Comrade Connor

Capitalism in global conquest (1492–1945)

Part 1 of With a few exceptions, colonialism is over: Postmodernist idiocy, neodevelopmentalist fantasy, and the past and present of capitalism-imperialism

By Kenny Lake | Going Against The Tide | October 2024

While the division of humanity into classes first took place within local communities, in the form of women being subjected to the patriarchal authority of property-owning men, over time it developed in complexity internally, beyond early patriarchy, and expanded externally, extending geographically beyond class-divided locales through the subjugation of neighboring groups of people. Moreover, since some groups of people did not embark on the path of class division, and those that did did so at different times and to different degrees, some local dominant classes amassed greater wealth and (proto-)state-building capacity than others through their exploitation of subordinated classes and domination over neighboring communities—an early process of uneven development. It is that uneven development that created the basis for empires, in which a power center where class divisions had developed further than its environs in turn subjugated surrounding and increasingly distant communities by virtue of its superior state capacity, especially its military. That superior state capacity rested on a division of labor in which the pillage and exploitation of subordinated peoples and classes was used to sustain sections of people devoted to war-making and other necessities of empire.

Before the rise of capitalism, empires existed on most continents of the planet and took a wide variety of forms in how the empire’s power center dominated its periphery. The most basic form, and probably the usual first step in building an empire, was simple pillage, wherein one group of people robs another through force. A more complex form requiring, and giving impetus to, greater state capacity is tribute, wherein surplus production is extracted from imperial subjects by the central power. Empires of tribute require territorial control, whether directly by the center, through a hierarchical system of intermediaries, or by way of the threat of force. And they have an internal impetus for territorial expansion, as more territory means more tribute means more means to finance state- and war-making capacity means more capacity to conquer more territory means…back around the upward spiral. Trade constitutes another form of empire building, in which a commercial center extracts wealth and surplus production from its peripheries through imposing, by military and other means, control over trade routes.

Pillage, tribute, and trade all played crucial roles in the development of capitalism and continue as means of capital accumulation into the present. What Marx called “primitive accumulation,” where the bourgeoisie plunders resources and which several prominent Marxist political economists have shown to be an ongoing process rather than just capitalism’s original sin, is mostly a form of pillage serving capital accumulation. As described above, extracting tribute through territorial expansion creates a compulsive logic with similarities to, and eventually feeding into, the “expand or die” logic of capital, and control over territory provides a crucial condition for capital accumulation. Trade imposes the commodity form on the locales that it involves in relations of commerce by bringing them into the buying and selling of commodities on the (regional or world) market, a process which, over time, extends the commodity form deeper and fuller into the internal economic life of those locales.

Yet the nature of pillage, tribute, territorial expansion, and trade began to change around the year 1500 as they all became tied to—and increasingly dominated by the logic of—processes of capital accumulation in the centers of rising capitalism in Europe. They no longer served only to fund the lavish lifestyles of the ruling classes, a specialized division of labor, and the state (especially military) that protected and extended the empire’s rule, but also to create capital used for profit-making activities, including but not limited to production. As longstanding logics of empire came to be dominated by the logic of capital accumulation, they became increasingly global in scope. Whereas the reach of pre-capitalist empires was more regional than global, the infamous boast of the nineteenth-century British empire that the sun never set on its imperial domain betrays the global reach of its pillage, tribute extraction, labor exploitation, and trade routes.

OCR Leadership | October 2024

“In the first few years of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries’ existence, we have led the production of a significant body of theoretical and analytical writings (published in kites and now in Going Against the Tide), which was crucial to attracting and training an initial wave of new communist cadre and providing strategic guidance to their political work. We have also led wide-ranging agitation and exposure in various forms (leaflets, posters, street agitation, social media posts, etc.) around a number of class contradictions and political questions, which has been central to mass work under our organization’s leadership. Both our agitation/exposure and our theoretical/analytical work need to continue, expand, and rise to new heights. Between theory and agitation, however, lies a crucial “mid-level” that communists call propaganda. The OCR has reached the point in our development, with dozens of people actively under our leadership, hundreds in our orbit, and reaching (if not directly organizing) thousands more with our agitation and mass organizing efforts, that consistently developing the mid-level of propaganda at a higher level is now a pressing task.

