Under Lock & Key

In the last issue, we mentioned the removal of Spanish-language content from federal websites. Since then, we’ve seen the Pentagon removing information about Navajo code-talkers, Jackie Robinson, Tuskegee Airmen and Japanese who fought for the U.$. in World War II from their websites.

The U.$. military helps to impose fascism on the oppressed people of the Third World when they get out of line. But now that fascism is coming home, the oppressed nations here are the first to feel the brunt.

There’s a long history of the U.$. military using benefits and even citizenship to bribe people to fight for them. There’s also a long history of the United $tates not always coming through with their promises. This erasure of oppressed people from their history is just one more slap in the face of those who thought they’d get in with the Amerikans by fighting in their wars. And we see it as a petty sign of how Amerika is taking a different approach to oppressed people in this country.

The Regime

While Trump wasn’t so different as a U.$. president first time around, we can look to his current cabinet to confirm the consolidation of fascists for this second term.

Does anyone think a Euro-immigrant from apartheid South Africa who throws Nazi salutes, and is the richest persyn in the world, is a friend of oppressed nations? How about Pete Hegseth, the guy with the Christian nationalist tattoos now in charge of the military that already had a white nationalist militia problem? Who ironically closed his self-leaked plans to bomb Yemen with:

“We are currently clean on OPSEC. Godspeed to our Warriors.”

President Trump recently told Salvadorian President Bukele to “build five more places” to hold “homegrown” criminals from the United $tates, referring to the giant Salvadorian “terrorist” concentration camp Trump has begun sending people to. Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser to Trump, when asked if Mahmoud Khalil will be deported, replied:

“Yes he will, as will anyone who preaches hate for America.”

Vice President J.D. Vance is a benefactor of another of the richest people in the world, Peter Thiel, who also funds Curtis Yarvin, who Vance says he takes much influence from. Yarvin believes New Afrikans have lower IQs and that their enslavement was thus justified because they were destined to be slaves. Yarvin is paraphrased as writing:

“He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”“(1)

This will sound very familiar to regular readers of ULK. This is the future of prison tablets. A slow genocide that avoids the current messiness of videos of dead babies inspiring young anti-imperialists to destroy weapons manufacturing plants of companies like Elbit Systems.

These are just some highlights of the current regime that have been exposed in much more depth by others over the past year. These people do not want us and they’re serious about it.

Peak Integration?

By the 1960s, the injustices of Jim Crow had garnered sympathy and support from many sectors for the self-determination of the internal semi-colonies (in particular the Black/New Afrikan nation). Since the victory of the Civil Rights Act, that support has declined, replaced with an imperialist project of assimilation. At this point, most of us have only lived in an integrated United $tates, which has greatly reduced the interest in national liberation on occupied Turtle Island. Of course the disproportionate poverty, homelessness, murder and torture of oppressed nations continues, but many in the internal semi-colonies joined the Amerikan consumer class post-integration as well. As a result, we have more Uncle Toms and Tio Tomas than ever before (especially the Tios and Tias who continue to join the U.$. military at increasing rates).

Black Lives Matter (peaking in 2020) and the al-Aqsa Flood in 2023 brought an uptick in support for national liberation. With the resumption of the U.$.-i$rael war on Palestine and Lebanon, breaking peace deals in both cases, opposition to what the imperialists are doing in the Middle East continues to rise within the United $tates. We also think the internal actions of the current Trump regime are already beginning to heighten contradictions and broaden the base for possible alliances as the fascist enemy consolidates its forces against us.

Deportations have targeted those from Latin America and the Muslim world so far. As the prospect of war with China advances we will also see the rise of racism against Chinese people (or those perceived to be Chinese) in this country, as we have seen in the past, as recently as the COVID-19 pandemic.

You Can’t Think Racism Away

While liberals think we can (and have) made progress against national oppression by fighting “wrong ideas” in peoples’ heads, racism is in reality a product of national oppression. It cannot be ended without the national liberation of the oppressed.

The reason people believe in integration is that they believe that the wealth and prosperity of the United $tates can exist without oppressing and exploiting other nations. It cannot. And the Trump regime has a more realistic understanding of this than most Amerikans.

As support for national liberation and alternatives to the current system grow, we must make this point very clear. We must draw a clear line between the proletarian line and the social fascist and crypto-Trotskyist lines that have historically linked the struggle against oppression with the struggle for more wealth for Amerikans. The struggle for more wealth always wins out. This is why the labor aristocracy is the main force for fascism, even if the imperialists are doing most of the work so far.

<sup>Notes:
1. Gil Duran, 22 July 2024, Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas, The New Republic.
2. MIM 2005 Congress, The labor aristocracy is the main force for fascism.</sup>

On 17 March 2025, one of the U.$. propaganda arms of Imperialism “Voice of America” was shut down. This came after major cuts to USAID, which serves U.$. interests through aid to people in crisis situations in other countries. Of course any time any of the capitalist institutions is shut down it’s a good thing. But these institutions of “soft power” influence are being replaced with trade war in the form of massive tariffs, and possibly hot war with ramped up military spending.

Voice of America? Voice of Imperialism.

It was World War II which compelled the United $tates to create the “Voice of America” (VOA) after taking a page out of Nazi Germany’s radio propaganda outlets. The VOA was used to play propaganda radio programs to countries opposed to U.$. imperialism. Over the years VOA has funded and created various propaganda broadcasts such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Radio Marti aimed at Cuba. VOA would essentially transmit U.$. propaganda at the targets with a goal to foment unrest, rebellions and to destabilize the targets. USAID, established in 1961, provides actual resources to influence conditions on the ground. Amerikans should keep this in mind when they get upset about Russian propaganda on the internet.

VOA often was used to promote and support opposition forces within a country that was targeted while spreading lies, disinformation and smear campaigns against those in power. No doubt countless lives were negatively affected if not lost to those who took directives or followed the advice from VOA in the decades it was in service. Perhaps we may never know the totality of damage that VOA is responsible for in its reign of terror. The Trump Administration has shut down the VOA, citing it as having become “radical” and pushing liberal views. We believe there is more to it and it’s important that the Chican@ Nation understands what this shut down means.

On the one hand, we welcome the death of VOA; however, to be honest, the VOA was no longer as vital to imperialism today as it was 80 years ago at the height of radio around the world. Today, many of the targets that the United $tates is focused on have blocked access to VOA via internet or radio waves. It was no longer as accessible as it once was. Furthermore, the occupiers seek to harness resources for harsher forms of oppression. The radio waves today are also packed with white nationalist broadcasts, on radio and internet podcasts and other media in multitudes that the days of WWII never dreamed of. Indeed, Goebbels would have soiled his pants in glee over the flood of white power media spewed out to the world from these false U.$. leaders. So, in that sense eliminating the VOA was simply trimming the fat for the oppressor nation. The state has developed the white nationalists to an extent where they can now supplement the capitalist state allowing Amerikkka to reroute its resources. As revolutionaries, we should glean the lesson in this and work harder to develop our independent institutions among the Chican@ masses while adjusting our resources to other much needed areas in our work.

Is the U.S. Tariff War Class Warfare?

Recently a bourgeois “journalist” asked a Trump official about the tariffs and how it’s “hurting” the economy. The capitalist politician said the tariffs were “class warfare” and that this warfare was being waged by the current administration on behalf of the working class. This of course is a gross distortion of the reality of what is taking place. What we are seeing is not class warfare. It is inter-imperialist rivalry where imperialists are fighting over resources, rare minerals and clout in the world. “Class War” is the furthest from the reality, if anything it’s the imperialist class fighting for who is going to exploit the proletariat of the world the most.

Political democracy in the United $tates is bourgeois in nature and one way that it survives another day is in fooling the masses into believing that it operates in their interests. It promotes the false narrative that it is fighting for equality for the people but true “equality” can only come when classes don’t exist, when capitalism – the very system which keeps the U.$. on life support– no longer exists. This is how ridiculous the U.$. bourgeois democracy is. But this is nothing new. Lenin spoke of the capitalists selling snake oil in the guise of democracy. This is because it lulls the masses into believing that the capitalist state is truly working in the people’s interests. Listening to the capitalist press (U.$. Corporate News Media) the masses believe in the propaganda that they do not need to engage in national liberation struggles because the colonizers are engaging in “Class War” and working towards equality. Aztlán will only be free as a class when we are free as a nation. Shutting down a propaganda arm or charging tariffs do not bring us one iota closer to national liberation. We don’t want money or lies, we want to be free!

MIM(Prisons) update: As we go to press Trump had put significant tariffs on goods coming into the United $tates from almost every other country, then quickly repealed them after bond markets became unstable (because other countries began to question the reliability of U.$. debt pay offs). The only new tariff increase the U.$. has maintained as we write this is on Chinese goods, which has triggered a tariff war between the United $tates and China. This is a war that Trump will not want to back down from, but China has less reason to back down since they are actually a self-sufficient economy.

Since the overthrow of socialism in China in 1976, the Chinese proletariat have been brought into the world capitalist system, becoming the source of much of the cheap goods (and surplus value) in the United $tates. As these economies became tightly intertwined over the last 50 years, the large proletariat in China has supported the smaller, but still significant, labor aristocracy consumer class in this country. The United $tates no longer produces enough to support its own people, even if we cut our consumption to more modest means. We have become a mall economy, where we buy and sell to each other the things that other countries make. While this system has been booming for decades, Trump is correct that this is not sustainable. The trade imbalances the Trump regime used to calculate the new tariffs notably excluded services, only accounting for trade deficits in goods. This is because Trump has been touting a plan to bring goods manufacturing back to the United $tates by forcing other countries to invest here.

It’s interesting to watch Amerikan social fascists, who for decades have lamented the loss of “good manufacturing jobs” to China suddenly be worried about becoming slaves in computer chip factories. They seem to now admit the truth that to destroy the relationship with China will lead to a significant reduction in capitalist trade and profits globally in the short term, as well as the ability of Amerikans to enjoy the consumption levels that we have enjoyed since WWII.

The United $tates has been preparing for war with China for years as this economic relationship has supported their continued rise to a technologically advanced super power. You cannot have imperialism without the contradictions between nations. And that includes the contradiction between the exploiter and exploited nations as well as between the imperialist nations themselves (such as the U.$. and China). Since there are no more non-capitalist countries to pull into this exploitative system, the expansion of finance capital is reaching its limits. Trump’s pulling back from tariffs on most countries indicates a disagreement among the imperialists on how to proceed. But at this point the only way for the imperialists to create the opportunity for expansion that the collapse of Chinese socialism offered is the destruction of capital via massive war. A war that the U.$. military and other imperialist militaries are ramping up for. Such a war poses a great threat to all people of the world, but especially those in the imperialist core who have been insulated from war for many decades. The only wars we support and will serve in is the wars for national liberation and for socialism of those under the boot of imperialism.

Comrade Eseibio, revolutionary greetings, it is my pleasure to have the opportunity to conduct this interview facilitated by the comrades at MIM(Prisons). Let me jump right into these questions:

1. By listening to your work, one can clearly see you have a firm grasp of social development. Can you share how you initially were introduced to revolutionary theory and historical organizations and individuals who practiced a revolutionary line?

My uncle was a Black Panther Party member in the early days of the Party. So I been around it all my life. My first introduction was me as a teenager getting caught shoplifting and sent to juvenile hall, and my uncle came to get me out. That’s something the Panthers did, get young brothers out of jail and juvenile hall. I was too young to understand why he did it. Then when I got a little older I had another mentor named Melvin Dickson who was a Black Panther Party member. He took me under his wing and showed me and taught me everything about being a real revolutionary and pushing a hard revolutionary line.

2. In one of your songs Bust a Cap, you spit: “I’m a revolutionary Black Nationalist,” Is this still your political identification? Why or why not?

Yes. I’m a revolutionary, a Black Nationalist, but also much more than that. Something that the Panthers taught me is that there is no more nations. Just communities. We use the word intercomunualism. Because an attack against one is an attack against all.

3. What do you believe is the current state of the revolutionary Black nationalist movement? What can we do to improve?

I believe the current state of the movement is heading in the right direction. Because comrades are getting more politically educated and are beginning to have more real solidarity with each other. And that’s what will help us organize more effectively.

4. I’ve been told your new project is centered upon Mao’s Red Book. What led you to make that book the inspiration of your project?

Yes all of my album and lyrics reflect the red book. The Black Panthers sold red books at UC Berkley. That’s a book that I read so many times it’s a part of who I am and I don’t go a day with out reading it. The Panthers got a saying: “Malcolm X in my heart, red book in my pocket.”

5. What is your favorite chapter or quote from the Red Book or from Mao generally and why?

That’s easy. The very first quote in chapter one. Because it was written on Sept 15th, and that’s my birth day. It says the force leading the cause forward is the revolutionary party. And our thinking is Marxism-Leninism.

6. With the recent elections and the clear rightward shift among most sectors, What are your thoughts on the best ways to move forward and organize in this political and social climate?

My thoughts are to organize around providing for the children. That’s how the Panthers did it. They started with a stop sign at an elementary school and a free breakfast program that was for the children. By teaching the truth to the youth you’re educating the next generation of revolutionaries to continue the struggle. The elder party members taught me and now it’s my turn to pass on the known. Each one teach one.

7. What are your thoughts about the clear rightward shift of an increasing amount of New Afrikan/Black men? Does this affect our ability to reach the masses, if so how?

Yes it does because they got the money and owns all the radio and TV stations. If we want to reach the masses we gotta be more creative and out organize them and use technology to our advantage.

8. What musical accomplishment are you most proud of? What keeps you motivated?

I’m proud of all my work and my biggest accomplishment is my album that I have not recorded yet. Or even started. It’s and accomplishment for me to keep going and making good music. Just recently I was in a documentary movie called “Stop Selling Grandma’s House.”

9. What artists do you listen to yourself?

I listen to a lot of myself. One artist that I think is dope right now is Dave East. I make beats so I listen to a lot of old school. And I listen to tons of audio books. From people like Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, etc.

10. In your music you reference Political Prisoners often. Amerika, Inc. denies the existence of Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War within its institutions. Trump calls the cats from the January 6 incident Political Prisoners. So, there is confusion for some on this issue. From your perspective who or what is a political Prisoner/Prisoner of War in the context of occupied Turtle Island?

