a capital ceases to be a capital. The capitalist who declines to cut costs and raise output is undersold and punished by the same market that rewards the capitalist who does not decline. Competition is the mechanism by which capital’s immanent laws are imposed on the individual capitalist as external coercive laws, laws he experiences not as his own preference but as a force confronting him from without.(12) This is why the capitalist class cannot simply choose to be humane. A firm that pays above the going rate, works its employees more gently, or forgoes a profitable cruelty is, other things equal, competing on worse terms than a firm that does none of these things, and over time the market selects against it. Capitalists are subordinated to the system they personify.(13) The market consequently appears as an objective force, a fact of nature with which one must reckon, rather than a command issued by an identifiable ruler.  

The word “market,” though, is the wrong term to rest on, because it names the surface rather than the source. Beneath competition lies the value form, and beneath the value form lies the peculiar dynamism Marx called value that valorizes itself [sich verwertender Wert], value whose whole tendency is to augment itself without limit. Marx goes so far as to describe value in process, value passing through its successive forms of money and commodity and back to more money, as the automatic subject [automatisches Subjekt] of the entire movement, the real agent of a process in which human beings figure as its functionaries.(14) The formula does not install value as a subject in place of the human one. It registers an inversion [Verkehrung]: value can stand in the place of the subject only because living activity has been reduced to its function. The automatic subject is a subject in the mode of perversion, not an agent standing behind the process. The imperative to accumulate is not, at root, the psychology of greedy individuals, though greedy individuals certainly exist.(15) It is the practical shape taken by self-valorizing value as it works itself out through people who  must serve it whether they relish the role or resent it.

This is the level at which my opening disagreement is finally settled. It explains why  governments of very different political colors find themselves administering recognizably similar constraints. A government that wishes to remain solvent, to attract and retain investment, and to keep its population employed must maintain conditions favorable to accumulation, and the range of policy compatible with that requirement is narrower than electoral rhetoric ever admits. The constraint is not a conspiracy of bankers, though bankers benefit from it. Where the impersonal compulsion of the value-form is mistaken for the design of an identifiable culprit, the result is not critique but its structural counterfeit. Modern antisemitism, with its figure of the scheming financier who personifies abstract domination, is the most persistent form this counterfeit takes. It is the impersonal pressure of the value form bearing on whoever holds office, which is why the order that follows the election so reliably resembles the order that preceded it.  

Why the Three Forms Cannot Be Separated  

The three forms are analytically distinct, and I have presented them as if one could examine  each on its own. In the social world they are practically inseparable, locked into a set of  feedback relations through which each sustains the others. Personal domination in the  workplace depends on structural dispossession, since the manager’s authority is effective only  because the worker, owning nothing else to sell, has nowhere better to go. Structural  dispossession is in turn reproduced through wage labor, since the worker’s daily participation  renews the separation that delivers him back to the market each morning. Wage labor is itself  shaped by impersonal imperatives, since the demands the manager transmits, the speed  required and the costs to be cut, are not the manager’s invention but the local expression of  competitive pressures the firm does not control. And those impersonal imperatives  continually recreate the workplace hierarchy and the dependence on wages on which personal  and structural domination rest. The circle closes, and having closed it turns, which is why no  single intervention at one point in it leaves the rest undisturbed.  

This is the deeper meaning of Marx’s insistence “that capital, rather than being a thing, is a  social relation between persons that is mediated by things.”(16) Capital is not a stock of machines, a sum of money, or a quantity of goods, although it appears in all of these guises. It  is a relation that organizes how people produce, what they must do to live, and how their activity is coordinated behind their backs, and it is a relation that reproduces itself. To call  capitalism a social relation rather than an economic arrangement is to say that it is not a static  system that could be left running while its parts are swapped out, but a dynamic process  whose very operation regenerates the conditions of its own continuation. Domination, on this  account, is not something capital has but something capital is: the name for a relation that  secures its own continuation through the activity of those it binds. 

 A Model of the Whole  

It helps to hold the three forms together in one picture, the picture that the next section of this  article sets out as a diagram. At the surface lie three sites, each with its characteristic form of  power. The workplace is governed by personal domination, the direct authority of those who command over those who obey. The society-wide dependence on wage labor is governed by  structural domination, the necessity that drives the propertyless to the market. The field of  competition and accumulation is governed by impersonal domination, the compulsion of  value that masters capitalists and workers alike. These are the visible levels, the ones at  which the experience of being dominated actually occurs.  

Beneath them lie the foundations. Historically, the relations were established by original  accumulation. But the violence of the founding is no longer the principal thing that keeps the  relations in place. Domination today is reproduced far less through overt force and far more through what might be called accumulated subsumption, the sedimented result of centuries of capitalist development, in which a separation that once had to be imposed at the point of a bayonet has settled into the unremarkable background of ordinary life. Most people are  delivered to the wage not by soldiers but by the simple absence of any alternative, an absence so total that it no longer registers as coercion at all.  

Two further mechanisms hold this structure in place, and because they are easily confused it  is worth marking the difference sharply. Neither is in the first instance a matter of what  individuals happen to believe. The first is fetishism. Fetishism is generated by the value-form  itself, prior to anyone’s wish to defend the existing order. It causes the social relations among  producers to appear as relations among things, so that the value of a commodity looks like a natural property of the object rather than a crystallization of social labor, and so that the  movement of prices and markets confronts people as a quasi-natural process with laws of its own.(17) Its effect is to make capitalist domination appear natural and objective, a feature of the world rather than a historically specific arrangement that human beings produce and could in principle dismantle. In the third volume of Capital this appearance reaches its most finished  form in what Marx calls the trinity formula, where capital, land, and labor present themselves as three independent sources of profit, rent, and wages, the social relation by now wholly dissolved into the apparently natural fertility of things.(18) Fetishism is not a mistake that a sufficiently clever person can see through by an effort of will. It is an objective feature of how a society organized by value necessarily appears to those who live in it. 

The second mechanism is ideology, and it operates differently. Ideology is produced and  reproduced through institutions: through culture, education, the media, and the exercise of  political power. Where fetishism is the spontaneous appearance thrown up by the value-form,  ideology is the elaborated set of interpretations that justify and normalize capitalist social relations, the stories a society tells about why things are as they are and why they could not easily be otherwise.(19) The two are related, since fetishism furnishes the raw material, the seemingly natural surface, on which ideology then builds. But they are not the same.  Fetishism arises from the form of value, with no author and no interest behind it. Ideology is  the work of institutions that have interests, and it can be contested, exposed, and fought in a  way that the fetish character of the commodity, which is not a falsehood but a real  appearance, cannot simply be argued away.  

Conclusion 

 So, in what ways does capitalism dominate? It dominates personally, in the relations of  command through which the workplace is run and the employer’s purchased authority is  made to tell. It dominates structurally, through the dispossession that strips people of any  independent means of life and the dependence that returns them, day after day, to the market for a wage. And it dominates impersonally, through the compulsions of value and competition  that subordinate the capitalist no less than the worker to an accumulation neither of them  controls. These are not three rival answers among which we must choose the truest. They are  three aspects of one relation, and the relation is powerful because they hold each other up.  The final thing to say is the most important. Capitalist domination is formidable above all  because it does not, for the most part, confront individuals as an external force standing over  against them. It is reproduced through ordinary social activity itself, through the very acts by which people meet their needs and conduct their lives. The worker who takes the job, the manager who enforces the targets, the investor who seeks a return, and the consumer who buys at the lowest price are not breaking the rules of some imposed system. They are following the only rational course their situation offers, and in following it they renew the situation.  

It does not follow that to undo this domination would be to arrive at freedom. That the relation is reproduced through us, rather than imposed upon us, unsettles the very concept by which its overcoming is usually named, and it is not obvious that what lies on the far side of this domination can still be called freedom at all. Capitalism dominates not only over people, but through them. The worker, the manager, the consumer, the investor, and the voter all participate in reproducing relations whose logic exceeds their intentions. The remarkable  achievement of capitalist domination is that it persists not despite our daily activity, but  through it.  

How “we shoot ourselves out of here” is a question which I have contemplated a lot recently.(20) To whomever might find these contemplations of interest can read my paper that I  will be presenting at the Society for Marxist Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark, in which I  examine whether emancipation can still be understood as freedom at all.

Footnotes & Reference List

1.) Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024), esp. chaps. 3 and 6. 

2.) Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024), esp. chaps. 3 and 6. Leipold reconstructs Marx’s critique of  capitalist unfreedom around the personal domination the capitalist exercises over the worker, the structural  domination secured by property relations, and the impersonal domination of the market to which capitalists and  workers alike are subject; he also insists that domination has an explanatory link to exploitation rather than  being reducible to it.

3.) I borrow Leipold’s tripartition as a descriptive ordering of capital’s modes of compulsion and not as an endorsement of the freedom-concept that underwrites it. Whether the determinate negation of this domination  yields a positive freedom, or only the non-identity of the concept, is a question this essay holds in abeyance and  pursues elsewhere.

4.) Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Paul Reitter, ed. Paul North (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024), 121–51.

5.) Marx, Capital, 1:650–91.

6.) Marx, Capital, 1:121–51. On the worker as “free in a double sense.”

7.) There are of course cases where this still happens, but they are all the more exceedingly rare.

8.) Marx, Capital, 1:521–33.

9.) Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (London: Verso, 2023). 216-225. Mau distinguishes economic power, the “mute compulsion” of economic relations, from the two other  modalities of capital’s power, violence and ideology, and argues that capital reproduces the conditions of its own  existence, such that it “presupposes its own presuppositions.”

10.) Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (London: Verso, 2023). 226.

11.) The figure of an acephalous [ἀκέφαλος, headless] power is meant literally: capital commands without a commanding head. I take the adjective and not Bataille’s Acéphale and its mythology; the substantive point is Marx’s, that competition imposes capital’s immanent laws on each capitalist as external coercion.

12.) Marx, Capital, 1:203–72.

13.) Marx, Capital, 1:127.

14.) Marx, Capital, 1:125–28.

15.) Marx, Capital, 1:127-28. Marx, actually says that greed, in the sense of amassing money, is the opposite of what capitalism requires.

16.) Marx, Capital, 1:694.

17.) Marx, Capital, 1:47–60 (the section on the fetish character of the commodity); Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, trans. Alexander Locascio (New York: Monthly  Review Press, 2012), chap. 3. On fetishism as the objective form of appearance of social relations under the  value form rather than a subjective error.

18.) Karl Marx, Capital Volume III, vol. 37 of Marx/Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). 801-18.

19.) Marx, Capital, 1:650. At the opening of the chapter on so-called original accumulation, Marx remarks that previous accumulation plays the same role in political economy that original sin plays in theology. The  bourgeois origin-myth, which refers the worker’s present dispossession back to an ancestral diligence, is a clear  instance of ideology in the sense meant here: an interpretation that legitimates the existing separation by  narrating it as deserved.

20.) Kommo, “Vi Måste Skjuta Oss Ut Härifrån,” 1982, streaming audio, Spotify.

Author’s Note: A PDF is attached at the bottom of the page.

In the wake of the third ‘No Kings Day’ march, we provide a critique of the Communist and Anarchist Left’s tendency towards mass politics. The latter section revolves around Crimethinc’s recent call for “anti-authoritarian blocs” at the last two anti-monarchist actions.

Introduction

On Saturday, March 28th, millions of Americans marched to the beat of anti-monarchism. An obvious but nonetheless curious dilemma is immediately raised here: There is no American Monarch. Although we have tried our best over the centuries, God has never cast His hand to our great rulers, choosing them as our anointed national saints. No, in the name of God, our great nation has only emancipated itself further from Him in all social aspects. As such, we only have ourselves-what little is left of humanity in America-to blame for any so-called abuses of authority. In a Democratic Republic, it is not monarchy which has shown its true character.

With the rallying cries of the democratic-bourgeois camp ringing hollow and nonreal, it is the those branded as the “Far-Right” which demonstrate the most convincing grasp on reality. The gears of Democracy thus turn for them slowly, and they wait idly by, doing nothing, watching the liberal machine hallucinate and sputter for life. The liberals do not look right, they must consider, because they can no longer recognize the fronts they attack and defend. Democracy provided the foot-soldiers, the AI bubble and the sky-high rents, but these liberals have seemingly now accosted Democracy as Monarchy, or even Fascism! Now as these liberals seek to overturn Fascism, our Rightist truly becomes the last defense of Democracy. 

