Southeast Kansas DSA faces the challenge of organizing a large, thinly-populated territory — which may contain the smallest city in the country with a DSA elected.

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We find ourselves in trying times. Fascism continues to rear its ugly head here in the heart of empire, reaching both inward toward our most vulnerable people and outward [to where?] on behalf of the interests of capital. Yet, we also find ourselves in an important position. DSA membership has reached historic levels, socialists are in office at higher and higher levels across more and more of the country, and collectivist sentiment rises in the face of the American [ICE] gestapo. We the workers are organizing! The successes of the socialist movement here in The United States may have inspired you to finally take the first step and say, “I am ready to get involved!” Maybe you have been hands-on involved in the struggle for years and the moment is feeling right again to make another push. Regardless of your tenure: I urge you to take action!

Though we as socialists share a common cause, countless efforts lie before us that must be tackled one-by-one to reach our end goal. As you plug in to DSA nationally, or here within the Denver chapter, the sheer number of causes to be involved with, [-] the committees, the working groups, the meetings, the protests, [-] all begin to flood your mind (and calendar). The call to participate in electoral processes at all levels will come down the line [soon]. Other organizations will make calls to comrades to join them in fighting for the rights of their fellow worker. If you find yourself overwhelmed, I promise you are not alone! You do not need your foot in every corner on day one, and you will likely never fully participate in every effort that comes your way. However, do not become paralyzed by an abundance of choice! I urge you to avoid doing nothing!

Find the causes that speak to you most and commit to them. Attend meetings for one committee or working group. Join the Starbucks workers on the picket line. Protest American military action in Latin America [and the Middle East]. Canvass to help elect a socialist into office [like Melat Kiros]. We have power in our numbers, meaning when we all step up to a cause we do not need to stretch ourselves thin and risk burnout. All I ask is you pick one and make an impact today. You are not locked in forever to one, and you do not have to limit yourself to one! But take this as your call to action, any action. This is what will make us the momentum {awkward} of the socialist movement! We must be persistent, we must maintain [our] revolutionary optimism, and we must remain grounded in the material conditions of workers around us. I hope to see you out there doing the hard but liberating work.

Solidarity forever comrades

As the name implies, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels attempts to build an understanding of how the family, divisions of class, gender, and the modern nation-state evolved over time.  At first glance, it’s simply an anthropological and sociological text about ancient and indigenous cultures. But on a deeper level it shows how economic modes of production have a huge influence on how society is organized.

Some people will tell you that things like the nuclear family, “traditional” gender roles, and capitalism are natural and have always existed, but if we look back only a few hundred years, we see many societies around the world that were organized very differently.  Engels started his study with the book Ancient Society by Lewis H. Morgan, an American lawyer who represented the Seneca nation of New York, who are part of a larger confederacy called the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois.  He found that the Haudenosaunee shared striking similarities with other indigenous cultures around the world, and with the early histories of cultures in Europe such as the Greeks, Romans, and Germans.

Using the Marxist philosophy of historical materialism, Engels built on Morgan’s work to show that most societies passed through the similar stages of development between hunter-gatherer tribes, settled agriculture, and ultimately modern capitalism.  Most importantly, he showed that the dominant economic mode of production and distribution is enormously impactful on society as a whole, especially on property relations, government and laws, and even family structures.  These societal structures tend to reinforce and strengthen the underlying economic systems, until some change forces a rupture, and a new system takes its place.Going all the way back to the beginning, the earliest bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers owned nothing beyond what they could carry on their backs, and had to rely on scarce and sporadic sources of food.  In these conditions, cooperation and sharing were necessary for survival.  This spirit of sharing extended to childcare, which was often communal; and even romantic relationships, where polyamory and plural marriage tended to be more common than they are today.  Because strict monogamy was almost unheard of, families tended to be matrilineal, since you can be sure of who a child’s mother is.  Morgan observed how extended families formed into matrilineal clans among the Haudenosaunee, and called them gentes, after a similar Roman family structure. 

Over time, technologies like fishing, fire, the bow and arrow, and horticulture (farming) allowed people to settle in villages, and this stage of development is where Morgan found the Haudenosaunee.  It was through the gens that land was owned in common, labor was organized, food and other goods were distributed, inheritance was passed on, and laws were administered. There was very little division of labor into separate job roles, and hardly ever would a leader inherit their office from a parent.  The Haudenosaunee had organized themselves into a representative democracy based on clans or gentes that ultimately came to include six related nations, but they didn’t have anything that we would call a state in the modern sense.  At this stage they had no use for taxes, standing armies, or private property, which is why Engels called this type of society “primitive communism.”  Despite what the anarcho-primitivists might say, we can’t actually go back to this type of society by destroying modern technology.Engels next shifts his focus onto Ancient Greece, specifically Athens, which developed along a similar path during its prehistory.  By the time that written language was introduced to Greece, the old structures of the gens was starting to unravel due to changing economic conditions.  As technologies like metal axes and plows were invented, more land could be cleared and cultivated than before.  The domestication of animals allowed for a more calorie-dense diet with less manpower.  This surplus of food demanded more organization, and technologies like written language and mathematics were invented to keep track of who owed what to whom.  At this stage, some men, probably the elected leaders of their gentes, decided that it was important to pass down this valuable farmland and herds of animals to their sons, and suddenly strict monogamy for women became important, so that men could be sure that their heirs were legitimate.  Of course men were still free to have multiple wives, or even take female slaves as concubines.  At this point the gentes still existed, but we see them change from matrilineal to patrilineal ways of reckoning relations. Where before a prisoner of war was just another mouth to feed, at this point it made economic sense to conquer and enslave neighboring tribes.  Suddenly, land was worth fighting for, and the collective property of the gens started to be divided up by households.  Free citizens found it increasingly difficult to compete with slave labor, and found that after a bad harvest they might have to mortgage or sell their land to a wealthier landowner.  At best they would end up as a sharecropper or landless peasant; at worst they might be sold into slavery to cover their debts.  So we see how the emergence of private property leads to class stratification.  At this time we also see the beginning of the division of labor, with specialized farmers and artisans making commodities specifically as commercial trade goods to sell rather than use themselves.  Thus people came to be divided into classes based on their relations to the means of production, with an emergent class of aristocrats controlling the bulk of the government and land.