Because of the politics of America We all are political prisoners and we just don’t know it. There’s only 2 Black Panther Party members in prison left. Mumia abu Jamal and H. Rap Brown [now Jamil al-Amin]. People have that term confused and think that if you throw a rock through a window and getting arrested makes them a political prisoner. But it’s much more than that.

11. Anybody on the inside you want to shout out?

Yes I want to shout out MIM(Prisons) and say “All power to the people!” to all the comrades behind the walls, and free my little cousin Quincy Lane locked up 20+ years in the California prison system. Free Mumia and H. Rap Brown. Let’s organize and watch crime drop and turn all the gang members back into revolutionaries. Listen to my new album “West Coast Revolutionaries.” Oh yea, can’t forget about all of the sisters in prison and all the babies born in jail. Recidivism is a serious thing. Let’s stay out of prison and get back out on the streets organizing our communities.

P.S. Thanks for your time, Comrade-Brotha Eseibio. The ’rades on the inside are bumping your music and we salute you for the content you pushing. Clenched Fist salute. - Triumphant, New Afrikan Political Prisoner

MIM(Prisons) responds: Thanks to Triumphant and Comrade Eseibio for this interview; there are a couple things we’d like to address. First, it is true that Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jamil Abdullah al-Amin are still in prison, however, as far as we know, Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore and Kamau Sadiki are still in prison as well, making at least four former Panthers who are currently incarcerated.

Secondly, we’d like to take this opportunity to discuss the concept of intercommunalism and what it means for our struggle. Huey P. Newton argued that by the 1970s the concept of nation had become obsolete due to the increasing globalization of the world under capitalism. Ey argued that the whole world has become tied together as a unified, economically interconnected system, the idea of any nation gaining independence has become outmoded, and the project of national liberation is not ultimately possible. Newton said we live in an interconnected world system called “intercommunalism,” but the kind of intercommunalism we live in today is reactionary, since it is still based on the overall dominance of the United $tates. Therefore, the project in front of us is to transform reactionary intercommunalism into revolutionary intercommunalism by reorganizing the social relations in society into socialist ones. Armed struggle and revolutionary nationalism were opposed by Newton as outmoded forms of struggle in the years following the peak of the Black Panther Party, after it had split with members who went on to organize Black Liberation Army cells separately. Newton’s faction advocated for building revolutionary intercommunalism community-by-community and building the world into a socialist one on the basis of the strong economic ties created by capitalism.

In practice, the theory of intercommunalism results in “micro-politics.” Instead of fighting for the large goal of national independence and self-determination, we should fight for small, community-level changes that will eventually build up into a global change. Second, intercommunalism prevents us from supporting struggles for national liberation abroad, even though Huey Newton still upheld this to an extent, supporting the Vietnamese struggle against the United $tates; but if we carry the theory to its logical conclusions we cannot come to the conclusion that national liberation is a practicable goal. It goes without saying that these views on what is to be done are in direct contrast to ours. We see our struggle as expressly for the national liberation of the oppressed nations of the whole world, and it is for that reason that we say that we are for the nationalism of the oppressed.

But let us touch on the theory of intercommunalism briefly. It is undoubtedly true that capitalism has a tendency towards the economic integration of all nations into a whole, in a word, towards globalization. However, Newton regards this process as already complete. But if this process is complete, where does the spontaneous tendency towards nationalism arise? The struggle in Palestine, for example, is a spontaneous reaction to national oppression. Why this national division if nations no longer exist? Instead of explaining why national liberation struggles continue, Newton regards them as mistakes. Newton, therefore, fails to explain the events of the world, and merely denounces them. It is evident to anyone who asks the question as to the origin of continuing national liberation struggles that we cannot merely write them off as being the product of people having a false understanding of the world: they are rather based in the real, material interests of the nations involved. To the supporters of the theory of intercommunalism, we ask for an explanation of why national wars continue to exist. In the absence of such an explanation, we regard intercommunalism as an exaggeration of capitalism’s inherent tendency towards globalization, an exaggeration which takes a mere tendency to be already complete.

This is Part 2 of the review of this revealing work.

Could many in the U.$. left be colorblind?

In summarizing the intro to the sixties the writers once more fall into the ideological swamp that we noticed in Part 1 of our review of this work. They state in part:

“Students, Black People, and (at the end of the Sixties ) soldiers constituted the main forces of rebellion…”

This continues in the same erroneous tradition as the RCP line. Statements like this highlight that, and RCPers have heard our stance before, but much of the non-Chican@ left, here in the snakes are what we of the ROA have come to define as colorblind. That is they only see Black and White struggles against empire. This outdated line needs to be “buried” along with the CP-USA that was previously criticized in Part 1 of our review. This colorblindness is what prevents any real revolution on these shores, especially with the Third World on our doorstep. Colorblindness is a major obstacle to many. Asked about the nation by us in the past, the RCP and their ilk have brushed it off.

“We don’t agree with those who say ‘Put my nation in front of the line’”, the RCP and their ilk have said in prior talks. Our point here is that the Chican@ nation simply be acknowledged as being in line period. For perspective of the times, the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR) declare erroneously that “Students, Black people and soldiers” were the supposed “main forces” of rebellion. Yet, since the end of the sixties Chican@ revolutionary orgs were developing throughout Aztlán. Groups like the Brown Berets, Chican@ Liberation Party and the Crusade for Justice that were brewing in this time would later be alleged by U.$. “law enforcement” of mobilizing the largest student strike on these shores with the school “blow outs” that included over 10,000 Chican@ youth, that mobilized over 10,000 people in a Chican@ anti-imperialist action in East L.A. called the Chicano Moratorium that downed a police helicopter and was alleged to have committed the only bombing of a CIA office on U.$. soil ever(1) not to mention many other instances of armed struggle.

The idea that any rebellion in these false U.$. borders does not include the Chican@ Nation is simply mierda. Those who uphold this thinking deserve full membership in the RCP-USA as their line is in goose step.

The tactics of “divide and conquer” employed by massa have worked so well on all of the masses here in the United Snakes; even within the so-called “Left” that not only are some folks pitted against other oppressed but some have come to not even acknowledge those in the trenches right beside them. Mao warned about who are our friends, who are our enemies. Malcolm X reiterated how we can end up loving our enemies and hating our friends.

BPP Legacy

As this work delved into the history of the Black Panther Party, it highlighted lessons learned. We agree with the analysis on the Panthers for the most part. The Panthers carved a path of resistance yet unseen in many ways for all of us. At the same time their imprint taught us the limits under U.$. imperialism, even when united fronts and allies are strongly in support, it is still not enough, without structural foundations in place. In this writing the authors frame it nicely in regard to the Panthers:

“The development of a vanguard party is not the same thing as and cannot wait for the development of a revolutionary situation. The ideological consolidation, theoretical development program and organizational apparatus of a vanguard party must be built consciously and systematically before the emergence of a revolutionary situation if the vanguard is to have the ability to withstand and advance through the pressure of intense events and vicious repression.”(2)

The state repression will come with victories small and large. Even when victories are small and an organization is not numerically large the organizers may down play the threat they pose to the state. But the state and their agents sometimes see the threat before the organizers, before the revolutionaries can see it and react. For this reason the vanguard must move in accordance to our potential threat to the capitalist state.

White Proletarians?

We disagree with the writers on their economic analysis in regards to who is a proletariat here in the snakes. The writers state:

“Labeling oppressed nations and nationalities in the U.S. as internal colonies, while morally justified, does not provide the analytical foundation for such a strategy and program. Instead suggesting separate struggles to liberate each”internal colony” perhaps linked by solidarity and a common enemy. The “internal colony” analysis fails to grasp that there is a multinational proletariat in the U.S. disproportionately made up of people of oppressed nation(s) and nationalities but also including white proletarians which bring together people of different nationalities who have a common class interest and similar but variegated experiences of exploitation and conditions of life that is in the strategic position, as a class, to lead the revolutionary overthrow of U.S. imperialism.”

Although many revolutions were fought and won by multi-national parties and organizations – including the Chinese Revolution and victory of 1949 – we disagree with the writers that a “white proletariat” exists within these false U.S. borders. Furthermore we do believe that there are internal semi-colonies, and the Chican@ nation, aka Aztlán, is one such internal semi-colony. The writers state that labeling the oppressed nations as such does not provide the analytical foundation for such a strategy and program but we would refer to the Chicano Red Book as the ROA refers to our precious book Chican@ Power and the Struggle for Aztlán, which does indeed provide the analytical foundation for such a strategy and program as it is Chican@ Maoist ideology. As for the bourgeoisified crumb-snatching First World labor aristocrats that are referred to as “white proletariat” we will refer the readers to MIM Theory # 1: A White Proletariat? for a more in depth examination of the white labor aristocracy in the occupied territories or Zak Cope’s Divided World, Divided Class.

Despite the writers alluding to the problematic nature of revolutionary nationalism we feel otherwise and side with Lenin on this:

“In the same way as mankind can arrive at the abolition of classes only through a transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, it can arrive at the inevitable integration of nations only through a transition period of the complete emancipation of all oppressed nations, i.e. their freedom to secede.”(3)

Aztláns secession will be a prelude to how the Chican@ nation votes via plebiscite on our way forward. No bourgeoisiefied worker will define our struggle or pre-determine who we consider the proletariat here in the First World. As we have come to the conclusion through our own scientific study that the reserve army of labor here in the United Snakes is imported, that is, the proletariat is Mexican@ for the most part.

We run into more colorblind assumptions in this writing in regards to the writers views on mass imprisonment. They seem to continue with the outdated 50 year-old lenses of mass incarceration when they state:

“The entire justice system, from the police to prosecutors to prisons, was (and still is) used to keep the Black masses”in their place” and became a defining feature of their daily lives.”

It seems to be describing the 1960’s or 70’s but in TODAY’S world it is the Brown masses who are feeling the brunt heel of the injustice system. The U.S. Federal prison system today reports 8% of its population being Mexican citizens, and another 8% not being U.$. citizens. Meanwhile 38.6% are reported as “racially Black”, while 29.4% are “ethnically Hispanic”.(4) The Federal prisons are often more harsh than state prisons, and more isolated, with families living in other states or other countries. Children and babies are being imprisoned in ICE kamps; babies handcuffed in kourt; Brown babies separated from parents and then “lost” in foster care. Brown people are now being sent to Guantanamo Bay to await deportation, or straight to supermax prison in the U.$.-fascist state in El Salvador.

The new greaser laws ensure that U.S. control units and solitary confinement units are also well stacked with Brown masses via “Gang” enhancements and classification within the concentration kamps. The 2013 California Hunger Strike exposed that the SHU, or control units, were populated by 80%+ Chican@s. With the brutality of the injustice system in this country used against raza, it is ridiculous to say it is only used on Black people. In general, the U.S. penal colonies are used for population control of Aztlán and the other oppressed nations on these occupied territories.

The section on postmodernism was refreshing to read. Much of the movement papers and writings these days not only gloss over the ills of “postmodern” ideology but even become influenced by it in many cases. In addressing this assault, the movement and its affect on the youth the writers state:

“For students, the bourgeoisie worked on two main fronts (1) they promoted, in academia, ideologies and politics that appeared oppositional but in reality fortified bourgeois rule and in effect steered students away from communism and other revolutionary ideas. Postmodernism was chief among these ideologies and has since become the dominant discourse within liberal academia.”

For the Chican@ nation we see the injection of the terms Latino, Latina, Latinx and all such derivatives as being part and parcel to the postmodernism project. For Aztlán, these terms move under the guise of “inclusiveness” only to obscure the identity of Chican@s, thereby detouring our focus on national liberation and land into simple multinational reforms within the confines of the bourgeois electoral politics arena. Those who espouse the postmodernist views within a raza context have clipped their wings which compels them to walk the road of brown capitalism, never soaring for secession or national liberation because the framers of their line have negated these paths starting with their identity.

As our Chican@ scholars sank into the swamp of academia their drive for Chican@ power and self-determination also sank. As Montaya put it:

“Most tenure-track scholars are aware that academic institutions rarely recognize grassroots activism and other non-traditional forms of scholarship.”(5)

In short the path and pull of integration into the empire is too strong for many who cannot resist the trinkets of blood and treasure squeezed out of the Third World by U.S. imperialists.

It becomes apparent that the writers were in the orbit of RCP-USA. The description of life surrounding the RCP-USA seemed like a scene out of Thomas More’s Utopia. Lots of talk of life surrounding the RCP being a vibrant socialist experience having “an atmosphere of theoretical discussion and debate.”…the writers say, I was captivated for a brief moment, very brief, especially when I realized that all this “theoretical discussion” left out the Chican@ Nation – as much of the so-called U.S. “left” seems to do so cleverly. The writers leave out in their lofty description that the RCP-USA is also colorblind, like the writers and most of the posers parading like communists in these occupied territories. “Racial” scientists would likely find unity with this colorblind RCP line which infects much of the U.$. “left.”

The national liberation struggle is very much necessary despite the rhetoric from some like the RCP-USA. The “All Lives Matter” crowd swear that the society we are oppressed in has somehow developed beyond national struggle and then we picked up some “progressive” rag and read it cover to cover and not read the word Aztlán, “Chican@” or any mention of the Chican@ struggle, despite many of these same parties and orgs existing in the Chican@ National territory (the U.S. Southwest) at this time. Raza must grasp that exploitation and dehumynization of the Chican@ did not end with the U.S. “civil rights” movement. Political exploitation and cooptation remains a threat to the Chica@ nation.

Much of the content on the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) was spent “dick riding” Avakian, although in the latter part there was some good criticism of Avakianism and the RCP more generally. The “dick riding” mostly being the writers gushing over some of Avakians writings and books.

The criticism of the RCP and Avakian was in pointing out various errors. One such error was in attempting to create a cult of personality for Avakian placing Avakian above the masses, above the movement. Claiming Avakian developed a “new synthesis” and “new communism.” Some of our members remember reading this claim years ago and not seeing it then, we do not see it now either. The writers correctly highlight that Revolution newspaper began to focus almost obsessively on filling its rag with quotes of Avakian speeches that he gave to the party. The closing of Revolution Books, the RCP-ran bookstores, was also criticized, especially when RCP said it was done to focus on promoting Avakian literature, when Avakian lit was mostly distributed at the bookstores. More striking was the fact that Avakian promoted voting for Biden when Biden and Trump squared off the first time. It appears that when it comes to Bourgeois democracy: the RCP can’t do better than that.

