Response to Socialist Youth Tampa (SYT)

Foreword

This essay is a response to Socialist Youth Tampa (SYT)’s declaration of their new ideology following the failed student encampments at the University of South Florida (USF). This declaration, “Ode to Revolution,” is reproduced from the Instagram post it came from in an Appendix at the end of this document.

Because of the tendency of organizations to come and go, there is no immediate reason why anyone should be interested in our lengthy opinions on Socialist Youth Tampa (SYT)’s reformation from Students for Socialism (SFS). After all, this pattern of organizations emerging, reforming, and in other cases splitting, disbanding, etc., is so commonplace that it appears to us as a fact of life while the communist “movement” remains in generally the same position: no discernible leadership from any communist party, nor any unified workers movement which challenges the state apparatuses. Every communist who must be interested in the question of how to build this “movement” must be interested in the goings-ons of other communist groups, since they are a microcosm of the state of organizing nationally. Therefore they have a lot to teach us.

One guess for why the movement tends to metabolize little organizations so quickly is that they each have failed to develop themselves to establish a real working-class connection, instead orienting themselves to the problems of working-class in the abstract. Different people have different ideas of what is “real working-class connection:” social democrats throw their energy into electoral reform because, to them, the state is the real decider of people’s well-being, as it intervenes into capitalist exploitation but also fundamental does not challenge it, instead striking a balance between private and public welfare. Other left (and right-wing) radicals may be found spending the majority of their time organizing protest events, because they believe that the real development of the movement is built through a collective expression of anger and grievance, and that either the proletariat would take notice or that the state would yield. Communists who focus their energy into organizing around sites of contradiction, not exclusively labor or tenant organizing, recognize the real as determined by the struggle had in these places, such as the workplace and apartment complex. But even communists notoriously disagree in the manner by which they must organize themselves, most notably whether a Leninist party is necessary for organization, or if it is a historical relic that should be shucked off with everything else.

If you replace any instance of the words “energy” or “effort” above with “time,” we reframe the problem of strategy into a problem about where communists place their time. If you ask communists individually to reflect on their own political development, they may admit they did things they no longer agree with which were nevertheless instrumental to their development, and so they may not think their time is wasted. Yet the fact that various lessons are lost and re-learned over the course of every “wave” of communist organizing reflects the inability of the movement to communicate its own wisdom. Of course the movement doesn’t communicate anything, people do, but the vicious cycle of contemporary organizing follows from there being no organization of communists able to retain, process, and share political memory, leading to new waves of people being burned out and failing to contribute to the construction of a movement.

The membership of the Committee for a Tropical Communist Party (C-TCP), with their own experience of protest-driven organizing and even more recently (2020-2023) mutual aid-style organizing in neighborhoods in East Tampa, has done things they no longer believe are useful to the movement. In our forthcoming self-criticism, we intend to unpack the various ideas we had at these stages which made them feel like real courses of action. Surely these ideas must have been presented as real to us when a “free store” model — hot dogs in a park — became an acceptable course of action for shy over three (!) years. But since 2023 we, now like SYT, believe the real objectives of the movement are founded in fostering working class organizations. We may simply disagree at this moment on the details. The analysis of our decision to start and then abandon the free store or “food share” model will be, like several other topics in this letter, be postponed in sake of focusing on the argument developed in “Ode to Revolution.” So our response to SYT is not only motivated because we think our unsolicited opinions on strategy may save individual persons’ time but that they may save time for the movement, where debate and analysis is always solicited and is always communists’ business. And so we hope this open letter is read as an analysis of their decision for the benefit of the movement.

Introduction

Recently Socialist Youth Tampa (SYT) announced¹ their reformation from Students for Socialism (SFS), which in part announced a break between an adherence to Lenin and the party-form. This announcement was followed by “Ode to Revolution”², a longer ideological explanation of their strategy, which involves a renunciation of the “professional revolutionary” concept, a broadening of the ideological tolerance in membership (such as including anarchists), and an interpretation of Lenin that calls for “organic self-organization” as opposed to a vanguard party.

These major changes are motivated by the absolute failure of other left-wing organizations, whose chapters are peppered in every city and college town, to take the lead on the student demonstrations in Spring 2024 against the genocide in Palestine. These organizations mechanically replicated the tactics of elsewhere onto USF Tampa, and their reformism, posturing, and neutering of the protest movement culminated into a spectacular failure that must fall squarely on their shoulders. So we agree with SYT that such organizations have not been pathfinders for revolution, and have been and are in fact bad leaders. SYT cites the same boring practice by “petty-bourgeois micro-parties,” which, in our summation of the student demonstrations (and from experience as long-standing organizers in Tampa) included below, we can specifically name the usual suspects — the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and their student wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as Tampa Bay’s latest representatives of left-wing groups like Tampa Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (TAARPR). This cast of characters have engaged in a two-decade tug-of-war of “communist leadership” which has inevitably included sending people into the woodchipper called “being arrested.”

None of these organizations can be completely reduced to one activity, but we focus our attention to the “protest mode” of organizing they engage in, which for us is most familiarly recognized through artifacts like the “yellow sign.” Waves of people moving politically leftward, most recently under the reelection of the Trump administration, would not know that this practice in PSL/ANSWER has been practically unchanged in two decades or so. They would only see the current direness of the political situation as demanding action be taken, and where better to start than with ready-made signage? For each wave of communists joining the movement, there was probably a point early in their political development where they held the yellow sign, and so while people may (often quickly) leave PSL/ANSWER protesting for their own projects, this general mode of protesting for its own sake, as if it will successfully rile the proletariat to join into our causes, is sometimes not widely examined.

In our experience, which SYT can probably speak to, such organizations are quick (almost reflexively) to take the bullhorn at such “events,” to come with their signs and pamphlets, to take hold of the messaging, etc., etc. But it’s easy to see over the decades that these are not just “reflexes,” but something which makes sense in the practiced worldview that these organizations hold. We regret we did not dig deep to find any article by, say, PSL, that says “we aim to enact change through mass protests.” Yet at every such protest you would see something familiar, like the yellow sign, which, as something hidebound into our expectations, leads us to suspect it is an automatic practice that it is no longer an object of their consciousness, so it is unlikely something that people reflect on. It is the ideology which compels groups to organize this way, so for us, criticism of this ideology is a way to bring things into focus that have otherwise been sewn into reality.

But our objective here is not to criticize the dominance of the protest mode of organizing that many communist and left-wing organizations do, but address SYT’s own criticism of it. As we see it, SYT misdiagnoses the problem with these groups; they do not identify the precise mistakes made nor the political ideologies of the characters involved, so they attribute the pattern to the party-form itself when the mistake was in these groups’ interpretation and implementation of the party-form. They mistake content with form.

We will argue with quotation that their reaction indicates a regressive direction because it is both historically revisionist–they edit the party-form out from Lenin–but also strategically revisionist, as their opportunistic conclusion (“All we have to do as communists is be there to seize the opportunity capital has so generously given us. We simply have to tie the noose with the rope capital has sold us.”) not only doesn’t provide a clear strategy for organizing, it’s quite vulnerable to being interpreted as willing to place an undue weight on the working class to arrive at the revolutionary conclusion themselves and have the communists take it over the finish line. We understand that SYT is at least attempting to be involved in organizing outside the protest model, but this language is unclear: Is this what communists should do, wait?

What were the preconditions for SYT’s break? Well, there are general and specific explanations: in the general case, there is both the dominant ideology of the communist parties SYT is criticizing, as well as the solution SYT proposes, which echoes the influence of neo-Kautskyism on American organizing at large. This topic is already worth an analysis, but we defer it in favor of the specific explanation found in the student encampments of Spring 2024 at the University of South Florida (USF). We dedicate the first part of this open letter to unpacking the events of USF’s encampment and identifying mistakes in the effort’s leadership. It is a summation written by an attending member of C-TCP at the encampments, derived from primary sources, such as testimonials from participants, both from within C-TCP and other organizations, as well as from unaffiliated students and community members, as well as livestream footage of the events. The year-long delay between the encampments and this letter is due to SYT’s diagnosis of the problem, published in October 2024, and so the second part of our letter will be critiquing SYT’s diagnosis of the problem, written by the Central Committee of C-TCP.