The bourgeois definition of propaganda that makes its way down to popular consciousness is content used, for nefarious or manipulative purposes, to convince people of a (dangerous) political viewpoint. Where there is a shred of truth in this definition when it comes to communist propaganda is that we are trying convince the masses of the need for proletarian revolution and the socialist transition to communism, and that political viewpoint is dangerous to bourgeois rule. However, when communists use the specific term propaganda, we are referring to political content we produce that deepens the masses’ proletarian class-consciousness and systematically trains them in the communist world outlook. Our propaganda is distinguished from our agitation in that the role of the latter is to spark and sustain people’s political consciousness through exposure and sometimes mobilize them based on that exposure with a call to action, whereas the former goes in depth into a particular contradiction or set of contradictions from different angles, consolidating its audience in the communist world outlook over time.

“The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), along with the Filipino working class and people, stands in solidarity with all democratic forces worldwide in their support of the revolutionary resistance of the Palestinian people as they mark one year in their fight against the aggression and occupation of their land by the US-supported Zionist forces in Israel.

The Party condemns the Zionist state of Israel for its indiscriminate and incessant bombing of homes and civilian infrastructure in Gaza. It has dropped thousands of tons of bombs, killing no fewer than 41,000 people, more than 27,000 of whom are women and children. At least 10,000 individuals remain missing and are believed to be buried in the rubble caused by the bombing. Almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced, with over 60% of homes destroyed. Public utilities and medical facilities have almost completely collapsed. The people of Gaza, especially children, are suffering from disease due to hunger, as well as lack of clean water and sanitation. Even the news media, sympathizers, humanitarian agencies and aid are not spared from attacks by Israel.

The year-long bombing and occupation of Gaza represent a disproportionate response to the October 7, 2023 armed uprising carried out by the freedom fighters of Palestine. On that day, they mounted armed offensives against military bases and facilities of the so-called Israeli Defense Forces and took prisoners. This was launched by a broad array of resistance groups in Palestine, including Islamic forces (Hamas), the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as well as other democratic, armed and unarmed revolutionary forces.

It’s been ten years since the Ferguson rebellion, and the police continue to kill Black and other oppressed people with impunity. A few killer cops have faced charges, trial, and prison time, but most of these murderers with a badge get away with their crimes. The police keep serving and protecting white supremacy and capitalism, and in that role, they are sanctioned to brutalize and kill.

Over 1,200 people were killed by police nationwide in 2023. The police respond to people in a mental health crisis with taser guns and bullets. In response to rising homelessness, homeless people are being criminalized, with police carrying out brutal raids on encampments. Squad cars creep through the hood, where the police harass Black, Latino, and proletarian youth, brutalizing them and throwing them into the prison pipeline. On reservations and in border towns, police murder Indigenous people at disturbing rates. And protestors have faced brutal repression from militarized police, including those opposing the construction of the Cop City police training facility in Atlanta, along with the college student encampments opposing the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza.

Why haven’t waves of protests against police brutality changed this state of affairs? Because the protest movement has been derailed time after time by politicians promising reforms and grifters using the movement for their personal gain. Justice Department investigations, legislation, police review boards, and other reforms cannot end police brutality because it’s baked into the system that government on all levels serves. It’s a fundamental tool, alongside mass incarceration, to keep oppressed people controlled and subjugated. On top of this, grifters from the Black Lives Matter organization to Robin DiAngelo, Shaun King, and Ibram X Kendi have anointed themselves the spokespeople of the movement and collected hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, corporate sponsorships, and book deals while serving themselves rather than the masses of people subjected to police brutality. (Look up the interview of Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, in New York Magazine to see what we’re talking about.)

This Fall, Dare To Struggle is working to rebuild the movement against police brutality and the oppression of Black people on solid foundations. Join us for protests on October 22nd, the national day of protest against police brutality. The movement we’re seeking to build will put the families and loved ones of the victims of police murder on the forefront, reviving a powerful weapon against police brutality. We will work to mobilize the youth under the gun of police brutality to stand up and speak for themselves. We will unite all who can be united in this struggle, regardless of identity. And we will reject begging for reforms in favor of mass action, outside the official political channels, to exert the just demands of the masses. Grifters and lawyers looking to cash in on grief will be exposed and removed.

Join us on October 22nd to demand:

No more murders and brutality by the police! Send killer cops to prison!

End the criminalization of Black, Latino, and Indigenous youth!

End the criminalization of homelessness and mental illness!

No more militarized police repression of protest!

Rally / Protest Locations:

Los Angeles: City Hall 4:30 pm

(200 N Spring Street, Los Angeles)

New York City: Betsy Head Park 7pm

(154 Dumont Ave, Brownsville, Brooklyn, NYC)

Chicago: Outside the killer cop 11th Precinct 5:30 pm (3151 W Harrison St, Chicago)

More to be added!