Should a real “Fascism” emerge from these conditions, we can’t say much that hasn’t been said. As Gilles Dauvé put it almost 50 years ago, it is not a question of “Fascism Or Democracy”, but “Fascism And Democracy”. There at the march against nonreal Monarchy, we are little more than Democrats and Fascists ourselves, marching spectacularly on Rome and the halls of power, for the preservation of both. Regardless of ideological bent, it is mass-political technique which produces the same motions through all of those at this march. Lines continue to blur, and a duo of Democratic and Fascistic camps emerge. Yet in the interim, either camp represents both movements.

The avant-garde of the counter-revolution are those most cunning savants of capital, who have not only managed to demolish the Communist movement, but grab hold of it so as to define the Communist movement. Those that define it have unanimously encouraged their organizations to attend and radicalize these Blackshirt dry-runs. It is ironic that as they flock in droves to provide the petit-bourgeois spectacle a political alternative, these organizations will damn the Left itself with no choice at all. To participate in the mass politic, to enmesh ourselves in the development of American fasci, or to die trying. 

We will meet the workers, or rather at these marches the upper semi-proletarians and small business owners where they are at, and strengthen a new, more Democratic and more Fascist Republic.

To a Fascist Republic

What is this Fascism, the presumed “real” enemy this past weekend sought to mobilize against? Does it represent anything new in the production and reproduction of society? Is it much different from Democracy? We draw from one of the more compelling definitions below, while still offering several criticisms of  this “Fascistology”. 

“What is the real thrust of fascism, if not the economic and political unification of capital, a tendency which has become general since 1914? Fascism was a particular way of bringing about that unity in countries — Italy and Germany — where, even though the revolution had been snuffed out, the state was unable to impose order, including order in the ranks of the bourgeoisie. Mussolini was no Thiers, with a solid base in power, ordering regular forces to massacre the Communards. An essential aspect of fascism is its birth in the streets, its use of disorder to impose order, its mobilisation of the old middle classes crazed by their own decline, and its regeneration, from without, of a state unable to deal with the crisis of capitalism. Fascism was an effort of the bourgeoisie to forcibly tame its own contradictions, to turn working class methods of mobilisation to its own advantage, and to deploy all the resources of the modern state, first against an internal enemy, then against an external one” (Dauvé, 1979).

We find Dauvé’s analysis historically accurate on 20th century Fascist movements, yet one must remember his inscriptions as related to the Fascist movements and not on capitalist development itself. “Fascism” is not a point in historical development nor of capitalist development. It is not unique in its “economic and political” unification of capital”, the primary consideration from Dauvé: Economics and politics are unified in every capitalist State. Fascist movements may give rise to qualitatively different ideologists, rhetoric and even means of organization-birth in the streets, for one-but Fascism is yet to inscribe itself as a unique historical stage. Likewise, Democracy is as much of an effort to “forcibly tame bourgeois contradictions”, depending on the definition of force and the specific actions of each State. The notion of pivoting State resources toward internal, then external enemies as well is also a nonstarter! Even enlightened Fidel and his compañeros couldn’t help but open up a few concentration camps, before pivoting their State-military resources elsewhere. The sheer inability of anyone to truly isolate Fascism as a phenomenon points to the critical understanding that Fascism is not an isolated phenomenon. Thus even our attempting to describe Fascism serves a moot point. So why are we organizing around and against it?

When “Fascism” arises in a society, it is dealt with by the liberal bourgeoisie and the Communist Parties as an external threat to pre-existing conditions (Democracy). On the contrary, Fascism is a push to save Democracy from itself, from its own fallacious attempts to tame the contradiction of class. When Democracy is truly wrecked, such as in Italy or Germany, Capital is unified in its political decision-making. Politics, or the language of distribution and allocation, and therefore Capital, becomes altogether more synonymous with this sole form of representation. Whatever existed previously is integrated into this form of representation, and whatever cannot be integrated is disposed of in violent speed. 

We are communists, so naturally we wish to survive the next great wave of counterrevolution, and maybe even see through the abolition of the capitalist relation. We understand the feelings of trepidation regarding the State, and the human desire to see it out, to survive. That being said we cannot help but see the rallying cries toward anti-monarchist, even anti-fascist mass-spectacular events as the enmeshing of working class organizations, of communist and anarchist organizations, within the reproduction of capital. We do ourselves no favors here, only further identifying as Democratic forces in a world providing no alternative. “All out to the march of millions” is the rational and efficient choice, but it is not the effective one. We consider the actions of Crimethinc, for example, to essentially be the offering up of Anarchists to these Democratic forces. 

The next section will cover this in greater detail, after developing an understanding of  the “technical” and “rational”, essentially how these calls to act within mass politics reproduce structures of Democratic legitimacy. We refer to Jacques Ellul’s framing of atomization within production and social reproduction here: Technique “has become the dominant factor in the Western world, so that the best name for our society is the “technicist society.” It is on technique that all other factors depend. Technique is no longer some uncertain and incomplete intermediary between humanity and the natural milieu. The latter is totally dominated and utilized (in Western society). Technique now constitutes a fabric of its own, replacing nature. Technique is the complex and complete milieu in which human beings must live and in relation to which they must define themselves. It is a universal mediator, producing a generalized mediation, totalizing and aspiring to totality.” Furthermore, Ellul argues that “technique constitutes a system in the strict sense of the term, that is to say, an ensemble in which factors are so closely linked together that:

• Each element has a meaning or significance only within the ensemble;
• Any modification of an element has repercussions on the ensemble and modifies it. Any modification of the ensemble likewise modifies the elements of their relationships;
• Privileged, almost exclusive relationships exist among the elements of the system, regardless of what is situated outside the system.”

While we find ourselves much in disagreement with Ellul’s idealist historical method, he provides a rough outline of atomization in productive and reproductive capacities. In a capitalist society where all human interaction revolves around efficiency and mediation, it is in the name of “rationality” that we meet the masses where they are. But as we do so, the significance of any given ideological banner is slighted by the reproduction of motion. Consider the following.

It means nothing to be an anarchist/communist/liberal/fascist/monarchist on an individual level, but in an ensemble we find our isolated traits becoming fruitful. Or rather, we believe that our respective ideological traditions can intervene in struggles once they brush the ground. Thus the tendency to mass-meet and make mass, to congeal and burrow into the proletarians and semi-proletariants, the lumpen and the petit-bourgeoisie. Yet ideology cannot make history, and it cannot alter the motion of capitalist technique toward the fulfillment of any ensemble. 

Ideology only has significance when it has mass support, but any construction of mass support directly alters the function of a given ideology. Anarchism, for example, may very well be the most revolutionary and anti-formist of all ideology: We aren’t the proper ideologists to judge these proceedings… But in the mass movement, and specifically at this moment in the ‘No Kings’ episodic series, an Anarchist ideological endeavor has a real tendency to be pick-pocketed. In order to relate to the protest and its adherents, Anarchism must now be an individual habit of consumption, or a tendency to make sandwiches for the poor, or to become allocative, even patriotic. It doesn’t matter how an Anarchist presents oneself here, because the function of the ensemble has already modified it and done away with the rest. The protest itself is a pageant, and in its many sins cannot help but reproduce activists doing activism for the Republic. Furthermore, an event like ‘No Kings’ is deliberately designed to congeal mass dissent and provide the dexterity to renew support for the national project. We will listen to the statesmen and loudspeakers, we will all stand around doing nothing, and we will walk through the streets ever so peacefully, with a gracious escort of police vehicles. Anarchist, “Communiser”, it does not matter. The ensemble has shown it can successfully neutralize any perceived threat with venom. Thus what once rested as a historical critique is washed away to realize itself as a plaything, one of the 20-odd playthings at a legalistic, bourgeois carnival. 

We talk not in vague terms here. In the following section, we deal with the specific pitch some Anarchists have predetermined their calls to: A remarkable reduction from class struggle and communism itself, to that of an “anti-authoritarian” popular front.

On Authority, the Cousin of Capital: An Anarchist-Populist Fallacy

We posit the theses of communisation theory leave very little institutional or legal juncture: How easy it is to proclaim communism itself… To get there we are but fools, and the series of trial and error our comrades embark on is welcome. 

In these experiments, we have noted that “radicalizing” a protest is a reactionary process. One can take the reins of technique and technology, but it cannot make them neutral, or even positive forces in the process of revolution and counterrevolution. The protest is still the lightning in the bottle, the codification of constraint and contradiction, into a weary puddle of unrealized exhaustion. Insurrection plucked from the womb in infancy, this time around with snarky t-shirts and inflatable suits.

Countering this, a poignant and prevailing faith seems to reside in the process of taking a protest to escalation. As it comprises a most dutiful allegiance to the mass political form, we specifically reference Crimethinc’s call to form “anti-authoritarian blocs”. On October 9th 2025, the “rebel alliance” initially called for a bourgeois alliance with “everyone, of all walks of life, to proclaim that opposition to fascism”. On March 16th, they doubled down, encouraging their readership to “Be someone’s radical moment”: “Some participants at No Kings are not going to be open to hearing radical critiques of capitalism and the state, but make it your mission to find the ones who are ready to join the struggle, who just need a framework and an idea of where to begin. Talk to them about their views and how those might fit within a larger global history of resistance. It’s not about convincing them, but sharing tools to give a name to their longing for liberation”. What has resulted from these calls encapsulates the dead weight of these platitudes to “resist”. Thus, we will critique the “anti-authoritarian bloc” in its performance and rhetorical content.

Across the country, as millions of upper semi-proletarians and petit-bourgeois take to the streets, a much smaller sub-sect are actively moving among them, attempting to counter hegemonic ideas. Whereas the Leninists sell ideology and book club invitations, the insurrectionist and Anarchist extend the most convincing of suggestions: To seize the protest and actually do something. To act outside of the confines of the bourgeoisie, to turn the capitalist donors on their head, and spit in the face of their elected faces in doing so. This is something that has been tried to varying degrees in several No Kings marches around the country. In those circumstances which have remotely succeeded, Anarchists have led splinter marches or even the entire thing. Crimethinc themselves advertise one of these moments as to “rubber-stamp” the most dreamlike efficacy of forming the bloc.

Again, the critique is that of a twofold account. Foremost, we have to question the nature of authority and subversion, both terms already ready to fit right into the liberal ensemble. Abstractly, we can say we are against “authority”. It at least sounds rather dulling. But when seeking to overturn said authority, we cannot pretend as if it is the contradiction which squeaks and grinds away. Rather, any harsh notion of “authority” is the sour taste of capitalist alienation, refracted light from which we now arrive at a thesis accommodating capital. To proclaim war on authority alone, therefore, is to retain the capitalist and salvage a “more capitalist capitalism” (Dauvé, 1979). 

What Crimethinc proclaims on the basis of being against authority is precisely to make inroads with those who marched on the Capitol. They too, were and are against fractures of authority. To be against authority, we may even extend our hands to Netanyahu or those Israeli settlers of the West Bank. They, perhaps more than any other, truly spit in the face of authority, bring about the nullification of the international bourgeois courts, and with it the entire moral-liberal framework. Should we offer critical support to such a cause, if it is against some authority? Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, all of the statesmen of history were first and foremost: “Against authority”. The Republican Party, domineering in all capacities, has long used the same language against overreaching government hands. Thus the protest is no different than a mock-putsch if it does not fundamentally alter the bond between classes (and therefore the classes themselves). Having a run-in with the police is welcome, but at what point is the expense of proletarian blood greater than the brief rush of energy against “authority”? On the secondary point of real tactical performance: If we launch an anti-authoritarian bloc ourselves, herd ‘No Kings’ protestors away from the monotony and toward the police line, none of it will matter if we all show up for work the next day. What bleeds from this tactic is lifestylism. Yet for building a bloc and a popular front, we have let our enemies trickle in behind us! They will continue to subject us to misery in the name of “anti-authoritarianism”.

The concept of an anti-authoritarian bloc, and the ceaseless calls to mass-politicize on the basis of authority itself, is an affront to the communist movement precisely because it undermines what makes us radical. Authority is but a tangent to the war on classes itself, and in emphasizing unity around the former, these Anarchist-Populists show they have forgotten the lessons of the Spanish Civil War. The Popular Front lives on. Capital lives on. And therefore, in our minds at least, “authority” survives as well.

Conclusion

So, whatever is Fascism and Authority? Fascism is nothing, and Authority is a Class (out of respect for these mobilizations, we won’t say which one). Yet if the Democratic Forces today-Liberals and Stalinists, Anarchists and Maoists-continue to mobilize under the mass politic, we are sure to taste both. 