Part 1. Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories

This summation is dedicated to the militant students and community members who stood their ground at USF on Tuesday, April 30, and risked their physical well-being and status with the law to resist USF’s active support of the occupation of Palestine and genocide of the Palestinian people. Your actions that day were exemplary of what we can and must be willing to do to put a halt to the imperialist war machine. As the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR) put it to us³: “Perhaps it is time to drop postmodernist mantras like ‘we keep us safe’ in favor of more militant stands like ‘we put ourselves in danger to stop a genocide.’”

In this summation, we will recount the events in question, analyze the politics, strategy, and tactics of the organizers, and identify how these factors resulted in the failure of the encampment. The intended audience for this summation is organizers in the Tampa Bay area, to persuade them to critically account for their actions, as well as the students and community members present at the events in question, so that they do not become discouraged by this defeat and disaffected to political work as a whole. They are owed an honest explanation of what led to their friends being gassed, beaten, and incarcerated, and it is certain that SDS, PSL, or the like will not be offering that any time soon.

As a political summation, this will serve not as a historical record but as an analysis of the events that transpired, so that we may learn from it and improve our efforts for the downfall of imperialism. As revolutionaries, we would be remiss if we didn’t use this experience to improve our efforts – and yet, that seems to be the norm. 

From Monday, April 29, to Wednesday, May 1, 2024, mothers, fathers, children, aunts and uncles, family friends, workers and shop-owners alike–of Temple Terrace, a majority Muslim and significantly Palestinian neighborhood, along with students, workers, and activists from around the Tampa Bay area, attempted an encampment at the University of South Florida and faced militarized police brutality. 

However, this mass movement, despite its willingness to escalate to end the genocide in Gaza, was set up for failure by the organizations that claimed to have led it, mainly Tampa Bay Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but also groups like the Tampa Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (TAARPR), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and many others. The aforementioned organizations, having embraced superficial radicalism and false pragmatism for years now, were bound to reuse failed tactics and sabotage this burgeoning uprising. These organizations are not trained to think critically; they are trained to memorize chants and hold signs. This results in decades of the same failed tactics, with different organizational faces and no meaningful victories to speak of.

This obsolescence of, in addition to an unusually militant student protest movement, as well as classic American militarized police brutality, led to the tremendous failure of the USF encampment. Instead of engaging with participants, learning from their perspectives, coordinating their forces, and generally exercising communist leadership, these organizations made cheap attention grabs by making Instagram posts, livestreaming, and speaking to bourgeois media, declaring that they had established a successful encampment. This resulted in serious casualties, including both students and community members, that these organizations then used to lend themselves the illusion of legitimacy, and sometimes, to fill their coffers of law enforcement. It is a cycle of self-aggrandizing, parasitic behavior that will prevent any successes as long as it remains unchallenged.

Summation

From the beginning of the first day’s events, it was clear that the announcement of an “encampment” was a symbolic gesture to the masses of protesters who demanded escalation and militancy, without having any plan to back up this gesture. An encampment inherently implies the use of violence against police and other malicious actors to occupy a physical space in the name of Palestinian liberation. However, SDS was only prepared to reap the rewards of such an escalation. They and other organizations immediately declared a successful encampment had been established on Monday, when–to the knowledge of the individuals writing this document and according to livestream footage–no tents were ever successfully pitched. From the get go, opportunism’s rot had set in.

The first major result of the asserted leadership’s opportunist and reformist politics was the attempted replication of the lawn occupation tactic that was undertaken at Columbia University, without considering the strategic viability of such a tactic or the degree of militancy and class consciousness of the sections of the masses sympathetic to our cause. Due to this, alternative forms of protest that were more escalatory and more strategically viable were not considered. Take, for example, the method of occupying a building that was taken up at Cal Poly Humboldt, echoing their call to get “out of the quads and into the buildings.”⁴ To all appearances, SDS was only interested in playing copycats to other, more successful actions, and that meant attempting a lawn encampment, despite the unwillingness of the opportunist leadership to take action beyond what law enforcement and university admins deemed acceptable.

The second major result was the police and university administration quickly setting the tone of the confrontation. Due to their reluctance to escalate and their punishment of protesters’ defiance and militancy, the masses were discouraged from “going on the offensive”, and thus an opportunity was created for the reactionaries to do so instead. The cops’ violent assault on protesters trying to pitch their tents was by far the most escalatory moment of the first day, with roughly 50 protesters putting their bodies between the police and the tents, including a C-TCP member that successfully withstood a cop attempting to pull them to the ground. The police attack was rebuffed, but not before four people were arrested, and it resulted in SDS and other organizers giving in to the University’s demands and asking protesters to not set up any tents. Thus, the “encampment” never exceeded anything more than a few tarps and blankets on the lawn.

Instead of daring to lead the militant students and workers in an escalation of the struggle, SDS and those collaborating with them–largely self-selected activists–chose to engage in negotiations with USF administration. This move, representative of SDS’ political reformism and collaborationism under the guise of “pragmatism,” completely undermined the entire encampment. Not only did they engage in negotiations without the assent of the protesters, but the mere act of speaking to administration and appointing “police liaisons” (both of whom were non-student activists who “offered their services [as police liaisons] to SDS”) lays bare the fact that their slogans of defiance, militancy, and escalation were just that–empty sloganeering. Escalation and militancy were never the goals of the leading organizations. Their “red liberal” politics made sure of it. The nail in the coffin was when the SDS organizers gave into the USF admin’s demands and told protesters to pack up and disperse.

Owing to their disdain for the masses that their stunts rely on and take advantage of, throughout the entirety of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday’s events, the organizers (particularly those from SDS, but also including those from other organizations) had little to no regard for operational security. They regularly spoke to media, including bourgeois media companies, and allowed them to record protesters without their explicit consent. Their social media presence isn’t much better; TAARPR organizers, through their Instagram, posted and livestreamed throughout all of the events. They displayed the faces and identifying information of countless protesters, and on multiple occasions, recorded and photographed Muslim protesters praying without any consent. Not only was this a threat to participants in its own right, but it also empowered groups like the Canary Mission to document organizers and participants on its site (which it promptly did) for fascists to utilize in their own attacks. This was a consistent problem at all the events in question, and displayed an acute lack of respect for protesters and of concern for their safety. Thus, their disregard for and disrespect of protesters is the third major problem. Additionally, TAARPR made no attempt to warn unmasked individuals and protesters of this danger; leadership, when questioned, took the stance that people should individually choose to mask and cover identifying features. However, we argue that it is leadership’s responsibility to make people aware of the risks associated with walking around unmasked, and give them options and resources to avoid doing so. Many of the individuals who we spoke to reported this being their first time at any real action; they didn’t have the experience or the knowledge of organizing and its unique dangers to take measures to protect themselves. Simply put, the opportunist organizations had no intention of asserting the leadership that the moment necessitated, and they either thought that their laissez-faire approach was adequate, or they lied to save face.

As Tuesday came and the reality of what happened the day before set in, more people took issue with SDS’ concession to the police and began to express their concerns. This began with participants and supporters of the protests commenting in TAARPR’s Tuesday livestream with things like, “Are you guys gonna pack up at 5 again?” as well as criticizing how openly they recorded names and faces. When the organizer running the TAARPR account saw these comments, they told their critics that, “If you have any concerns with the organizers, come out here and talk to them in person.” Around the same time that statement was made, a medic approached a lead SDS organizer, offering their services where needed and telling the organizer that if they continued to acquiesce to the University’s demands, the other medics and this person would no longer be interested in providing their services. The entire time the medic spoke, the SDS member had their face buried in their phone, not making eye contact even once, but when a criticism was leveled in a very calm and direct way, they rolled their eyes and dismissively shrugged. Needless to say, the organizers of the event had absolutely no willingness to accept criticism and were actively hostile to anyone that criticized their dangerous attempt at leadership.