The first print issue of Going Against the Tide will drop in August. In addition to the training manuals for communist cadre by the OCR that are already available on our website, this issue will feature a revolutionary song and the first installment of “With a few exceptions, colonialism is over: postmodernist idiocy, neodevelopmentalist fantasy, and the past and present of capitalism-imperialism” by Kenny Lake. This first installment traces the history of “capitalism in global conquest” from 1492 to 1945.

Mail-order copies of Going Against the Tide #1 will be available exclusively through www.leftwingbooks.net. You can also holla at the diehard kites readers you know about getting a print copy as soon as it’s available.

Before he was assassinated by Israeli bombs, the Palestinian teacher and poet Refaat Alareer addressed his last tweet to Killer Kamala Harris, writing simply, “The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.”

Self-righteous woke capitulation or revolutionary resolve?

Going Against the Tide journal

June 2024

Any mass movement, radical organization, or mass organizing effort inevitably confronts challenges, setbacks, and even defeats, as well as moments when the energy of mass participation gives way to a low tide of little mass activity. When faced with these difficulties, which sometimes have no immediate solutions, those involved in the mass movements and organizations in question have a choice to make: give up, or figure out how to persevere and eventually advance again. In decades past, when people decided to give up, they generally did so quietly and more or less honestly, admitting that they did not see a path forward and were unwilling to persist in trying to find one, and moving on with their lives. But over the last decade, those who decide to give up on the masses and the struggle usually do so with arrogant self-righteousness, condemning the ones who remain committed with accusations of violating the ever-shifting rules of woke politics. Capitulation is now painted as an act of virtue, and staying on the revolutionary path is condemned with vitriolic contempt.

Within organizations, self-righteous woke capitulation generally plays out along the following lines: Young, new activists, along with one or a few seasoned opportunists, join organizations when those organizations are at a peak of activity or in the middle of leading a mass movement. They enter those organizations with seemingly genuine enthusiasm and commitment, and profess agreement with the politics of the organizations they join. Then, when the activity of the organization ebbs, when there is repression against or slander of the organization, when being in the organization might lose you friends or social media approval, or when the political work gets challenging, those new activists, along with any seasoned opportunists, jump out to condemn the organization they joined. Their condemnation draws on whatever woke justifications offer the easiest insults and best show of self-righteousness: false accusations of “anti-blackness” or transphobia or ableism, playing identity politics to drag the genuine down and prop the opportunists up, or developing dishonest critiques of the organization’s politics. Sometimes their aim is to take over the organization they joined and make it serve their opportunist politics, while other times the objective seems to be to wreck and dismantle the organization. This chain of events has played out within, and led to the demise of, numerous organizations over the last decade, often in ways that seem utterly absurd to outside observers. Yet rarely, if ever, are the people responsible held accountable for their opportunism and destructive behavior, even as they themselves are likely to talk a lot about (some vague notion of) accountability.

Beyond organizations, self-righteous woke capitulation has weakened and even derailed entire mass movements. The most recent examples can be discerned in the movement against the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza. From the earliest protests in October 2023, opportunists in leadership positions opposed and tried to block any moves in a more militant direction with the justification that such moves could put Palestinians (or Muslims, Black people, “BIPOC”…insert whatever identity category makes sense for the situation) at the protests at risk of arrest or police brutality. Particularly hypocritical is the fact that these opportunists are often the ones most loudly trumpeting the actions of resistance fighters in Palestine, as though the brave souls who dared to cross Israel’s apartheid wall and take the battle to the Zionist aggressor were not putting themselves at grave risk. Those resistance fighters surely knew that the well-armed Israeli military would retaliate, with the utmost brutality, against the Palestinian population, but the Palestinian masses know better than anyone that it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

As the opportunists failed to block growing militancy in the antiwar movement in the US when Fall turned to Winter and the death toll in Gaza kept rising, they changed tact, started pretending their protests were militant (for example, using the phrase “shut it down” while not trying to shut anything down), and positioned themselves to get a few photo-op arrests, probably rehearsing their arrest faces in front of a mirror at home beforehand. Then along came the encampment movement on college campuses from late April through May 2024, which drew forward new layers of students, whose outrage had grown with each new picture of the death and devastation in Gaza, to protests that were far more militant in character. Some encampments refused to back down in the face of repression or give in when the university administration offered a few crumbs, and succeeded in mobilizing a larger mass of students to combat the repression and take the place of student protesters who had been banned from campus. Others quickly capitulated the self-righteous woke way, accepting the offers of university administrations to rename a room on campus and take in a few more Palestinian students next Fall, with the hollow promise of a dialogue about divestment down the road. The route of capitulation was almost always justified by appointing some people of the “right” identity (in this case, Palestinian and Black students) to carry out the capitulation, and sometimes with the claim that ending the encampment was necessary for protecting the safety of [insert identity group].