The portion at the end is informative on the organizational functions of the vanguard party on what the writers define as the “nuts and bolts” of the vanguard. There is much to learn from studying the development and disasters of revisionist parties like the CP-USA and the RCP-USA. We take our duties here in the beast serious and the Chican@ nation will not be bamboozled via neo-colonial projects that masquerade in communist barb. The Republic of Aztlán is re-building the nation and studying the errors of the past to be successful in our struggle.

Free Aztlán!

<sup>Notes:
1 The Crusade for Justice by Ernesto Vigil.
2. “The CP, The Sixties, The RCP and the Crying need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today” by The Organization of Communist Revolutionaries.
3. V.I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, January-February 1916 from Selected Works Vol. 1, International Publishers, NY, 1971, P. 160.
4. https://www2.fed.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_citizenship.jsp 5. “Chicano Movement for Beginners” by Maceo Montoya, 2016, page 202.</sup>

MIM(Prisons) adds: We’ve published a paper by the Dawnland Group discussing the organizations that were behind the now defunct magazine Kites. As summarized in that essay, these organizations reject the labor aristocracy thesis and the importance of national liberation struggles (see What is MIM(Prisons)? for more on our positions).

In addition, this month we are publishing on our website the final version of our paper, “Why the International Communist Movement (ICM) Must Break with the Legacy of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM).” This paper is a critique of the RCP-U$A, and the RIM that it helped lead, on the grounds that they put First Worldist and revisionist ideology at the forefront of the ICM. This paper was inspired in part by the work of the OCR and the ideas and papers (by Bob Avakian) that they promote. Part 2 of this review by ROA addresses the section of Kites #8 on the RCP-U$A.]

In this piece put out by the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR) they attempt to shed light on two organizations – the Communist Party-USA (CP) and the Revolutionary Communist Party USA (RCP-USA). This paper further delves into the 1960’s and the communist movement in general, particularly within these false U.$. borders.

As the writers point out little has been written about the RCP-USA so not much is known for the newer generation of revolutionaries. Some of the members of our organization however have experience with the RCP-USA and have debated and struggled with them for a couple of decades over their neo-colonial line toward Aztlán to no avail. Their failure to recognize the existence of the Chican@ Nation has led us to label them as a revisionist party to say the least. So this paper was welcoming and a way for our comrades to sum up this relic of a distorted past called the RCP-USA.

The writers list the Socialist Party of America (SP) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as the forerunners to communist organization in the United $tates. It should also be noted that white supremacy and language barriers hindered the recruitment of Chican@s, or other raza, into these organizations. It is interesting that 100 years later white supremacy continues to affect the line of many multi-national organizations like the IWW, especially when they attempt to put our national interests on the back burner while accusing us of wanting to put our nation first. It is not that we simply want to put the national struggle to the forefront for some subjective reward, we do so as revolutionary nationalists because we have determined that the principle contradiction is between the oppressed nations and the oppressor nation. A people cannot be free to determine their future if they are suffering from oppression.

As noted in this paper, the early days of the communist movement in the United $tates had a proletariat that was “substantially immigrant”, today we see the same with the proletariat being mainly migrant workers, particularly those from Mexico. This seems to make the vanguard’s job easier organizationally. Back then there was a proletariat of various migrants from various countries, including many from Europe, so a communist vanguard role would have been to create agit/prop material in these various languages in an attempt to raise consciousness in these populations. We see the Chican@ nations role as key in today’s environment where the proletariat is largely Mexican@ and from Central and South America making Aztlán’s job of uniting the Brown exploited workers under the Chican@ leadership much easier than any other national organization. The trail of liberation on these shores is Brown.

At one point the issue of Black oppression was addressed in this paper, noting that the communist movement of this time essentially dropped the ball and:

“Subjectively, the failure of US communists to prioritize making an analysis of the Black national question – the oppression of Black People and how that oppression can be ended through communist revolution and begin making political interventions in struggles over the oppression of Black people was a serious, strategic blunder that only compounded the objective problem.”(1)

Another “strategic blunder” of the time was in not prioritizing an analysis of Chican@ national oppression – not only back in the early 1900’s but the continued blundering of today when many political organizations within these false U.$. borders continue to ignore the very essential Chican@ struggle in their analysis. This also highlights the continued necessity of single-nation building for Aztlán. After all if the Chicano nation does not organize for the liberation of Aztlán who will?

The early 1900’s was prime time for the Chican@ nation in terms of rebellion, it was just about 50 years since colonization at the hands of U.$. imperialism but it was also a time of the Plan de San Diego. As our Chicano Red Book put it:

“During the first decade of the 1900’s a group of unidentified Mexican@s or Chican@s put out a document calling for armed resistance by Chican@s. The Plan de San Diego called for Armed Struggle against Amerika and proclaimed that upon victory the”South West United States” would become a Chican@ state, New Afrikans would form their own state and First Nations their own state. This was the first united front of the oppressed nations on these shores that sought independence for all oppressed nations upon victory: the Plan demonstrated true internationalism.”(2)

So although Chican@s have been resisting and organizing for independence even before U.$. communists began to organize in the SP, IWW, CP or Communist Labor Party (CLP), none of these so-called revolutionary orgs developed an analysis on raza or our colonization during the early 20th century. The RCP-USA still has not supported Chican@ independence. Marxism taught us historical materialism which we use to learn from hystory. Hystory has taught us that anytime we have lifted the boot of the white oppressor nation off our necks it has been by Chicanos coming together and struggling. Whether it was against white terror that las Goras Blancas (the white caps) fought or against Amerikkka which compelled the Plan de San Diego to develop, we have, as a people, always struggled against national oppression from the factories to the field. The most significant labor strike in U.$. hystory, which was a Chican@ strike but which white labor has hijacked and renamed “The Ludlow Massacre”.

During the time that the SP, CP, IWW and CLP were committing the blunder on the Black nation, they likewise committed a great blunder on the Chican@ nation who was also struggling against national oppression. Because of this hystory we set out to create the Republic of Aztlán, the government in waiting for the Chican@ nation. The writers note the CP’s “foreign language workers clubs” and their role in organizing non-English speakers. Taking into account the almost non-existent analysis of the Chican@ struggle by the movement in U.$. borders, it highlights the need for Raza workers org’s and clubs to help organize and develop immigrants who suffer from exploitation.

This piece sums up the trials and tribulations of the CP. Their factionalism and devotion to the unions seemed to drown out the suffering of the internal semi-colonies of the time. The Comintern and, in particular, Stalin’s guidance, led the CP to finally give the Black nation and their struggles against national oppression some attention. Aztlán was ripe for development during this time when white labor denied Chican@s as well as many other oppressed at the time.

An interesting mention in this piece was on the development of a “guerilla military force.” In discussing the communist activities of the 1920’s the writers state:

“There is a question of whether Communists could have developed some type of guerrilla military force to supplement the mass labor struggles that erupted and to contend with the repression by way of organized armed defense of strikers where appropriate (some of that happened spontaneously) and selective assassinations of agents of repression!!” (3)

Although we do not promote People’s War today, the fact remains that a vanguard’s role is to be prepared to defend the people, especially when the capitalist state unleashes the most vile forms of repression. One has to be prepared for the inevitable, this includes the understanding that a strike force is a very necessary vehicle for defense of an oppressed peoples. No nation will ever acquire liberation without such a mechanism in place. Cadre should grasp this, teach this and prepare for the time when such a force is necessary. Fanon was clear in that colonial violence can only be overcome by a greater violence, the oppressor nation understands no other language. At the same time, the cadre should accept that such a dialogue is a great sacrifice of the highest form. Indeed, we cannot study revolution without studying what such warfare would deliver society to such a transformation. The Black Liberation Army sliced to the heart of it when they said:

“Bombings, kidnappings, sniping, revolutionary executions, surprise raids, bank robbery: all of these are rightfully weapons of urban guerrilla warfare. As we use them we must take care to maintain high principles and keep in mind that power to the people is more than just”campaign rhetoric”.” (4)

Although campaign rhetoric may be leading much of the public discourse, a realistic view of national liberation leads us to develop plans of attack and self defense even if the plans do not become operational until after our demise. The future of any socialist revolution demands this.

Subjectively, the part of this writing that hit the hardest to those of us who organize within the U.$. concentration kamps was the portion describing the story of the young womyn named Marian Morna, the 18 year old member of the CP’s Young Communist League who describes integrating with the masses to organize strikes in the fields of California’s Imperial Valley. Her description was incredibly moving, in her words:

“The years with the fruit pickers became a world within the world, a microcosm of feelings that never left me, not even when I left them. I lived with the pickers, ate, slept, and got drunk with them. I helped bury their men and deliver their babies. We laughed, cried, and talked endlessly into the night together. And, slowly, some extraordinary interchange began to take place between us. I taught them how to read, and they taught me how to think. I taught them how to organize, and they taught me how to lead. I saw things happening to people I’d never seen before. I saw them becoming as they never dreamed they could become. Day by day people were developing, transforming, communicating inarticulate dreams, discovering a force of being in themselves. Desires, skills, capacities they didn’t know they had blossomed under the pressure of active struggle. And the sweetness, the generosity, the pure comradeship that came flowing out of them as they began to feel themselves! They were—there’s no other word for it—noble. Powerful in struggle, no longer sluggish with depression, they became inventive, alive, democratic, filled with an instinctive sense of responsibility for each other. And we were all like that, all of us, the spirit touched all of us. It was my dream of socialism come to life. I saw then what I could be like, what people could always be like, how good the earth and all things upon it could be, how sweet to be alive and to feel yourself in everyone else.”

If one were to replace the words “fruit pickers” with “lumpen” or “prisoners” it would be spot on to an organizer’s experiences in the concentration kamps. I feel it. The connections that develop with the masses in any environment cannot be manufactured insincerely. Oppressed people, wherever they may be struggling against an oppressor, at some point develop relations that give us a glimmer of what social interaction and struggle will feel like as society transforms to a higher level, we taste it and this sampler compels us forward for more.

Another glimmer of hope we learn about in this piece was in the lesson of the Yokinen Show trial in 1931. August Yokinen was a member of the CP who refused to allow Black folks to enter the Finnish Workers Club in Harlem and went on to say their place was in Black Harlem. The reaction to this was the CP having a show trial charging Yokinen with white chauvinism. It was public and even got coverage in the bourgeois press with The New York Times putting it on the front page. The trial provided good agit prop for the masses and highlighted the inability of the capitalist state to address white supremacy and hold white chauvinism accountable and the CP did. This educated the masses and put Amerika on blast. This reminded me of our org’s action around a gun buy-back program by the pigs. We had a comrade announce on the radio live that there was going to be a gun buy back, where the pigs can turn in the stolen “hot” guns they had in their trunks that they regularly planted on people. We announced they can remain anonymous and that we will not ask for a badge number. Our goal was simply to keep our streets safe from pig terror. We did this to raise consciousness and, although in our case we did not get coverage in the bourgeois press, we addressed a real form of repression in a very audacious way which, to our knowledge, had not been previously done.

Raising consciousness is our job as communists however because of the brainwashing that the state does on a mass scale we have to be bold, creative and audacious in our efforts, all without crossing the line where the state has ammunition to lock us up. In the end sometimes they’ll make shit up and lock us up anyways. The Republic of Aztlán has taken up its responsibility to serve the people by all means necessary and we overstand the dangers that come with this role!

This piece has many lessons within it, too many to address in our writing here. The case of the Scottsboro boys is worth a mention though. It was of course a sad case of injustice and imprisonment but the lesson was definitely on how communists of the time responded and struggled with bourgeois liberals on which way that struggle developed. This struggle reminded me in a small way to the prisoner hunger strike of 2011/2013 in Califas and how a variety of orgs entered the arena of coalition.

It is always a struggle to at once unite with the masses in struggle while resisting the pull towards reformism which often engulfs mass struggles. This first part of our review framed the CP and its good and bad characteristics that we can learn from today. Soviet revisionism ultimately sank the CP ship. Despite all of its efforts, it continues to be anchored in the graveyard of bourgeois elections today. This first part of the review was successful in “burying” the CP for our organization.

<sup>Notes:
1. “The CP, the Sixties, the RCP and the Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party today: Summing up a century of Communist leadership , organization, strategy and practice in the United States so that we can rise to the challenges before us.” By Organization of Communist Revolutionaries
2. Chican@ Power and the Struggle for Aztlán by a MIM Prisons Study Group, 2nd Edition 2021, Aztlán Press, Page 40.
3. Organization of Communist Revolutionaries IBID.
4. Collected Works of the Black Liberation Army, Rookery Press, Page 92.</sup>

I have been trying to follow the Palestinian liberation struggle for some time now, well at least in the best ways I can behind enemy lines: piecing bits and pieces of information together from the various media sources that make it in here.

What strikes me the most at this juncture is the dialectic between New Afrikan youth and Palestinian youth. Over here in the Amerikkkan empire, New Afrikan youth, particularly New Afrikan male youth occupy very unfortunate spaces in the Amerikkkan oppressor nation’s mental. These youth dwell in the danger zone, spaces that are purely a figment of the “white” imagination. This criminal Black youth label. This “hyper-reality” is no more real than the emperor’s new clothes, analogous to the rapist who takes the mentally ill patient back to the scene of the crime, back to the moment of trauma, when the delusions began. It is within the dark interiority of this lived nightmare, the womb of the unforgiving chattel slavery regime enclosed within old style colonialism that the New Afrikan male youth was conceived. This is critical and informative for understanding mass imprisonment in New Afrika.

This process of marking New Afrikan youth as criminal prisoners essential to the functioning of mass incarceration is a mechanism of social control operative under national oppression. For this repressive institution to succeed, New Afrikan youth must be branded as criminal before they are formally subject to this mechanism of control. This is essential, for forms of explicit colonial control are not only prohibited but are widely condemned. Capitalism evolved.

Both New Afrikan and Palestinian people are entrenched beneath the boot of their colonizers without a state that is theirs to foster, nurture, and facilitate their respective national liberation struggles to actualize control over their destiny. Both face the repressive arm of mass imprisonment to undermine and destroy their resistance efforts and thus fine comb their national oppression nightmare.