As brave as the protesters were in the face of brutal state repression, the fact of the matter is the aforementioned flaws doomed them to failure. Ten protesters, including students and community members, were brutalized and arrested Tuesday, with thousands of dollars going into the carceral system and participants being surveilled more than ever. While SDS and TAARPR have held “call-ins” to “demand” that certain charges be dropped (and we empathize with this sentiment), they fail to take responsibility for the mistakes that led to students and community members being attacked. Thus, they are doomed to repeat these fatal flaws for years to come, continuing the cycle of endangering the masses, then using any “martyrs” to justify endangering them again. This lack of responsibility in the aftermath is the final major problem we have identified with the opportunist leadership.

Our experience is not unique. Across North America, summations have been published of failed encampment experiences, and the issue appears to be the same across most of these cases: a group of opportunists project leadership and divert the masses towards toothless, liberal, and reformist actions that undermine the action, both strategically and tactically. The opposite is true, as well: we have seen that the longest-surviving and most successful encampments are those that are truly militant and uncompromising.

The most majorly corrosive problems plaguing the North American student movement for Palestinian liberation:

1. The lack of class analysis and social investigation, leading to mechanical replication of ineffective tactics.
2. The reluctance to escalate and move beyond reformist politics and the subsequent punishment and undermining of militant protesters.
3. The disregard for the operational and informational security and general lack of respect for protesters.
4. The lack of willingness to reflect, summarize, or provide meaningful leadership in the aftermath of the struggle.

It is our hope that future efforts to organize revolutionary action will learn from what happened at USF. We recognize the dire necessity of militant escalation in response to Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, and thus, the necessity of airtight operational and informational security, deep study of the conditions of the struggle we aim to engage in, respect for and a willingness to learn from fellow comrades in the struggle, and the ability to reflect on our successes and failures so that we may constantly be improving and sharpening our strategies and tactics.

Part 2: Response to “Ode to Revolution”

Our account of the encampment affirms a pattern in the protest-driven Left where a certain wing of organizers, be they communist by-name or right-wing elements such as liberal progressives, co-opt the organization and political quality of the “event,” effectively de-clawing it and returning it to a level acceptable to the state. Mind that the language of “event” in Left parlance seems to place more importance on the fact something is being hosted, and makes the political action more of an occupation of a specific slot in someone’s calendar.

So we are sympathetic with SYT on this state of things. However, as we introduced, their conclusions set them up to unwittingly replicate the conditions for keeping the “movement” in a tortuous cycle of burn-out, disorganization, and wasted time and energy. We regret that the length of our response dwarfs the length of the original article, but we believe there is a lot to say. We ask that SYT forgives our attempt to shorten the response with frequent hand-waving to “forthcoming articles.” Being said, it’s best to start by addressing SYT point-by-point:

In the past year we have seen the burgeoning radical movement in America explode in popularity and then summarily peter off, with its heroic climax occurring at the end of the last academic semester with nationwide encampments and clashes with police on university campuses. But how “heroic” was this climax? The answer is both very much and not all. While there were thousands of revolutionaries and working class individuals genuinely committed to taking up the fight for Palestine against our oppressive state, their efforts were actively neutered at every step of the way. At every fork in the road, the so-called “experienced leadership” of “professional revolutionaries” betrayed the very class they so boldly claim to uphold and protect. The international proletariat, the people of Palestine, and all oppressed people of the world have been betrayed! These “revolutionaries” are nothing more than activists!

“Ode to Revolution”

This heady paragraph leaves a lot for us to respond. But for the moment the acceptable point is that those who have postured as communist experts fumbled a national moment again. This is a sad state of affairs for the socialist movement, which for decades have stumbled to consolidate its energy into a persistent and national-scale force which addresses the contradictions in capitalism: the extraction of surplus value, the reign of capital and private property, its expansion into foreign lands it already debilitated, the perfected domination of ideas over human lives. 

As we’ve mentioned, the “experienced leadership” of these so-called “professional revolutionaries” was earned from doing the same thing again and again and has no semblance to learning anything. So while the outrage in the passage above towards this “experience” is valid, it doesn’t interrogate the ways in which this leadership has failed. Instead it shifts the blame onto the concept of the professional revolutionary.

Going on:

The past several decades of the American Left has been notably punctuated by the advent of the “professional activist”. The professional activist represents the corporatization and bastardization of the workers movement. The professional activist represents the petty bourgeois take over of the proletarian movement. The professional activist is the complete opposite of what the professional revolutionary is supposed to embody. But is it?

The division between professional revolutionaries and activists is more deeply explored in a forthcoming analysis by ourselves, but the distinction made in the above passage accurately reflects how the movement is either “corporatized” (careerists) or “bastardized” (hobbyists). Note this opposition comes from a tension between work and free-time; the employed activist’s politics is controlled by the objectives of their employer, meanwhile the hobbyist considers the movement an idle commitment which never challenges them. Often, this is at best a half-hearted commitment to a focused and sustained manner of organizing in the places of working class struggle. In both cases petty-bourgeois ideology influences their political aspirations, where they may professionalize themselves by defining their personal identity as an activist along paid or volunteer lines. Despite their diametric opposition, these two camps both lower the quality of the movement and tend to collaborate easily, with the association of different left-wing organizations in an area–the “local scene” – is generally dominated by an admixture of those employed to organize and those who set aside their free time to do this with a hobbyist (and comfortable) attachment to the Left. Of course, there are many cases where working class people become activists in response to violence from capitalism and the state. We are just addressing a specific pattern of organizing.

For C-TCP, a professional revolutionary is, at the level of the individual person, a communist subject to a tension: the first aspect of this tension is being someone who must understand the motor of class struggle, the contradiction between capital and wage labor, they have to embed themselves in the places where these problems are felt most immediately. Otherwise, people who consider the problems of the working class in the abstract—either by speaking for them, or by hyper-focusing their struggle into discrete and disconnected issues, effectively also estrange themselves from considering the continuity of these issues under class struggle, and so from the real problems of real people. The second aspect of this tension is, as a revolutionary, conceiving of total social change as not only possible but actual. Therefore they not only have to contemplate society as a whole, with the struggles of the proletariat as an aspect of their consideration, they also must materialize the path which connects the present to the revolutionary future. Lenin also commented on both the nature of concrete organizing and contemplation of the social whole in the process of building class consciousness:

The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population.

Lenin, What is to be Done? Chapter III

The supporting evidence for this need to consider the social whole was argued by Lenin, who generalized this skill to the “working masses” as part of a polemic against the economist tendency, which based the working-class movement on economic struggle only. However Lenin is referring to the Social-Democrats, so we attribute it as a necessity for the underlying contradiction which makes the professional revolutionary a dynamic position in the movement, and not as a dead concept as observed by SYT by other such “professional revolutionaries.” In the same vein, we quote Lukács again, who observed that from the perspective of the class that there is a tension between remaining embedded within class society but also becoming distinct or “self-aware” through its consciousness:

…the proletariat’s historical task is both to emancipate itself from all ideological association with other classes and to establish its own class-consciousness on the basis of its unique class position and the consequent independence of its class interests. Only thus will it be capable of leading all the oppressed and exploited elements of bourgeois society in the common struggle against their economic and political oppressors.

Lukács Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought.

Of course the proletariat as a class does not develop this consciousness themselves, but from communist organizing within it. However in this light the quote might be attributed to mean that any other organizational form, such as a grand network of unions and workers associations, would suffice instead of a party. For Lenin and Lukács both, this is not the case.