Indeed, “safety” has absurdly become the new mantra for justifying capitulation, as if staying safe should be our prime concern when we are trying to stop a genocide (or any other injustice). That is not to say every protest action must be the most militant, or that there is not a place for lower risk actions that children, grandparents, undocumented immigrants, etc. can take part in. But let’s be honest: the people using “safety” to justify capitulation are doing so because they are cowards, opportunists, or both, not out of any genuine concern for people more vulnerable to police repression.

It is not just in the antiwar movement over the last year that we find resistance derailed by self-righteous woke capitulation. If we examine the rise and fall of any mass movement over the last decade, we can see the same dynamic at play, especially in their moments of decline. For example, in Spring 2022, when the Supreme Court moved to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to ban abortion and restrict women’s control over their reproductive rights and their bodies, a wave of mass protest, initiated by the organization Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and drawing forward high school students as its leading force, swept society before quickly disintegrating the subsequent Summer. After the Supreme Court’s decision was formally announced and with no one in the halls of bourgeois political power willing to move decisively against this reactionary move, the youth who had been out in the streets en masse confronted the difficulty of how to advance the movement through their own independent mass action. Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights had no good answers for how to advance, relying on ever smaller disruptive actions coveting media coverage and mostly focusing its activity in liberal cities where abortion rights were not under threat, failing to come up with a plan for taking the struggle to the states enacting draconian laws against women.

While we can criticize Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights for this failure, rooted in the degeneration of the Revolutionary Communist Party (commonly known today as the RevComs) that led it, we have to condemn the opportunist attacks that derailed it. The organization NYC for Abortion Rights, led by Trotskyites who used to be in the International Socialist Organization,1 started the derailment process by leveling accusations of transphobia against the RevComs, drawing on the Revolutionary Communist Party’s bad former position on homosexuality that it renounced over twenty years ago.2 Those accusations dovetailed with a broader trend of woke capitulation in the protests for abortion rights: elevating the inclusivity of language above the rights of women, insisting that the word “women” be downplayed or not spoken at all so as not to exclude people who do not identify as women but are biologically capable of getting pregnant. This reactionary woke capitulation failed to explain why we cannot recognize that abortion is principally a question of women’s rights while also including, in the struggle, the reproductive rights of people who are not women but can give birth. The result has been widespread resignation to the reactionary overturning of Roe v. Wade, leaving people in places where Christian fundamentalism holds sway in state government to fend for themselves.

While it was seasoned opportunists who led the charge to derail the movement for abortion rights in 2022, the bigger problem was that their reasoning for capitulation quickly won over the mass of youth who had been on the frontlines of the protests. That critical mass quickly quit the movement, with no small degree of smug self-righteousness, convincing themselves they were quitting to distance themselves from transphobia rather than consigning women to forced motherhood and medical nightmares. Opportunists gonna opportunize, and if we could just chop down some poisonous weeds to solve the problem, that would not be so difficult. But the entire soil is polluted, so we need to conduct a deeper excavation if we are to prevent the whole garden from being overtaken by poisonous weeds.

How did the soil get so polluted? Why do so many people who join mass movements and radical organizations quickly become opportunists, or at least start acting like opportunists? The paradigm for self-righteous woke capitulation was set by Black Lives Matter. The three grifters who started Black Lives Matter—Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi—inserted themselves into the 2014 rebellion and protests in Ferguson, Missouri against the police killing of Michael Brown. They came from the nonprofit-activist sector, were trained in postmodernist politics, and had no significant prior involvement in protests against police brutality. They did not seek to make substantive connections with the masses of Black proletarians in Ferguson who rose up in rebellion and get to know their lives, struggles, and desires. They used the families of people killed by police to bolster their credentials when they could, and snubbed and disrespected them when they couldn’t.3 They arrogantly asserted themselves as the leaders of the mass movement, coveting protest photo-ops, media appearances, and corporate donations, while failing to do anything to advance the struggle to stop the police killings of Black and other oppressed people. In fact, rather than advancing the righeous demands of the masses, they imposed postmodernist politics on the mass movement and used it to advance their own narrow class interests as members of the Black postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie. They used their identities as queer Black women to covet the support of the woke white petty-bourgeoisie, who, together with members of the liberal bourgeoisie, elevated Black Lives Matter as the leadership and politics of the mass movement. In the process, the mass movement against police brutality and the oppression of Black people has been derailed, the masses have been left with cynicism and despair, and a generation of activists has been trained to arrogantly assert themselves and their postmodernist politics of capitulation over and above the masses and their righteous resistance.