At its peak, Athens had about 90,000 citizens, 365,000 slaves, and 45,000 free non-citizens.  There still was a form of democracy, but only for a shrinking number of male citizens.  As Athens transformed fully into a slave society, the old rules based on the gens became less and less relevant.  Trade and commerce incentivized many people to move away from their home villages, disconnecting them from their mother gens.

These changes lead to the emergence of a centralized government that ruled based on divisions of geography rather than family.  The gentes lost all political relevance, and stayed around merely as social and religious organizations.  A state apparatus emerged to collect taxes, maintain a police force, and raise a standing army for the conquest of their neighbors.  But the contradictions inherent in such a top-heavy and expansionist empire ultimately lead to the downfall of Athens.In a similar way, the Roman Republic grew by conquering and enslaving their neighbors, and well before it became an Empire, the old matrilineal gens had faded away in favor of a highly patriarchal system.  Our modern English word “family” comes from the Latin familia, meaning a man’s household, including his wife, children, and slaves, over whom he legally held complete control, even in matters of life and death.  Whole books have been written on why the Roman Empire ultimately collapsed, but one important cause was that small independent farms run by Roman citizens weren’t able to compete with the large latifundia or plantations in which slaves worked the land for wealthy landowners. Once the Roman Empire began to falter, Germanic and Celtic tribes swept in to take its place in much of Europe.  These tribes were living or had recently lived in clan structures similar to the gens of the Haudenosaunee, Greeks, and Romans, but as military conquest became more important, their war chiefs gained power in their societies, and often took on aspects of Roman culture.  These chiefs became the aristocracy of the new feudal order as Europe moved into the Medieval Era. Engels has now set the stage for the emergence of capitalism, nation-states, colonialism, and the situation in which we find ourselves today.

So how does this apply to us today?  My take-away is that human nature is a multi-faceted thing, that throughout history humans have organized themselves into various types of societies, and we can consciously work towards creating a society that is more equal, democratic, and free.

I want to leave you with a hopeful vision of how socialism has transformed and will transform society for the better, and how economic liberation leads to more freedom for everyone.  Socialized medicine means that you don’t have to stay in a shitty job just for the health insurance.  Socialized housing means that you don’t have to stay in a shitty relationship just to keep a roof over your head.  Socialized childcare means that no one has to put their career on pause in order to start a family.  And the abolition of private property means an end to divisions of class, and the coercive power of the bourgeoisie.

I also hope that I’ve inspired you to read and study Origin of the Family or any of the other foundational Marxist texts, to gain a better understanding of how the capitalist mode of production impacts our daily lives.  Most of those texts are free and in the public domain, and many can be found in e-book formats at marxists.org, or as audiobooks at librivox.org.

High up in the ranks of social media companies, there exists a job title that probably wont surprise you. Behavioral engineers at Meta, Tik Tok, Reddit, or any other algorithmically generated place you might scroll, are getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to figure out ways to keep us online. The good feelings we get from [scrolling] social media keep us entertained, but it’s the feelings of fear and especially anger that keep us addicted. Rage is the currency of the modern age, and I think this is hurting our movement more than it's helping it. Organized socialists need to develop defensive strategies to handle these attacks on our psyches from the bourgeois, and fast.

Capitalists will be the first to (proudly) admit that social media algorithms are designed to work like a slot machine. You put your attention in, pull the lever, and see what happens next. The addictive part about a slot machine is that when you pull the lever, you don't know what you're going to get. You might line up three cherries in a row and get a decent payout, or more often than not, you'll lose and pull the lever again. We pull the lever again because we're seeking out the dopamine from a payout. The machine trains our brains using conditioning tactics to seek out the reward of a big payout, in spite of the negative consequences.

The thing about social media is the illusory reward isn't even money, it's just exploitation. When we see a sad video when scrolling, the response planned by the bourgeois is for us to keep scrolling until that feeling can be reconciled. They’ve researched the emotions of the working class, they’ve researched the mechanisms of learning and behavior, and they’ve landed on an equation that keeps us online. And while the interplay between positive and negative emotions alone is enough to pull us in, some emotions do a better job than others. Anger, for example, does both. The endorphins released when we get embroiled in some heated argument on Reddit are addictive on their own, even though most people would not exactly classify rage as positive.