The I$raeli colonial project is a direct extension of U.$. imperialism. The U.$. penal system being the first and largest experiment in humyn bondage, it is only fitting that this institution of social control finds its way into the Palestinian lived experience under I$raeli occupation.

Palestinian youth are the only youth that are formally subject to a “military” court/detention system. Palestinian youth are not privy to a civil court; that means when they go before a judge they are not entitled to a lawyer, nor a translator even though the entire court proceedings are in Hebrew – a non-Arabic language. And if they remain silent, that means they plead guilty. So no civilian proceedings for any Palestinian youth at all.

Many of these oppressed youth are taken during night raids from their parents or adult supervisors to further facilitate intimidating interrogation techniques. These parallel a lot of New Afrikan juvenile situations as the school-to-prison pipeline. The harsh penalties for simple offenses that are the rule, just the whole criminalization process of entire neighborhoods/locations mirror U.$. law enforcement imposition of gang injunctions/occupational patrolling of predominantly New Afrikan neighborhoods in the United $tates of Amerikkka.

The I$raeli settler occupation project parallels Amerikkkan national oppression of New Afrika with the language and practical application of the tried and tired excuse of blaming the so-called “savages” for provoking the “reasonable” and “peace loving” settlers into defending themselves and the land “God ordained” them to have thus dehumanizing and criminalizing a whole nation. The zionist regime’s actions against Palestinian youth are nothing short of genocidal.

In the current news, it is important to note the essential role played by the Palestinian youth, mostly under 18. The resistance movement there is mobilizing their youth to stand up and struggle forward. This is very important to glean lessons from, particularly within the historical and contemporary social dynamics encircling settler colonialism and national oppression in Occupied Palestine. This is good for an application to the Amerikan empire. As ULK aptly notes: the Black Panthers were mostly teenagers.

The New Communist Party of Canada [(N)CPC] was formed by the Kanadian communist group Revolutionary Initiative (RI) in early 2024. The RI announced the (N)CPC through the journal Kites which it co-publishes alongside the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR), a communist group in the United States.

In February 2024 the OCR Issued a “red salute” to the (N)CPC containing mostly praise. In May 2024, the journal Kites disbanded, explained with reference to the unique circumstances in Kanada vs. Amerika as well as unspecified ideological disagreements between the two organizations.

While unity between the (N)CPC and the OCR may have appeared unprincipled based upon the latter’s criticism of the former, this polemic argues that they shared a rejection of two crucial political lines: the labor aristocracy thesis and the significance of national liberation struggles. To support these claims, first the Dawnland Group examines the (N)CPC’s political program followed by the OCR’s response, each published in Kites.

(N)CPC says natives should ally with settlers

It is difficult to separate the influence of Trotskyism from its settler-colonial baggage and the (N)CPC demonstrates this truth well. The Political Program of the New Communist Party of Canada opens with the (N)CPC’s two “innately linked” objectives: “a) establish working class rule in the economic and political spheres of Canada; and b) Usher in a new, non-colonial, equal and fraternal type of relations between all nations which today remain forcefully and unequally united within the Canadian state.”(1)

Alone, the second objective is agreeable. But the (N)CPC clarifies how these two goals are interlinked, writing that neither “is likely to be achieved in a lasting, meaningful way without the other. Working-class power without national liberation and national equality would have to be built on an illegitimate, coercive basis. National liberation without working-class power would mean a mere reform of Canadian law, or else create powerless statelets that would fall prey to any of the multiple imperialist powers contending for domination and survival in the world today.”

Despite claiming that equality and national liberation are necessary for indigenous peoples, the (N)CPC supports this only conditionally, demanding “working class” power come first. Charitably interpreted, the (N)CPC can be read as considering the “proletariat” of indigenous nations to be an important aspect of the Kanadian “working class”. In any case, considering settlers proletariat as (N)CPC does, this would make the Kanadian “working class” overwhelmingly settler.

Support of indigenous sovereignty contingent upon prior proletarian revolution renders this support meaningless. Thus, when the (N)CPC claims that “the only conceivable way to resolve the separate legal status of Indigenous people without liquidating Indigenous nations as legal entities is collective rights under the banner of the full right to self-determination, up to and including secession” and the necessity of “upholding of the right to secede by popular referendum for all component republics of the Multinational Socialist Confederacy;” their conditions render these rights null until proletarian revolution.

National Liberation is a value as much as a strategy. All peoples have the right to autonomy and self-determination and these rights must be supported without regards to the opinions of settlers.

Beyond values there are strategic concerns. This “alliance” is directly risking the sustained colonization of indigenous groups by “socialist” settlers. The Israeli Kibbutz movement historically purchased lands form Arabic landlords, where they would evict Palestinian tenants in order to create “communes.” Despite Kibbutzniks being considered “left wing” and “socialist,” their settlements encircle the Gaza strip and they have been used to condemn the October 7 resistance operation (2), the newest stage of the Palestinian national liberation war. Here the Israeli “working class” has achieved power and constitutes the main foot-soldiers of genocide. Demanding working class power in exchange for indigenous sovereignty also neglects the inverse possibility that national liberation of colonies will be prerequisite for overthrowing the bourgeoisie.

As addressed in A Polemic Against Settler “Maoism”, settlers have an inherently reactionary class role.(3) While isolated settlers reject this role, the vast majority occupy indigenous lands, stealing their resources and cheap labor. The basis of settler-colonialism has never been a deceitful bourgeoisie but their transparent alliance with settlers: former-proletariat, offered petty-bourgeois class positions through the redistribution of land acquired through theft and genocide. The (N)CPC is wrong that the bourgeoisie is the only force standing in-between the settler-workers and decolonization, and that through “excluding the monopoly bourgeoisie from this process entirely,” Kanada can negotiate more just treaties with the First Nations. Settlers are not deceived by the capitalists against their better interest – a supposed alliance with the indigenous masses. Settlers assume such a class role because, with respect to the capitalist mode of production, it is their best interest.

Settlers are knowing, willful participants in genocide as part of a bargain with those capitalists in exchange for a petty-bourgeois class position.(4) This is their best material interest as a class permitted to escape proletarian existence through conquest. The bargain between settlers and their bourgeoisie is not conceived via ignorance or deception, it is the rational consequence of pursuing one’s material interest within class society: ascension up class and/or national hierarchy to positions of greater wealth and culpability in oppression. Settlers fill niches where the bourgeoisie wishes to expand private property and commodity production, dispose of surplus populations and compete with other imperial powers. In exchange for exterminating the original inhabitants, settlers are allowed free reign of the land and resources of the dead.

There may be a more subconscious belief involved in apologizing for settlers and manufacturing their innocence, namely that, although settlers are indeed rationally pursuing their material interests, this betrays their human interest to live in a world without exploitation, and that communists can win over the masses of settlers to this superior moral position.

As discussed in the Polemic Against Settler “Maoism”, there are important differences between classes and individuals. It is possible to successfully appeal to the morals and internationalist sentiments of certain individuals from each class and nation. This will vary wildly depending on the individual in question and their background. But at the macro-level, only oppressed nations and classes have the material interest in a world without oppression which has historically been wielded to make revolution. Settlers are oppressors. As Black Liberation Army soldier Assata Shakur famously says, “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” The (N)CPC suggests just that failed strategy.

While morals are required to undertake communist revolution, morals can never be abstracted from their class context. Settler morals, including the belief that settlers’ working conditions are more important than indigenous rights, were created with the rise of capitalism in Europe whose surplus proletarian population was offered overseas class roles similar to that of Auschwitz guards. The Nazis’ thirst for lebensraum, which slaughtered millions of Jews and Slavs during the holocaust, was directly copied from manifest destiny and the treatment of indigenous peoples on Occupied Turtle Island where between 10 and 15 million were murdered (5).

In their first few paragraphs of published writing the (N)CPC have downplayed the Kanadian “worker” role in ongoing genocide of First Nations, manufacturing a myth of innocent, deceived settlers. Further, they dictate the terms of national liberation to the indigenous communities of Canada in service of the more important “proletarian revolution.” This is settler “Marxism” and Trotskyism.

Trotskyists believe that third-world revolutions are doomed to failure without the aid of the more “advanced” proletariat of the western nations, that socialism is not possible within one country. The ideas are best summarized by the man himself, discussing how:

“A backward colonial or semi-colonial country, the proletariat of which is insufficiently prepared to unite the peasantry and take power, is thereby incapable of bringing the democratic revolution to its conclusion. Contrariwise, in a country where the proletariat has power in its hands as the result of the democratic revolution, the subsequent fate of the dictatorship and socialism depends in the last analysis not only and not so much upon the national productive forces as upon the development of the international socialist revolution.”(6)

Thus, even if a colonial or semi-colonial country managed to seize state power, it would fail if international “proletarian” revolution did not quickly follow. This was as true for Trotsky in the USSR as it later became for him in China, where he argued with extremely poor foresight that alliance with the Koumintang had defeated the revolution and that instead “permanent revolution” was necessary to liberate China.(7) To the Trotskyist, the proletariat of these nations is insufficiently numerically developed to lead a revolution. They forget the fact that no (western) European nation – those initially with the greatest industrial proletariat – has ever waged a successful struggle for state socialism, and the fact that third-world national liberation struggles have accomplished the most significant strategic advances towards communism in history. Finally, as covered below, most of the populations in core imperialist countries are labor aristocrats who hold petty-bourgeois class positions despite receiving wages: they won’t be leading revolution anytime soon.

Trotskyism is pervasive in Amerika and Kanada. Even without reference to Trotsky, without explicit statements of the inferiority of national liberation struggles, it is still perfectly possible for “Marxist-Lenninist” and “Maoist” groups to uphold Trotsky’s ideas through organizing settlers of an oppressor nation instead of organizing the oppressed.

As discussed in the Polemic against Settler-Maoism, settler “maoism” and Trotskyism share certain chronology with regards to national liberation, another characteristic of belief that proletarian revolution takes priority. The (N)CPC believes socialist revolution will precede national autonomy for indigenous peoples:

“The only way to cut the proverbial Gordian knot is for the Indigenous national struggle to link up with the proletarian struggle for socialism in overthrowing the extant Canadian State. Once it is overthrown, new agreements can be reached over the use of land, resources and their sharing between nations. True sovereignty can be enshrined in a new, multinational constitution. This sovereignty can ensure full, distinct national rights without the need for any”Indian status,” which would be replaced by full citizenship in a sovereign nation. Full independence can be achieved by those nations who want it and have the resources needed to sustain it.” (Bold ours)

There are no legitimate “agreements” between settlers and indigenous peoples, because the settlers have used genocide and theft to acquire their negotiating assets. This is why DLG advocates for the Joint Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the Oppressed Nations, which will enforce the will of the oppressed nations at the expense of the imperialist and settler nations, such as the Amerikan and Kanadian nation, a process involving extensive redistribution of land and resources as well as peoples’ tribunals for criminals against humanity. Finally, the notion that settlers can decide if indigenous nations “want” or are “ready” for independence, has been used by colonial powers for centuries to continue oppressing their subjects.

There is a related issue throughout the (N)CPC political program of advocating for a homogeneous Kanadian culture without the consent of the indigenous peoples. Deciding autonomously on such a path long after achieving independence and having received back all stolen land and resources, plus some for interest from the settlers, would be a consensual decision. Settlers should not be advocating for any such cultural assimilation today. The (N)CPC writes that:

“The monopoly bourgeoisie and its State willfully confuse the potential of Canada for its actual reality. Canada really could be a brand-new type of country, one where national sovereignty is not the preserve of a small parasitic class but is instead granted to the myriad national groups that give it its rich cultural mosaic. We really could all work together to preserve our respective cultures, develop our economy in sustainable ways which benefit all working people, embrace cultures and traditions originating from pre-colonial North America, from Europe and now from the entire world. We could collectively take everything that is old and make it into something new.” (Bold ours).

Settlers have no right to advocate for the creation of international cultures together with their colonial subjects. This reduces to an argument for cultural integration which, in Kanada and the United $tates, represents genocide through sterilization, kidnappings, residential schools, and murder by colonial militias and police. Whether or not they understand this, their language is overtly colonial, advocating for assimilation and continued unequal relationships between oppressed and oppressor nations. They need an explicit, unconditional recognition of indigenous sovereignty or they are no different than other settlers seeking to maintain unfair treaties with First Nations without reparations or sovereignty.

The Dawnland Group (DLG) writes this polemic because the (N)CPC’s understanding of indigenous sovereignty directly contradicts with DLG’s support for New Democracy in Occupied Turtle Island. In 1940 Mao argued that imperialism and feudalism prevented China from directly pursuing socialism. Rather, New Democracy was required first, a dictatorship of revolutionary classes over the country in order to liberate it from outside domination, so that socialism may be constructed thereafter:

“The first step or stage in our revolution is definitely not, and cannot be, the establishment of a capitalist society under the dictatorship of the Chinese bourgeoisie, but will result in the establishment of a new-democratic society under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes of China headed by the Chinese proletariat The revolution will then be carried forward to the second stage, in which a socialist society will be established in China.”

To liberate China, the Communist Party led a united front with the peasants, proletariat, petty-bourgeoisie and some national bourgeoisie who sided with the communists against Japan in the war for national liberation. Whereas in Europe, feudalism could be overthrown by the bourgeois-democratic revolution due to the bourgeoisie’s antagonism with the feudal mode of production, in colonies and oppressed nations, imperialism is inclined to promote feudalism from without and thus a broader united front is required. Despite the defeat of the Cultural Revolution and the capitalist road taken in 1976, the strategy of New Democracy liberated China from foreign domination.

Here Mao gives context as to how New Democracy applies to Chinese conditions:

“Being a bourgeoisie in a colonial and semi-colonial country and oppressed by imperialism, the Chinese national bourgeoisie retains a certain revolutionary quality at certain periods and to a certain degree… Since tsarist Russia was a military-feudal imperialism which carried on aggression against other countries, the Russian bourgeoisie was entirely lacking in revolutionary quality. There, the task of the proletariat was to oppose the bourgeoisie, not to unite with it. But China’s national bourgeoisie has a revolutionary quality at certain periods and to a certain degree, because China is a colonial and semi-colonial country which is a victim of aggression. Here, the task of the proletariat is to form a united front with the national bourgeoisie against imperialism and the bureaucrat and warlord governments without overlooking its revolutionary quality.”