While Black Lives Matter provided the paradigm, there are broader dynamics at play that have facilitated self-righteous woke capitulation. At the top of the list is social media, which has trained people to covet social acceptance above all else, albeit sometimes in the form of being edgy online in order to gain a niche following. Social media has inculcated people in a fear of stepping out, of taking a bold stand, and been used to tear down those who dare to defy algorithm-driven acceptance. It provides those who wish to derail mass movements and radical organizations with an easy means to do so from the comfort of their homes, where they can instigate Twitter takedowns of people and organizations who do not have the time to respond to pile-ons in the comments because they are out in the real world doing real shit. While criticisms of “cancel culture” are often cover for right-wing politics, there is certainly truth to the groupthink and mob mentality behind attempts to “cancel” people and organizations by Leftists.

The politics of postmodernism that have dominated liberal academia and nonprofit organizations are also a big part of the problem. Postmodernist politics train people to elevate “proper” terminology above actions, teach people in the art of being contrarian for performative purposes rather than cultivating genuine and productive critical thinking, and offer a buffet of justifications for capitulation and false accusations to level at those who do not capitulate. Moreover, postmodernism’s ever more obscurantist terms of discourse make it impossible to have sincere discussions and debates over the path forward for liberation.

Finally, from 2011’s Occupy Wall Street down to today, there has been a succession of mass protests that seemingly came out of nowhere, got large numbers of people involved in them, and then dissipated as quickly as they developed. While those waves of mass protests have given the youth involved in them some valuable experiences, they have not provided the experience of protracted, hard work to win people over to join a mass struggle. Consequently, the conception of political resistance they have left behind is one of immediate, quick results rather than persevering through difficulties and relying on an at first small but growing dedicated core of people. That conception dovetails with the short attention span that has been cultivated more broadly in American society. The result is that it’s become normal to dump things, including political movements and organizations, that don’t achieve the desired results within a short time span.

So how do we take away the smug self-righteousness and woke superiority complex with which capitulation proclaims itself as virtuous today? How do we expose capitulation for what is is and deny those embracing it the moral high ground? Our starting point must be firm revolutionary resolve and a willingness to go against the tide. Anyone not joining the woke herd and taking the exit ramp of self-righteous capitulation will inevitably be subjected to insults and slander, and our response should be something along the lines of “do your fucking worst.” The insults shouldn’t phase us, no matter how ugly they get, as we should be confident that the revolutionary path is the right one, and the woke alphabet soup and shifting identity claims that justify capitulation are utter nonsense and the desperation of cowards.

Our revolutionary resolve must then guide us to make solid arguments against capitulation that tear the veil off its self-righteousness and draw out the limitations of postmodernist politics. These arguments should be well-reasoned and walk people through the differences in political line between us and the capitulators, but they should also not hold back from ridicule where warranted. We have to explain the politics of capitulation to those we can win away from it while not treating capitulationist politics as worthy of legitimacy. And we have to prove not just that the capitulationist path is wrong, but also that we can forge a revolutionary path forward, with a solid program for struggle and with our actions.

To make those arguments, we should disengage from forms in which self-righteous woke capitulation has the upperhand—social media comments and groupchats—when necessary. These forms allow empty phrase-mongering and unfounded accusations to carry the day, and are not conducive to well-reasoned, evidence-based argumentation. They encourage “pile-ons” in defense of capitulation, and give people with unlimited time to spend on their phones, rather than on organizing efforts, the opportunity to dominate the conversation. Perhaps most importantly, you cannot carry out the communist principle of “if you talk shit, you’re gonna get hit” on social media or text message—only in person. Since self-righteous woke capitulation often first rears its head on social media or groupchats rather than in the real world, a best immediate response within organizations is to call a meeting so that the questions and controversies can be debated out in person. Exercising self-discipline and not letting our (justifiably frustrated) emotions to guide us is imperative. When social media comments or groupchats go off the rails, it’s better to shut them down and offer a unified, thoughtful but timely response rather than individual knee-jerk reactions.