Anger isn't bad. It's a reasonable response to the state of things, and, in the right circumstances, it's one of the cornerstones of emotion that movements are built on. You should be angry! The thing is, behavioral engineers at social media companies know what they're doing. They're not manufacturing the kind of rage that gets most people off their asses and into the streets. The kind of rage they want on their platforms is designed to keep people glued to comment sections– brooding, and scared, but complacent. They want us to be good little soldiers of a culture war that none of us ever consented to fighting. In most circumstances, online discourse is a shell of what debate should be by design. These jerks deal in the business of exploitation, like all great capitalists do. Every second of doomscrolling means another dollar in their offshore banks to them.

Propaganda isn’t always explicit, and the content of a medium isn’t always the only thing impacting us. How we engage with the internet can and does impact our behavior off of it, even if the effects are subtle. The way that social media is designed means that we are constantly battling propaganda that urges us to stay online, to disregard complexity, and to stay angry, even when avoiding the more obvious pro-fascist content. A working class that is distracted by their anger is a lot easier to beat than one motivated to organize by it. To me, the scariest part is that these companies aren't only keeping us scrolling, commenting, and fighting. They're actively making it harder to organize a united front against their BS, using tactics ranging in complexity from simple algorithm planning and shadow banning to literally hiring trolls to agitate activists online.

For every DSA member there is a platoon of people who are just as activated by the media they consume on these platforms as they are paralyzed. And just because you and I, comrade, broke through the fog to join DSA, doesn't mean we're free from their psychological warfare. Now, I’m not saying we should give up on social media entirely. Many of us woke up to the tyranny of the modern age through social media, and it is necessary that we be engaging with primary sources as our country descends even further into fascism. It’s also necessary that we use these platforms to urge our future comrades to join the fight. Instead, I’m saying this as a reminder that none of us are immune to propaganda, and that propaganda isn’t always what it seems. Stay angry, but be mindful of who is benefiting from it- us or them?

Oxford report on industrial social media manipulation by political actors:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulation-political-actors-industrial-scale-problem-oxford-report
Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal, Israeli born (surprise, surprise) behavioral engineer
https://denver.overdrive.com/media/1817200

There is a problem amongst the left-wing of socialism. These comrades correctly fight against opportunism, and their intended program is, broadly, this – a clean break to form an independent party from the Democrats, militant trade unions and strikes to bring capital to heel, and international solidarity that does not haggle over ridiculous questions like whether Hamas are the good guys or not. There are, however, issues with this program, one of which is that it has been obsolete for over a century. Its historical origin is in Social Democratic politics, and if we don’t learn from this history, we are doomed to repeat all of its failures, including the victory of fascism. I will elaborate this history and explain its relevance to the minimum program above.

Pre-Social Democratic Politics

Marx and Engels formed the basis for Social Democratic politics. To them, “progressive” did not mean “better relative to current conditions,” but historical progress towards communism. The strategy they believed should be employed changed over time.

In the revolutions of 1848, the Communist League led the proletariat in armed conflict, often street battles. Its goal was cohering the proletariat as a class and refusing any developments by the then-revolutionary bourgeoisie that would weaken the emerging working class’s independent political power. But in his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France, Engels reflects on the obsolescence of this revolutionary strategy. The socialist parties of Europe had largely won the right to operate legally, and Germans had recently won universal suffrage for working men. Tying this obsolescence to improvements in the state’s military technology and organization, he says:

“The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in on it . . . And if universal suffrage had offered no other advantage than that it allowed us to count our numbers every three years; that by the regularly established, unexpectedly rapid rise in our vote it increased in equal measure the workers’ certainty of victory and the dismay of their opponents, and so became our best means of propaganda; . . . To keep this growth going without interruption until it gets beyond the control of the prevailing governmental system of itself, [...], but to keep it intact until the decisive day, that is our main task . . . And if we are not so crazy as to let ourselves be driven to street fighting in order to please them, then in the end there is nothing left for them to do but themselves break through this dire legality . . . If, therefore, you break the constitution of the Reich, [the Social-Democratic Party of Germany] is free, and can do as it pleases with regard to you. But it will hardly blurt out to you today what it is going to do then.”

There are three important things to note here:

1. Revolution must involve the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat and the proletariat is not conceived separately from the party.
2.  Elections are tools to measure your strength via popularity and propaganda meant to raise revolutionary consciousness. One of the SPD’s main principles at this time also says that their parliamentary work should abstain from any support for government programs (“not a farthing for this government”).
3. While street-fighting is obsolete, revolution is not abandoned — and revolution is not achieved through elections.

There was another change that made these previous forms of struggle obsolete – the first instance of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In 1871, France and Prussia had fought a war which France handedly lost, ending with a siege on Paris. After Paris surrendered, the National Guard stationed there – composed of much of the city’s able-bodied proletariat – and the rest of Paris, angry after decades of poverty and now a war, declared war when the new French democratic government tried to disarm them. They established a new republic, the Paris Commune, founded on common property and an end to class society, first organizing co-operatives, aiming to bring them under “one great union,” as well as largely disenfranchising the Parisian bourgeoisie.

The Commune was crushed by the forces of Versailles after only a few months, and while Marx and Engels criticized many of the specific measures taken by the Commune — especially how they didn’t march on Versailles — they recognized that the class struggle had fundamentally changed. No longer was the working class stuck in the realm of trade unions and mere reforms post-1848. No, the working class could establish a world where it was in charge, dismantling class society under a new, proletarian state that had smashed the bourgeois state. This is what Engels is referring to when he says “Social-Democracy is free, and can do as it pleases with regard to you.” The proletarian state would then wither away as its functions as a mediator of class antagonisms become irrelevant with the disappearance of those antagonisms.