DLG views the application of New Democracy in Occupied Turtle Island to mean that, in the oppressed nations, similarly to China, the bourgeoisie may be an importantly ally in the national liberation struggle. In the oppressor nations (Amerika, Kanada), not only is the bourgeoisie entirely counter-revolutionary but this is true of the petty-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy as well due to benefiting from and carrying out imperialism and settler-colonialism.

Most bourgeoisie and rich peasantry in China were less wealthy than the petty-bourgeoisie and much of the labor aristocracy today on Occupied Turtle Island. The petty-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy of oppressor nations in OTI have no great interest in being won over to a communist cause, because most face no national oppression and are bought-off from imperialist superprofits. Thus, DLG argues that the role of the Amerikan/Kanadian communist vanguard is to treat these classes as hostile and instead support the national liberation wars of the internal semi-colonies and oppressed nations.

By contrast, the (N)CPC writes of the Kanadian situation that “an Indigenous petty-bourgeoisie and intelligentsia have also been fostered by the State as part of its counter-revolutionary strategy. The revolutionary camp will have to cautiously navigate in building a class alliance that unites the broadest interests of the Indigenous peoples while isolating and struggling against these new reactionary classes.” While imperialism promotes neo-colonial sections of each oppressed nation’s ruling class who collaborate with the oppressor nation, the (N)CPC is confusing this small segment of the indigenous (petty) bourgeoisie with its entirety.

The (N)CPC argues the petty-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie of the First Nations must be struggled against but the labor aristocracy and petty-bourgeoisie of the settler nation are important allies to the revolution. This is a paradoxical reversal of New Democracy, in which it is inapplicable in the oppressed nations where it was designed and synthesized successfully, and yet it is applicable in the core imperialist countries where it has never been employed. Concluding on their views about national liberation, the (N)CPC recognizes:

“oppressed nations’ right to self-determination up to and including secession. But we do not content ourselves with this: we recognize that given the way Canada has been built, total separation between its various nations is likely to be counterproductive. Therefore, we intend to build a new form of political and economic unity, a multinational socialist confederacy whose component parts are not arbitrarily-drawn provinces, but really-existing peoples and nations…” (Bold ours)

They provide no explanation for why “separation between various nations is likely to be counterproductive,” although this is a convenient platitude for settlers who wish to have an input about when indigenous people are “ready” for independence, as the (N)CPC indicated above. It is historically illiterate of the complicity of settlers in genocide and naive in assuming somehow this time things will be different and the settler-majority will solve the very contradiction that their class exists because of.

The (N)CPC pitch must be confusing for First Nations, who have been systematically slaughtered, expelled and forced onto reservations for centuries not by capitalists but by settlers pursuing their material interests. By contrast, a vanguard among the settler nation would be formed through a revolutionary defeatist position, unequivocally bent towards the destruction of the settler class role through the repatriation of land, resources and sovereignty to First Nations via revolutionary national liberation war.

The small chance of a vanguard position emerging in Kanada and Amerika will be squandered so long as Trotskyism continues selling indigenous peoples the promise of new negotiations with the same settler class that has been occupying their lands and seeing their genocide through for centuries.

Making proletarians from labor aristocrats

The (N)CPC writes that,

“comprised of all those deprived of the means to produce and forced to sell their labour power to survive, the proletariat is the largest class in society, forming somewhere between 60 and 65% of the population.”

There are two crucial Trotskyist components involved in viewing Kanada as 60% proletarian. First is the view discussed above that settlers can occupy revolutionary class positions; that they can still be “workers”. Second is the view that labor aristocrats who are paid above the value of their wages through super-exploitation of the global south can be proletarian rather than petty-bourgeois. These ideas closely overlap because the labor aristocracy on Occupied Turtle Island is mostly settler and the settler nation (Amerika/Kanada) is overwhelmingly labor aristocratic, save for a tiny minority who fall into the lumpenproletariat including homeless and prisoners.

Throughout their political program, the (N)CPC rejects the labor aristocracy thesis. The (N)CPC views the three main contradictions in the world as

“(a) between the imperialists themselves, which means the struggle for the re-division of the world is always in motion, albeit to varying degrees; (b) between imperialist countries and oppressed countries, which means imperialist exploitation and oppression, and the struggle for self-determination and independent national development; and (c) between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in each country, which means class struggle and the potential for socialist revolution.”

Contradiction (b), an important mention, is suspect based on their treatment of oppressed-nation struggles within Kanada as shown above. Because of their use of the term “countries”, it is unclear if they believe this imperialist/oppressed dynamic plays out among the nations internal to settler-colonies. Contradiction (c) however is wholly incorrect as in Kanada and Amerika, the proletariat is numerically insignificant. The vast majority are allied to the bourgeoisie as settlers and/or Labor Aristocrats, making class struggle minimal on Occupied Turtle Island at the present time.

The (N)CPC disagrees. They write that

“Through the housing market an ever-growing portion of workers’ paycheques are transferred back to the bourgeoisie in the form of rent or interest. Either enslaved to mortgages or rents, workers are often one step away from the streets.”

The term slavery is best reserved for slaves, not home owners. The view that swaths of workers are “enslaved” to their rent via landlords is subjective, equally so to being “one step away from the streets.”

In Occupied Turtle Island, these terms are overused as much as living “paycheck to paycheck.” In the imperial core where minimum wages are ten times that of the global proletariat, where public services provide the vast majority with water, electricity and transportation, it is chauvinistic to discuss “slavery” to anything. The global proletariat often choose between extremely limited and poor quality food and housing, or earns too little for this choice, subsisting parasitically or dying prematurely. It should be clear that the (N)CPC is attempting to minimize the wages of imperialism paid to the labor aristocracy through super-exploitation of the global south. The Polemic Against Settler-Maoism and MIM(Prisons)’s study on the housing market (8) are invaluable demonstrations of the growth of the labor aristocracy in Occupied Turtle Island throughout the previous half century.

The (N)CPC’s specific examples of the proletariat exemplify another Trotskyist approach:

“At its core are those who work in natural resources, manufacturing, construction, transport, and logistics — labourers at the centre of capitalist exploitation. They are key to the revolutionary movement not only by their large number – around 4 million – but because they are the producers of commodities and wealth… those working in industries which allow labour-power to reproduce itself over time – chiefly health care and education – totalling approximately 4 million workers… those working to facilitate the circulation of capital – primarily workers in retail and services with about 3 million workers. Without these workers the bourgeoisie cannot maintain itself in the long run or realize its profit. Together with the labourers, these sections of the proletariat, totalling about 11 million people, hold the potential to establish a new, socialist economy.” (Bold ours)

Here is a typical Trotskyist confusion of the “importance” of a given trade to the economy for the revolutionary potential of the workers therein, which the (N)CPC states as the

“principle of workers’ centrality. That is, the principle that the workers at the centre of production – and found in great concentration, specifically, the labourers in large-scale industry and the health and education workers in the major service centres – form the heart of the proletariat and the main force for socialist revolution in Canada. The Party must therefore, first and foremost, establish and build itself within these workplaces.”

As discussed in the Polemic Against Settler-Maoism, this is a Trotskyist obsession with numbers and a mechanical application of the conditions of other historical revolutions onto the imperial core, assuming revolutionary insurrection will play out along similar lines despite the bargain of the majority with imperialism. This follows Trotsky’s belief in a quantity of “advanced” “workers” in capitalism as prerequisite for socialism, a condition missing from “backwards” (oppressed) nations.

This opportunistic error leads to mass work among a numerically enormous yet counter-revolutionary base who benefit from imperialism. This mass-work is ultimately not communist because improving the lot of labor aristocrats is important to the bourgeoisie. Social democratic policies greatly expanding the labor aristocracy were implemented during the 1930s and 1940s across western Europe and Occupied Turtle Island in order to compete with socialism in the USSR and materially dissuade workers from communist politics. This strategy succeeded and that’s why only oppressed nations have led communist vanguards in OTI since; there is next-to-no more economic exploitation.

OCR “Revolutionary Salute” to Trotskyism

All should salute the OCR for criticizing a major (former) partner organization. A complete assessment of OCR line and practice is far beyond the scope of our discussion – perhaps impossible during a human lifespan given their volume of writing.

Unfortunately though, they must be criticized for their unity with the (N)CPC as well as what this demonstrates: deeper held agreements with a Trotskyist political formation. This should serve as cause for reflection and struggle for OCR membership and readers.

Lets begin discussing some strengths of the OCR’s Red Salute.(9)

Readers will have noticed the (N)CPC does not even claim to uphold Maoism as the most advanced science of the proletariat and the OCR is correct to criticize them for this, although it is strange the latter do not require Maoism for joint publications with other communist groups. All the same, their section on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the Red Salute develops many interesting criticisms of the (N)CPC not addressed in this polemic.

OCR criticisms of the (N)CPC’s betrayal of the labor aristocracy thesis and their failure to recognize the class nature of imperialism, as well as pointing out the ludicrous idea of a 60% proletarian Kanada, are all strong. We praise their criticisms that college-degree occupations including teachers and medical workers are petty-bourgeois, and their criticisms of economism and “worker centrality” are good.

Yet, despite acknowledging that they are not Maoist nor sufficiently anti-imperialist in their class analysis, the OCR still issues a revolutionary salute to the (N)CPC. At first this seems odd, given the significance of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and mention of labor aristocracy in the OCR Manifesto and within Kites 8. Ultimately, DLG concludes that the unity of these two groups derived from a shared lack of ideological commitment to national liberation and the labor aristocracy thesis.

OCR’s soft Labor Aristocracy thesis

Regarding the (N)CPC’s view that the labor aristocracy forms a mass base for revolution, the OCR’s manifesto says those gaining from imperialism in the United States include:

“the petty-bourgeoisie – people who own and operate small enterprises or who possess skills and education that enable them to sell their labor at a higher rate – as well as the labor aristocracy and bourgeoisified workers, whose work is more proletarian in character but who make substantial wages above what they need to survive and have significant job security and health and retirement benefits… However, among these middle classes and the ideological state apparatuses and political institutions of the US, there is always conflict and struggle with the bourgeoisie which at times becomes quite acute.” (Bold Ours)

This concept is evident within Kites 8, the OCR’s most significant work, an attempt to summarize all those communist parties across U.S. history which they consider important. (10) They praise the Revolutionary Communist Party(USA), saying that the latter “developed a united-front-level program that addressed the key social faultlines of the time and could unite, in a broad resistance movement, all those in political motion who were objectively on the proletariat’s side of those social faultlines.” Much like the (N)CPC, the OCR is claiming there are segments of each class that can potentially be united to fight for the proletariat.

Written by an OCR author named Kenny Lake in Kites #2, the second article in the “Specter” series’s conception of proletarian revolution is put similarly. Lake writes that:

“revolutionary civil war can only be initiated after the proletariat, led by communists, has built up the organized forces for revolution through a lengthy process of class struggle and creates and takes advantage of favorable conditions for the launch of an insurrection. The proletariat cannot do this alone, but must forge an alliance of classes under its leadership by taking advantage of the conflicts and struggles between the various middle classes and the bourgeoisie and within the bourgeoisie’s ideological state apparatuses” (Kites 2, pg 36. Bold ours).

It is crucial to say that the proletariat “cannot do this alone.” This is quite similar to the (N)CPC’s view of the petty-bourgeoisie, who they claim is

“neither exploiter nor exploited…For a large part of this class, the lower petty-bourgeoisie, living conditions are similar to that of much of the proletariat…stuck between a rock and a hard place, we must win this class to allying with the proletariat for a better life in socialism. The proletariat must struggle to win them over under its leadership in a united front against the bourgeoisie, as they can be powerful allies, holding much influence in universities, trade unions, media outlets, religious organizations and other such institutions.”

Thus, one explanation of the OCR’s unity with the (N)CPC despite the latter rejecting the labor aristocracy thesis outright is because the former hold a weak version of it. For the OCR, even though the proletariat is the primary revolutionary class, the petty-bourgeoisie and “various middle classes” still hold revolutionary contradictions with the U$ bourgeoisie. As such, it may not matter if a struggle revolves around the concerns of the proletariat or the petty bourgeoisie or the labor aristocracy because there are advantageous contradictions among each group.

It is true that actual oppressed classes and nations at times must make alliances with others. The potential for progressive alliances depends heavily on the class or nation in question. The OCR and (N)CPC are misguided because the “middle classes” in Amerika and Kanada are direct perpetrators of imperialism and settler-colonialism, and as classes have conflicts with the bourgeoisie only over dividing spoils.

National Liberation and New Democracy on Occupied Turtle Island

As previously indicated, the OCR and (N)CPC “class alliance” theories are an inverted application of the Maoist idea of New Democracy to the United $tates / Kanada context, these countries being inundated with settler-colonialism and labor aristocracy. Settlers have a counter-revolutionary class position with regards to indigenous peoples, and labor aristocrats have a counter-revolutionary class position with regards to their nation’s imperialism.

The application of New Democracy to Occupied Turtle Island means that revolutionaries in various nations have highly distinct responsibilities. The Amerikan vanguard is distinct from that of oppressed nation vanguards. The main role of the Amerikan vanguard is to promote the formation of a Joint Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the Oppressed Nations through the national liberation struggles of colonies and internal semi-colonies on Occupied Turtle Island. Amerikan revolutionaries will not liberate themselves because they suffer no oppression or exploitation.

By contrast, labor aristocrats within oppressed nations hold certain revolutionary contradictions by virtue of experiencing national oppression. Their class can be organized towards the goal of liberation for their respective nation. This is true for the petty-bourgeoisie and some of the bourgeoisie of oppressed nations in Occupied Turtle Island as well.

The same is untrue in the oppressor/settler nation. The few revolutionaries who form the oppressor/settler vanguard take a class-suicidal position, sacrificing and attempting to destroy their petty-bourgeois class through supporting external national liberation struggles. While the OCR agrees with us on paper with the attitude labor aristocrat and settler revolutionaries should have regarding self-sacrifice, they are incorrect to search for revolutionary contradictions between these groups and their ally-bourgeoisie. If the alliance is in each party’s mutual interest, there can be no contradiction.