The enormous task of contemplating the social whole is not something for individuals, but necessarily done in a thinking organization revolutionaries who strategize a path for total social change. They must also must have as a point of unity the actual possibility of a revolution, and so carrying an understanding that the revolution is something which is materially dependent on such organizations to make it happen. After all, it is impossible for professional revolutionaries on their own to conduct any lasting, meaningful change, which is a point we believe SYT agrees with us on. So therefore if the professional revolutionary recognizes the actuality of the revolution, and the necessity of other like-minded individuals to accomplish this, then their organization must contain as a point of unity the actuality of revolution. This point on the role of the party being the organization which anticipates revolution is also observed by Lukács,

This alone makes the organizational independence of the fully conscious elements of the proletariat indispensable. It is this that demonstrates that the Leninist form of organization is inseparably connected with the ability to foresee the approaching revolution.

While many other organizational forms might also claim they also consider revolution as an actual possibility, they must also recognize the need, as an organization which navigates the battlefield of class struggle, to adapt their conclusions as they learn, and so in effect place stronger lines on itself. In other words it has to regulate a tension between the will of the party, which contains the shared will of a revolution among its members, with the natural wills of individuals. But for many individualists and people of other political stripes, this poses a problem, since their ideas would not be tolerated. But while “freedom of criticism” is always welcome, the compromising of shared political tenets is not.

Going on,

Pseudo-Leninists, as they are to be called because they outright falsify the works of him, claim that by joining some party or organization a proletarian joins the ranks of their fellow cadre in transforming into professional revolutionaries. The concept of a professional revolutionary has its origins in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done.”

“…And hence this struggle [economism] can never give rise to such an organization as will combine, in one general assault, all the manifestations of political opposition, protest, and indignation, an organization that will consist of professional revolutionaries and be led by the real political leaders of the entire people.” – What Is To Be Done, Lenin.”

Lenin outlines the need for a selected and committed group of proletarians that with their consciousness will dedicate their life to the real movement, and will steer the movement of the working class towards inevitable class conflict. Further, these professional revolutionaries will make up the basis of the communist vanguard party. While this model might have worked in Lenin’s time, it has both proven itself to be less useful in the 21st century in advanced capitalist states and has been time and time again corrupted by petty bourgeois agents.

The authors are at once asserting that the professional revolutionaries in question are falsifiers of Lenin, but also that the vanguard party model described by Lenin is no longer valid! Lenin is being used to revise Lenin. Between these two claims, they cite Lenin’s observation that a real problem of economism will never amount to the organization of “all the manifestations of political opposition, protest, and indignation.” Notice this quote rings similar to the quote we provided earlier in our definition of the professional revolutionary as a synthesis of two contradictory states of being, but they don’t comment on this role of the need for the professional revolutionary to consider the entire social whole; instead they focus on giving a reasonable definition of the vanguard but never justifying why it might be wrong. The authors don’t criticize Lenin’s claim, they just assert that it has been proven to be less useful in “advanced capitalist states,” despite also admitting that it is actively corrupted by petty-bourgeois agents. If these “agents” are intentionally directed by the state, then that is no different than successful revolutions in the 21st century; if these agents are “unintentional,” or driven by petty-bourgeois ideology (the current problem), then even a modest solution of marshaling an intellectual defense against these agents is out of the question, since there is no real attempt to do so here. 

Before we address their claim regarding “advanced capitalism,” we want to point out that in the process of estimating whether the “professional revolutionary” and “vanguard party” concepts are still relevant, the authors have confused the nature of what it means to be a professional revolutionary for the ideology of the actually-existing vanguard parties they operate within. Plainly, they confuse “what someone says” with “what someone does” and “what someone is.” Someone says they are professional revolutionaries, they do things in the name of being professional revolutionaries, but both SYT and we know that these things are not befitting such “professional revolutionaries” as described by Lenin. We haven’t yet unpacked what specific practices the modern-day professional revolutionary is doing, but we have the same general criticism. Notably, the word “transforming” does a lot of work in their passage: in the sense it is used, it means that someone joining PSL (or whichever) auto-magically becomes a “professional revolutionary.” Perhaps this is how such communists think of themselves, but it is then plainly false, and accusations against this concept would be arguing on a basis of appearance rather than essence.

We will address the relationship between member and party a little later in this criticism, but for the time being we should remember that during Lenin’s time the dominant mode of production was capitalism, and the dominant mode of production today is ultimately capitalism. So unless SYT can enunciate how the differences between “advanced capitalism” then and now affects the party-form, then we must firmly disagree on the obsoletion of the party-form.

We can, however, agree that the phase of capitalism, neoliberalism, and the victory of financial capital affects the ideology of the communist and has opened more pathways for revising the method. We can read the same everyone-gets-a-voice style of massless protesting, the dominance of social media as the tell-tale sign of an organization’s existence, and the endless self-appellations of “online” “Marxists” as symptoms confluent with the neoliberal trait of self-branding and promotion. Even the notion of “being online” as an ironic self-declaration still, like any irony, reflects a real state of affairs where the most tempting way for someone to connect with others politically is through any of the websites that themselves reproduce each other’s “content.” 

But even when people are active offline, we can see that they form a loose mixture of organizations endlessly networking with themselves to borrow labor for each other’s projects. You may even see communists leaving parties for non-party activist organizations on the principle that, if they can’t be in the party-form they still have to be doing something. This criticism of activist networking⁷ was also raised nearly eight years ago by Tim Horras of the Philadelphia Socialists, but still remains in force today as a compulsion symptomatic of a strategic and an ideological problem. But not being in the party, much less building it, buries the question of what the point of all this is, reframing the strategy of “the only way out is through” to a mindless “keep digging, we’ll figure out where we’re going later.” 

A communist leaving their party to engage in the work might say, “I don’t necessarily agree with everything they do, but they are organizing tenants.” The communist’s increasing interest in practice or “doing the work” unscrews its connection to theory, or “why,” “how,” and “for what.” Ideologically, this detachment between individual and organizational politics resembles a quality of professional labor which skips around jobs offering their “skills,” or what they have been trained in, and what type of organizer they are. There is no party-wide division of labor, it’s simply and totally decided by the independent communist, and so in helping other organizations they have no real connection to the organization on theoretical grounds, just simply on the practical availability. At the same time, the organization truly does not “have” the communist; the communist has no dedication to the organization on the basis it is a reasonable vehicle for steering class struggle, they are instead just a resident until the work runs dry or an interpersonal conflict tears the organization apart. While these traits have likely existed in organizing for a long time, this particular manner of people skipping around to different organizations, networking themselves, and having a diverse commitment to many different, unrelated struggles reflects the neoliberal condition that nothing is truly owned, but borrowed!

All to say that SYT might agree that the neoliberal condition affects how both organizer and proletarian conceive of the world around them. But SYT doesn’t attempt any class analysis beyond declaring activists as petty-bourgeois, so they make themselves susceptible to replicating petty-bourgeois organizational tactics. It remains a priority for us to not only organize a political force which can mobilize people in forms that their ideology would prohibit them from doing otherwise, it also means building an organization which develops communists away from the petty-bourgeois ideology which colors their thinking. This two-handed attempt to build the socialist and workers movement must be done with close engagement with the other–one contains the contradictions that the other elucidates.

In the following paragraph the authors criticize the professional revolutionary concept further. We break the cadence of their argument to weigh in on smaller parts, but to do them justice we recapitulate this idea:

Following Lenin’s logic (in the mind of the petty bourgeois pretenders), 3 things are true: the party is the vanguard of the proletariat, the party recruits individuals with awakened class consciousness, and those that dedicate their lives to the revolution are titled professional revolutionaries. Each of these statements are true on their own, meaning in a situation if one is true then all 3 are true. This is the crux of the issue with the current “movement.”