This is a much different goal than the daily struggles of trade union activity and electoral reforms that were arising at the same time. Marx, in Value, Price, & Profit, critiques unions for being stuck in the daily changes of the market, and in the 1891 Critique of the Erfurt Program, Engels defines opportunism in a particular way, one that is tied to these daily struggles:

“This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present, may be ‘honestly’ meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and ‘honest’ opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all!”

Opportunism is, then, seizing upon immediate opportunities for momentary “progress” that does not progress us towards socialism at all and dedicates time and resources away from the overarching goal. It does not matter if you mean well or not; it is not some moral claim about why someone does things, although careerist opportunists do exist.

Altogether, what we see from both Marx and Engels are:

1.  a commitment to an independent proletarian party composed of revolutionary masses and not just a group of dedicated revolutionaries on the outside, capable of leading a revolution,
2. a commitment to a historically progressive vision of revolution that guides how they engage in any activity, as opposed to directing their activity towards the constant changes in markets and government, and
3. an ability to change their tactics with developments in the class struggle – their organizing is not based on eternal validity of this or that strategy, but if and how it is effective, and if it has been outmoded by new developments.

Nearly all of this was completely lost on the Second International, a group of socialist parties across Europe that collapsed when most of the constituent parties supported their governments’ entries into World War I, effectively supporting war on their comrades. The parallels to today are enormous. Let us examine how these lessons were ignored or misunderstood.

The Failure of Social Democracy

The SPD was the most advanced socialist party in the world before WWI. Like us, it advanced its own electoral candidates, swore up and down against capitalism and the bourgeois parties, worked with trade unions – and became an opportunistic party. Why?

The answer largely lies in class consciousness. In her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution?, SPD-member Rosa Luxemburg rejects fellow member Eduard Bernstein’s lack of belief in revolution and states that trade union and electoral work are only means of raising class consciousness that teach the working class how to lead so that, when revolution occurs, it can lead. She goes along with SPD theoretical leader Kautsky’s phrase that the SPD “is a revolutionary party, not a revolution-making party,” i.e., a revolution must be the spontaneous uprising of the masses, which will be brought about by a crisis. After the 1905 Russian Revolution, she advocated for the mass strike as the way for the working class to start this spontaneous revolution: mass economic action to make revolutionary political demands.

It is easy to see where she got this from Marx and Engels. They say, in multiple works, that the burgeoning contradictions of capitalist society will lead to a crisis that the proletariat will then exploit to make revolution. The earlier quote from The Class Struggle in France (edited by Kautsky) says that there will be a “decisive day” when revolution occurs, which indicates that there will be a spontaneous eruption of the proletariat over a crisis that then ends capitalism.

But there are major problems with the SPD’s understanding. Firstly, when is this decisive day? When a crisis occurs. Ok, why hadn’t previous crises outside of the Commune led to socialist revolutions, even ones with socialist parties present? Luxemburg has no answer for this, leaving the revolution to chance. She and many others said that this spontaneity could become revolutionary without fully explaining how, only that a revolutionary party would lead when such a spontaneous uprising occurs.

Today, literally every spontaneous uprising shows this does not happen. You could point to the October Revolution or others that arose from crises, but this misses what actually turned these from protests or bourgeois movements into socialist revolutions – revolutionary consciousness in the working class built by a revolution making party, contrary to orthodoxy. We see here that it is not sufficient to have an independent party with some revolutionary horizon; this party must also start a revolution, not wait around to lead one.

This leads to the second point. Your consciousness is determined by your social environment and activity. Spontaneous activity will not build revolutionary class consciousness. You need revolutionary activity to build widespread revolutionary class consciousness. This should seem obvious, but the fact that Rosa says, “trade unions and elections are not revolutionary activity,” and then implies that they are somehow capable of building broad revolutionary class consciousness amongst workers should stand out as contradictory.

Consider what would happen in a spontaneous uprising where there is a “revolutionary party” but not a revolution-making party. Why would the workers here have revolutionary consciousness? They have myriad beliefs in any spontaneous situation, and almost none of them understand what socialism really is, assuming that is the preference of even some workers. If you want to teach socialism to most of them, you need revolutionary activity. But if you’re waiting for revolution, all you can do is spontaneous activity that workers are already doing themselves – workers don’t need a socialist party to unionize or protest and, as we see today, are active in electoral politics with or without socialists. This work then leaves no way for the majority of workers to assimilate a revolutionary horizon since their activity is directed towards issues that frequently come and go.

Opportunists also win them over in these areas, meaning we’re competing for their trust without presenting anything new. This leaves us stuck in the daily struggle, i.e., opportunistic work, running around in circles in the midst of capital’s relentless onslaught of basic rights and compromising with cynical opportunists to get anywhere. It’s a major issue the SPD had, breaking with its own principles by catering to conservative trade unions that did not care about revolution and trying to make social reforms in a bourgeois government, which also created an environment where more and more party cadres were openly reformist or followed the revolutionary spirit of Marxism in words but not in deeds.