As identified in the Polemic Against Settler Maoism, the labor aristocracy has grown wealthier from the 1960’s until the 2020’s. This signifies to all settlers as well as those from oppressed nations the opportunity for petty-bourgeois life through rejecting revolutionary struggle. As such, only a small portion of people from these groups will constitute a revolutionary vanguard rejecting their class status, as is demonstrated by the historical record in the U$ and Kanada which shows a very small amount of communist revolutionaries. Compare this to China in which hundreds of millions joined the communist party. The bases for this difference were national oppression and exploitation in China.

The OCR praise the (N)CPC for having developed a “creative” solution to national liberation struggles through a “clear analysis.” There are important examples of the OCR qualifying their belief in the significance of national liberation struggles such that this praise accords. In Kites 8, they write that:

“Labeling oppressed nations and nationalities in the US as internal colonies, while morally justified, does not provide the analytical foundation for such a strategy and program, instead suggesting separate struggles to liberate each ‘internal colony’ perhaps linked by solidarity and a common enemy. The “internal colony” analysis fails to grasp that there is a multinational proletariat in the US, disproportionately made up of people of oppressed nation(s) and nationalities but also including white proletarians, which brings together people of different nationalities who have a common class interest and similar but variegated experiences of exploitation and conditions of life, that is in the strategic position, as a class, to lead the revolutionary overthrow of US imperialism.”(11)

Submerging the national struggles of all oppressed nations into the primary “multinational proletarian” struggle is a recipe for Trotskyism, especially when combined with the implication that some whites hold revolutionary class positions. It makes struggling with Trotskyist groups such as the (N)CPC impossible. Having demoted national liberation struggles compared to “multinational proletarian revolution”, how could the OCR disagree that class struggle is more significant?

Despite their affirmation of the right of separate nations to their own revolutionary organizations, OCR says that this trend ideologically

“strengthened revolutionary nationalism and weakened the potential hegemony of the communist world outlook over the growing revolutionary movement. Practically, it meant that the best of the Sixties generation were in separate organizational structures rather than combining their strengths and debating out the crucial questions before the revolutionary movement within one united democratic centralist structure.”

This echoes the (N)CPC’s claim that it would likely be “counterproductive” to have separate vanguards for First Nations, despite the strong risk that white chauvinism will corrupt the formation of a vanguard party as the OCR documents having happened to the Communist Party(USA) and the Revolutionary Communist Party(USA) within Kites 8.(12)

Towards the end of Kites 8 the OCR writes how US revolution could hinge on developments in nations like Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, other Caribbean nations as well as countries in Central and South America. They write that

“To maximize potential for revolutionary spillover, a communist vanguard must carry out political work among the immigrant populations in the US from the countries in question and link the struggles in their homelands with the struggle in the diaspora.”

While we agree with the attention necessary towards these oppressed nations, their value is not about “spillover” but about the necessity of destroying imperialism before proletarian revolution can happen on Occupied Turtle Island. Until this time, there will be almost no proletariat whatsoever, but rather a mass of bought-off labor aristocrats, even among the oppressed nations. The toppling of imperialism and settler-colonialism will break the class basis for the labor aristocracy and shift the tide in the favor of a Joint Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the Oppressed Nations (JDPON). This would allow the return of all First Nation lands and resources alongside reparations for all internal semi-colonies. At such point, Amerika would no longer be living parasitically from the Third World or oppressed peoples and the class base of bought-off settlers and labor aristocrats would disappear.

Conclusion

That the two organizations co-published Kites for over three years and the disagreements we discuss above go unmentioned by the (N)CPC raises the question if some aspects of their theoretical line were discarded during party formation. As much is particularly suggested by the Spectre series – originally published by Revolutionary Initiative (RI), precursor to the (N)CPC – where a version of the Labor Aristocracy thesis is employed to study the United States class structure and locate the US proletariat.

It is the responsibility of the communist movement, particularly in the imperial core where socialists far and wide are attempting to win over the labor aristocracy, to establish firm boundaries of cooperation. Although there is not a single correct method to determine such boundaries, those claiming to be vanguard formations owe it to the global proletariat to establish them transparently. Unity between groups who supposedly disagree about fundamental principles is irresponsible and deeply confusing to the masses. Here it raised the questions: how did the RI and OCR cooperate for years to publish Kites without struggling out some of these differences? Did the (N)CPC’s formation include a (faction-based) ideological drift the OCR was not aware of? If not the labor aristocracy thesis, Maoism or the importance of national liberation, what is the basis for unity with the OCR?

Ultimately, we can only conclude that neither group considers these lines dividing. Despite everything worth praise from the OCR and the journal Kites, they need to develop higher ideological standards and more explicit ideological lines. Although their recent disassociation from the (N)CPC may be a positive change, the OCR must allow no further opportunistic alliances to fester, internal or external. Finally, they should struggle with DLG ideologically and engage with the critiques we’ve laid out here.

<sup>Notes: 1. (New)Communist Party of Canada, “The Political Program of the New Communist Party of Canada” Kites, January 2024.
2. Joshua Berlinger, CNN “What is the Kibbutz? A brief history of the communes targeted in the Hamas terror attack.” Oct 11, 2023.
3. The Dawnland Group, “A Polemic against Settler Maoism” MIM (Prisons) website, June 2024.
4. Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the White proletariat from mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb.
5. David Cochran, Oct 7 2020. “How Hitler Found His Blueprint for a German Empire by looking to the American West.” Waging Nonviolence, Oct 7, 2020.
6. Leon Trotsky, “The Permanent Revolution” Marxist Internet Archive, 1931.
7. Leon Trotsky, “The Chinese Revolution” Marxist Internet Archive, 1938.
8. MIM (Prisons), “Building United-Front surrounded by Enemies: Case Study of the Declining U$ Housing Market” Aug 2010
9. Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, “Red Salute on the Formation of the Communist Party of Canada and the publication of its Program.” Kites, 2023.
10. Interestingly, Kites 8 gives no mention of the Maoist Internationalist Movement despite them having regularly struggled with RCP and that this was often reciprocated publicly.
11. Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, Kites 8, pg 325.
12. While the OCR claims the two were each temporarily communist vanguards, we would disagree, especially regarding the RCP.</sup>

In the West Bank, I$rael has killed at least 502 Palestinians since 7 October 2023, the day Operation Al Aqsa Flood commenced by the Palestinian resistance. At least 4,950 people were injured, 3,985 people were displaced, 8,088 people were arrested and 648 structures were demolished.(1) All of this is not even mentioning the recent declaration by I$raeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich that 800 hectares (1,977 acres) in occupied West Bank are now state land for I$raeli settlements.(2) As we know, the I$raeli war has focused on Gaza, where official estimates put the death toll at 38,000, while public health experts estimate that number could be as high as 186,000.(2.5)

These figures alone are abstract, so to paint a better picture of accounts from those living in the West Bank now, contextualizing history and statistics will be provided. It is estimated that 3.25 million people live in the West Bank, meaning that just from the above statistics 0.54% (17525 affected / 3.25 million population) of people were directly affected with countless more affected indirectly from the intensified settler terror in just 6-7 months. The amount of deaths has been three times as high as 2022 already. The lack of infrastructure to collect accurate data also makes this statistic likely an underestimate of the severity, with it only getting worse on the ground as we speak.

The aim of this article is to historicize the initial I$raeli response in the West Bank to the Al Aqsa Flood before the prisoner exchange and temporary “end” (which was constantly violated by I$rael) of hostilities in Gaza. It will be the first part of a series of articles that cover the occupation of the West Bank. Together, Gaza and the West Bank make up the “occupied territories” of Palestine that have not yet been seized by I$rael.

Operation Al Aqsa Flood, settlers panic in West Bank

The very existence of settlers are premised on the displacement of the native people and colonial occupation of entire nations or sections of nations. This is on top of the exploitation of land and labor of the colonized to feed an ever-growing parasitic strata. The I$raeli colonial projects on the border of Gaza were challenged on October 7th, with resistance seizing their land back from the settlers by force. The sense of control from having some of the best surveillance methods and technologies in the world, while being backed by the most powerful imperialist power, was shattered. The carefully crafted methods to maintain and further colonization to feed I$raeli settlers while helping their Amerikan overseers to pacify the entire region under its boot was challenged. The I$raeli project floats on nothing, it produces nothing for the world beyond feeding the hunger of settlers and their imperialist allies off the backs of the colonized. Desperately, it sought to reduce its reliance on those it displaced and colonized, knowing full well what that’d mean. I$rael sought out Third World labor, begged for a share of profits from its imperialist overseers and tried to become more “self-sufficient”. Ultimately it failed in its endeavors, finding itself reliant on imperialist backers to sustain itself against militant resistance from all sides. Once that runs dry, I$rael is doomed and its dream will be ruined, with a victory for the resistance and the liberation of Palestine!

On 11 October 2023, a lock down on West Bank was declared, shutting down more than 500 checkpoints and the only major international border crossing, which is with Jordan, at Allenby Bridge.(3) The I$raeli settlers were faced with a war on two fronts, resorting to extreme measures in fear of losing control of their occupation. Their fears were further confirmed with the death of General Leon Bar, a senior officer of the West Bank Division of the I$raeli Offensive Forces (IOF) on 12 October 2023.(4) Alarms were set off in both “Beitar Illit”, near Bethlehem, and “Ma’ale Efraim”, near Ramallah, due to fears of resistance infiltration on 13 October 2023. On the same day, raids were conducted in Nablus, Aqabat, Jaber camp, Areeha, and Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. The IOF began an invasion of the city of Nablus and clashes continued in Jenin as resistance fighters confronted the invasion. Hamas’s brigades, the Izz al Din al-Qassem Brigades, were one of the known resistance factions who fended off the IOF invasion, while also fighting in the Ain Al-Sultan and Aqabat Jabr camps in Areeha.(5)

As of October 14th, 842 acts of resistance were carried out in the West Bank in just a week. Of those confirmed, there were 241 shooting operations, 30 qualitative operations, one settlement infiltration, 570 confrontations in various forms, and 98 demonstrations and marches. Twenty two IOF injures were confirmed, a number were killed, and there were 56 martyrs on the side of the resistance. The confrontations took place in 254 areas, including Nablus (45), Al-Quds (38), Ramallah (38), Al-Khalil (33), Jenin (27), Tulkarem (19), Bethlehem (17), Qalqilya (13), Areeha (11), Salfit (9), and Tubas(4).(6) Just a week since Operation Al Aqsa Flood, the resistance was stiff against I$raeli attempts to subdue the West Bank under its grasp. A resistance to settler-colonialism and national oppression within the United $tates must adopt similar discipline, rejecting integration for self-determination for oppressed nations in solidarity with the struggle against imperialism across the world.

The resistance in the West Bank continued, with the al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades, which are the military wing of Popular Resistance Committees, targeting the Belt Furik checkpoint and the IOF post established on “Mount Gerizim” on 15 October 2023. The IOF by this time had abducted more than 500 in the West Bank and Al-Quds.(7) On 17 October 2023, protestors in the occupied West Bank demanded the fall of president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, a neocolonial puppet entity ruling over West Bank. The response was repression, with tear gas and stun grenades used to disperse the protestors.(8) Amidst the protests, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which are military wing of Fatah, were able to successfully target zionist occupation checkpoints and clashed with them on the same day.(9)

Sheikh Hassan Yousef, co-founder of Hamas, was abducted by the IOF in his home in Ramallah after giving a speech there on 18 October 2023. This was part of a larger campaign of abductions by the IOF which expanded that day.(10) Confrontations further escalated within the West Bank, with a victory for the resistance occurring with the Saraya Al-Quds, which is the militant wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), part of the Tulkarm Brigade carried out numerous strikes, offensive operations, ambushes, explosive detonations, and ambush executions. It was a 28 hour battle, which led to the IOF completely withdrawing from the Nour Shams camp.(11) The cowardly settlers retaliated the next day at the Al-Ansar mosque, believing that Hamas and PIJ used it as a headquarters. This resulted in the death of two, and the arrest of dozens who were suspected to work with the Jenin Brigade or other resistance groups.(12) On the same day, Zionist special forces stormed the Askar camp in Nablus, clashing with the resistance.(13) Just four days later, on 26 October 2023, the IOF carried out a massive arrest campaign across the West Bank with armed clashes breaking out.(14) This preludes the rise of resistance in the West Bank the next day, with violent confrontation in the Al-Aroub camp, against the “Nitzani Oz” checkpoint, the “Dotan” checkpoint, Jabal Al-Tur and Abu Dis on 27 October 2023.(15)

I$raeli invasion of Gaza, settler counter-offensive

The invasion of Gaza officially began on 28 October 2023. On this day, many cities in the West Bank went on strike in support of the resistance in Gaza.(16) A specialized hospital in Nablus was targetted in the West Bank due to the IOF’s suspicion of the resistance groups there.(17) On 2 November 2023, armed clashes broke out across various cities in the West Bank following a wide campaign of arrests.(18) On 4 November 2023, the resistant youth in the West Bank threw Moltov cocktails at settlers’ vehicles near Marda and at zionist forces in Al-Aroub camp. In addition, they threw stones at settlers near Hizma and Route 443.(19) The important part to note here is the role of the youth and how a large section of the Palestinian people are under 18. The resistance’s mobilization of the youth to fight is important to learn from, especially in contexts of settler-colonialism and national oppression, for application to the United $tates. The Black Panthers were mostly teenagers.