We think our technical nitpicks are warranted when the strategic objectives of the movement are in question. Like this quote, Lukács still refers to more “conscious elements of the proletariat.” Individuals do not themselves have class consciousness, a class does. But technically this consciousness makes sense in an organization which can synthesize the consciousness of its members into a strategy to embody the consciousness of an entire class. The party plays the role of mediating the class with the professional revolutionaries as the material component for class consciousness. Necessarily we should not think of a party as a “collection of conscious individuals.” Consider this quote from Lukács’ again:

They are – in other words – the tangible embodiment of proletarian class-consciousness. The problem of their organization is determined by their conception of the way in which the proletariat will really gain its own class-consciousness and be itself able to master and fully appropriate it. All who do not unconditionally deny the party’s revolutionary role accept that this does not happen of itself, either through the mechanical evolution of the economic forces of capitalism or through the simple organic growth of mass spontaneity.

The formula they allege, “Each of these statements are true on their own, meaning in a situation if one is true then all 3 are true” is of course both incorrect formally—without some dialectical exposition of the ways they interconnect, three independent propositions cannot also be mutually-dependent—but also in content; substantially if we take this for granted we can see one “situation” that is obviously incorrect: many “awakened” communists do not form a vanguard party! But their allegation that vanguardists think this way is not justified, it’s just polemic.

SYT so far has claimed the professional revolutionary and vanguard party as obsolete if not counter-revolutionary concepts. In our opinion, the party-form and the communist (professional revolutionary) are reciprocally determined by one another, and in this tension we can go about showing how the apparent independence of the professional revolutionary and party enter into a relationship where one determines the other. But we don’t yet have this exposition from the authors, and instead we go immediately into a more comfortable terrain where a charge is leveled against American communists as being bourgeois:

The American Left is no stranger to sectarianism, opportunism, and individualism. Bourgeois culture has disseminated throughout the working class and has even found a home in the ranks of the communist movement. Every sect of Marxism, or rather individual falsification of Marx, has deemed it necessary they each need their own micro-party. While this has the immediate effect of splitting what little communist movement currently exists, it also poses the crisis that: Each (micro) “party” thinks themselves as the current vanguard of the working class.

There are two remarkable points here: the self-estimation of these “micro-parties” and the state of the American Left. This term is not a substitute for the proper communist movement, but only reflects the potpourri of left-wing organizations which continue to collaborate with one another. In other words it is a classless movement.

To the point regarding micro-parties, new organizations come with a renewed optimism that they will scale to the representative capability of the working class, and define the working class into a proletariat with class consciousness. But there is a difference between whether one thinks of themselves “as” the vanguard or one believes in vanguardism—that a party should prepare the conditions for the revolution and chart a path for the communist movement. Just like an individual joining an organization of revolutionaries does not immediately make them a professional revolutionary–it depends on how such organization operates. By the same token if my organization thinks that a vanguard party is necessary for revolution it doesn’t mean my organization is necessarily the vanguard. 

In our case, C-TCP is an organization which agrees that a vanguard party is necessary to lead the proletariat to revolution. However, C-TCP does not think of itself as a vanguard of the working class because it has not yet earned the right to do so. The point where this “right” is “earned” is not well-defined, but we hand-wave this away for the purposes of this response by the ongoing internal question of what it means for a “party-forming” organization, ex., a Committee, to mature into a “party.” For us this question of “dropping the C” is our raison d’etre as a Committee and distinguishes our organization’s state from the Party.

As for the second point, the authors identify problems in the movement but do not demonstrate how the party-form is uniquely responsible for these problems. Any organization, party-form or otherwise, is subject to sectarianism, opportunism, and individualism (the status quo in neoliberalism). It’s just that avowedly anti-party-form organizations handle these conflicts differently, even to the degree that they may be unaware that differences between individuals may be reflective of different ideological commitments, whereas “sectarian” organizations generally make it their business to make explicit ideological differences. The difference is whether these ideological conflicts immediately lead to splits or would test an organization’s ability to resolve debates and synthesize positions.

Perhaps one consequence of the “bourgeois culture” is individualism taking the form of self-promotion—the various “vanguard organizations” are well-known to take center stage and promote themselves through social media. They will make long posts about how they are now the organization of the masses, and use the styles and graphics of the day to convey a gritty radicalness. But how many achieve an actual connection to the masses?

But in general, passing the bull-horn at such protests is now tradition. And how can “sharing the mic” with every usual suspect in the Left organizing scene be individualistic? Perhaps going beyond the usual sense of individualism to the level of organizing can we see that the mosaic of Left organizations (“professional activists”) enter into an unexamined coalition with one another. One example in recent history was Tampa Bay’s own May Day march of 2018 which, in celebration of the 50-year anniversary of May of ‘68, brought almost the entirety of the left-wing organizations in Tampa Bay to march from Curtis Hixon Park into Centennial Park, holding hands, allowing every political stripe to speak from the Green Party progressives to the now-defunct Red Guards contingency, the Tampa Maoist Collective. The apparent unity of the Left nevertheless was unable to materialize their shared optimism into any concrete plan, much less unite these factions into class struggle, and so debates about strategy and ideology would continue until time and stress tore the Left apart along its perforations. If there was a beneficiary to this march, it was likely just the DSA; while the only opposition to this march originated from the right-wing elements of the organization, it was nevertheless an organization whose “big-tentedness” pulled more activists of all stripes into its orbit, happily unbothered if not overjoyed by the exodus of communists from the organization since then. And rightfully so!

Going on:

Following the line of logic inherited by Lenin, if the party is the true vanguard of the proletariat, which these so-called parties believe themselves to be, then those that they recruit are, supposedly, the most class-conscious section of the working class. Which then therefore posits that these members are themselves professional revolutionaries.

We will respond with a quote from Lenin, who made special notice that the party does not separate away thought nor action from proletariat:

…To concentrate all secret functions in the hands of as small a number of professional revolutionaries as possible does not mean that the latter will “do the thinking for all” and that the rank and file will not take an active part in the movement.

Lenin, What is to be Done?

Lukács, commenting on Lenin’s conception of the party, supports the notion that the party reciprocally determines and is determined by the quality of people within it:

Lenin’s concept of organization is in itself dialectical: it is both a product of and a conscious contributor to, historical development in so far as it, too, is simultaneously product and producer of itself. Men themselves build a party. A high degree of class-consciousness and devotion is required in order to want and to be capable of working in a party organization at all. However, only by being so organized and by working through a party can men become real professional revolutionaries.

Lukács, Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought

If you accept the dialectical relationship between the party and its general body, then you may conclude that the party is built by and builds professional revolutionaries–it is not simply a relation between the member and party, who mutually declare each other revolutionary. In the Lenin quote, members are obligated to take part in and build the movement, and in doing so take an active part in building themselves, and then take an active part in building the party which reciprocally builds them. The tasks-at-hand for the professional revolutionary is a dogged attachment to the working-class struggle and a process of collectively theorizing about the essential problems within them. The party sits “in-between” or mediates the communist and the movement, but also enables one to enforce the other; the agreements among party-members are held binding, while the communists as real people give the party an actual existence in the world, and as real people hostile to domination by ideas can amend these agreements. At its core this reciprocal process of building and amending an understanding is scientific.

This organizational understanding of party and cadre has been developed in C-TCP for some time, and codified in our membership requirements during our own reformation in May around the strategy of the Mass Line. It is mandatory for members to engage in mass organizing, because it both challenges the underlying ideology of the individual organizers, but also brings the Party closer to the site of real struggle. But to belabor the point, the end-goal of this dialectical relationship between member and party is not their mutual-enrichment but preparing the revolution to be an actual possibility.

Going on:

It is in this flawed logical system that we currently exist. Running off of footnotes of Marx and Lenin, these falsifiers and opportunists assert their authority in matters of revolutionary action! Calling back to the recent waves of protests and outright insurrection on college campuses and from American youth, it was the broadly unorganized and unaffiliated workers and students that organized organically. It was not the professional revolutionaries that stoked the flames of class conflict, it was the opposite in fact. It was “vanguard(s)” of the proletariat that stifled revolutionary action. It was the “vanguard(s)” who ultimately betrayed the historical mission of the proletariat, not the proletariat itself.