Even a mass strike cannot teach this horizon. The sporadic work in the vague lead-up leaves most activity to party members, giving the masses hardly any activity, revolutionary or not, between disconnected pushes. So, the framework of much of the masses from the start of this sudden event is not revolutionary while the party has been compromising on revolution, and millions of people rising up at the same time cannot possibly assimilate a revolutionary horizon fast enough in a situation like this. Engels said “the masses themselves must also be in on it” for a reason. They cannot learn to lead this way or develop widespread revolutionary consciousness, contrary to Luxemburg’s position.

What we see is all of these issues arise from the type of class consciousness workers and the party have. There is an alternative. Bourgeois revolutions were by-and-large spontaneous in the 19th century, and successful. The issue is that the bourgeoisie had built up their political and productive capacities for centuries, so that when they spontaneously arose, it was feasible to take power because generalized commodity production was already widespread. Their economic power translated to political power. We have no such assurances precisely because you cannot build an economy based on socialized production without commodities within a global economy that is entirely premised on commodity production.

Instead, you build this through dual power, a scenario where a genuine proletarian power exists parallel to the bourgeois state. This is historically successful, but it took great effort on Lenin’s part to convince the Bolsheviks that the 1917 soviets were an embryonic form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. These workers councils saw the proletariat making their own legislation that the bourgeois provisional government could not ignore because it was backed by Russian enlisted soldiers. Winning them over was largely improvised because it was a new strategy and the soviets were not made by the Bolsheviks, but by opportunists who sought to use them merely to mitigate the bourgeois government’s power, not end it.

Mao generalized this experience in China, showing how to start and spread soviets as distinct territories. It requires that the vanguard (not a section of the vanguard, but the vanguard as a whole) is ideologically developed in Marxism. The vanguard establishes a region of dual power and, within it, workers manage their own affairs and disenfranchise the bourgeoisie. This fusion between the vanguard and the workers forms the basis of a communist party truly capable of leading a revolution. They then expand this against the bourgeoisie, which is revolutionary precisely because it is expanding a sharp break with capitalism.

Revolution becomes the proletariat’s life. That is how you build revolutionary consciousness. That is how you make revolution and end capitalism. Mass strikes could never do this because they are too short in duration and do not lay the prior groundwork. This strategy, its underlying basis, and the history of spontaneity make unions, elections, and protests obsolete unless you can properly place them as supports to dual power, but they are only a possible tactic and never required.

Communists in Germany that still believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat either refused to accept the non-spontaneous strategy the Bolsheviks demonstrated, or tried to apply it without the necessary ideological groundwork when soviets spontaneously formed in Germany. In the end, despite their commitment to revolution, spontaneity was their downfall. The 1918 German Revolution was led by opportunists, and the 1919 German revolution was a complete failure. Luxemburg was summarily executed after being tortured by mercenaries employed by Friedrich Ebert, leader of the SPD, a noted anti-theory “socialist” who cared about the day-to-day struggle. The SPD’s Weimar Republic did nothing to end capitalism, which opened the door for Nazism to arise. Revolutionary party, indeed.

Marx said that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please” due to circumstances handed down to them — even so, we still make our own history. History does not spontaneously make itself.

Clean vs. Dirty Break

Like the Second International, we have not learned the lessons laid out at the end of the first section, but with even less justification — they did not have the past century to learn from like

we do now. We are still spontaneous, waiting for revolution, persisting in obsolete strategies, and orienting our activity around relative-progressivism instead of historic progressivism.

Take the Clean vs. Dirty Break debate. Cleanly breaking is better, but what is our activity as a party after “breaking”? We want progressive candidates for “non-reformist reforms,” as if these will do anything meaningful, and to engage in trade union work that might lead to a mass strike with no revolutionary horizon, only reforms – M4A under capitalism and/or a likely return to the slower Palestinian genocide pre-2023. When this moment isn’t what we hoped for, we, jaded, will keep meeting workers in the daily struggle because we don’t know what else to do after this, never fully connecting with them. We are one more party that claims to be a mass party, but our work is outside the masses, only intersecting instead of fusing, only building consciousness as a class that knows it has interests separate from the bourgeoisie instead of consciousness that wants to permanently end class society, just like the SPD.

The “clean” break as envisioned now is not really a clean break – it might be an organizational break, but it is not a break in ideology or practice. We are merely providing different answers to the same opportunist questions. Instead of breaking with people and organizations from the start, you must first break with the obsolete mode of class struggle inside yourself. This is why I went from being active in so many things across our chapter to focusing on political education, especially my own. Once you have laid foundations, you can support others in doing the same and bring this to the working class as a whole. It’s slow, but successful dual power is impossible, otherwise.

This is not reading books for the sake of reading books – spreading this consciousness is a necessary prerequisite to form a party capable of starting a revolution, and you will have to work with other like-minded comrades to conduct a two-line struggle against opportunism across the global left, not just one organization in one country. Without a hegemonic Marxist revolutionary political line, opportunism (including honest opportunism) will reign and we will never have a revolution.

For many queer people, sexual liberation consists of embracing sexual desire and pursuing sexual gratification without the shame imposed on them through cisheteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality. But many others who claim an asexual identity experience sexual liberation as a liberation from sex.

As a trans fem, my understanding of the varieties of asexual experience comes mainly from conversations with other trans fems who have claimed an ace identity. These conversations sometimes include raw and harrowing discussions of past trauma, but are, overall, wonderfully intimate experiences of shared joy. For us, asexuality is a revelatory discovery, and for many of us, this discovery allows us to experience, for the first time, an entire world of beautiful intimacy that feels safe, satisfying, and natural. Unfortunately, when we try to share our joy with our allosexual friends (those whose sexuality is more in line with normative expectations), we are often met with confusion, hostility, and, worst of all, a patronizing disbelief that we could happily remove ourselves in any way from the pool of available and enthusiastic sexual resources.