The armed clashes continued between resistance fighters and zionist forces in Qalqilya, following raids on cities and a large campaign of abductions.(20) The Lion’s Den, a Palestinian resistance group in the West Bank, claimed responsibility for conducting shooting operations near “Itamar” which was successful on 8 November 2023.(21) In Jenin, a day afterward, the Al-Qassam fighters and all resistance formations in the Jenin camp engaged in armed clashes with the IOF. Reinforcements were sent toward the Balata camp by the IOF after the resistance discovered a special zionist force. In the end, the battle resulted in a victory for the resistance after two hours, with the IOF withdrawing without being able to abduct resistance fighters or occupy the area.(22) The Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, militant wing of the PFLP, were able to target the occupation forces in Jenin with explosive devices on 11 November 2023. The same day, resistance fighters open fired on the “Belt Hefer” settlement and “Nitzanei Oz” checkpoint in Tulkarem. It ended successfully, with a safe return for the resistance forces and heavy damage to the targeted areas.(23)

The Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades, part of the Tulkarem Brigade, announced a general mobilization in the West Bank and Al-Quds on 12 November 2023.(24) The Al-Qassam Brigades – West Bank, announced responsibility for storming the Tunnel Checkpoint in the south of occupied Al-Quds in the morning. Here the resistance was able to attack enemy forces at the military checkpoint separating northern Bethlehem and southern occupied Al-Quds.(25) On 20 November 2023, the Mujahideen Brigades were victorious in firing upon an incursion of IOF soldiers in Jenin, clashing with special forces in Tubas, and shooting a jeep in Tubas.(26) On November 21st, an IOF drone targeted a site in Tulkarem camp, continuing to prevent ambulances from reaching the site. Afterward the IOF stormed the Thabet Thabet Hospital to prevent the ambulances from working.(27) Only a few days later on November 23rd, a wave of widespread arrests were carried out, clashing with the resistance and locals in Balata refugee camp, Al-Arroub, Dura, Beit Liqya, and Qalandiya refugee camp.(28) On November 24th, the Mujahideen Brigades, succeeded in bombing the “Dotan” military checkpoint southwest of Jenin.(29)

Conclusion

The resistance in the West Bank face similar conditions to the nationally oppressed in the United $tates. One key difference is the proximity to imperialism with integrationist pull that pacifies resistance. Aside from that, both are firmly occupied under the boot of the colonizers with no state of their own and both face mass incarceration to destroy resistance and further colonization. The resistance’s capability to form a united front to fight back and coordinate in conditions of immense surveillance and repression is important to note. I$rael used all of its capabilities, controlling the supply of food, water, medicine, internal movement, and etc… but it still failed in face of resistance. A strategy within the United $tates will have to encompass these factors and surpass them, coordinating not only internally but externally with the Third World against forces of imperialism and colonialism.

In the next part, there will be a discussion of the prisoner exchange and temporary “end” of hostilities, at the least, along the beginning of I$rael’s advance in Rafah along with the emboldened colonization which I$rael embarked on in the West Bank. Specifically, declaring more than 800 hectares of land as part of I$rael, aiming to fully annex the West Bank.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

من النهر إلى البحر / فلسطين ستتحرر

Notes:

(1) Israel kills more than 500 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, May 16th, 2024

2. Israel seizes 800 hectares of Palestinian land in occupied West Bank, March 22st, 2024

(2.5) Sharon Zhang, 8 July 2024, Researchers Estimate True Gaza Death Toll at 186,000 or More, Truthout.

3. Palestinians in occupied West Bank are under Israeli lockdown, October 11th, 2023

4. Israel: Another High-Ranking Officer Killed in Gaza Resistance Operation, October 13th, 2023

5. Resistance News Network, October 13th, 2023

6. Resistance News Network, October 14th, 2023

7. Resistance News Network, October 15th, 2023

8. PA forces fire tear gas at West Bank protesters after Gaza hospital strike, October 10th, 2023

9. Resistance News Network, October 17th, 2023

10. Resistance News Network, October 18th, 2023

11. A new massacre in Nour Shams camp, Tulkarm, October 22, 2023

12. Israel strikes mosque in occupied West Bank refugee camp. October wwth, 2024

13. Resistance News Network, October 22st, 2023

14. Resistance News Network, October 26th, 2023

15. Resistance News Network, October 27th, 2023

16. Resistance News Network, October 28th, 2023

17. Resistance News Network, October 30th, 2023

18. Resistance News Network, November 2nd, 2023

19. Resistance News Network, November 4th, 2023

20. Resistance News Network, November 7th, 2023

21. Resistance News Network, November 8th, 2023

22. Resistance News Network, November 9th, 2023

23. Resistance News Network, November 11th, 2023

24. Resistance News Network, November 12th, 2023

25. Resistance News Network, November 16th, 2023

26. Resistance News Network, November 20th, 2023

27. Resistance News Network, November 21st, 2023

28. Resistance News Network, November 23rd, 2023

29. Resistance News Network, November 24th, 2023

“I held my gun so that the generations after me could hold a sickle…” -Palestinian song, Ahd Allah Ma Nerhal (By God We Won’t Leave)

“… [W]e have hope because we know, now more than ever, that these horrors in the name of upholding a racist settler-colonial occupation are not going to last forever. Anyone who ever thought it would will be astounded in hindsight.” -Rawan Masri, “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood Was An Act of Decolonization”

I, like most of Our comrades who contribute to and/or read ULK and organize behind the gulag walls, have been following the ongoing genocide carried out by the Zionist entity upon the people of Palestine with varied mixtures of feelings, with the number one emotion being unadulterated rage alongside an equal amount of awe at the steadfast courage of the Palestinian resistance and their allies throughout the Middle East.

You might think that the rage stems from the atrocious conduct that sadly has been par for the course of the Zionists since at least 1947 in the beginnings of what would become the Nakba carried out by the various Zionist terror organizations such as the Haganah, Irgun and LEHI who most infamously were responsible for the April 9, 1948 Deir Yassin massacre in which 250 defenseless Palestinians were slaughtered, including 100 wimmin and children, and then the village was looted and plundered. While I cannot deny that the daily depredations of the Zionist occupation forces raises my ire profoundly, the rage actually stems more from the stunning ignorance of the so-called “friends and supporters” of I$rael who voice their profoundly inaccurate, and most of the time entirely false statements, “history lessons on the so-called ‘conflict’,” (non)interpretations of the international law, and most importantly their insistence on not calling the Zionist entity’s actions and policies what they’ve been since the start of the ethnic cleansing under Plan Dalet beginning in April 1948: genocidal. Many of these people are probably of the opinion as well that the vast majority of other settler-colonist projects (such as the United $nakes, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, etc.) were also not genocidal from their beginnings, likely using the age old excuses of blaming the so-called “savages” for provoking the “reasonable” and “peace loving” settlers into defending themselves and the land they mistakenly believe they didn’t steal thanks to their belief that God gifted or promised it to them in perpetuity because “he’s God” and “what he says goes.”(1) These “friends and supporters” of I$rael will do absolutely no research into the validity of their statements, instead choosing to equate the Palestinian struggle to liberate all of the historic Palestine and finally be free to return to their lands with a genocidal Arab conspiracy to wipe out the Jews.

So in the interests of correcting the misinformation and lies, and cutting through the Zionist propaganda it stems from and in full solidarity with Our comrades across historic Palestine, in the diaspora, on campuses and in the streets, this article will attempt to deconstruct some of the most common discourse that is parroted in the mainstream media which has fueled this latest round of anti-Arab hysteria and Islamophobia and crucially, the pattern of Amerikan rejectionism to Palestinian Liberation and indifference to the crimes of its client state.

As communists or anarchists (as many of Our comrades who read ULK identify as), it behooves Us to study history, and studying the histories of what has become known as the Palestinian-I$raeli conflict and the principal actors and organizations is not an exception to this rule.

So in that context, I will begin with one of the Zionists’ more devious lies; the so-called I$raeli “purity of arms” and its common usage, that I$rael never targets civilians or civilian infrastructure. Although any cursory observation of I$rael’s conduct from the 1948 Nakba to the present day would prove otherwise, We can look to none other than Zionist hero and first prime minister David Ben-Gurion for the proof. In his Independence War Diary, he set down on paper the military doctrine that would become standard protocol throughout the history of the Zionist project.

There is no question as to whether a reaction is necessary or not. The question is only time and place. Blowing up a house is not enough. What is necessary is cruel strong reactions. We need precision in time place and causalities. If we know the family – [we must] strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.(2)

This specific entry was written on January 1, 1948, one day after the Haganah occupied the Palestinian village of Balad al-Shaykh, the burial place of Shaykh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (one of Palestine’s most revered resistance leaders of the 1920’s and 30’s), massacring over 60 Palestinian civilians, men, wimmin, and children, most while they were asleep in their homes. This massacring of civilians in their sleep over 75 years ago lines up exactly with the countless stories told by survivors of today’s indiscriminate bombings to the doctors that have been working nonstop within the largely destroyed remains of Gaza’s hospitals.(3)

Let us also remember that when Ben-Gurion wrote those words, the Zionist leadership at the time was working on “Plan Dalet”, finalized on March 10, 1948, which was the military blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine.(4)

To illustrate before moving on to the next topic, lets look back at two of the lesser known massacres during the initial Nakba; “Lydda and Ramla” and “Safsah.”

On a blistering hot Ramadan day in July 1948, a Haganah general named Yitzhak Rabin (who would later become ambassador to Washington D.C., then I$raeli Prime Minister, then sign the Oslo accords on the White House lawn, then be assassinated for it by I$raeli reactionaries) descended upon the Palestinian towns of Lydda and Ramla with his unit and violently expelled approximately 50,000 men, wimmin and children.

In Lydda, dozens of Palestinians were gathered and detained in the Dahmash mosque and church premises, all unarmed, and were subsequently gunned down. Afterwards the Zionists gathered an additional 20 to 50 Palestinians to clean up the mosque and bury all of the bodies. After they had placed the bodies in their graves, they themselves were slot into the open graves and left there to bleed out and die. In total between 250 to 400 Palestinians were massacred in Lydda. An additional 350 more died after being expected and forced to march to the frontlines of the Arab armies in what would become known as the Lydda Death March.(5)

As a sidenote, the events that occurred at Lydda and the subsequent death march after, were a formative event in the life of a young George Habash, who was from Lydda, and in 1948 at age 19 left the American University in Beirut, Lebanon where he was a medical student and returned to Lydda during the war to help his family. The Haganah attacked the town soon after, and in the subsequent death march, without water or food, during Ramadan no less, his sister died before they reached the Arab army’s frontlines. This could possibly be one of the reasons which fed his uncompromising leadership and opposition to the Zionist regime as a pivotal leader of first the Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-Arab (Arab Nationalist Movement) and then of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Lastly, we come to the massacre at Safsaf during the initial Nakba. Though this is one of the lesser known atrocities of the Nakba, it is vital to the overall understanding, as a quarter of the 12 well documented instances of rape by the Zionists were recorded here (though many more may have occurred, lost to history but not to the long memory of the people and the land of Palestine).

The Zionists started by cleansing the town by using their “patented” strategy of surrounding the town on 3 sides, firing into the air and into the sides of buildings in the hopes of driving the population out of the fourth, open side of the town. Then they entered the town, gathering up all of those who still remained in their homes, initially shooting and killing 12 young men. The remaining 52 men were caught, then tied together and thrown into a pit the Zionists dug, then subsequently shot and killed. Seeing this, the remaining wimmin of the town came and asked the Zionists for mercy. The Zionists, not being satisfied with the massacre they had just committed, told several of the wimmin to go and fetch water to the town. Once they moved away from the others, they were followed by the militiamen and raped, two of the wimmin being killed in the process. The womyn who survived was a child of fourteen years old.(6) These are just a few of the massacres of civilians by the Zionists during the initial Nakba. If we line them up alongside others, for instance, the October 1953 massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya by Ariel Sharon’s (another past war criminal made prime minister) infamous unit 101 of the I$raeli Defense Forces (IDF) special forces, the October 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre, the full IDF support given during the 1982 Lebanon war to their proxies, the Christian Phalangist and Maronite militias, to massacre 2,000 civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila (which in hindsight was probably the last time there was mass protests within I$rael by Jews over their regime’s crimes against Palestinians), to the more recent wars, like today’s war, but also ones such as during “Operations Cast Lead” in 2008-09 which the UN’s fact finding report (Goldstone report) called a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population”, a certain pattern starts to emerge; one of the ethnic cleansing and genocide, funded and with political cover by Amerika.

Genocide & Denial

Genocide, the word as well as the action hangs heavy over Amerika and I$rael, so much so that it has stopped many from speaking out and acknowledging the Zionist regime’s actions against Palestine as genocidal.

A comrade over at Slingshot Collective in Berkeley, CA wrote an article for their latest newspaper issue, trying to elaborate on the reasons behind the silence during an active genocide, and though I agree with many of their conclusions (not wanting to sound “anti-Semitic”, general Amerikan apathy and indifference to the suffering of others and not wanting to split the Democratic Party base leading to a Trump victory this election year), I think there are other, deeper explanations for this, as well as outright genocide denial.(7)

When most Amerikans and I$raelis think about the word genocide, it is inevitable that they will first think of the Holocaust. The mass shootings carried out by the Einstatzgruppen and the gassing and immolation of millions of Ashkenazi Jews are rightfully called genocide; and yet many of these same Amerikans and I$raelis forget the genocide of approximately half of the 2 million Sinti and Romani peoples (Gypsies) of German occupied Europe known as the Porrajmos in the Romani language, nor do they seem to remember the systematic massacres of Slavic, gay, and disabled peoples along with many political dissidents during the same time period by Nazi Germany.(8) And so, the benchmark for both countries for some act to count as genocide is something which looks like the Holocaust; a massive extermination of people in a relatively short amount of time.

And yet, the Nazi genocide and Zionist genocide do not resemble each other structurally or in any other meaningful way.

Like the settler colonial regimes of the United $nakes, Canada, New Zealand and Australia among others, the genocides that took place upon the indigenous First Nations have taken place over many decades, a small act here, a large act there, and this is what the genocide of the Palestinian Arab people by the Zionist regime has looked like and continues to look like to this day.(9)

As this practice of genocide continues against the people of Palestine, so too does Amerika continue this practice upon the internal semi-colonies of New Afrikans, Chican@s, and the First Nations here on occupied Turtle Island. Amerika also has a very interesting, as well as appalling, history relating to the UN Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that bears mentioning.

After its founding convention in San Francisco in 1945, the United Nations set about sponsoring the creation of an international legal instrument for the prevention and punishment of genocide. The job for drafting this document was handed down to the Economic and Social Council of the UN General Assembly (GA) which retained several international legal consultants foremost among them Dr. Raphael Lemkin; an exiled Polish-Jewish jurist who had in 1944 coined the term ‘genocide’ in his work “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.” Lemkin, who authored most of the draft, submitted it in June 1947, and a month later it was rejected by several member states of the General Assembly, foremost among them the United $nakes, because of “important philosophical disagreements.” It was edited and then finally adopted by the GA on December 9, 1948. By 1951 enough countries had ratified it to afford it the status of binding international law; except for a partial ratification (with conditions and edits) in 1988 by the Reagan Administration, the U.$. has still not ratified the convention in its entirety.(10)

First off, lets look at what parts of Lemkin’s draft were so “philosophically disagreeable” to the United $tates. Lemkin was extremely thorough in the draft document, where he included linguistic and political groups under currently protected groups of racial, national, and religious groups. Also importantly, he included in the list of punishable acts (enumerated in Article 3 of the current convention) engaging in a number of “preparatory” acts such as developing techniques of genocide and setting up installations for the purpose of committing genocide.