We think SYT is right and wrong here. We have agreed that those who fly under the banner of vanguardism may not also be authorities in leadership. Speculatively, there were likely inter-organizational tensions about strategy, and authority in some way was invoked to beat down discussion. Frustrating!

We also agree that the students and some mass of works organized organically in the sense that outrage against the US-sanctioned (and enabled) genocide against Palestine has prompted a national response. But this response occurred at many local scales, and was largely uncoordinated except perhaps by national student groups, maybe Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and the “broadly unorganized and unaffiliated workers.”?

But assuming some encampments were spontaneous, the encampments elsewhere were copied, and it’s clear that the organizations that took part in enabling that copying to happen were likely present at every stage of these struggles. So there was already an organizing force which jumped the encampments into the national scale, it might have been in the unconscious ideological presumptions of the organizers. Here the ideology developed the organizing “organically,” whereas the professional revolutionaries inorganically and haughtily asserted their bad ideas. 

Brusquely, organic is seen as good, inorganic bad; the fact it was organic might have been an ideological attachment to a particular mode of organizing. While SYT radically reorients itself to organize the working class, they have not given any analysis of their original commitments. But supposing that these encampments were spontaneous, their disunity left them vulnerable to the practice of another national group whose praxis seems to pathologically co-opt and seize attention. At some level there was unity on ideas and strategy, and if these were so vague as to be just the emancipation of Palestinians from genocide, then what body of ideas identifies their struggle as a working class struggle, or what body of ideas connects this struggle to the historical mission of the proletariat?

A good example of co-opting was reported by an anarchist documentary Touch the Sky¹² regarding the Ferguson uprising. As documented, during the earlier stages of the uprising, Black Americans occupied a gas station in protest against the state’s murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager. Attention to this moment grew with the people that joined them, until local representatives, generally working-class activists, were slowly replaced by liberal representatives and politicians who, in generalizing the demands to the wider problem of police brutality in America, softened the demands considerably.

Another good example is the co-opting of the George Floyd uprising in Tampa: hundreds of people, mostly from Black neighborhoods in central and north Tampa, took to the streets of East and North Tampa. One of the most active sites of this outrage was in the University area, and for several days the bourgeois local media, much less national media, was unable to make heads or tails of this uprising. Slowly however, the activist scene from the Left, and liberal representatives from the Right, in an attempt to keep the uprising going, balancing risk and publicity, began to take the protests downtown, and then downtown again, and then into marches along Kennedy. If there was anything so indicative of the differences between what one thinks they do and what others think they do, one march in East Tampa, a historically Black neighborhood, was received by residents as a parade. These marches and protests, while undergoing fits and starts, petered out with the committed core of the existing Left at the time into the bourgeois neighborhood of Hyde Park, citing their frustration against the residents who brunched during this awful summer. It was in this upscale neighborhood that two prominent activist-leaders were struck independently by cars, and the protests, with probably some exceptions for the subsequent and highly-publicized murders of Black men and women by police, stopped.

Tracing the trajectory of the protests on a map from beginning to end you may be able to make out a spiraling outwards from central and north Tampa into downtown, and eventually into Hyde Park, the general spending power of the average resident in each neighborhood increasing over time. It reminds us of a gyroscope winding larger and larger arcs as it loses momentum. But if anything is clear in our sketched-out timeline of the Ferguson protests, the mass character of the Left was lost by co-option from the right and “ultra-left.” Each moment the Left became more separated from the masses themselves.

This had not stopped other groups forming in response to the continued absence of a decisive political voice, communist or not, but they did so in order to continue the same style of practice. This pattern indicates process; the repeated behavior of political groups indicates a certain way of thinking. Surely SYT agrees:

Ironically enough, it is these pseudo-Leninists that Lenin himself warned about, in the same chapter of the same book mind you. The proletariat does not need masters from on high. It does not need benevolent figures and leaders that will rule and guide them from above.

Solving the problem of “masters on high” is generally done by immersing communists into the masses. The idea that something is “on high” and “from above” is not the fact that there is a hierarchical ordering of leadership, but a heavenly disconnect of leadership. But the orientation of the communist to the masses also has to come from their self-organization, or else the lessons of these moments, if they remain together long enough to receive and transmit them, would be totally lost. Socialists should not throw themselves into the masses and their organizations, they should attempt to bring socialist politics early into the working class through the close presence of an organization with the reputation of doing so. Otherwise, socialists are just sky-diving into struggle, and their jumping-off point, their respective organizations above, having a tenuous connection with the masses.

Going on,

The time to dump the pseudo-Leninists off the back of the working class has come and it must dispose of these opportunists with ruthless efficiency! It has long since been time for the model of revolution to be updated. While it is true that: the party may have worked in Lenin’s time, that there will be advanced sections of the working class, and that the party will prove useful in governance post-revolution; its role in the current pre-revolutionary hellscape we find ourselves in needs to be critically examined to fit our conditions. 

A consistent theme in our response is that the “pseudo-Leninist” allegations may or may not be warranted but are clumsy when Lenin is interpreted as both for and against a professional devotion to the working-class struggle. There has been no serious critique of the failure of vanguard parties, just polemic here. 

We sympathize with SYT on the so-called vanguard party misdirecting the encampments, but the authors don’t offer even the outline of a strategy for solving the evergreen problems of organizing—(1) a memory for what has happened, (2) a robust dance between theory and practice, and (3) accountability to do what one said they were going to do—generally solved by an organization which is persisting, reflective, and bound by some line subject to amendment.

Going on,

What is ultimately true is that a true vanguard of the proletariat is needed, and that the petty bourgeois “parties” need to be struggled against. Organic self organization of the proletariat is not only preferable, but is within the realm of possibility. Capital already organizes the proletariat for itself. Capital creates workplaces that employ and centralize labor. It creates an environment that alienates workers and injects proletarians with class consciousness.

It’s a little vague what the “itself” in “Capital already organizes the proletariat for itself” means here: capital or proletariat? If “capital” then this is a sort of a filler phrase. But the underlined passage forces us to believe they mean “Capital already organizes the proletariat for the proletariat,” which becomes dangerous and rife with practical and technical issues.

Practically, it suggests that it is only a matter of time before the contradictions of capital restore the proletariat to a position where it recognizes itself. Capital organizes the conditions for revolution by concentrating and immiserating the proletariat, but since capital is in dialectical unity with wage labor, it, personified by the bourgeoisie and their collaborators, responds to the conditions of the working class in order to retain the domination of ideas over humankind. Therefore it is not a matter of increasing the intensity of capitalist exploitation to a fever pitch like water boiling into steam. Thinking otherwise relies on a poor metaphor too often used by dialectical materialists. This mistaken understanding is part of a deficit of Marxist science.

Those who take capital as the revolutionary subject seriously then turn their attention away from the proletariat and towards the bourgeoisie, trying to advance the process by which they “dig their own graves” and support policies which drive capitalism to intensify its own contradictions. They may pretend to be “revolutionary defeatists,” but are actually closer to the accelerationist position which was in vogue in the late-2010s. Nevertheless, they are fundamentally pessimistic for the proletariat achieving a revolutionary position, and so capital becomes the true source of where good ideas come from.

The conclusion (“capital…injects proletarians with class consciousness”) is more technically challenged. We have already said that capital is not an organizing subject, however in situations where we technically understand each other this mistake can be forgiven as a rhetorical device. But the underlined claim is built on a dangerous misunderstanding of class consciousness. 

In the same line, SYT argues that class consciousness is simultaneously built and destroyed (alienation) by capital. This is predicated on a shallow understanding of alienation, in which workers who recognize their separation from each other will organize oppositely. It doesn’t appreciate how deeply capitalist ideology affects what the working person believes is possible. Even a smidgen of organizing in any capacity would convince a communist that at the crucial moment it is too common that a working person would rather roll over and accept their fate rather than talk to their coworker or neighbor. But this process of objectifying and being separated from your products of labor, means of production, relation to the natural world, and ultimately other people is exactly what alienation describes.