Perhaps the first thing I would like my allosexual friends to understand is that when I tell them I'm ace they can't leap to any conclusions about my sex life. The only conclusion they can reasonably come to is that sex and sexuality are decentered in my day-to-day experiences and in particular in my relationships with others. And I won't reveal anything personal beyond that here!

The second thing I would like my friends to understand is that, just as transgender people often have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of gender than cisgender people because we have struggled long with our own genders, ace people often have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of sexuality than allosexual people because we have struggled with our own sexualities, made fine distinctions, and compared notes with each other. We have identified many axes of sexuality that are supposedly identical in normative sexuality, but are in fact merely correlated in allosexual experience, such as sexual desire, sexual attraction, and libido.

Allosexual people assume all ace people are sex- or even touch-averse, and I want to stress that many of us are. For some of us, though, our asexuality is defined as much or more by a positive orientation toward nonsexual forms of intimacy than by a negative orientation toward sex. We may experience great pleasure and intimacy from non-sexual physical touch, or we may experience it from different kinds of stimulation, like music and dance (I suppose I don't mind revealing that I fall in these categories: the most purely pleasurable and intimate experiences I've had with others come from touch without sex and from ecstatic shared experiences of dancing, listening to music, and making music). Some of us have neutral or positive attitudes toward sex, but our positive sexual experiences are not, for us, notably sexual, and may stem from simply an intellectual interest in sex stemming from our struggles to understand ourselves and others, or in aspects of the experiences that are not inherently sexual. Allosexual people are often surprised when I tell them that ace people are overrepresented in sex education and even kink. Indeed a few ace people I have talked to who are completely sex-neutral have more experiences that normative sexuality considers sexual, with more partners than most allosexual people.

While aromanticism, the experience of living a life where romantic feelings and connections are decentered compared to what is normative in society, is a different spectrum, or set of axes, than asexuality, it bears some consideration here. Aromantic people engage in the same kind of careful and nuanced consideration of something that cisheteronormativity and compulsory sexuality takes for granted that asexual people do. Not all asexual people are aromantic. Some of us cherish romantic relationships and experience profound desire and yearning for others without desiring to have sex with them, while others find the concept of romantic desire profoundly alien to our experience.

Many people who consider themselves allosexual would benefit from learning more about asexuality and aromanticity, and would find the exercise challenging to and informing of their own ideas about themselves. I have had more than one person react to my description of my sexuality with something like, "that's not ace, that's just normal," even as others hear the same description and do not question my ace identity in the slightest.

The third, and perhaps the most important, thing I would like my friends to understand is that struggles with sexual trauma in no way invalidate someone's ace identity. Allosexuality is really just another imposed social construct, like gender, and all forms of social compulsion are achieved through means of force that leave trauma scars. This is the only way that compulsion to behave against one's nature and desires can function. It is perfectly valid for someone to claim an ace identity as a result of trauma, and though some of us, after working through our trauma, eventually claim a different relationship to sexuality, many do not. Whether we do or do not is nobody else's business but ours.

The worst impulse someone can have is to treat an ace person's trauma as a problem to be solved. When people attempt to "fix" us they most often reinforce our traumatic relationship to sex. This attitude is dehumanizing and treats us more as resources than as people. Instead, naive allosexuals (those who have not thought deeply about their own sexuality) would benefit from listening to us and considering how much of their own sexuality is natural to them and how much is learned behavior. 

As a boy, I was told by other boys, and many men behind the backs of the women in their lives, that girls should be pursued, that the goal of such pursuit was my own sexual gratification, and that my allegiances should be to my male friends and not to the girls and women in my life. This attitude was pervasive and dominant in my social interactions with other boys and men. Some of the filthiest jokes I've heard are told among trans fems, and they are variations on the degrading jokes and scenarios we endured from cis boys and men or viewed in pornography growing up, but often inverted, with ourselves as the humiliated objects. Children of all genders are given a brutal and brutalizing education in sexuality from an early age in a system of cisheteronormative grooming that is discussed with genuine discomfort and regret by many adults, but which is culturally tolerated because it is a primary mechanism by which patriarchy is communicated and reinforced. And it's not just patriarchy.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici discusses how during the medieval and renaissance eras of primitive accumulation in Europe, through the mechanism of witch hunts and persecution of heresy, reproductively female bodies were dehumanized, stripped of their economic autonomy, and made reproductive slaves en masse to enable biologically male bodies to become the wage-laboring proletariat class. In some times and places, proletarian women were forced into public brothels, making the rape of proletarian women functionally legal.

Asexual people exemplify, on the other hand, the ideas that we are not entitled to each other's bodies or affections, that we are autonomous beings who may freely choose the number, frequency, and kinds of intimate relationships that we engage in according to our own natures and desires. Asexuality is a direct threat to the capitalist treatment of sexuality and fertility as a problem of resource allocation and labor exploitation. In fact, it is a far bigger threat to capitalism and patriarchy than that posed by the choices that transgender people make about how and whether we wish to alter our bodies in ways that affect our fertility, given there are far more people poised to discover they are on the ace spectrum than there are trans people. With the rise of global fascism, I expect panic over asexuality to become a successor moral panic to the current one over transgender people, and, as an ace trans fem, I look forward to continuing to be a reviled outlaw in the coming years, should I survive to see them.