Citations

1. Dauvé, G. (1979). When Insurrections Die. Endnotes. https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-1/gilles-dauve-when-insurrections-die 
2. Ellul, J. (1983). Technology is Not the Same as Technique!. International Jacques Ellul Society. https://ellul.org/themes/ellul-and-technique/ 
3. Collective, CrimethInc. E.-W. (2025, October 9). No Kings, No Masters. CrimethInc. https://crimethinc.com/2025/10/09/no-kings-no-masters-a-call-for-anti-authoritarian-blocs-at-the-october-18-no-kings-demonstrations 
4. Collective, CrimethInc. E.-W. (2026, March 16). No Kings, No Masters: Building the Resistance. CrimethInc. https://crimethinc.com/2026/03/16/no-kings-no-masters-a-call-to-mobilize-at-the-march-28-no-kings-rallies 
5. Collective, CrimethInc. E.-W. (2025b, October 20). Anarchists At the No Kings Rallies. CrimethInc. https://crimethinc.com/2025/10/20/anarchists-at-the-no-kings-rallies-reports-from-around-the-country#account-i-a-small-city 

Editor’s Note: A PDF copy of the article is attached at the bottom of the page.

SCENE:

The United States. “Amerikkka”. The Evil Empire. You know where we are.

TIME:

When else but now? 2026 since the Year of Our Lord. ((1447 if you happen to be a heretic) 14.4 Billion Years if you’re an Atheist) 

SETTING: 

A dreary sight to behold. Sat in the middle of the room is a table. Around the table are several chairs. In each chair sits an [ORGANIZER]. This room could be anywhere: the living room of a friend’s apartment, the basement of a “progressive church”, the secluded back office of a book store. The air is tense. The mood is sour.

AT RISE:

Four [ORGANIZERS] sit huddled together. Tones are hushed. [ORGANIZER 3]’s head is stuck in his notebook as he scribbles down random musings. [ORGANIZER 2] gets up and paces around the table. [ORGANIZER 1] sits calmly with a cup of (something). [ORGANIZER 4] wields the communal laptop. The previous conversation resumes.

[ACT 1]

[ORGANIZER 4]

So what do we do? 

(SHE PULLS OUT HER PHONE AND GLANCES AT IT QUICKLY BEFORE PUTTING IT AWAY)

We’ve been at this for how many months now?

[ORGANIZER 2]

A few at least. 

(HE BEGINS SCRATCHING HIS HEAD AND A SLIGHT FROWN IS NOW NOTICEABLE)

I’m not sure why we don’t have more people. How are our socials doing?

[ORGANIZER 3]

Our impressions are fine. Everything’s better than last month. And the month before that. People just don’t seem to be interested I guess.

[ORGANIZER 1]

(INTEJECTING)

We need to meet the people where they are at. We need to INTEGRATE ourselves into the masses. Join community orgs, go to neighborhoods. Ask people what they need. Join our Unions. Attend local – 

[stop]

You get the point…

INTRODUCTION

Mass Politics is the central theme of the current moment. Both the Left and Right of Capital are rushing, en masse, to recruit and proselytize the nascent masses into their cults (of progress and reaction, respectfully). Even on the fringes of the ultra-left (which we would consider ourselves a part of) the same conversations are still held as the one played out above. One central question is seared into everyone’s mind:

How can we create, or influence, the mass movement?

This is, of course, no small question. It’s a question that has divided the movement for the past century, if not more. The role of the mass movement, and where we fit in, is critical to the understanding each sect has in regards to its most basic ideological and practical principles. However, what if everyone was thinking of mass politics wrong? 

Mass politics implies, at a core level, a distinction between the masses and the revolutionaries. There exists a space for the “authentic and genuine” revolutionaries to coalesce their forces and power (usually organized along the lines of the party form), at which they will use said power upon the masses to steer its political “development”. You can see the problem here, right? The current understanding of mass politics not only separates the masses and the revolutionaries, but it actively sets them up as antagonistic and contradictory forces. Instead of being one with the class, the faux-revolutionary seeks to gain dominion over it. Mass politics can hardly be said to be “mass” orientated in its current state. Decisions are made in backrooms and among “leadership”, not on the streets. To this end, mass politics doesn’t exist. All those fighting for this ideal are caught in the trap of chasing the specter of mass politics.

A FALSE DICHOTOMY

In the very genesis of political pseudoscience lies the quest of mass distinction. The idea that there is the individual, or the elite individual, and the hordes of beastly vermin whose loyalty must be bought, sold, and wagered. These germs are all of the remnants of society which cannot be trusted with economic decision making, and thus must be isolated from this process through political mediation. Unidentifiable as a single class and of mass interests, the “masses” cannot be codified or bribed to one specific principle, language or ideology. They sell their labor and goods side by side, warring and cannibalizing their rival mass. Most critical to understand is that they lack a unified social function: The remnants of the indecisive entails the inclusion of the many. And this is a fundamental contradiction inherent to the mass politic. The rugged individuals, being the mass politicians, are clear about this every moment they think and act as an atomized campaign. What is sacred is “the people”, “the nation”, or any containment jar which can fit all the robust categories and social remnants. We emphasize that the position of the mass politician is a pseudoscientific-albeit politically pragmatic-grab for power.

Meanwhile, the frantic masses-especially the working masses, the class-are clear about their incompatibility. Through the social function of the petit-bourgeois small landlord who leaves their properties in routine neglect, they declare war against the service sector proletarian everyday. Through the immense accumulation of time theft, city workers offer their management apparatus a translucent middle finger. These and many other contradictions are obvious, and thus only the most ambitious of politicians can sift through the accumulation of all these characters. Therefore, the contradiction of the mass politic is the contradiction of the mass: This utopian idea of the mass is not only lazy, it does not really exist in class society, and it can hardly act in unison without immense bloodshed and violence to temporarily grease the chain.

The false dichotomy we discuss above is relevant to the communist especially. As communists, we understand that our movement can only be championed by the proletariat. We believe that while history is not linear, to seek a qualitative change in terms of class rule, the international proletariat is the only class which can possibly dethrone the bourgeoisie. Thus when weaponized by the communist, the “mass politic” posits an irreconcilable hypothesis that rather than the proletariat, abstract masses of hostile social groups can come together for a communist revolution.

There is a further dichotomy which we as communists must address as well: The idea of severance from the masses. We often posit that we are activists, or revolutionaries, but in the very essence of our activity we reflect what is already within the class. To isolate ourselves from class activity is to commit an act of grave pseudoscience, where we are atomized individuals unfettered by any historical social relation. That we simply came into being and presented our wishes. No, we are the materialization of our class backgrounds, and our activity contains that kernel of contradictory rebelliousness within the greater society. That contradiction represented by our activity is most resemblant of that of the proletariat, and therefore we must re-emphasize this class basis in our activity. To turn to the mass politic at this point would highlight one thing larger than an abstract betrayal, then. It points to the petit-bourgeois, mass-democratic limitations of our real class background. What we are is what is in the class. 

THE ANTI-MASS NATURE OF MASS POLITICS

If the mass politic is anything when wielded by the communist, it is remarkably anti-mass. By this, we consider that in meeting society where it is most infectious and reactionary, the communist actually loses sight of the mass itself and falls behind it. The greater the scope of their rhetoric, the more classes it includes, the more the communist alienates itself from the real movement to abolish classes. Likewise, the less it distinguishes itself from the political liberals, whose pole is both more radical, all-encompassing, and convincing. Therefore, the communist will draw in but few murmurs of support. Let us elaborate.

It can be argued that our era is the era of the counterrevolution, that in the wave of the defeats of the 20th century we have never been more atomized and sorely broken down by capital. Whether or not this is tenable, we must understand that in this age, communism is an ugly delinquent on the political field. In the United States especially, it has no ideological proponents. Its name continues to be tossed around and avoided like a political Black Death; Those with the strongest stature feign ignorance and recirculate it the most frequently. Thus even if it is in the tendency of the proletarian to struggle against the total supremacy of capital, it is also the tendency to deride the undesirables as communists. On another plane, many of the great American communists have never recovered from the deindustrialization of American society, leaving those precious few with little to theorize about. In the place of the domestic project they now make leaps in support of “anti-imperialism” and the national projects of other nations! Yes, Communism is a dead man’s comfort.

Thus, when communists search out for the masses, it is because of a chasm at their current vantage point. They are as isolated as ever, with few ties to the remaining great trade unions or the like. Their cries in the night ring out to no ears, and at the long last of so many a political project, our dear communist realizes they will never be embraced as such. Just as the bourgeoisie continuously morphs into something more demonic, the communist must become ever more gracious and holy. Impending salvation for all believers.

When they make their inscription on society, it is typically a moral-political-economic tone that can collect all of the classes in its pocket. The movement toward communism becomes cloaked in what is just, as the communist now theorizes not a movement of classes but a movement of ideas, towards a movement of classes. In this, we consider that rather than take to the project of immediate class struggle, communists indulge themselves in lengthy diatribes over the ideals and moral judgements they believe will move the most people. They infer, incorrectly, that we can begin a period of class/mass struggle with the imposition of an ideal. If only the petit-bourgeoisie would be so kind as to join our struggle, once they have heard our ideas! But fear not. These tidings will nurture a new wave of great reformers, hawkish priests, and desensitized youths, and when our numbers finally swell, we will carve up the dominion of the bourgeoisie, storm their palaces, and maybe even consolidate political power. It would all be so beautiful, if only the masses recognized our original mass politic as a means of placation.

The sheer inability of the communist mass politic to turn contradiction to momentum is astounding. It so turns out that no matter which bent of ideology, communism cannot be cloaked in Enlightenment without becoming disfigured under the shroud. 

From Crimethinc to PSL to DSA to the ultra milieu itself, our most obvious criticism is that the mass politic is so outwardly reformist that it offers no such pole to really congregate from. This criticism was of course inspired by variants of the aforementioned organizations, yet surprisingly birthed via a conversation with ultra-leftists around pole-setting. The overwhelming dream within the anti-ICE movement was to set a line along “Feds Out of Chicago”, due to the mass reach of such a position. An ultimate play in mass politics. What these comrades dismissed, however, is the overwhelming anti-mass nature of this very tendency. By seeking to go for all the marbles, these mass politicians have only done a favor to the real mass politicians, who are currently gathering around the slogans of “Reform” and “Abolish” as we speak. Wholly more advanced than the ultras, and wholly more attractive to the activists and migrants alike. What this means is that we are actively allowing the bourgeoisie to cause a shift in our ultimate ambitions, in defence of the status quo and a return to the sacred. We are politically out maneuvered.

Furthermore, the anti-mass nature of a communist mass politic is intertwined with the tendency of capital to accumulate. As it congeals toward the monopolization of society, the bourgeois representatives have become tighter knit in capital’s defense. Political language itself monopolizes, in the form of a handful of Parties which offer markedly similar visions of mass society. In America there are only 2, and they share agreement on every critical deficit in society. Their resources accumulate at a grand scale, and on the back of the State this monopoly will surely propagate its pole better than a few communists: The Spectacle guarantees it. What made the communist subversive was its anti-formist, revolutionary position, and when that is whittled away, they are nothing more than a liberal coalition member. If there is truly nothing the communist offers that the bourgeoisie cannot, then of course, the latter will always appear as great liberators. Hence the intensity at which we must struggle against opaque moralism and ceaseless calls for reform. In the following section, we analyze what is really anti-mass: The mass line itself.