Already we can see that if the above made it into the final draft, both Amerika and I$rael would have been in the ‘hot seat’, so to speak.

Lemkin also included preventing the “preservation or development” of the above groups as a punishable act as well as policies that would bring about the disintegration of the political, social, or economic structure of a group or nation (author’s note: Settlers & Neocolonialists Beware!).

Lastly and most crucially, Lemkin detailed 3 distinct and specific forms of genocide: physical, biological, and cultural. For physical genocide he included “slow death” measures such as the “subjection to conditions of life which, owing to lack of proper housing, clothing, food, hygiene and medical care… are likely to result in debilitation or death of individuals”, as well as “deprivation of all means of livelihood by confiscation of property, looting, curtailment of work, and denial of housing and supplies otherwise available to the other inhabitants of the territory concerned.” Biological genocide, apart from compulsory abortion and sterilization, included segregation of the sexes and obstacles to marriage. Cultural genocide included forced and systematic exile of individuals representing the culture of a group, as well as the destruction of a groups historical or religious monuments and the destruction of a group’s historical, artistic, and religious documents or objects.(11)

If one looks to the UN Genocide Convention today, it would be entirely accurate to say it no longer resembles in any meaningful way the original intentions of the author(s).

One might ask what the consequences of this are, and though there are many, I’ll only go into one.

Consequently, it has continued to further obfuscate what constitutes genocide, further allowing imperialist and reactionary regimes to continue policies of genocidal oppression, domestically as well as in the Global South. Yet as a direct result of this in the case of I$rael, many countries in the Global South have had enough of the genocidal Zionist regime. Most importantly South Africa (where the Zionists supported the apartheid regime before its collapse) charged the Zionist entity with genocide at the ICC in the Hague. Many Central and South American countries, like Chile and Honduras, who both had to deal with genocidal reactionary regimes propped up by the support of both Amerika and I$rael, have both said enough is enough, and recalled their ambassadors to I$rael over the Amerikan funded genocide.(12) And also extremely important, and as a great way to segue into my last topic of this article, it has set off an explosion of support for Palestine from within the belly of the imperialist beast, in the U.$. but also all across Europe; vital to this effort has been Our comrades on college campuses across Turtle Island.

Student Activism and U.$. Attempts to “Silence the Intifada”

When the first encampments and building occupations were setup, from Columbia University to campuses across Turtle Island all the way to UC Berkeley, though I wasn’t surprised, (and forgive me for my emotional subjectiveness) tears of joy and pride sprang to my eyes as I watched the moving images on CNN move across the screen. Not since the Vietnam War and organizations like Student for a Democratic Society (SDS) have we seen the anti-war movement, nor the BDS movement since South African apartheid, consolidate into such a huge outpouring of love, rage, and solidarity on college campuses.

I was sadly also not surprised when the Pro-Zionist reactionaries sent the pigs in to silence the movement, nor have I been surprised at the Zionist propaganda campaign attempting to label the entire Palestinian solidarity movement “anti-Semitic” and “violent”, even going so far (a la Stop Cop City activists) as calling all protesting for Palestine “terrorists” and “supporters of terrorists”. Here in the Bay Area, there have been lies spread saying that the BDS strategy is no longer viable or legally possible for UC Board of Regents to boycott/divest from the Zionist entity, which has been uncovered as a lie to get Our comrades at Berkeley to abandon their camp and goals. Whether divestment is possible, we can look to the success of the BDS movement in 1986 at Berkeley to finally pressure the UC to divest $3.1 billion from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa.(13) Aside from this it’s also been insane to watch the bipartisan effort, from genocide Joe to the outer reaches of the far right, to attempt to get the masses concerned with some of the alleged rhetoric of individuals on campus and the violence (which from numerous sources have been proven to be incited by Zionist counter-demonstrators and the pigs) at the encampments, to try to get everyone to somehow forget his “ironclad” support of I$raeli genocide. Sadly for Genocide Joe and his Pro-Zionist rabble in Congress, students on campuses across Turtle Island have dug in and refused the false images the imperialists and their media have tried to paint of them, and have let the imperialists know 3 things: We are NOT going anywhere, We will NOT be silenced, and PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

As the college term wraps up for the summer and many in the Palestine Solidarity Movement, on and off campus, set their sights this summer on an explosive confrontation at the Democratic National Convention alongside many other avenues for protest and action, I’d like to give one bit of advice if any students or other outside comrades may be reading: I think aside from the also important avenues of protest and actions here in the belly of the imperialist beast, it would be extremely beneficial to send as many comrades (students or otherwise) to the West Bank this summer, to live and learn among the Palestinian people themselves. Mao himself called attention numerous times to the importance of this, as did Huey P. Newton which led him to visit revolutionary China. SDS and what would become the Weather Underground Organization (WU) also saw the importance of this in the 60’s and early 70’s meeting with revolutionaries from Cuba, Vietnam, and other countries to learn about them, their life and their struggle from their own points of view and in their own voices.

As the Zionists have only continued the ramping up of repression in the West Bank since operation Al-Aqsa Flood, you could also play an integral role in getting the stories of Palestinians there back to the masses here in the U.$. as well as help in the already ongoing humanitarian efforts going on there. Just something to think about as we move into the summer.

In case you weren’t aware, We behind the gulag walls admire your unshakable and uncompromising support for Palestine’s liberation, and your unwavering courage in the face of wave after wave of attacks by Zionist reactionaries and their pig helpers. You inspire us behind the wall and We can’t wait to see what you do next.

From the river to the sea,
Palestine will be Free!

MIM(Prisons) responds: Wimmin and children have fought bravely in the resistance to Zionist occupation. There is something concrete to seeing the murder of children as more egregious in terms of the immiseration of a people via genocide by destroying its capacity to produce for the nation and build the future. But to treat wimmin’s lives as more precious or needing additional protection feeds into the patriarchal thinking that lets I$rael use myths of rape to rally support for bombing thousands of more Palestinians. To the extent that it is true that grown men are doing more of the fighting for Palestine, this only demonstrates the value their lives have for the nation.

MIM talked about genocide as one of a number of forms of “absolute immiseration” today:

“there is a sociology discourse claiming that Marx’s ideas of”absolute deprivation” are incorrect, because supposedly absolute immiseration of the proletariat has not happened under capitalism since Marx’s time. …To avoid talking about [examples of absolute immiseration like] militarism, the environment and prison, the bourgeois social scientists talk about “relative deprivation” …Genocide is a matter of absolute immiseration. There can be nothing worse.”

It is no mystery that Palestine is a key contradiction in the imperialist system today. It is not because Palestinians play an important role in value production, but because of the absolute immiseration they face at the hands of U.$. imperialism in its attempt to maintain a foothold in the part of the world they happen to inhabit.

<sup>Notes: 1. Patrick Wolfe, December 2006, “Settler Colonialism and the elimination of the native”, Journal of Genocide Research, 814
2. Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle – The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, ( Haymarket Books, 2014), pp. 200
3. Irfan Galaria, February 23, 2024,”Doctor in Gaza sees only annihilation”, San Jose Mercury News
4. Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappe, “Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on the U.S. Israeli War on the Palestinians” (Haymarket Books, 2013), pp.69
5. Nur Masalha, “The Palestinian Nakba: Decolonizing History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory” (Zed Books, 2012), pp. 86
6. Adel Manna, “Nakba and Survival: The Story of Palestinians who Remained inn Haifa and the Galilee, 1948-1956” (University of California Press, (2022), pp. 75-80
7. Kermit, “Watching and Waiting?: On Speaking Out & Being Silent During Genocide”, Slingshot Issue 140 Summer 2024, pp. 2-3
8. Ward Churchill, “A little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present” (City Lights Books, 1997), pp. 36-49
9. Patrick Wolfe, December 2006, “Settler Colonialism and the elimination of the native”, Journal of Genocide Research, 814
10. Ward Churchill, pp. 363-364
11. Ward Churchill, pp. 265-366
12. FP Explainers, 3 May 2024, After Colombia, now Turkey: Which other nations have cut ties with Israel over Gaza war?, FirstPost.com
13. DD, “Resisting the Neoliberal University & Unethical Investment”, Slingshot Issue 140 Summer 2024, pp. 5
14. MC5, March 1999, On the Internal Class Structure of the Internal Semi-Colonies, MIM Theory 14: United Front, p.57-58.</sup>

Months after rebellions began in Kanaky (aka New Caledonia), fighting continues against the French militias and colonial forces. In New Caledonia, voting is restricted to families who have been living there since 1998.(1) This is in order to establish the dominance of the natives over the settlers in the voting system. On 2 April 2024, the French Senate voted for an amendment to the rule which would allow voting for anyone who has lived in New Caledonia for a continuous ten years, on a rolling basis.(2) This triggered the resistance of the people, as one Kanaky source recently reported:

“The toll of the riots since May 13 is very heavy: Nine people were killed and hundreds of others injured, 200 houses burned or looted and nearly 900 businesses closed. A first estimation raises the “damage” to 1.5 billion euros. More than 3,000 soldiers, gendarmes and police were deployed there by the colonial State. Great victory for the Kanak people: hundreds of French families made the decision to pack their bags and leave the colony for good.”(3)

However, the struggle over voting rights itself has cooled as parliamentary crisis struck France, and French President Macron announced on 12 June 2024 the suspension of the proposed changes in voting rights in New Caledonia. France is now focused on an emergency election at home to try to prevent a sharp rightward turn in the parliament and presidency.

[UPDATE: 7 July 2024 - Voters succeeded in preventing a victory of the anti-immigrant Le Pen, but results leave uncertainty in France as there was no clear majority.]

Background on Kanaky

For our readers to understand New Caledonia (home of the Kanak), we might use a shortcut of thinking about Puerto Rico (home of the Boricua). New Caledonia is an island near Australia and Aotearoa (aka New Zealand) claimed by France with a history of brutal colonization and imperialist domination. Europeans arrived in Kanaky in the late 18th century, beginning the colonial period in which the natives (Kanak people) were enslaved, sold, exposed to European disease, displaced from their land and placed on reservations. After France gained control of the area, nickel was discovered in the territory and the French government began sending prisoners to extract the resource and settle on the land. Ever since that time settlement has continued, though the Kanak people remain the largest group.(4) The Kanak people have been struggling for independence and liberation for generations, with recent events reflecting the latest upsurge of resistance. In recent years, the liberation movement has engaged in violent resistance to the sale of their nickel mines.

As mentioned above, New Caledonia hit news headlines after France proposed allowing all immigrants, including newer settlers, to vote in elections on the island. On 15 April, tens of thousands protested the bill, and on that same day the French National Assembly voted in favor of it, moving it one step further towards being passed. In May, violent protests of Kanak people were responded to with the arrest of hundreds and the French deploying their armed forces to suppress the movement. This deployment of forces starkly reveals the absurdity of a “free choice” to be independent. As MIM said about Puerto Rico in 1998:

“The Puerto Ricans have tried for decades”to persuade” the United States to leave, but only dictatorship (organized force) will settle the question. Without the freedom to keep the Yankees out, the elections only show what the Puerto Rican people will say with their arms twisted behind their backs.”(5)

One of the major arenas of struggle has been the independence referendum. There have been three of these in the past 4 years; in the first two the option to remain a territory of France narrowly won (56.6% and 53.2%), and nationality played a major role in the decision. Kanaks generally voted for independence while the other minorities generally voted for dependence. In the third, the independence movement boycotted the referendum, resulting in a 97% victory for dependence, but the turnout was only 43.9%, throwing its validity into question.(6) The protests and riots in May led to the declaration of a state of emergency (lifted after May 31) and the deployment of reinforcements from France. Barricades were set up by independence protesters and, in earlier reports, the clashes led to the death of two French Armed Forces personnel and injury of over 54 police officers.(7)

The struggle for an independent New Caledonia is a revolutionary struggle against imperialism. New Caledonians fight France, Palestinians fight I$rael, and the oppressed here in Occupied Turtle Island fight the United $tates, all in a united struggle against a common enemy. The struggle in Puerto Rico against the corrupt government of Ricardo Rosselló is no different. Puerto Rico was acquired by the United $tates in the bloody wars of its ascendancy into an imperialist power.

Imperialism is the number one enemy of the self-determination of nations, reaching its hands across the globe to squeeze every last drop of profit it can find. The struggle of the oppressed nations, wherever they are, is the number one weapon against this imperialist system, and that weapon is ever more powerful the more the oppressed nations ally with each other and fight imperialism as one. Puerto Rico has a history of independence movements being co-opted by leaders trying to get a slice of the imperialist pie. The movement for statehood represents this tendency, while the independence movement is the movement for national self-determination against imperialism. In both New Caledonia and Puerto Rico, the referendums have shown the majority of the population voting to remain a part of their imperialist occupiers in order to access certain benefits, whereas the independence movement represents the revolutionary opposition to national oppression and the upholding of self-determination.

Kanaky Will Be Free! Palestine Will Be Free! Puerto Rico Will Be Free!

<sup>Notes:
1. Giorgio Leali, 16 May 2024, Nickle, guns and foreign powers: How France’s New Caledonia reached the bring of ‘civil war’, Politico.
2. Explainer: What sparked New Caledonia’s Deadly civil unrest?, RNZ.
3. F.W. 20 June 2024, France: Kanaky (New Caledonia): The flame of revolt is not extinguished, CAuse du Peuple - tranlation by redherald.org
4. CIA World Fact Book, 2024
5. MC5, 22 March 1998, Puerto Rico’s relationship to U.$. imperialism and Puerto Rico’s class struggle, MIM Theory 14: United Front, 2001, Page 49.
6. AP, 13 December 2021, New Caledonia votes to stay with France, but it’s a hollow victory that will only ratchet up tensions, The Conversation.
7. AP, 14 May 2024, France imposes curfew in New Caledonia to quell independence-driven unrest.</sup>