The project of liberation is always both personal and political. The more we uncover and understand the parts of natural human variation and experience that have been denied to us, hidden from us, and traumatically beaten out of us, within ourselves and each other, the more we liberate ourselves and each other, the more we respect each other and our choices, the more we are able to form honest, authentic, non-carceral, celebratory bonds and connections with each other, the more we quietly degrade the hold that violent systems of capitalist oppression have over us and create a more just, loving, and equitable future.

"Every empire needs a story that makes its actions sound necessary, even noble. For the United States, one of the most persistent tools in building a narrative is what historians call the “Great Man Theory of History.”

In simple terms, the Great Man Theory claims that history is driven mainly by powerful and/or unique individuals. Kings, presidents, generals, and dictators are presented as the people who shape the fate of nations. According to this way of thinking, if you want to understand a country, you don’t need to look at its workers, its institutions, its economy, or its political movements; you just need to look at the person at the top.

This idea might seem harmless, even intuitive,but it has played a powerful role in how Americans are taught to see the rest of the world. In U.S. foreign policy, it has become one of the most effective tools for selling intervention and regime change. When Washington wants public support for economic sanctions, covert operations, or military action, the story is almost always the same: identify a villain, make him the face of an entire country, and convince the American public that removing that individual will solve everything. Reduce a society to a single “bad man,” and suddenly intervention looks like liberation.

Turning Countries Into Villains

The Great Man narrative works because it simplifies complex political tensions into something that fits neatly into a headline. Countries are complicated places. Socialists with a dialectical mindset know they are shaped by decades of political conflict, economic pressures, class struggles, and historic experiences. Explaining those dynamics requires time, context, and nuance. Blaming everything on a single leader is much easier.

Instead of asking why a country developed the way it did, Americans are told that the entire political system is simply the result of one tyrant’s personality. If that leader disappears, the story goes, democracy and stability will naturally take his place. This makes intervention easier to justify, and also turns foreign policy into a moral drama. After all, if history is shaped by heroes and villains, then removing villains becomes a moral obligation. Removing the villains allows us, the morally righteous, to shape history.

Venezuela and the “Maduro Problem”

Take Venezuela. For years, American political discourse has framed Venezuela’s crisis almost entirely around President Nicolás Maduro. Economic collapse, inflation, migration, and political unrest are presented as the result of one man’s inept rule. If only he had international, American led corporations to guide their economy. But Venezuela’s situation is far more complex than that narrative suggests.

The country’s economy has long been dependent on oil exports, making it vulnerable to global price swings. Internal political conflict between socialist movements and economic elites has shaped Venezuelan politics for decades. U.S. sanctions have dramatically worsened the country’s economic crisis. But  nuance rarely fits easily into a soundbite.

Instead, Americans are told a much simpler story: Venezuela has a dictator. Remove him and the problem disappears. This framing turns a complicated geopolitical situation into a morality play. It makes regime change sound less like foreign interference and more like humanitarian rescue.

Iran and the Personalization of Politics

The same narrative is used when Washington talks about Iran. Listen to the way Iran is discussed in American political rhetoric and media coverage. The country’s entire political system is often reduced to the figure of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran becomes less a society (or more accurately: multiple societies) and more a personality. Iran is not a monarchy ruled by a single man’s whims. It has a complex political structure with multiple power centers, elected institutions, internal factions, and a long history shaped by  internal political movements and foreign intervention. The existing regime has support, but that support is never acknowledged in the western narrative.

One of the most important events shaping modern Iranian politics was the U.S.-backed coup in 1953 that overthrew the country’s elected government. That history still influences how Iranians view American power today. Yet that context rarely appears in mainstream discussions. Instead, Americans are told that tensions with Iran exist primarily because of the decisions of one leader. The implication is clear: remove that leader, and relations would improve overnight. Once again, the Great Man myth replaces historical reality.

The Next Target: Cuba

Now we see the same narrative beginning to take shape around Cuba. For decades, American political rhetoric treated Fidel Castro as the embodiment of the Cuban political system. Even after Castro’s death, the story continues to revolve around a handful of leaders rather than the broader forces shaping Cuban society. Cuba is portrayed as a country held hostage by its rulers rather than a nation shaped by its own history, political institutions, and popular movements.

This framing conveniently ignores one key factor: more than sixty years of U.S. economic sanctions. Those sanctions have had enormous effects on the Cuban economy and everyday life on the island. But in the Great Man narrative, structural pressures like sanctions fade into the background. The blame rests on the leadership alone. The message is familiar: change the leaders, and the system collapses.

History Is Made by People

Socialists have long rejected the Great Man theory for a simple reason: it misunderstands how societies actually work. History is not driven by a few powerful individuals. It is shaped by millions of workers, activists, communities, and social movements struggling over the direction of their societies. Leaders matter, but they do not exist in a vacuum. They rise from political systems, economic conditions, and historical struggles that cannot be erased simply by removing a single person. We call this framing a ""people's history.""