AN EQUATION AGAINST MASS LINE

1. If we are serious about instituting a mass line, this necessitates we meet the masses where they are most ideologically mangled by capital, to assure them that in some form the bourgeoisie bears inherent truth about their situation. This betrayal will only stoke flames later in which the proletarian-or abstract mass we politic-must sincerely revolt against the mass line.  
2. We are not in favor of meeting the masses where they are. We are not in favor of sympathetic humanists amongst the bourgeoisie, we deny the rights of the petit-bourgeoisie, and we are not to cast a blind eye toward a proletarian’s racialism, nationalism, allocationism, xenophobia, or any other product of capitalist society. If this places us as an outward minority amongst the social scape, we can mourn that, but nonetheless have no interest in political games. In times of crisis, we must drag the proletariat to us.
3. When we set our pole for the proletariat to see, we have to be incredibly decisive about our rhetoric and intent; We cannot straddle on the edge of reality all alone nor can we falter in political debris. Thus we must do the work of imagining what communism looks like. If this image contains, even reifies critical functions of capital (such as the State or Value form), then we have only ourselves to blame when the revolt against the mass line attacks the Communist movement itself. As it stands many of the most radical communists are tacitly in favor of this societal retention. Furthermore as the bourgeoisie finds the communist cheerleaders the most repulsive, regardless of their opportunism these comrades will be readily hung by the masses. In times where great illusions break, they cannot hide from their own truths or lies. They are communists masquerading as a liberal, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
4. Communism is not a line nor a compromise. It is a scope beyond our comprehension as capitalist subjects, we cannot pretend to know what is assuredly next. But we can fashion ourselves in a manner that is revolutionary, that breaks with the prevailing logic of how we understand the world at once, to sever ties with interpretations and wholly change it. Communism is the realization of this and the willingness to imagine new possibilities.
5. If we believe our movement to be real, then we must practice against enticing mediatory forms. In the streets with proletarians, we cannot pretend to be their urban heroes. We must decisively break with all those forms of coercive language, not only to encourage the proletariat to move beyond us, but to ensure that we do not betray them in our conservatism. This means that we are the movement against borders and nations and the bourgeoisie, until the proletariat is the movement against the proletarian condition, upending all that is sacred. 
6. Even heaven cannot bear the monsters it has created. We are not instituting a political equation that can rein in the proletariat or catch their interest, as we are not interested in retaining their condition. We seek their violent expression, and to ascribe a language against popular languages.

FETISHISM OF THE QUANITATIVE FORM

We are fairly certain the masses move history, so one can be forgiven for what is assuredly a ludicrous proposition: The Communist fetish is one of numbers. Rather than take any introspection in our condition today, we have sanctified the concept of the many. The proletariat en masse are our nightriders who will awaken on our behalf, sword and shield in tow. In this view, every foul idea is a thousand proletarians away from the next uprising.

As communists typically take up the herculean task of building infrastructure, we stumble toward this grand assessment of the quantitative form. Its essence is part and parcel of what we believe: Not of the Great Men, but of those Great Many who will decide their own destiny. The issue arises when we view our respective activity as a numbers game in its entirety. This always implies not that the dejected project is a meek representation of our strength, nor that the performative nature of parliamentarism is flagrantly reactionary, or even that our own community defense projects are conservative in scope. No, the issue is that there are not enough people following through these mechanical motions, not enough people protesting, voting, or defending their “community”. The fetish of the quantitative form forgoes thought for boldness, introspection for raw energy, both projected at nothing at all. 

When building a pole, the fetishistic nature of the mass politic becomes so obvious. We are enticed not to think and act, but to act then reflect on the quantitative production of our actions. If something is not working, it is because it is not accessible enough to the dejected worker, and it must be more accessible through a myriad of tropes and concessions. If something is working, it is because thousands of people have responded to it positively, taking up their own roles in the process. Yet it remains to be said that none of this will resolve the initial contradictions, which are internal to the birth of such an effort. A case study can be found in a community defense/infrastructure project of our own, where in light of consistent local support we toyed with a neighborhood canvas. This canvas idea undoubtedly promises more mass energy towards the project, more outreach and more eyes, but unless it threatens to change the content of the project, we are simply a petit-capitalist scrounging around for more inputs. What we must realize is that all the same, the rate of profit will decline, no matter how much cheaper we can procure our bulk for. The content of the project itself must no longer seek the defense of localized, block-by-block capitalism, and begin taking stabs at it. The content of each and every action a communist takes must be reckoned with and turned on its head. Let us consider another example.

When uprisings broke out in 2020, what was not elusive was the mass of numbers; The greatest demonstrations of the epoch were rather triumphant. They managed to paper over cracks in class society, bringing together revolutionary black youths and white petit-bourgeois and treacherous nonprofits and even some of the bourgeoisie themselves. The quantitative form was on full display in every city and suburb, streets lined with protestors week in, week out. Out of this bubble, some Socialists profited immensely, such as those with PSL, FRSO, and DSA. They managed to swing from the mass energy a new wave of quantitative inputs, and plug those into their next campaigns of reform. The usage of new recruits in this way only solidifies the initial contradictions, forcing them to buckle once labor dries up. This can be seen in FRSO’s nationwide hand in the “National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression” (NAARPR), and the recent backslide in creative or communist capacity within the organization. Regarding their pole, we are sure we would love whatever community control of the police is supposed to mean. Sincerely. But more than that, to break with the urban military itself, we cannot sit idly by for public show trials in which the State brings no fist down on the State itself. Hence the Alliance, taking the side of the police in every street ordeal, now has to reckon with the fact that the banner it hoists is no more than an extension of Democratic initiative. Our masters have handed us the reins to conduct community control of police through accountability sessions, and we are no more living creatures than devilish monstrosities. The fetish of the masses gave birth to this renewed push from NAARPR, as much as it has deliberately tightened the rest of our leases. 

We break with ideas, not the people we seek to revolt alongside. But to do this, we must struggle against our love of labor, of mass inputs and energy, of political projects and mass politics as movers of history alone. Labor as an input is not enough to seal the fate of action.

SOCIALISM AS THE AVANT-GARDE OF THE COUNTER REVOLUTION

Counter revolution is counter revolution, that much is certain. However, amongst the various sections of counter revolution present in our society, there does exist a qualitative difference amongst each. Broadly, we identify three different sections that add up to form the body of the counter revolution. They are: the “Conservatives”, the “Liberals”, and the “Socialists”. Let us investigate each of these further.

Conservatism is the most visible and often the most openly violent form of counter revolution. What is commonly understood as “the right wing” is encapsulated by this conservative title. Their actions and rhetoric are openly reactionary. Their hopes are of an imagined and non-existent past. A great rebirth, a paleogenesis of the nation and state. They are brutal, animalistic, and violent. Look no further than the current acts of ICE, DHS, and CBP (Immigration Enforcement, Department of Homeland Security, and Border Patrol). Roving gangs of federalized mercenaries roam the streets lashing out with impunity. Be it man, woman, or child, no one is safe from their wrath. Their terror is passionate, instinctive, and most importantly open. Not only are their murders recorded and uploaded by helpless bystanders, but they broadcast it themselves! The murderer of Renee Good, Jonathon Ross, held in one hand his pistol and in his other a phone. These are the “Conservatives”, who ironically seem to have zero interest in “conserving” much of anything. Their form of counter revolution is often seen as the most dangerous. After all they are the ones pulling the trigger, are they not? However, we would disagree. They may present the most immediate threat, but they are certainly not the most dangerous to our movement. 

In contrast to the Conservative stands the Liberal.¹ Calm and complacent, the Liberal upholds the status quo and has little much else to say. When Conservative mercenaries lash out at society, the Liberal’s only response is to highlight their illegality and novelty. Their solution lies in the very institutions that propped up and allowed for the most open forms of reaction. Looking back at the ICE murders, the Democrats clamor to “de-mask” the killers, so that when pistols and rifles are thrust in our faces we may at the very least see the eyes of our murderer for hire. Their other grandiose solution is to force ICE to wear body cameras, so that we may see their depravity from yet another angle. Liberals seek to redirect the anguish and discontent of the proletariat. In terms of electoral progress, the Liberals have shown themselves to be the only group in society to have any “success” against the Conservatives. Although, this “success” has yet to lead to any meaningful victory for the workers in ours, or any, country.

All of this leads to our late arrival in the counter revolution party, the Socialist. At first the Socialist seems to stand in complete defiance to the Liberal and Conservative. The Socialist proclaims “class struggle” and revolution. They fight for the rights of workers, the dispossessed, and the needy. Their cause is seen to be noble and just, and it might as well be. However, the Socialist does little to agitate beyond economistic measures. For all their rhetoric of revolution, their plans are hardly different from the Liberals. The State is not a means to an end, unfortunately a belief many of our fellow Communists hold, it is the end. The wage system is not to be abolished, it is made to be more equitable. Private property is not smashed and broken up, it is made “less predatory”. In our world, the wrath of the proletariat is like that of a raging typhoon. As the water level of our discontent surges, each one of these groups acts as a stopgap. The Conservatives are like that of a wall. A hard barrier that directly stops and hinders the movement of our class. Liberals act like a levee, gradually levelling off the movement. Finally, the Socialist is the floodgate. A series of levers that allow for the redirection of our consciousness. Right when our movement is on the precipice of overcoming the great dam that is class society, the masses’ efforts are redirected and their flows are shifted. Through their complicity and action in all the sins our class society has to offer (unionism, statism, workerism), the Socialists have become the avant-garde of the counter revolution. But what do we mean by this?

Socialism (the Left Wing of Capital) ends up as the “Avant-Garde” of the Counter Revolution in that it is the most developed and dangerous form of mediation. Often Socialists stand at the “forefront” of social movements, that is at least in first glances. Socialist organizations, such as the PSL and FRSO, have often lauded their own efforts in both historical and contemporary events. In the aftermath of the George Floyd Rebellion, these groups have spread their revisionist history and often outright lies of the moment. In both the past and now, the various socialist movements have stood in contradiction to the organic movement of the proletariat. At many a historical impasse, the first actors to jump in front of the proletariat and stall their attack on class have often been the Socialists.

The first great betrayal is the one that is the most often known. Few names are as synonymous with betrayal as Judas, Benedict Arnold, and of course Friedrich Ebert. The German Social Democratic Party was at one point the North Star for the global Communist movement. Successful in nearly every metric, the SPD dominated the political landscape. That was until the 20th Century. On the eve of the Great War, the SPD decided to vote in favor of war credits, i.e. they voted to fund Germany’s war effort. Internationalism was cast aside in favor of national chauvinism. Had they stopped there perhaps we might not even bring them up in this article, but their degeneration went even further. 

In the aftermath of Germany’s loss in the first World War and the harsh transition to democracy, the SPD had swept up much of the political power centered in Weimar. Anxious to lose their strategic positioning in the fledgling republic, the SPD aligned with the Friekorps (Free Corps). The Friekorps were a wide and various militia movement soldiered by veterans of the Kaiser’s army. Holding nationalistic, xenophobic, and patriarchal views the Friekorps engaged in numerous acts of state sanctioned terror. The Federal Troops, commanded by the SPD government, alongside the Friekorps smothered the infant Bavarian Council Republic in its crib.² In the Ruhr Valley the situation was no different: SPD government soldiers stood side by side with the Friekorps. Brothers in arms in the slaughter of revolution.³ Of course we all know of the ultimate tragedy, the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and the crushing of the Spartacist Revolt. Carried out by the Friekorps, directed by the SPD. Rather than fight alongside their Communist comrades, they aligned with reaction. So goes the first, and most notorious, example of Socialist counter revolution.

There may be no greater example of Socialist distortion than in France of May ‘68, when a social revolution was on the horizon.⁴ Sparked initially by a genuine student uprising on May 6th, brief occupation swept into seizure as barricades sprang up around Paris. Brutal days of street fighting followed, where tens of thousands of students ripped Paris’ brick roads apart for street ammunition. With these riots came apprehension from the Socialist to respond, who opted for condemnation of the communist movement.

By mid-May, two-thirds of the French labor force went on strike. Yet through public attacks against student riots and the process of confining-in some cases, quite literally locking inside-workers to their shop floor, leading Socialists were able to take control of the crisis. The French Communist Party even took the road of intermittently calling off the revolution. They worked fervently with the police-State to break strikes, crush the student movement, and leave a river of blood through Paris’ Latin Quarter. In the face of such immense violence, they then turned to the young insurgents and accused them of the social inflammation. This was so aptly concluded by the PCF mouthpiece newspaper L’Humanite, which-successfully-argued that  “Leftist groups intervene violently to oppose the will of the workers to resume work”, not sounding altogether different to the peace police we face in the street today. After dislocating the class struggle and bending it to their will, Socialists continued to meet with factory owners and politicians behind closed doors, eking away at concessions before ultimately settling for modest raises.⁵ Most infamous of all, these foolhardy Socialist mass politicians used the class momentum to foment political momentum, calling for a General Election which they would lose the very next month. For a deeper understanding of the gravedigging role the Socialists played in this epoch, we recommend Daniel Singer’s ‘Prelude to Revolution’, and especially engaging with the sections ‘How to Not Seize Power’, and ‘From General Strike to General Election’.

Just as the PCF “wrapped up the red flag in the national tricolor”, our contemporaries are boastful mass politicians chasing shadows and ghosts⁶. Of insurgencies today, we have discussed the avoidant tendencies the Socialists showed for police abolition in 2020. Now they have performatively risen to the halls of power, welcomed by the bourgeoisie and granted their own time to speak and debate, yet just like the PCF our Socialist cheerleaders are no more bolstered to the illustrious seat of power. The historical moment they tied themselves to-revolutionary situations in 1918, 1968, or 2020-carried them far along, but they all missed a clinical lynchpin-the communist pole itself-to seal their fate. At that, we must renounce Socialism as our predecessors did Social-Democracy.

