February 2026

A condensed, theses version of this essay is available here.

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I would like to dedicate this essay to Asad Haider, whose recent passing is devastating for his family, friends, and loved ones first and foremost. Asad was also an incredible teacher and mentor to myself and so many others, and I will forever be indebted to his thought and guidance. His work in Viewpoint Magazine, Mistaken Identity, and elsewhere will continue to influence communist thought for a very long time. He was one of the great theorists of our time, and his recent work on Lazarus and emancipatory politics was a major inspiration for this essay.

The bulk of this essay was written throughout the summer of 2025, and it’s under difficult circumstances that I present it to all of you.

Communism is necessarily a negation of everything that exists, and this negation can only happen through the complete transformation of everyday life in the construction of the new. This is the logical addendum to the communist hypothesis which asserts that this world is not necessary. Not the state, not the capitalist mode of production, not markets, not the police, and not ICE. None of it. Not only is this world not necessary, but a new one must be created. Rupture is thus the crux of communism. An issue in the history of the communist movement is an attachment to the world as it currently exists, but revolutionary situations throw everything out the window, and the entire world as we know it is on trial while people invent new ways of living. Organizers don’t necessarily have to abandon previous strategies, and ideally they should be developed with the reality of rupture in mind, but a completely new set of conditions is laid bare. 

The last large-scale political-economic crisis is still in the rear view mirror. We are just about a half decade removed from the turbulent 2020 which saw the second defeat of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary race, a global pandemic which transformed the nature of everyday life and the economy, and the George Floyd protests against police brutality and the carceral state. These events have all shaped the present conjuncture in the United States. Sanders’ primary loss led to the election of Joe Biden, whose impotent presidency overlapped with the intensification of global conflict in Gaza and Ukraine, while also paving the way for Trump’s resurgence and eventual 2024 Presidential Election victory. The Covid-19 pandemic’s impact has yet to fully reverberate, but it only intensified the divisions in American society while producing new generations whose development has been stunted, alongside mass death and disablement. Lastly, the George Floyd Protests can be connected to a new wave of struggles and repression, like the Stop Cop City movement, the Encampments, and now the anti-ICE riots playing out in parts of the country. The Summer of 2020 also emboldened the paranoia of contemporary fascism, as the Trump administration is now ruthlessly cracking down on protestors and immigrants. 

What does all of this mean for contemporary communist organization?

The years preceding the summer of 2020 were marked by two prominent organizational currents within the US left: the social democratic electoral campaigns that dominated DSA’s post-2016 surge, and base-building (both within DSA and the broader communist milieu). The former strategy was designed to continue the momentum of Bernie’s 2016 campaign, which saw a mass influx of members into DSA and a renewed interest in socialism by running socialists at every level of government (mostly in congress and local government). Base building, on the other hand, was a strategy focused on organizing the unorganized in order to develop working class organization, which could then become the base for a mass socialist politics. 2020 was a critical inflection point—the electoralist bubble burst following Bernie’s second defeat, and base building’s limits were laid bare. After all, how could a mass movement against the state, which went as far as burning down police stations, form outside of the socialist movement? If base-building had been successful to that point, wouldn’t the organized left have played a larger role in that summer? 

Of course, neither strategy was defeated in the absolute sense. The electoralists continued canvassing for socialists at the local level, and base builders saw an even greater need to organize the unorganized. Both strategies continue to proliferate today, albeit in different, evolved forms. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race has reignited debates on electoral politics, abolition, and struggles over the meaning of his candidacy for socialist politics.[1] While the meaning of base building has evolved over the last five years, many organizations continue to espouse its premises in political organization.

The question of organization feels more pressing than ever in the face of the Palestinian Genocide and the brazen fascism of Trump’s second term. The 2025 riots in LA protesting ICE’s gestapo-esque practices, alongside recent events in Minnesota, have only heightened parallels with the Summer of 2020. Does the Left feel any more equipped now than it did then to adequately intervene in our conjuncture? And if the answer is negative, are existing strategies at least on the right path towards creating a force capable of delivering communism?

Some might balk at this kind of approach by thinking we’re not nearly ready to be discussing the transition towards communism. After all, how can we discuss communism in a context where fascist forces, whether through the state itself (ICE) or outside of it, are breathing down our necks? Shouldn’t resisting these forces be our primary focus right now? In fact this is what we’re seeing right now in Minnesota, where a combination of nascent local organizations (like safety brigades and rapid response groups) and pre-existing formal organizations (like labor and tenant unions) are pushing back against their federal occupation, culminating in an unprecedented general strike on Friday, January 23rd.

There’s two responses to that line of thought: 1) If communism isn’t on the horizon, no matter how distant (even if it’s just a spec barely visible from the shoreline), then what’s the point? 2) How can you reach an end goal if it’s not even factored into your strategy?