Within organizations, we must construct solid safeguards to minimize the eruptions of self-righteous woke capitulation. First and foremost among them is to not allow opportunists into organizations, and to check any opportunist behavior hard and fast. Second is to lay down clear standards for how an organization should function to ensure open and honest debate. Third is to have no qualms about setting terms within an organization rather than letting influxes of new people dictate how they function. Even with strong safeguards, however, the presently strong winds of self-righteous woke capitulation cannot be entirely blocked from blowing into organizations that invite mass participation, so leading such organizations will inevitably involve navigating through these winds, keeping as many new members on board as possible without hesitating to kick people out who start playing an opportunist role. Revolutionary organizations need much higher standards for membership that effectively keep opportunists and opportunist behavior far outside their ranks (see the Membership Constitution of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, available at ocrev.org, for an example of such higher standards).

One important reason to take a firm stand against self-righteous woke capitulation within organizations is that the playbook of woke capitulation is indistinguishable from actions that undercover cops use to derail radical and revolutionary organizations. This makes it more difficult today to recognize and expose undercover cops, as there are so many Leftists who act just like them. Undoubtedly, the FBI has recognized how the woke playbook gives police agents lots of opportunities for entering into mass movements and radical organizations and disrupting them, and it would be no surprise to find out that some instances of self-righteous woke capitulation were initiated or egged on by police agents. Consequently, when self-righteous woke capitulation rears its head within organizations, a “zero tolerance” policy is necessary to deny police agents maneuvering room to swim within a sea of self-righteous woke capitulation.

On April 18, 2024, Columbia University students discovered America. Their university takes its name from the supposed discoverer of the Americas, but a much more profound discovery was made by the over a hundred Columbia University students arrested on April 18 by the NYPD, on the orders of Columbia University president Minouche Shafik, for protesting the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza. Through their defiance, they discovered that America is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a class whose wealth and dominance is fueled by, and who is willing to defend with vicious repression, its imperialist exploitation and domination of the world.

A lynchpin of American imperialism after World War II has been the state of Israel, which serves as an attack dog and enforcer of the imperialist order in the Middle East, helping to ensure that the oil keeps flowing, world trade keeps moving through the Suez Canal, and US imperialism remains hegemonic in the region. To play that role, Israel has been armed to the teeth with vast quantities of the most technologically advanced weaponry by the US, and has been allowed and encouraged, also by the US, to expel Palestinians from their land through wars, massacres, and ongoing displacement, and rule over those who remain in conditions of apartheid and siege. As US imperialist hegemony has lost some ground in the region owing to the failures of US wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, challenges by other powers, and the resistance of the masses, Israel has become an even more vicious attack dog for US imperialism. The genocidal war on Gaza that Israel unleashed last October has increasingly exposed the depths of this viciousness, with most of Gaza leveled to rubble, tens of thousands massacred, and, most recently, mass graves of hundreds, including children, discovered around a hospital. The Israeli military literally massacred hundreds of Palestinians in a hospital and tried to hide their bodies in mass graves.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has been met with worldwide protests since October, and has begun to spark divisions among imperialists and their junior partners over how to maintain their support for Israel. In occupied and besieged Palestine, resistance fighters and the masses of people have refused to give up their aspirations for national liberation and even delivered significant blows against the well-armed Israeli military. In the US, the mass movement against the US-Israel genocidal war has certainly included some defiant protest, but has been held back by a postmodernist politics that elevates the safety and comfort of protesters over the need to take actions that can truly stop the war machine. Furthermore, various opportunist organizations that make up the Left in the US have worked to keep protests within “acceptable” limits even while trying to make themselves appear more radical than they are through empty sloganeering and occasional arrest photo-ops.

It is about time that some decided to step out of those acceptable limits and disregard their personal safety and comfort in favor of defiance. That such defiance first came from students at elite universities such as Columbia is no surprise, considering that such students have greater freedom to do so, and when they exercise that freedom to side with the masses, it can provide oxygen that breathes defiance into other sections of society. The particular tactic—setting up encampments in the middle of campus—and the degree of preparedness is far less important than the defiance itself—the willingness to get arrested, to get suspended or expelled from college, to go up in the face of slander by university administrators, top government officials, and the bourgeois media. For it is that defiance that has created favorable new conditions through struggle, and “discovered” the bourgeois dictatorship that props up Israel and its genocide of Palestinians and represses any serious opposition to it in the US. Indeed, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, is a great educator, for she has taught college students everywhere more about power relations under capitalism than than all the Foucauldian nonsense and other postmodernist theory they have had shoved down their throats in college classes. The crackdowns on pro-Palestine, anti-genocide encampments at college campuses across the country are indicative of the fact that the US bourgeoisie cannot allow the legitimacy of its attack dog Israel to be called into question.