Interested in nostalgia and apologetics for the various movements of the 20th century, the Socialist is either unwilling or unable to set the rhetorical pole amidst their supposed class. In lieu of a revolutionary message, it is becoming increasingly obvious that ultras cannot throw their weight and support behind these organizations, and must divorce themselves from the politics of these left wing capitalists.

MASS POLITICAL HERITAGE

The avant-garde of the counter revolution is here, and as we have discussed, these communist mass politicians draw from the work of their bourgeois counterparts. Just as this occurs, the Spectacular bourgeois theater will ring out for all to hear on a deafening scale. They will win, again and again until the end of mass political time. We now immerse ourselves in the world of the bourgeois counterparts, to better understand the Socialist avant-garde.

While moments in history come and go, the everpresent call to the people so thoroughly permeates our epoch. In an apocalyptic wasteland of Recession, Obama rolled out the corpse of “Yes We Can”. Political savvy and mass zeal led to the buy-in of millions of households nationwide. Yet Obama’s only fault as a mass politician was his dedication to lack of principle. Obama sought the approval of every class of every political and cultural persuasion, in order to keep the gears turning as such. Or rather, in being everyone’s politician, he could not cook up an economic program to pair with his mass politic. 

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was intended to serve as that mass program, uniting all peoples and especially the most numerous class in the proletariat. Yet, as famed bourgeois economist Paul Krugman (yes, the Keynesian who wrote your high school textbook) describes, this was not further from the case. 

“For while Mr. Obama got more or less what he asked for, he almost certainly didn’t ask for enough. We’re probably facing the worst slump since the Great Depression. The Congressional Budget Office, not usually given to hyperbole, predicts that over the next three years there will be a $2.9 trillion gap between what the economy could produce and what it will actually produce. And $800 billion, while it sounds like a lot of money, isn’t nearly enough to bridge that chasm.

Officially, the administration insists that the plan is adequate to the economy’s need. But few economists agree. And it’s widely believed that political considerations led to a plan that was weaker and contains more tax cuts than it should have,  that Mr. Obama compromised in advance in the hope of gaining broad bipartisan support. We’ve just seen how well that worked.

Now, the chances that the fiscal stimulus will prove adequate would be higher if it were accompanied by an effective financial rescue, one that would unfreeze the credit markets and get money moving again. But the long-awaited announcement of the Obama administration’s plans on that front, which also came this week, landed with a dull thud.

The plan sketched out by Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wasn’t bad, exactly. What it was, instead, was vague. It left everyone trying to figure out where the administration was really going. Will those public-private partnerships end up being a covert way to bail out bankers at taxpayers’ expense? Or will the required “stress test” act as a back-door route to temporary bank nationalization (the solution favored by a growing number of economists, myself included)?.”⁷

By teetering between a neoliberal world and Keynesian mass cries, Obama’s mass politic set a watery pole between the two. The implications of this are hard to understate: His efforts only intensified a vague spiral toward disaster, characterized by   his Party’s inability to characterize anything. As the Republican Party has grown emboldened and subsequently dropped the facade of respect, Democrats have continued to camp out on that bastion of neoliberal-Keynesian madness. If we were their bourgeois political scientists, we would diagnose this a voluntary suicide. 

In the 9 years since Obama left the White House, we feel the bourgeoisie may have finally found its answer. While it has not been easy for them, a new type of Democrat has finally entered office. That is, if their Party will let them. Enter the Democratic-Socialist. The child of the Liberal and the Socialist mass zealots.

Everyone loves Zohran Mamdani. The small business owners, the taxi drivers, the Gen Z politigram reels fueled by water-indulgent AI, influencers, blue collar laborers, sections of New York City’s MAGA base, you name it.⁸ In the masquerade of Spectacular material-spiritualism, we have not felt the cultural zeitgeist entrench itself so thoroughly in a politician since Obama. You simply cannot help but lavish the attention of the Boss who smiles graciously at you, offers you a raise, before opening the door for you to get on your way. This new era of gracious Bosses rings to the tune of 327 DSA-sponsored candidates nationwide in the last decade, as well as the social-democratization of some of the existing political apparatus over the same time period.⁹ The fact that this new crop of mass politicians claim Socialism is both indicative in the re-emergence of Keynesian hysteria as much as the communist movement itself.  

For the first time in our lifetime, there now exists a current which threatens to upend the Democratic ordeal of nothing politics. The latter, which appealed to the masses due to its scope, seems rather dated at this time. Nothing can be acceptable when there is an emphasis on national unity and faith in institutions-or people-to turn around the crisis. But when there is a backslide and rift lasting generations, an opaque dinosaur can only do so much. Obama’s handshakes across the aisle can hardly be repeated by Democrats now, as not only is their opposition more incessant on their demise: The masses themselves demand a generational, qualitative change regardless of civility. About a third of Americans even believe in the justification of political violence to these ends.¹⁰ Likewise, the Spectacular is simple: The old guard of political monotony lacks Spectacular savvy compared to this generation of social media magicians. Just as Hilary couldn’t hold a candle to Obama’s zeal in 2008, Mamdani and AOC are head and shoulders above the personability of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Politics are not only more treacherous: They have gone fully parasocial.

Zohran’s time in the spotlight was made possible not only by worsening conditions, but also by the actions of mass-political “nothing” politicians like Obama. From them Mamdani took spirited language, charisma and actually capitalized on an explicit political program with a label. While still remaining a mass politician himself, he offers a different project of national unity: Dependent entirely on smiles and welfare, with a defined ideological bent. This project may be untenable without institutional backing now, but the true threat of this rise is in what is to come. A single mass politician is one thing, but the multiplication of language across the country is another. The electoral space is analogous to one large stew, where the introduction of one or two strong ingredients can carry the flavor of the rest of the pot. The multiplication of flavor in this instance, or language the next, is a rapid frenzy that will surely outpace any opposition to its imposition. 

So as DSA continues to spearhead dozens of campaigns a year to take on the “nothing” politicians, they employ the strongest defense of the national project. Soon they will be joined hand in hand by a purposeless political establishment, at this time rivalling the Republicans as the People’s Party. The next climactic battle between austerity and welfare is set. 

Can the Socialists acquire the affection of the petit-bourgeoisie? How far of an inroads can they make with blue collar laborers? How long will they have to feign indifference on foreign conquests and colonial holdings? We can’t precisely say. Yet with this new development, it is as clear as can be that the bourgeoisie’s chosen mouthpieces are finally on a path to action. They drift through the wreckage of the misery they are responsible for, salvaging whatever remains and repurposing it in the new mass political movement. If we dare say to mimic them, that is to avoid the mistake of mass politics and project communism itself.

References

Kuhn, Gabriel (2012) All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918-1919.

Krugman, P. (2009, February 12). Opinion | Failure to Rise. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/opinion/13krugman.html 

More Perfect Union. (2026, January 16). 60,000 Trump Voters Just Elected a Socialist. We Asked Them Why. YouTube. https://youtu.be/ICroxl2r1B8?si=IFvNYWE7oatiPikp 

Past Endorsements – DSA National Electoral Commission. (n.d.). https://electoral.dsausa.org/our-campaigns/past-endorsements/  

Montanaro, D. (2025, October 1). Poll: More Americans Now Agree Political Violence May Be Necessary to Right the Country. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/10/01/nx-s1-5558304/poll-political-violence-free-speech-vaccines-national-guard-epstein-trump  

Singer, D. (2013). Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968. Haymarket Books.

1. It should be noted that all 3 of the groups listed as members of the counter revolution are liberals, in that they defend and uphold Capital and all of its sins (the State, the Market, Wages, Value, etc.). We use the term “Liberal”, “Conservative”, and “Socialist” as they are understood in the vernacular of the American political system. We recognize that these may not be the most “scientific” terms to use, but for the sake of a concise, coherent argument we choose to use these terms as they exist in the wild ↩︎
2. Kuhn, Gabriel (2012) All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German
   Revolution of 1918-1919. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Singer, D. (2013). Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968. Haymarket Books. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7. Krugman, P. (2009, February 12). Opinion | Failure to Rise. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/opinion/13krugman.html ↩︎
8. More Perfect Union. (2026, January 16). 60,000 Trump Voters Just Elected a Socialist. We Asked Them Why. YouTube. https://youtu.be/ICroxl2r1B8?si=IFvNYWE7oatiPikp ↩︎
9. Past Endorsements – DSA National Electoral Commission. (n.d.). https://electoral.dsausa.org/our-campaigns/past-endorsements/ ↩︎
10. Montanaro, D. (2025, October 1). Poll: More Americans Now Agree Political Violence May Be Necessary to Right the Country. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/10/01/nx-s1-5558304/poll-political-violence-free-speech-vaccines-national-guard-epstein-trump  ↩︎

Author’s Note: A PDF version of this article is attached at the bottom of the page.

Introduction

“The reigning paradigm of organization among the autonomous revolutionary current today is the “milieu,” or radical scene: a mode of organization premised upon small groups of friends who stand apart from society and attempt to intervene within social struggles…By refusing to stake out a place within the ideological pantheon of existing political forms, by asserting its position in the mode of a non-position, the milieu functions as an axiomatic default that has excused itself from the realm of critique on the grounds that it proffers no ‘models’ of its own: ‘autonomy’ becomes a stand-in for the milieu itself. Yet the organizational form of the milieu stands in the way of its revolutionary potential in a variety of ways. While it imagines itself as standing outside society as a space of purity and safety from the bad ways of society, the milieu continually recreates a tyranny of structurelessness, as its informal organization reproduces existing social hierarchies. While its naive politics of friendship has certain advantages in terms of fostering political intensities, it tends toward a form of cultural and racial closure that prevents political relations from being fostered across social differences. Finally, with the milieu we lack the means to foster the capacities of our comrades. On one hand, we tell ourselves that we are all equal, while at the same time vast differences in experience and inequalities in our relations speak the truth of our situation.” 

– Kevin Suemnicht

If we have inherited anything from our milieu’s tradition, it is nothing. Or rather, the absence of any codified idea or tactic, frozen in time for our repeated use. We do not fear organic manifestation as much as rigid ideological premise. We represent the movement of whatever works, at any time, to advance the most radical pole in the movement of communism; This amounts to nothing more but the call for immediate communism itself. This lack of marriage to any born concept rests on the premise of fluidity in struggle, that we must behave like water. At various points in struggle it is necessary to expand, contract, as what matters is not form but the motion of radical content.

From this vantage point, we are disturbed by a lack of obvious formation to come, and question how to tackle organization as a social, rather than political, question. We write this piece to share recent discussions within the movement of our day, as well as to open up a dialogue amongst comrades. 

This piece deals with the most popular and fetishized methods of organization of our day: the Cell, the Mass Party, and the varying Autonomous infrastructure projects tucked neatly within the confines of every city. What characterizes our conception of each is their collective gasps for survival after shaky births, nestling within the bourgeois world from different ends of a conservative spectrum, attempting to carve out social, rhetorical, or physical niches to stay alive. Thus, we will recount the current position of each, their appeals and developments, and offer our own thesis on the matter: That we must embark on a political suicide, i.e. an overt renunciation of politics and economics, and break with remnants of half-baked Blanquism and Leninism in the building of a visible communist pole.

Social Conservatism: The Cell in Retrospect

There is nothing more mystified than the modern communist Cell, born in such an epoch of fear and anxiety. An eternally young form, its tracings are minimal, relations typically insular projects of affinity, and its site is implanted at the heart of the mass movement. We strictly refer to the Cell as the construction of a clandestine, self-limiting affinity-based organization with the intent to influence wider ranging social movements. Cells seek the outward imposition of revolutionary ideals and tactics, correcting their own growths for this very reason. While the popularization of insurrectionary Anarchist groups has led to a narrow image of Celldom, such a structure may even swallow the wandering liberal, and not all follow the same guidelines for they make up wide-ranging groups of ideologues. A Cell today can be hierarchical or horizontal, formal or informal, Anarchist or Leninist, and may operate under any medium under the sun; The Cell is not ideological but social-survivalist in nature. They also tend to cast aside any exception of mediation for struggle in immediacy, an enticing proposition for the ultra left.