Going on,

All we have to do as communists is be there to seize the opportunity capital has so generously given us. We simply have to tie the noose with the rope capital has sold us. 

This is definitionally opportunism. Communists, as dialecticians, recognize that they are part of the world they seek to change, and therefore do not seize opportunities but make them. This “All we have to do”-talk comes from a stunted understanding of class struggle. This image painted by SYT moreover suggests they will come onto the scene at the crucial moment, as if they were hidden in the crowd. Oppositely, the Mass Line aims to make the Party known in such mass organizations early and tactfully.

“This past decade has shown us that the professional revolutionary is a ghost. It is a spirit that may have existed at one time, yet now only lurks to those still willing to chase it. The professional revolutionary ideal is dead and it is for the better. “The proletariat needs no professional revolutionaries, for its very existence is a revolutionary act!“

This rapturous conclusion marries two incorrect lines of thinking in this post: dragging with it the sum-total of their misunderstanding of Lenin, they also proclaim that the proletariat by existing replaces the intentional organization towards revolution. This connection between existence and revolution resembles the rad-lib Rest is Resistance movement, or the notion that, say, queer people’s mere existence is revolutionary. Without no class analysis, this argument treats the oppressed class’s need to sustain itself as equivalent to a conscious want to struggle against an oppressor. It forgets that the capitalist class requires the proletariat to exist in order to exploit it. But this fact goes out the window if capital is already seen as the organizing force which “injects” the proletariat with class consciousness. Problems ensue! Without any class consciousness-building organization, we are led to believe that the proletariat will by their own bootstraps marshal a revolutionary force, precluding any contribution that the socialist movement can offer except at the last moment. From Lukács, again:

However it would be a mechanistic application of Marxism, and therefore a totally unhistorical illusion, to conclude that a correct proletarian class-consciousness – adequate to the proletariat’s leading role – can gradually develop on its own, without both frictions and setbacks, as though the proletariat could gradually evolve ideologically into the revolutionary vocation appropriate to its class.

This passage rightfully addresses that the proletariat cannot spontaneously develop class consciousness. The alternative—a party of conscious proletarians and their allies—reflects the problems of the proletariat into a well-defined alternative. These socialists (now useless) must surgically make themselves proletarians by going into existing mass organizations (because building such organizations is relegated to the workers movement) or changing careers to jobs traditionally associated with proletarians. We leave the analysis of SYT’s writing with one more quote from Lukács, quoting Lenin again:

‘Political questions cannot be mechanically separated from organization questions,’ said Lenin, ‘and anybody who accepts or rejects the Bolshevik party organization independently of whether or not we live at a time of proletarian revolution has completely misunderstood it.’

Conclusion

Simply put, SYT’s “Ode to Revolution” is a polemic against the misleadership of the communist movement by so-called vanguard parties. It addresses the problem of micro-parties and self-styled professional revolutionaries in the communist movement, which is a persistent problem and subject of criticism by many of those on the “American Left.” It gives a passing criticism of how the notion of “professional revolutionaries” is employed. 

But this post makes a serious error by alleging the nature of the party-form is incompatible with organizing in capitalism today; not only do they not substantiate how capitalism today makes the party-form irrelevant, they generally confuse “what people say” with what they “do,” and because they don’t equip themselves with this distinction, they are forced revise Lenin’s position of the vanguard party. Not to mention that it does not address the successes of the parties behind the 20th-century revolutions, nor the conditions and mistakes of the failed ones. They simply make a clean break between “then” and “now.”

The motivation for this reformation was the failure of the vanguard parties to lead a national protest movement. But no words were spared to reflect on the limitations of the protest movement. Instead this failure for the protest movement was blamed on other communists and leads to the conclusion that they have to organize with working people, with never a fault on their own behalf admitted. The students and unaffiliated workers simply had the right idea, but were thwarted!

SYT does not name why these vanguard parties have failed the movement, but misinterpret the reading to support the thesis that the party-form itself is obsolete, if not counter-revolutionary. The consequences prepare communists and young activists to repeat the same mistakes committed in Tampa and elsewhere. The “rope” these authors are tying is not the “noose” of capitalism but that which binds their arms and legs to the Wheel of Ixion of the same endless cycle of activist organizing they oppose.

All in all, on the premises that professional revolutionaries and the vanguard parties are counter-revolutionary, SYT loosens the constraints of a theoretical (or essential) unity of their organization in order to increase an apparent unity of many different left-wing people—including people of all political stripes, even anarchists. In turn they introduce slack into the possibility of a revolution. We have argued point-by-point with quotations from Lenin and Lukács that this is a serious revision of Lenin’s conception of the party-form. As part of the long list of forthcoming articles, we will argue that anti-revisionism is less so textual or historical fidelity, but an adherence to the dialectical method. So we emphasize that even though we stand by our disagreements on the textual interpretation of Lenin, our opposition is squarely methodological, arguing that in their frustration SYT falls short of conducting a dialectical argument.

As part of closing this argument we want to address a trend in organizing today. Quoting SYT with our own emphasis:

We also recognize the lack of need for hierarchical structures at this time, both inside and outside our organization. This means that we’ll be decentralizing leadership in favor of a more collective form of ownership. In doing so, we’ll be encouraging students and workers to protagonize themselves.

This interesting word also appears in a position advanced by some wing of the DSA tenant organizing body, introduced in this Cosmonaut article⁵ and reprinted in their own publication Worker-Tenant. Coincidentally, C-TCP was already researching protagonism in response to the “worker-tenant” notion already being theorized, which will be documented in a more general, historical analysis in another forthcoming article. We hope to situate this revisionist break between Lenin and the party-form in history, by contrasting Lenin and Kautsky, the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). For our purposes here, it is unclear what praxis is built by “encouraging students and workers to protagonize themselves”—for instance, there is no analysis of which movement, socialist or worker, the students will slot into. The protagonists are focused on people who are oppressed at the site of contradiction (workers in workplaces, tenants in complexes) to be front-and-center in the decision-making. If instead this praxis is just a figure of speech, “encouraging” workers to protagonize themselves doesn’t clarify any strategy, and it’s unclear what struggle the students will be engaged in which they are the primarily oppressed, and therefore the protagonized: Are they organizing against the cost of student housing, or the appropriation of the university funds for vanity projects and business schools? Or if genuine labor/tenant-organizing comes from this, it would be directed by an organization of student communists which are set to cycle out every four or so years, reintroducing the brain-drain problem, the loss of collective organizing wisdom, in the movement. Or will this brain-drain happen quicker, through the burnout incurred by the the protest-driven stage of development in the movement. What concretely is SYT going to do?

We recognize that the kernel of our response may still be interpreted as just “well the party-form was not done right!” This reduces the problem to communists evaluating each other’s technique and performance, and can be found aplenty in other communists, especially those who fly under the banner of anti-revisionism. We don’t think that the vanguardists this article criticizes are “not executing the Party correctly,” but that they have “bad ideas which prevent them from doing the Party correctly.” It changes our position from “they should have done this” to “they should be thinking this way.” Also, we recognize that we are focusing our critique on one aspect of the Left, making our letter appear to be a  “Left-criticizing-Left” article. We hold ourselves to some esteem that our faithful attempts at communist leadership and class-based analyses distinguish ourselves from the “Left” activist-organizer scenes. As a small local organization interested in the goings-on of another small local organization, our response to SYT is based on a principle that we should voice our opinions when it comes to open discussions of theory and practice. 