What remains to be seen is whether the US bourgeoisie is able to weather this storm, continue backing and bankrolling Israel’s genocidal war, and relegitimize its system, including Israel’s role within the imperialist order. Whether they are able to do so depends substantially on what people in the US decide to do in the coming weeks and months. In the immediate sense, it is essential to spread the student revolts and duplicate the most defiant acts of protest far and wide. Perhaps it is time to drop postmodernist mantras like “we keep us safe” in favor of more militant stands like “we put ourselves in danger to stop a genocide.”

Next is the issue of how to prevent the current high tide of struggle from going the way of every other high tide of mass protest since 2011—into tepid reformism, capitulation, and grifters using moments of radicalism to launch their careers. Preventing that all too familiar scenario will take a deeper interrogation of the limits of postmodernist and Leftist politics, as these politics remain ideologically pervasive in the student movement even as many students have practically, but only temporarily, stepped beyond their narrow horizon. For defiance to persist past the current moment, some of the defiant ones will have to become dedicated revolutionaries. To that end, we offer the journal kites as the best tool in the ideological struggle against the limitations of postmodernist and Leftist politics. While ideological rupture with postmodernism and the Left will be a necessary and arduous process, the defiant ones can readily reject conservatism in the anti-war movement with the attitude of “Fuck Rules and Safety Obsession.” And they can reject the encroachments of grifters and misleaders into their encampments with the attitude of “Fuck Revisionists, Snakes, and Opportunists.”

Then there is the question of how this April storm feeds into a red hot summer of struggle. Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie it is an election year, and millions can see that an electoral system in which it is impossible to vote against genocide is a sham. The bourgeoisie has provided us with opportunities to expose this sham—both the Republicans and the Democrats have conventions this summer that will enshrine their presidential candidates and their imperialist, pro-genocide, politics. The Democratic National Convention will be a special display of bourgeois hypocrisy, enshrining Genocide Joe Biden as a candidate they expect people to re-elect for the sole reason that he is not Donald Trump, and consequently deserves to be the main target of struggle. What happens outside—and maybe even breaking inside—of the conventions can expose this sham and demonstrate to the world that millions of people inside the US have discovered America, the true America, that one that plunders and exploits the world.

Equally as important as the militant struggle on the campuses, outside the conventions, and in the streets is the mission to win over large numbers of people, especially among the most exploited and oppressed masses, to support that struggle, oppose the current genocidal war on Gaza, and lose any remaining faith they have in bourgeois-democracy. To that end, we call on all those radicalized by the current moment to spend their summer going to the masses, agitating against the US-Israel war, getting to know the masses and their struggles, and fusing the defiant energy of the student movement with the depth of experience and daily struggles of the proletarian masses. It is that process that can not only strengthen the current anti-war movement, but also begin to forge a revolutionary movement.

A big responsibility falls on the class of 2024, just as it did on the class of 1968. This is a moment to seize, to not go back to normalcy, to reject reformist politics of all varieties, and to go from defiance to firm revolutionary convictions. As we wrote in our November 2023 statement “Spread the Steadfast Spirit of the Palestinian Struggle,” our mission right now is to “aim at nothing short of provoking a legitimacy crisis for bourgeois rule in the US, wherein the role of ‘our’ bourgeoisie in backing and supporting a genocidal war is so thoroughly exposed and hated that their political rule is broadly thought of as completely illegitimate, and they have trouble ruling society in the old ways.” You in?

Spread the spirit, fan the flames!

Join Behind Enemy Lines for a national organizing meeting on Thursday evening.

- Hear directly from a BEL member who was arrested at the Columbia occupation.

- Discuss the article that they wrote, "Create two, three, many Columbias"

- Learn about BEL's Chicago summer plan to bring militant youth to Chicago to confront Genocide Joe's Death and Nakba Coronation (DNC).

- Find out how to get involved in Behind Enemy Lines.

Thursday evening, 6pm Central/7 pm Eastern. DM for link, bring your questions and your determination.

"The Columbia occupation could be remembered as part of a wave of protests that demonstrated mass outrage in the tace of genocide, but ultimately slowed down and capitulated. Or it could be remembered as a critical turning point, in which a small but critical and growing number of people dedicated themselves to standing with the people of the world. How it's remembered is up to us. And you."