What further unites our conception of the Cell is an emphasis on directly influencing, or “revolutionizing”, the broader social movements, and at least a sole point of immediate unity on which this rests. In the anti-ICE movement, this may mean concentrating proletarian creative expression on the entire State apparatus, rather than just one federal department. It could also be a tactical point of unity, such as the building of street militancy and physical confrontation with the State. In either example, the Cell is also an attractive option for those in our movement who seek to avoid State repression, Far-Right reprisals, or a far more likely outcome at this time: A betrayal on part of the liberal bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie. This practice also allows for a wider range of tactics and rhetoric to be used, as the public-facing mass organizations typically cannot make calls for revolution without their bloody dismemberment. As the communists’ social world in embryonic form, these layers of protection and mobility provide a quaint picture of the Cell. Truthfully, it has just as many glaring weaknesses. 

Cells in Chicago’s variational anti-ICE movement have performed to mixed success. Autonomous groups were able to direct movement traffic and build small links with one another, in tandem causing a mass effect where they outpaced liberal representatives of the movement and forced their hand. At forbidden sites of circulation where the sacred was intact-migrant processing centers, courthouses, and federal buildings-liberals dragged their feet in the face of new possibilities, ultimately giving way to Cell-led moments of struggle. The bourgeois had to catch up to the work of the meager Cell, in a game of cat and mouse which temporarily decentralized the former’s monopoly of power.

As it often is, many of these efforts ran dry. Cells set a physical pole and defended it on their own, hoping for a wave of mass energy to crash behind them. At various locations, this never happened. Here, the site of Cell activity became something of an infrastructure project, which we will elaborate on in the 4th section. But for essential context, the Cells were forced to stake out on their lonesome at these sites, recreate autonomous infrastructure reliant on tedious labor, with their own turnout relying on what essentially became shift schedules. This recreated social divisions and a division of labor that saw a propulsion of young activists or student types who had little work, thereby influencing a drain of any class element in the struggle. 

At sites where mass energy would follow, like the Broadview Immigration Processing Center, the Cells’ own tendency toward embedding and social survival limited the function of its rhetorical devices. Cells pushed the movement forward by holding a tactical pole at this chokepoint, and this time the mass did come to them, yet the Cell could not find a means to propagate revolutionary consciousness. Their rhetorical pole here was relegated to insular debate, almost invisible to any proletarian. A wave of nationalists thus proceeded to launch an offensive, and the scene of this crime is still being tampered with today. Local “community leaders”, including politicians and Church hierarchy, were able to identity-politic their way into center stage. While radicals attempted to divert course in large movement assemblies, they found themselves undermined by a star-studded cast and quickly drowned out in these pop-up shops of democracy. Furthermore, Cells and their frequency to lose an immediate point of tactical unity meant they were consistently at odds with their own existence. As the movement was further declassed, some grouplets formed with overt liberal elements confused by the communist position. Or rather, the lack of social understanding amongst Cells and their emphasis on minimal points of immediate practical unity (i.e. taking X tactic to the streets) instead of a long-term revolutionary consciousness proved fatal.

What the experiences of Broadview point to is that radical communists must decisively, collectively act before the mobilizations occur, before makeshift democratic organs are injected, before tactics are debated frivolously, to propagate their pole as widely as possible. We point to a September piece on Crimethinc, where a severe gap between frontliners and the critical mass helped shatter what could have otherwise been a swelling surge, instead resulting in a spectacle of unanswered State violence. This documented lack of mass understanding is a relatively frequent occurrence, compounded by the liberals’ contradictory framing and information. In situations of crisis, the chasm between independent, radical Cells and the masses cannot always be crossed by the immediate experiences of struggle and repression like many insurrectionists have theorized. More likely, it is that the radical grouplets need to expand and provide an alternative to the day-to-day of the liberal bourgeois representatives. The Cell, in at least this conception, fails to provide a tangible functioning outside of its milieu. Its members stick their heads out of the herd to offer saliency, before digging deep inside the Earth to withstand the impact. 

Reality is ironic. This phenomenon of conservation which safeguards the social life of the Cell just as likely carves up the willing radicals to atomization. With little coordination or visible signs of life, communists cannot even build a clear pole amongst themselves. This remarkable state of confusion can be found in another Crimethinc piece released in November. It documents another Cell of radicals who entered the fray more recently and miscalculated the trajectory of the Broadview and Rapid Response networks. Despite waves of unsuccessful Rapid Response struggles (led by controlled opposition) and mass kidnappings (see our recent submission, ‘White Collaborators’, for the full context), despite all evidence pointing that Broadview had been lost to the Illinois State Police and the controlled opposition, these radicals called for a return to recycled tactics, their thesis on recent events boiling down to the reintegration of radicals into these bourgeois neighborhood watch groups. This is not so much to critique their own findings in isolation, struggle against pluralism, or to reemphasize the failings of the anti-ICE movement, as much as to emphasize a stark lack of coordination that can occur between different Cells within the same milieu. 

What appears to be missing is interaction with the real movement on a mass level (the communication of communist opposition), coordinating amongst both the ultra left and the proletariat. In this climate it seems the Cell is either unable or unwilling to build a radical pole and challenge the bourgeois world outside of the immediate tactical struggle. 

Courage is needed to break with lone Cells, but courage for what?

Rhetorical Conservatism: The Mass Party & Its Discontents

The modern mass Party is simply the inverse of the Cell. In staking out its own pole for all to see, it gestures to the public fervently, shouting to the world to recognize itself for what it is. An immediate justification of its life. Unfortunately, in the public sphere of politics and economics, the fledgling Party subsequently trips over and embarrasses itself. Its decision to adhere to liberalism is conformist, our milieu offers, but we must likewise recognize it is a tactful decision of survival; The nature of the  mass Party must conform to live another day.

Much of our work already contends with this dynamic, and our readership at large is so overwhelmingly critical of the traditional Party that we feel no such need to launch into lengthy diatribes. Of what must be said: We hold no such gripes with the mass Party as an eternal truth, either positive in the lens of the Leninists or negative in that of the Anarchists. We do hold gripes with politics and economics, which the mass Party must adopt in order to seem sensible to the masses it must meet. As such, we are concerned with the question of its relevance in setting a pole beyond what is possible within capitalism. 

In analyzing the role of the mass Party form within our midst, it is of course apparent they have not been able to accomplish the former. No, there is a decisive social penetration on part of the bourgeoisie which distracts the Party and detracts from its revolutionary potential. The Party is forced to act within the real world as it really exists, forced to chalk up real demands and find real bones for the proletarian to sustain its social reproduction as slave. Slavery is comfortable, it sells, it lives on.

The Cell is comfortable from this purview: To act inside the mass movement from an insular outside is a rather warm proposal. But likewise, neither are on profound footing. Whereas the Party barges in with brute force, guiding the mass movement from a formal context, including a formal division of labor and needless hierarchies, the lone Cell attempts to sneak by unaccounted for, recreating social divisions of labor and a tyranny of structurelessness which itself results in the very chain of command it claims to despise. Both are dishonest for both assume the role of the communist to be in opaqueness, which only leads to the implicit or explicit recreation of bourgeois society. 

In summation: The Party insists on meeting the masses where they are, and in doing so establishes a political-economic line. The proletariat can then become accustomed to this Party. Yet in extreme crisis the Party is now a conservative element which the proletariat is forced to leapfrog for their abolition. At that, we are not convinced a mass Party is to save us from our troubles.

Physical Conservatism: 

Infrastructure Projects & Autonomous Zones

Lastly, we point our criticism toward the physical conservation of spaces in which many a communist has engaged in. This spawns from a dilemma amongst communists on how to approach the masses, and the question of flexing our own muscle in relation to the proletariat. A relatively potent view can be found in ‘Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict’, where author Phil A. Neel surmises that it is strength and infrastructure, not ideas or political programs, which will win the poor masses. He discussed this through the lens of Far-Right activity in the rural West:

“By providing material incentives that guarantee stability, combined with threats of coercion for those who oppose them, such groups become capable of making the population complicit in their rise, regardless of ideological positions. In fact, Kilcullen points out that in such situations (epitomized by all-out civil war), support for one faction or another simply does not follow ideology. People don’t throw their weight behind those they agree with, and often many in a population can’t be said to have any deep-seated ideological commitment in the first place. Instead, support follows strength, and ideology follows support. Political or religious attachment is often an after-the-fact development, preceded by the capable intervention of a pragmatic, functional partisan group that begins as a small minority of the population.” (p. 32)

Neel embellishes further here:

“There are a few simple lessons that might be drawn from all of this. The first overarching observation is simply that the future of class war in the United States is beginning to enter a period of severe polarization and extreme contingency. More and more people are becoming aware that liberalism is a failed political project. The ability of partisans to succeed in the environment of competitive control opened up by this failure will correlate to their ability to offer strength and stability to populations in the midst of crisis.” (p. 86)

This view is attractive, as it falls in line with Marxist developmental theory at large, rejects the conception that ideas move history, and so on. We meet the workers, we feed them, house them, provide them dignity, and in return we hope for some signal of social validation. This is a process that requires communists to build strength and exert it as such, with an emphasis on meeting the workers’ material conditions in immediacy, as an input to revolution, and expanding on the revolution later as we build capacity. There are concerns we have with this methodology, both practical and historical. 

This incremental strength built on purchasing loyalty requires a reinforcement of preexisting social relationships in the insular. We have seen this time and time again through a variety of mutual aid programs. In a community center on Chicago’s Southwest Side, for example, an autonomous group delivers food, drink, clothing, masks, whistles, handwarmers, and a slew of resources and information at all times. Next, there were large bursts of activity and it gradually became more and more extensive in scope. Establishing links between immigrant day laborers, a local encampment, local workers, and even small businesses who provided aid, it served as sorely needed community defense infrastructure. Yet even this project, which has existed for almost 4 months, has employed fewer and fewer committed activists as winter onset and time pushed on. Even as masked federal agents frequently attacked the site and kidnapped immigrants, the activist presence simply could not sustain itself. For them, they still have to face the music and return to work eventually; All of this labor is just energy expended that could be bringing themselves sustenance. Naturally, then, the project lends itself to fewer and fewer people, typically slanting young/student-based, white collar professionals, and/or remote/part-time workers who can clearly make an excuse to maintain the infrastructure. In the grand scheme of things, this is neither a large nor reliable group to build the machines to feed the masses. The movement naturally becomes further declassed, as described with the autonomous zones in ‘The Cell in Retrospect’. It is no surprise then that after some time, these projects often go stillborn; The litany of autonomous zones in the Occupy Movement, 2020, and various other historical moments reflect the insulation of capitalist relations. If they carve out a niche longer, they are repurposed within capitalist life as to be so thoroughly void of radical content. 

We are generally skeptical of the occupation of spaces as a real means to achieve revolt. When the Palestine Solidarity Movement tested its strength in the epoch of 2024, its primary method of expression was the Encampment. These Encampments of course differed around the country, but almost all existed as a physical space and social hub where literature and information was exchanged, with various developments in regards to mutual aid, community programming, and so on. The remarkability of these Encampments to spring up so quickly papered over how quickly many ruptured over the question of physical conservation. After dozens of parks and campus lawns were taken across the country, what was next? The student uprising had to feed itself, but it did not know how. We had declared that the university was ours, but what this meant for the reproduction of our identities within society, we had no answer. We remained as social inputs, as workers to-be, just with a communal twist.

And while we do not pretend that this was the only reason the Encampments collapsed-let alone the primary or secondary cause-there is something to be said about the role of physical conservation in this mess. Many Encampments quickly became wrought with fear and suspicion due to the political circumstances of the time, causing a ripple effect in which they fiercely guarded their zonal borders. Instead of attempting to swing the revolt throughout or even off-campus, the primary antagonism became what waited off-campus. The proletariat, the bourgeoisie, all of it. As the dust settled, it meant so much more time and energy would be relegated to patrolling a patch of grass; The revolt would be dead. A product of dreams, the cushy insulation of the autonomous zone was exposed as a wretched child of capitalist alienation. This is not specific to the encampment: The autonomous zone itself is a rejection of the world, yet the world turned inward. This is not satisfactory to do away with any class relations.

The last great hope truly is in a revolutionary explosion, where the need to return to work can visibly be annihilated through the expropriation of both commodities and the means of production. The possibilities are endless as rents start to slowly go missing, the revolt targets mass infrastructure, and shops are raided in the interim. This allows autonomous centers and various grouplets dedicated to providing services to form with less structural pressure. But within a capitalist relation, we fear these heroic structures typically bend, deform into radicals hunting and gathering for scraps, and the limit of their lifespans make them undependable for the working class. 