Understanding that reality forces us to ask harder questions about U.S. foreign policy. It forces us to examine the structures of power: economic pressure, sanctions, military alliances, and global inequality. Those questions are uncomfortable. They challenge the comforting idea that America is simply rescuing the world from a series of bad leaders. But if we want an honest conversation about empire, we have to stop telling ourselves fairy tales about great men."

Yeah, I know, 

gas has gone up lately. 

Well, I can't afford to 

not go to school because 

I need the loans. 

I know you need the loans too. 

I know, three bankruptcies. 

That must be hard. 

You won't talk to the union rep. 

No, yeah, I'm sure he's incompetent. 

So you quit? 

And your car got repossessed? 

And you need mine? 

And your wife's parents got deported, so they can't help either? 

Yeah, I know. 

Well, you know if you...

Have you eaten? No? 

We can stop at McDonalds. 

No, I know I said we're boycotting them

but I'm too tired to think of

anything else. 

I'm okay. 

Yeah, you're right, if we had communism in America, we wouldn't have Subway anymore. 

Yeah, I see the stuff in Iran. 

Yeah, he's doing okay. Medical care is just expensive. 

You paid for your wife's out of pocket and now you can't afford groceries and she won't get on government sponsored care because she's not sick enough, even though everything is chronic? 

Yeah, I know.

I know. 

I love you too.

The Colorado Democratic Party caucus and assembly process just wrapped, culminating in the state assembly on Saturday, March 28th in Pueblo. Thank you to the hundred-plus comrades who participated. Your presence made a palpable difference.

We learned in Pueblo that Democrats are hungry for material change. Some of the loudest cheers from delegates came when candidates named wealth discrepancies and the purchase that the billionaire class has on Colorado politics. Concrete demands landed with far more force than the vague platitudes so common in stump speeches.

That energy translated into results. DDSA-endorsed Melat Kiros beat Diana DeGette 158-77, nearly locking the fifteen-term incumbent out of the primary ballot entirely. Julie Gonzales won roughly 75% of delegates, not only securing ballot access but preventing Karen Breslin from clearing the 30% threshold. David Seligman closed the gap to within a percentage point of Jena Griswold for Attorney General. Amanda Gonzalez beat out Jessie Danielson for Secretary of State by a nearly two-to-one margin.

It is notable that establishment figures of the Colorado Democratic Party, Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper, were absent from the assembly. They chose to bypass the democratic process rather than face a base that has moved well past them. That choice concedes that the progressive and socialist base now sets the terms of engagement, and it may cost them more in credibility than an expensive signature-gathering campaign ever could.

The platform told the same story. DSA members had fought to defend progressive language against establishment attempts to water it down in the lead-up to the assembly. When that language came before delegates on Saturday, they reinstated it by an overwhelming margin. The platform now includes opposition to the genocide of Palestinians, support for their right to statehood, a call to cut off aid to Israel, and support for 340B drug pricing. The Abolish ICE minority report won 92.4% support. While the platform is both imperfect and non-binding, it represents a clear demand by Democrats to move away from establishment politics, and a real opportunity for DDSA to capitalize on.

Despite these wins, there were hard lessons. In the state treasurer race, two progressive candidates, Brianna Titone and John Mikos, both ran on a public bank of Colorado as part of their platform. They split the vote, each missing the 30% threshold. This allowed Opportunity Caucus-adjacent Jeff Bridges to easily make the ballot and run unopposed in the primary. Mobilizing just fourteen more delegates could have swung that race. When aligned campaigns falter like this, we should study them as organizing blueprints and as the clearest argument yet for Ranked Choice Voting in the caucus and assembly process.

Electoralism is simultaneously a point-in-time checkpoint where we get to see what people are responding to and an opportunity to build a movement that extends beyond any one campaign. This cycle's wins show that progressives are ascending, and we socialists are the clarion call for that work. We should not turn away from the hard work of electoral campaigns and the piecemeal gains that come with it. Nor should we let our vision of a mass movement prepared for a true rupture atrophy. Instead, we double down and use these results to organize harder between elections so that our skills and influence grow while others wait for the next cult of personality to seize them.

This is not the end but the beginning. Now that ballot access has been secured for Melat, the work is just starting. Will you join us in ensuring she wins the June 30th primary and is the Democratic nominee for CO-1? Will you help us build lasting power across the metro area to advance socialist values? There are many ways to get plugged in: join our electoral meetings or the electoral Slack channel to learn more.

how many weapons of mass destruction will our country find –

searching in the burned-out craters where once stood a family’s home

symbols of resistance cooked into the flesh of civilians.

or are they victims or human shields or casualties or puppets of the regime or terrorists?

draw a peace sign on our hellcats so they know it comes with good intentions,

pray they sought the white Christian religion out before meeting an unavoidable death.

we were just following orders from America’s rich and powerful–

please don’t take it personally.

how many war crimes will our country commit

so the girls we killed can go to school,

the people elect a president, one of America’s choosing, 

give their oil rights to the rich?

& how many Iraqis will be denied a funeral–

no bodies for their family to find.

less than a hundred is an accident, more than a million is a statistic

if you’re brown – labelled collateral. 

how many Americans will be sent home in coffins?

their parents bury their kin, 

draped in the flag that sent them to die.

politicians crocodile teary-eyed speeches, lay medals drenched in blood.

called a hero, a martyr, or a symbol of a cause– 

ask not what your country won’t do for you

but what you’ll give for them.

how much of your humanity are you willing to sacrifice 

for a government that doesn’t love you back