Marco Valbuena | Chief Information Officer | Communist Party of the Philippines | April 17, 2024 

The patriotic and peace-loving Filipino people, together with the American people, must condemn and reject the US government’s plan to provide the Philippines with $500 million in annual military aid for the next five years, in order to dump and preposition US war matériel in the Philippines.

This huge amount of US foreign military financing forms part of its war-mongering and war preparations against China, which is raising military tensions in the West Philippine Sea and the Asian region.

The planned US military aid will completely transform the Philippine military into an auxiliary force of the US military, that will be trained and tasked to handle US-provided weapons, to achieve US military objectives in its campaign to encircle and provoke China.

The increase in US military aid will also exacerbate the human rights situation in the Philippines amid Marcos’ order to intensify counterinsurgency operations. It will provide the AFP with more lethal and brutal force to carry out its campaign of political repression against the Filipino people.

At the instigation of US military advisers, the AFP has been spending billions of pesos to buy jet fighters, helicopters, bombs, missiles and rockets that have rained terror among the people in the countryside.

A call to students and youth: Come to Chicago this summer and shut down the DNC! 

If you’ve spoken out and protested against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, you may have been doxxed, fired from your job, slandered in the bourgeois media, or arrested. Your student organization may have been disbanded by your college administration. You should wear all those acts of repression as a badge of honor, as to be attacked by the enemy is a good thing. But have you thrown down against the Chicago police yet? Come to Chicago this summer to oppose the Death and Nakba Coronation, a.k.a. the Democratic National Convention!

Behind Enemy Lines Anti-Imperialist Resistance is currently waging a campaign to demand the City of Chicago cancel the Democratic National Convention (DNC) due to Biden and the Democratic Party’s material, moral, and political support for Israel’s occupation, apartheid, and genocidal war. But if our demand is not met, we’ve got a backup plan: mobilize the broadest possible opposition in Chicago to the DNC while calling on anti-imperialist students and youth to flood the city, organize its residents to protest, and be on the frontlines of those protests with the goal of preventing the coronation of Genocide Joe.

We welcome volunteers all summer long, but we especially call on students and youth to join us in Chicago for the two weeks from August 9 to August 23. Week 1 will be focused on mass outreach: going door-to-door talking to people and agitating car-to-car on the Chicago L train about US imperialism, the DNC, and our Palestine Vote Pledge; getting our “Genocide Joe is Not Welcome in Chicago!” posters up everywhere; holding neighborhood speak-outs that connect US crimes abroad to the slow genocide of Black and oppressed people taking place in Chicago; and organizing people to come to the DNC protests. Week 2 will be focused on protesting the DNC, and while there will be a breadth of protest activity, we’re calling on students and youth to be bold and audacious, take the frontlines, and yes, take police beatings and arrests to oppose Genocide Joe. 

The 2024 DNC protests should join the great tradition of anti-imperialist militancy in the belly of the beast, which includes the 1968 Chicago DNC protests and the 1999 protests that shut down the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle and subsequent militant protests against the meetings of the economic instruments of imperialism such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.  Make bruises from Chicago police batons the 2024 back to school Fall fashion!  We won’t be silent, we won’t be tame, the war on Gaza is not in our name!  Shut down the DNC!

No Genocide Joe in Chicago! Cancel the DNC!

This August, Chicago is set to host the Democratic National Convention where they present to the world Genocide Joe Biden as their candidate of death and destruction. People in Chicago have a responsibility to raise the demand: Genocide Joe is Not Welcome! Brandon Johnson, city of Chicago, Cancel the DNC!

With the blood of 33,000+ Palestinians on his hands, it is not enough to wait around until August to protest this convention. It is not enough to be content with getting demands within sight and sound of the convention. Our obligation to people in Palestine, Yemen, and beyond is to deny the legitimacy of Genocide Joe Biden through keeping his bloody cabal out of Chicago.

In the weeks and months ahead we will be strategizing, protesting, and most importantly going to the people to make this demand material, and let Brandon Johnson and anyone else who welcomes Genocide Joe into Chicago know that they are on the wrong side of history. Reach out to get involved!

No business as usual. Join us! Cancel the DNC!

Ready to get involved? 

Stay up to date with BEL’s social media to catch upcoming events and activities 

Hit us up to join our street teams going out to the people to talk about the fight to shut down the convention and organize them into the struggle. 

Invite BEL to give a presentation on the fight against the DNC to your political organization, union, school, church, mosque or other house of worship, or just get a few friends together

Hit us up to get a “Genocide Joe is Not Welcome in Chicago” poster for your apartment, car, or business 

Make a donation to help up spread the word