Due to these factors, we are skeptical of the ability of infrastructure projects and acts of physical conservation, especially those that exist outside of a violent setting of mass expropriation. Which of course, would bleed revolution itself rather than the task of an “infrastructure project”. We understand the immense work that these projects are when undertaken correctly, and criticize with the intent to generate other outcomes.

This places us in a uniquely horrid position where we not only recognize the apocalypse of raw tactical immediacy or rhetorical slyness, but also in the long term fate of grassroots activism. 

We must look beyond the immediacy of day to day life to seek social revolution, but in day to day life find the spark to reproduce a social revolution, so it goes.

A Test of Political Suicide: The Formal & Informal

In much of our writing we refer to the “real movement” for communism, which is simply the sum of the contradictions of class society and their continuous struggle against one another, regardless of any mediatory attachments. Thus we have spoken against activism and spectacular protesting. We have wrung our hands on the topic of democratic centralism. In this piece, we have criticized the reproductive nature of infrastructure projects, Cells, Parties, at which point we have seemingly left no place for communists to do anything. We are not making a caricature of our position as much as illuminating a partial truth: Capitalist spectacle infiltrates and reproduces absolutely, with every protest or infrastructure project bearing its resemblance. So, is it that communists actually do anything, or are we awaiting a mass death before allowing ourselves to poke around in the wreckage for a communist utopia?

What is imperative is not to glorify action for its own sake, but to both think and act in the understanding of the movement in which we reside. This includes the heightened contradictions of Capital’s overbearing police State, and the corrective measures on the labor supply. As such there are several methods we suggest moving forward. The priority is first political suicide, i.e., a rejection of all political and economic mediations and mediatory mechanisms. Neel is right in his assessment that the masses do not prioritize ideological clarity as much as material sustenance; We would be chauvinists to assume anything else. Likewise, we do our own understanding of capitalist society a terrible ill when we confine our observations to the laws of the time. Whether it is a strategic alliance with the petit-bourgeoisie, the quest to reallocate capitalist society for the benefit of exploited cogs in the machine, or the popularization of bourgeois regimes: Communist internationalism supersedes these laws, is incompatible with them, and therefore should not be confined to them. 

What must be done is to establish a communist pole on the brink of reality, which marks a clear, distinct change in social life while remaining completely impossible under a capitalist mode. This is a stark rejection of mass politics, and meeting masses where they are entrenched by bourgeois ideology. Practically, it may look like the following process, in which we use the anti-ICE movement as a real example:

1. The advent of increasingly militaristic raids bring to light contradictions of State violence and the conceptual border itself. ->
   1. Splits within bourgeois representatives and an overbearing military industrial complex imbue further chaos into daily capitalist life, and its ability to reproduce itself. ->
2. The real movement naturally expresses itself in opposition to these raids. ->
   1. The response from the proletariat is mixed, infused with courage and widespread hysteria. They set the initial pole of what is possible through their own action and self-organization. ->
3. The bourgeoisie is split over support for this opposition. Tentative factions make abstract appeals for reform, or simply make complaints. The banners of anti-Trumpism and civic nationalism are raised. Civilians are told to stand down, and are made aware of the reprisals if they do not. Various poles of obedience and faith are set by warring factions of controlled opposition, pulling back the initial pole of the proletariat. ->
   1. Faith fails to resolve any quantifiable amount of violence nor contradiction, and appears only as the bourgeoisie closing its ranks. ->
4. Communists set a rhetorical and physical pole that is both quantifiable, imaginable, yet impossible: To abolish, say, the police-State apparatus itself. ->
   1. They will hold out on this front for as long as possible. If it succeeds, the proletariat has the potential to push the pole beyond the communists and disintegrate the social fabric. If it fails, it will resemble similarly the nature of the autonomous infrastructure project. 

Now, how do we organize during the setting of this pole? In the setting of an impossible objective, communists immediately break the conservative rules of both the Cell and the Party. That is, in order to agitate around communism, the Communist Cell cannot parse through a piecemeal survival tactic: It must learn to trust both other Cells, and to offer some level of coordination with them in defense of the pole. Likewise, the docile Party conserves public energy on a political-economic basis as its lifeforce. The sheer possibility of the Party to do so makes it all the more conservative, and historically, it must act outside of conservation for communism to survive. 

In order to defend the pole, communists have to defend themselves. Through affinity groups and the act of struggling alongside new comrades, a semblance of this defense exists. In order to not only cling for survival but tilt toward the erosion of capitalist society, we recommend the following various steps. These are not to be taken as prescriptions for any terrain, but as a loose guide.

1. Genesis. The primary work is to be done within a communist’s closest affinity and social family with the task of building a critique of the mass movement. Thus, it is easiest to begin at the lone Cell, or small group of shared vision and milieu which may be formed. It must contain a mutual delineation of both revolutionary sentiment and genuine ambition to revolutionize daily life. This is not a sweeping mass Party, and as such members should agree upon realistic expectations prior to beginning work within the Cell. If contradiction of interests extends (simple apathy amongst communists is a common one), members should always stay fluid and be open to the formation of new Cells.
2. Through the study and formation of this Cell, the members should leverage their social contacts in the creation of a network. The transcription of sentiment and ambition amidst the network allow the original Cell to visualize an informal organizational structure. This is such that it is noncompulsory, non-public, and individuals are free to enter and exit one or two Cells at any given time, provided that they share some degree of affinity with the network.
3. Intermission. The informality of this communist network is guaranteed to be immiserating. It takes extensive patience to transcribe social expectations even just one degree outward from the original Cell. This period is not about recruiting promising individuals to uplift the lone Cell, but to bring communists both within and outside of the milieu together to theorize the practical setting of a visible, rhetorical pole. We encourage the rhetorical pole to fall under one impossible banner, i.e., “Abolish the Police-State”, “Abolish Work”, and so on. 
4. As this public practicality is born, it necessitates the formation of further Cell-groupings of people and resources. Independent but related tasks may give rise, such as prominent single issues that we seek to unite under a sole rhetorical pole (anti-ICE, anti-cop, and anti-surveillance sentiments, for example).The responsibility here is to stave off impatient desires to federalize all practical work amongst the founding Cell(s), which risks the multiplicity of the movement (due to risk of repression, and likelihood of Cell growth). In this, we mean that as ideas take shape, we communists tend to conserve them at all costs, often in the shape of the Party form and program. We must understand we are not to conserve the pole and its implications, but to seek its obliteration by the proletariat on the edge of possibility. In summation, as practical steps are taken, this must coincide with new growths or reformations of Cells.
5. Multiplicity. With the patient formation of new Cells and movement amidst the network, this allows a formation to take shape that adheres to neither the informal nor formal, central nor decentral. Rather, it is the centralization of isolated sentiments amongst decentralized groupings, and the formal protocol of revolutionary content within informal, or non-programmatic, anti-political settings. Assemblies, to a degree of formality that relies on judgement of the purveyor, can then proceed in which the Cells discuss the defense of the pole and tinkering with its magnetism. Specific tasks or actions of individual Cells are not to be discussed in large assemblies, as much as the general success of the pole and its position. This process can be continuous as long as it is productive and to some degree of social security, i.e., does not openly compromise the immediate tasks of the Cells and the pole at large.
6. In the Streets. We favor operating in clandestinity on a mass level, sharing ideas and tactical information which take the language of our pole, while acting together in a way that pushes physical boundaries. The banner is thus public for all to see, while the network behind its genesis remains fluid and opaque. Workshops can be held, anti-political campaigns federated under the pole and pushed, independent actions taken, all with this in mind. It is important that we do not fall victim to mass politics in this attempt, but rather encourage the masses to leap beyond us. 

Consider another approach to the “vital cells” phenomenon:

“Vital cells are formed with a small number of comrades: we suggest 5-10 individuals within a cell. Each person should participate in two cells simultaneously. The first cell is the ‘primary’ cell and is composed of members already within the milieu or is the cell that you initially join. Having found a home cell, each member of the vital cells should strive to create a second cell composed of participants outside the milieu (or who are not currently organized). The home cell should communicate with its members to promote the organization of the second cell. Having organized two cells, the individual should cease to expand quantitatively and should instead grow qualitatively. This prevents a “growth-at-all-costs” mentality, while still allowing particular cells to expand. Once a cell reaches its maximum capacity it should split into two or more cells. Through this process, the cells can expand in each direction. Over time, connections between groups of cells will change, and we can imagine several ‘sections’ of cells emerging over time. Finally, cells should incorporate expiration dates at which the cell disbands, and a new cell is formed out of its pieces. This serves to prevent stagnation, promote opacity, thereby making them illegible to the police, and to form a greater number of intensive bonds among other comrades” (Suemnicht). 

Conclusion

We have no choice but to wave the banner of communism. What this looks like, how, and where, is specific to the conditions to each grouplet of radicals. Yet as with recent developments, conservatism will get us nowhere. We have to break with social, rhetorical, and physical paralysis, actively seek our comrades out, and build a visible pole through clandestine means. This pole must be impossible and only accompanied by revolution in its content. Of course, if this task was easy the revolution would have already subsumed us.

Long live the movement to communise.

References

• Suemnicht, K. (2021, December 22). Vital Cells. • Ill Will. https://illwill.com/vital-cells 
• CrimethInc. (2025, September 9). Ice Out of Illinois, Ice Out of Everywhere. CrimethInc. https://crimethinc.com/2025/09/23/ice-out-of-illinois-ice-out-of-everywhere-a-report-from-the-blockades-at-the-broadview-facility 
• Collective, CrimethInc. (2025, November 20). Resisting Ice in Chicago. CrimethInc. https://crimethinc.com/2025/11/20/reflections-on-resisting-ice-in-chicago-the-view-from-broadview 
• Neel, P. A. (2020, May 1). Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo28433484.html

EDITOR’S NOTE: Una traducción al español se encuentra al final.

The controlled opposition reveals itself through terroristic means. 

As millions of others do around the country and the world, we mourn the loss of Renee Nicole Good. Good was murdered yesterday while responding to an ongoing deportation effort. This violence is part of a larger State terror campaign in Minneapolis, which constitutes over 1,500 Enforcement and Removal Officers (EROs) and a total force of around 2,100 federal agents.¹ She will forever be a martyr in the ongoing movement against ICE and the State. 

This Event represented a radical rupture in the ongoing movement. It was previously unthinkable, or at least unheard of, that an activist would be killed simply for documenting ongoing federal raids. Of course, we had seen brutalizations, violent arrests, and court procedures for activists following ICE in their cars. We had also seen demonstrators routinely pummeled by tear gas, plastic bullets and batons before being dragged into shadowy detention centers. Yet this represented something altogether new, especially as mediations emerged between the activist core and migrants (the subjects of prior Events) themselves. For the opportune constructors of movement language, the murder of Silverio Villegas González last September could at least be chalked up to DHS’s claim he is not a legal resident, an “Other”. Further reports justified his murder by alleging he had cocaine in his system.² Separate from the sensible American citizen, it was levied that his resistance warranted lethal force in which the Americans supposedly did not. In the murders of 32 others in detention, this same language was used to force the public to forget them all as aliens, criminals, and so on.³ Faceless humans without causes. These carefully knitted boundaries quickly patched up what otherwise may have been explosive.

The sheer panic that ensued this time was evidenced by the scrambling of the bourgeoisie  an hour after Good’s State execution, as detractors sprung out of the woodwork to ascribe sensible language to what had transpired. We are sure many reading this have already seen Trump’s response, where he declared that Good had attempted to run an agent over with her car.⁴ Many liberals clung to this narrative, wishing, hoping Good had been a bad actor, before several videos sprang up which immediately contradicted Trump’s claim. Good then, for the vast majority of people, could not be described as a criminal, migrant, or outside agitator. Thus it made the public further spiral.

In all, the nature of this Event, its accessibility to the public, and context of the recent siege in Minneapolis sent shockwaves around the country in immediacy. This was nothing ordinary, one could feel it in their bones. Thousands of activists and workers around our city piled on top of each other, snowballing into open-ended questions that had no answer. This was State violence that had no solution in the truth of this world. Here, even compliant, peaceful activism prescribed by liberal NGOs was weaponized by the State. 