C-TCP is a “micro-party” committed to earning the respect and trust of the working class and to applying and demystifying dialectical materialism, the essential component of Marxism. We have been active since 2019 but has kept a shut-mouth and heads-down approach to organizing that has had both advantages and disadvantages. We have also made gross mistakes in our strategy, and we will publish our lessons in a forthcoming dissection of our mass line strategy and organizational history. But the most relevant thing to admit for this article is that over the majority of our time as C-TCP we made a lot of mistaken assumptions about the spontaneous nature of the proletariat. We confused the spontaneous ways that the proletariat acted, i.e. inventiveness or outrage, with the spontaneity that they would jump “in a qualitative leap” to an outrage against the ruling class by-name. The proletariat defines and is defined by the bourgeoisie in an antagonistic dance, so it is unreasonable to strategize that they will rise as a class to the occasion spontaneously to challenge the very social order that defines them. Yet spontaneity was one of the tenets that we used to justify a long-standing free store model of organizing that we eventually abandoned. Waffling on spontaneity can lead communists to commit months, if not years, of their time to repeating mistakes that we have also made.

As communists, we are working to earn the representation of the working class, and if asked, SYT or any other communist organization worth their salt would say the same. The difference is what you do, and the quality of the development between old and new practice. That is, does an organization actually change and adapt from its mistakes, or does it repeat the same practice over and over? Quoting Marx, “We must force the “frozen circumstances to dance by singing to them their own melody.” Does the party question its own praxis and ideology, its “frozen circumstances”?

Organizations in Tampa Bay, and anywhere else in a nation where no communist party has a definite claim of leadership over the movement, will come and go. Like a beach without any dune grass, organizations wash away when they have not achieved real working-class connection. These beaches can be replenished when fresh sand is dumped on them, like the endless assault of issues-of-the-day that drive people into organizing. But such organizations must also identify and promote the problems of working people into questions for the movement. We, C-TCP, hope that our long response to the reformation of SYT will open a dialogue for the pressing questions of the movement, including a continued questioning of communist organizations as implemented.

Forthcoming articles:

• A summation of our own mutual aid practice from 2020-2023, and current strategy
• an analysis of the protagonism tendency and neo-Kautskyism
• our conception of “anti-revisionism”
• an analysis of the professional revolutionary and activist concepts

References

1. SYT Reorganization Announcement, https://www.instagram.com/p/DAWx1cIPvwh/
2. SYT, “Ode to Revolution”, https://www.instagram.com/p/DAWyeH7vy8c/
3. OCR, “Make Way For The Defiant Ones”, https://ocrev.org/make-way-for-the-defiant-ones/
4. CrimethInc, “Report from within the Cal Poly Humboldt Building Occupation”, https://crimethinc.com/2024/04/23/report-from-within-the-cal-poly-humboldt-occupation-the-occupation-of-siemens-hall
5. Cosmonaut, “The Protagonism of Tenants”, https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/05/the-protagonism-of-tenants/
6. V. I. Lenin, “Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/
7. The Philadelphia Partisan, “Base-Building: Activist Networking or Organizing the Unorganized?”, https://phillypartisan.com/2017/07/20/base-building-activist-networking-or-organizing-the-unorganized-tim-horras/
8. V. I. Lenin, “What Is To Be Done?”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/
9. Georg Lukacs, “Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1924/lenin/ch03.htm

Touch The Sky, https://touchthesky.noblogs.org/

Appendix: “Ode to Revolution”

This has been copied here for convenience.

In the past year we have seen the burgeoning radical movement in America explode in popularity and then summarily peter off, with its heroic climax occurring at the end of the last academic semester with nationwide encampments and clashes with police on university campuses. But how “heroic” was this climax? The answer is both very much and not all. While there were thousands of revolutionaries and working class individuals genuinely committed to taking up the fight for Palestine against our oppressive state, their efforts were actively neutered at every step of the way. At every fork in the road, the so-called “experienced leadership” of “professional revolutionaries” betrayed the very class they so boldly claim to uphold and protect. The international proletariat, the people of Palestine, and all oppressed people of the world have been betrayed! These “revolutionaries” are nothing more than activists!

The past several decades of the American Left has been notably punctuated by the advent of the “professional activist”. The professional activist represents the corporatization and bastardization of the workers movement. The professional activist represents the petty bourgeois take over of the proletarian movement. The professional activist is the complete opposite of what the *professional revolutionary* is supposed to embody. But is it?

Pseudo-Leninists, as they are to be called because they outright falsify the works of him, claim that by joining some party or organization a proletarian joins the ranks of their fellow cadre in transforming into professional revolutionaries. The concept of a professional revolutionary has its origins in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done:

…And hence this struggle [economism] can never give rise to such an organization as will combine, in one general assault, all the manifestations of political opposition, protest, and indignation, an organization that will consist of professional revolutionaries and be led by the real political leaders of the entire people. – What Is To Be Done, Lenin.

Lenin outlines the need for a selected and committed group of proletarians that with their consciousness will dedicate their life to the real movement, and will steer the movement of the working class towards inevitable class conflict. Further, these professional revolutionaries will make up the basis of the communist vanguard party. While this model might have worked in Lenin’s time, it has both proven itself to be less useful in the 21st century in advanced capitalist states and has been time and time again corrupted by petty bourgeois agents.

Following Lenin’s logic (in the mind of the petty bourgeois pretenders), 3 things are true: the party is the vanguard of the proletariat, the party recruits individuals with awakened class consciousness, and those that dedicate their lives to the revolution are titled professional revolutionaries. Each of these statements are true on their own, meaning in a situation if one is true then all 3 are true. This is the crux of the issue with the current “movement”. The American Left is no stranger to sectarianism, opportunism, and individualism. Bourgeois culture has disseminated throughout the working class and has even found a home in the ranks of the communist movement. Every sect of Marxism, or rather individual falsification of Marx, has deemed it necessary they each need their own micro-party. While this has the immediate effect of splitting what little communist movement currently exists, it also poses the crisis that: Each (micro) “party” thinks themselves as the current vanguard of the working class.

“Following the line of logic inherited by Lenin, if the party is the true vanguard of the proletariat, which these so-called parties believe themselves to be, then those that they recruit are, supposedly, the most class-conscious section of the working class. Which then therefore posits that these members are themselves *professional revolutionaries.*

“…To concentrate all secret functions in the hands of as small a number of professional revolutionaries as possible does not mean that the latter will “do the thinking for all” and that the rank and file will not take an active part in the movement.” – What Is To Be Done, Lenin

It is in this flawed logical system that we currently exist. Running off of footnotes of Marx and Lenin, these falsifiers and opportunists assert their authority in matters of revolutionary action! Calling back to the recent waves of protests and outright insurrection on college campuses and from American youth, it was the broadly unorganized and unaffiliated workers and students that organized organically. It was not the *professional revolutionaries* that stoked the flames of class conflict, it was the opposite in fact. It was “vanguard(s)” of the proletariat that stifled revolutionary action. It was the “vanguard(s)” who ultimately betrayed the historical mission of the proletariat, not the proletariat itself. Ironically enough, it is these pseudo-Leninists that Lenin himself warned about, in the same chapter of the same book mind you.

The proletariat does not need masters from on high. It does not need benevolent figures and leaders that will rule and guide them from above. The time to dump the pseudo-Leninists off the back of the working class has come and it must dispose of these opportunists with ruthless efficiency! It has long since been time for the model of revolution to be updated. While it is true that: the party may have worked in Lenin’s time, that there will be advanced sections of the working class, and that the party will prove useful in governance post-revolution; its role in the current pre-revolutionary hellscape we find ourselves in needs to be critically examined to fit our conditions. What is ultimately true is that a true vanguard of the proletariat is needed, and that the petty bourgeois “parties” need to be struggled against.

Organic self organization of the proletariat is not only preferable, but is within the realm of possibility. Capital already organizes the proletariat for itself. Capital creates workplaces that employ and centralize labor. It creates an environment that alienates workers and injects proletarians with class consciousness. All we have to do as communists is be there to seize the opportunity capital has so generously given us. We simply have to tie the noose with the rope capital has sold us.

This past decade has shown us that the professional revolutionary is a ghost. It is a spirit that may have existed at one time, yet now only lurks to those still willing to chase it. The professional revolutionary ideal is dead and it is for the better.

The proletariat needs no professional revolutionaries, for its very existence is a revolutionary act!