The decision of the liberal bourgeoisie represented here became that of the grave robber. If they let Renee Nicole Good rest in the entire truth of what occurred, of State violence in its entirety, they risked fanning the flames of insurrectionary multitudes. Sensing the parallels between this Event and that of police violence in the past, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey quickly spoke out, emboldening his language enough to sedate the masses. The respectable career Centrist of Capital who typically has nothing to say at all times, Frey suavely demanded in an impassioned response that ICE “Get the fuck” out of his city.⁵ Despite his very Minneapolis Police cordoning off an angry crowd to help murderous federal agents break from the scene, he managed to appear as the very difference between a strong, righteous locality and the overbearing, burdensome State apparatus. It didn’t matter that Frey would do nothing of substance; He simply needed to reinforce this narrative.

Likewise, the controlled opposition of the anti-ICE movement simply had to reinforce its own narrative. Last night, at least 3 large vigils were held around the city of Chicago. As typical with these events, they capitalize on the violence of the Event itself, the murder of Renee Nicole Good, while offering the working class no possible option forward. Good herself was rather an afterthought for the partisans of these events, and one could be mistaken that this was just another movement march, one of dozens that the Leninist-NGO marriage had concocted since Trump took office or even October 7th. Speakers all offered the same solution for the critical mass: “To get organized”. What this entails did not matter, as the purpose was the abstraction.

At least 7 or 8 Socialist newspapers were hawked around as Leninists, Dengists, Maoists, Hoxhaists, and Democratic Socialists vied for mass attention. Each special interest organization carried their own personable gimmick to the facade. Cameras flashed, reporters accosted their camera crews. All of this was supported by a large convoy of the Chicago Police Department, the same representatives of State violence that had killed Renee Nicole Good, the same ones that barricaded the angry crowd from the culprit who pulled the trigger. The emphasis from the Socialists, as ever, was on abstract local “People Power”, “Getting Organized”, and ultimately, just as Jacob Frey implied, giving the masses rhetoric while assuring the absence of anything at all.

We can only do Renee Nicole Good justice if we pinpoint the precise cause of her execution. It was not abstract evil or a merely federal overreach, but a concoction of State violence predicated on Capital’s own contradictions. Currently, that is the emphasis of the national labor supply, surplus labor, and corrective measures to divide the proletariat as the rate of profit continues to fall. We must recognize all of these things, or else Renee, Silverio, and all of the martyrs have been murdered with no Sun on the horizon. In a literal sense, the controlled opposition joins with the local State forces to offer us an absence of outcomes. We reject this for our survival and liberation, in life and in death.

The task of communists at this moment is to offer an alternative pole of possibilities, to raise the contradictions which both the federal campaign and the controlled opposition rests on. This has been done in our city in the past year, but ultimately it has not been enough. As we continue to push onward, we reflect on our structures and decision-making in order to parse out new syntheses. Here’s to a better world than this one. 

Glory to All of the Martyrs

Nicole Renee Good

Silverio Villegas González

Genry Ruiz Guillén

Serawit Gezahegn Dejene

Maksym Chernyak

Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez

Brayan Garzón-Rayo

Nhon Ngoc Nguyen

Marie Ange Blaise

Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado

Jesus Molina-Veya

Johnny Noviello

Isidro Pérez

Tien Xuan Phan

Chaofeng Ge

Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas

Oscar Rascon Duarte

Santos Banegas Reyes

Ismael Ayala-Uribe

Norlan Guzman-Fuentes

Miguel Ángel García Medina

Huabing Xie

Leo Cruz-Silva

Hasan Ali Moh’D Saleh

Josué Castro Rivera

Gabriel Garcia Aviles

Kai Yin Wong

Francisco Gaspar-Andrés

Pete Sumalo Montejo

Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani

Jean Wilson Brutus

Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir

Delvin Francisco Rodriguez

Nenko Stanev Gantchev

And all those others facing State brutality.

Long Live Revolution.

1. Kelly, B., & Uren, A. (2026, January 6). Where Has ICE Been Operating in Twin Cities Since Escalation by Trump Administration?. Bring Me the News. https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/where-has-ice-been-operating-in-twin-cities-since-escalation-against-immigrants-by-trump-administration  ↩︎
2. Schuba, T., & Sherry, S. (2025, November 17). Silverio Villegas González, Killed By ICE Agent in Suburban Chicago, Had Cocaine in System, Autopsy Shows. Chicago Sun-Times. https://chicago.suntimes.com/the-watchdogs/2025/11/17/silverio-villegas-gonzalez-ice-dhs-trump-midway-blitz-shooting-homicide-franklin-park-chicago  ↩︎
3. Singh, M., Marcos, M., & Simmonds, C. (2026, January 4). 2025 Was Ice’s Deadliest Year in Two Decades. Here Are the 32 People Who Died in Custody. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/usimmigration  ↩︎
4. Henderson, E. (2026, January 7). Trump Claims Woman “Ran Over” ICE Agent in Minneapolis Before He Fatally Shot Her; Video Contradicts Claim. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/trump-claims-woman-ran-over-ice-agent-minneapolis/  ↩︎
5. Clifford, A. (2026, January 8). Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey tears into DHS and ICE after woman is fatally shot by agent. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/07/us/video/acfreymn ↩︎

EN ESPAÑOL:

 La vigilia es saqueadora de tumbas

La oposición controlada se revela a si a través de medios terroristas.

Así como millones alrededor del país y del mundo, nosotros estamos de luto por la pérdida de Renee Nicole Good. Good fue asesinada ayer mientras atendía un caso de intento de deportación. Esta  violencia es parte de una gran campaña de Terrorismo de Estado en Minneapolis, que cuenta con más de 1500 oficiales de Ejecución y Expulsión (EROs, por sus siglas en inglés) y una fuerza total de alrededor de 2100 agentes federales.¹ Ella será por siempre una mártir en el movimiento contra ICE y el Estado en curso. 

Este Suceso representa una ruptura radical en el movimiento en curso. Era previamente impensable, o al menos desconocido, que un o una activista fuera asesinada simplemente por documental los asedios federales que se han y siguen perpetrando. Claro que habíamos visto brutalización, arrestos violentos y procedimientos judiciales hacia activistas que seguían a ICE en sus autos. También habíamos visto a manifestantes rutinariamente apaleados por gas lacrimógeno, balas de plástico y porras, antes de ser arrastrados a sombríos centros de detención. Sin embargo, esto representaba algo completamente nuevo, especialmente cuando surgieron mediaciones entre el núcleo activista y los propios migrantes (los sujetos de los Eventos anteriores). Para los oportunos constructrores del lenguaje acerca del movimiento (grupos liberales, pseudo-comunistas y organizaciones no gubernamentales), la muerte de Silverio Villegas González, en septiembre pasado, podría atribuirse al menos a la afirmación del DHS (Departamento de Seguridad Nacional, DHS, por sus siglas en inglés), de que no es un residente legal, un «Otro». Informes adicionales justificaron su asesinato alegando que tenía cocaína en su sistema.² Aparte del sensato ciudadano estadounidense, se consideró que su resistencia justificaba fuerza letal, algo que supuestamente no aplicaba a los estadounidenses. En el asesinato de otras 32 personas detenidas, este mismo lenguaje fue usado para forzar a las masas a olvidarlos a todos como extranjeros, criminales, entre otros términos peyorativos y deshumanizantes.³ Seres humanos sin rostro y sin causas. Estos límites cuidadosamente entretejidos rápidamente arregló lo que de otra manera pudo haber sido explosivo.

El pánico absoluto que le siguió se evidenció, esta vez, por el revuelo de la burguesía una hora después de la Ejecución de Estado de Good, mientras los detractores salían de la nada para adscribir con un lenguaje sensato a lo que había sucedido. Estamos seguros de que muchos leyendo esto ya han visto la respuesta de Trump, donde declara que Good había intentado atropellar a un agente con su auto.⁴ Muchos liberales se aferraron de esta narrativa, deseando, esperanzados de que Good había sido la que había actuado mal, antes de que diversos videos aparecieran que inmediatamente contradijeron la afirmación de Trump. Good entonces, para la vasta mayoría de las personas, no podía ser descrita como criminal, migrante o agitadora externa. Esto provocó que la opinión pública entrara en una espiral aún mayor.

En definitiva, la naturaleza de este Evento, su accesiilidad al público y el contexto del más reciente asedio en Minneapolis causó conmoción en todo el país de forma inmediata. Esto no fue nada ordinario, uno lo puede sentir en sus huesos. Miles de activistas y trabajadores alrededor de nuestra ciudad se amontonaron unos encima de otros, generando una avalancha de preguntas abiertas que no tenían respuesta. Esta fue violencia de Estado que no tiene solución en la verdad de este mundo. Aquí, incluso los serviles activistas pacíficos prescritos por organizaciones no-gubernamentales liberales fue utilizado como arma por el estado.

La decisión de la burguesía liberal aquí representada se convirtió en la de la saqueadora de tumbas. Si permiten que Renee Nicole Good descanse en toda la verdad de lo que ocurrió, de la violencia de Estado en su totalidad, se arriesgan a avivar las llamas de las multitudes insurreccionales. Percibiendo los paralelos entre este Evento y los de la violencia policial en el pasado, el alcalde de Minneapolis Jacob Frey, rápidamente se pronució, envalentonando su lenguaje lo suficiente como para sedar a las masas. El respetable Centralista del Capital de carrera que usualmente no tiene nada que decir en ningún momento, Frey exigió con suavidad en una respuesta apasionada que ICE «se largara a la mierda» de su ciudad.⁵ A pesar de que sus propios policías de Minneapolis acordonaron a una multitud furibunda para ayudar a los agentes federales asesinos salir de la escena, logró aparecer como la diferencia misma entre una localidad fuerte y justa y el aparato estatal dominante y opresivo. No importó que Frey no hiciera nada sustancial; él simplemente necesitaba reforzar esta narrativa.

De igual manera, la oposición controlada del movimiento anti-ICE simplemente necesitó reforzar su propia narrativa. Anoche, se realizaron al menos 3 grandes vigilias en distintas zonas de Chicago. Como suele suceder en estos eventos, sacaron provecho de la violencia del Evento en sí, el asesinato de Renee Nicole Good, sin ofrecer a la clase obrera ninguna opción viable para avanzar. La propia Good era más bien una idea de último momento para los partidarios de estos acontecimientos y uno podría pensar erróneamente que se trataba de otra marcha más, una de las docenas que la alianza entre leninistas y las organizaciones no-gubernamentales habían organizado desde que Trump asumió el cargo o incluso desde el 7 de octubre. Todos los oradores ofrecieron la misma solución a la masa crítica: «Organizarse». Lo que esto significa no importaba, ya que el propósito era la abstracción.

Al menos 7 u 8 periódicos socialistas se vendían por todas partes, mientras que leninistas, denguistas, maoístas, hoxhaístas y socialistas democráticos competían por la atención del público. Cada organización de interés especial llevaba su propio truco personal a la farsa. Las cámaras disparaban sus flashes, los periodistas abordaban a sus equipos de filmación. Todo esto fue apoyado por un gran convoy del Departamento de Policía de Chicago, los mismos representates de la violencia estatal que había matado a Renee Nicole Good, los mismos que habían bloqueado a la multitud enojada para defender al culpable que había tirado del gatillo. El énfasis de los socialistas, como siempre, fue el abstracto y local “Poder Popular”, “Organizarse” y a la larga, así como Jacob Frey dio a entender, dar retórica a las masas mientras se asegura la ausencia de cualquier cosa en absoluto.

Sólo podremos brindarle justicia a Renee Nicole Good si apuntamos a las causas precisas de su ejecución. No fue maldad abstracta o una mera extralimitación federal, sino un cóctel de violencia de Estado, basado en las propias contradicciones del Capital. Actualmente, ese es el énfasis de la oferta laboral nacional, el excedente de mano de obra y las medidas correctivas para dividir al proletariado a medida que la tasa de ganancia sigue cayendo. Debemos de reconocer todos estos aspectos o de otra manera Renee, Silverio y todos y todas las mártires han sido asesinadas sin el Sol en el horizonte. En un sentido literal, la oposición controlada se une a las fuerzas del Estado locales para ofrecernos ausencia de resultados. Nosotros rechazamos esto por nuestra sobrevivencia y liberación, en la vida y en la muerte.  

La tarea de los comunistas para este momento es ofrecer una serie de alternativas, plantear las contradicciones en las que se basan tanto la campaña federal como la oposición controlada. Esto se ha hecho en nuestra ciudad durante el último año, pero al final no ha sido suficiente. A medida que seguimos avanzando, reflexionamos acerca de nuestras estructuras y toma de decisiones con el fin de analizar nuevas síntesis. Por un mundo mejor que este.

Gloria a todos y todas las mártires.