To the first point, the communist hypothesis, articulated by Badiou, asserts that this world is not necessary. Haider builds on this formulation to say that in the absence of sustaining the communist hypothesis, which has become the norm in our conjuncture, we are only left with forms of adjustment to the world as it currently exists.[2] These forms are the formation of political ideologies based on ad hoc opinions, using social media to demonstrate one’s politics, and a general preoccupation with political and social identities. Thus we do not sustain the communist hypothesis today, we do not produce egalitarian forms (or egalitarian exceptions), and our political vision is restricted as a result (we do not imagine other worlds). Without sustaining the communist hypothesis, we will not have the capacity to produce a communist world, nevermind the ability to fully topple capital. 

Secondly, if communism isn’t directly posed in relation to strategy, individuals and organizations will be pulled back into the world as it currently exists, whether in the form of pursuing entrance into the capitalist state or taking capitalist social relations as a given (such as the worker/boss or tenant/landlord relation). The whole point of communism is to dismantle the state and capitalist social relations, and while that can’t happen in one fell swoop, it has to be posed at some point. There needs to be some understanding of how to move from day-to-day subsistence struggles (to use Phil Neel’s turn of phrase) to revolution proper. This doesn’t mean we need an elaborate blueprint that outlines how to do this at every step, especially since the tactics to do so can only be formulated from within the concrete situation. But a failure to adhere to the communist hypothesis will always lead back to what currently exists, even though the whole point is to transcend it.

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Before proceeding into an analysis of class and party in relation to base-building, I want to offer some background on the concept of base-building to better contextualize the rest of the essay. Working class organization is historically the base of communist politics, and the goal of base-building is to construct this in our conjuncture. Göran Therborn conceptualizes Marxism as a triangle historically containing three points: the study of contradiction, the mode of production, and socialist politics.[3] The collapse/destruction of socialist politics towards the end of the twentieth century disconnected the triangle. 

Base-building was initially staged in opposition to activism, which was seen as the dominant nature of the U.S. Left in the mid-2010s following Occupy.[4] Activism is conflated with an abandonment of working class politics, where activists instead merely network with each other on ideological grounds. Base building, on the other hand, seeks to organize the unorganized, whether workers or tenants, with the goal of producing new militants. Base-building was thus designed in part to produce unity amongst the divided, atomized working class. The base-building tendency initially coalesced around the organizations and individuals that formed the Marxist Center in the late 2010s before disbanding in 2022, largely due to internal conflicts over organizational form and structure.[5] Some of the main practitioners of base-building today can be found in DSA.[6]

Two common premises of base-building are the collapse of twentieth century communism and the failures of contemporary social-democracy and/or progressivism. The former can be understood as the problem of disorganization, since there is a general absence of working class organization in our conjuncture.[7] The latter was specifically exposed in the defeat of Bernie’s presidential campaigns, and in the difficulty of sustaining an electoral strategy that meaningfully challenges the status quo. The recent Zohran Mamdani mayoral victory in NYC may be able to tip the scales for electoral strategies, but we still have very little knowledge of how his term will actually play out. DSA electeds have historically faced considerable disadvantages even if they manage to get elected, and it’s unclear how democratic socialists will be able to account for those. Regardless, many conceptions of base-building are centered on a presupposition where the working class is the subject of politics and where the goal of organization is to cultivate working class protagonism. 

Class

I will begin with an assessment of base-building in relation to class and organization before turning to the party-form, which has been positioned as a solution to the problems that arise in base-building.

There are two ambiguous points in how base-building has been theorized. One is on whether the goal of base-building is to rebuild working class organization or to build new forms of it (or perhaps both), and the other is whether base-building is a practice that precedes or enables politics, or whether it’s a practice that is itself political. These ambiguities can be reframed into the four statements, some of which may stand in opposition to each other: 

1. Base-building is the reconstruction of the organizational infrastructure of the twentieth century.[8]
2. Base-building is constructing new forms of (class?) organization.[9]
3. Base-building is a process that is political in itself. 
4. Base-building is a process that precedes and enables real politics.

These four statements will be explored at various points throughout the essay, rather than all at once. Additionally, they will be explored at a higher level of abstraction because they touch on a number of debates in communist organization, both now and historically. For now, I will explore statement one. 

Reconstruction or Building the New?

The United States and most of Western Europe exhibited a similar pattern of mass communist parties and unions dominating working class organization in the twentieth century. While the existence of these organizations established a working class culture and habits of collective struggle, they were insufficient in establishing communism. Instead, these organizations served to minimize the degree of exploitation faced by the working class by fighting for better conditions for workers. They were integrated into the larger capitalist system and the class struggle was contained relatively easily, at least in the US. France and Italy were two countries where working class organization came closer in escalating the communist struggle, but even then they ended up becoming neutralizing forces in emancipatory struggles.[10]

The immediate objection to my claim is that in order to have a revolution in general, we need an organized working class to halt production. Additionally, one could argue that the problem of the twentieth century wasn’t the forms of struggle per se, but the larger forces of neutralization that forced communists into dead ends. In other words, it’s not the case that parties and unions are necessarily neutralizing forces when emancipatory struggles kick into higher gear, but that the organizers of the time weren’t able to overcome the opposing forces which were armed with an entire legal and repressive state apparatus, which could not only exert physical force to neutralize struggles, but also pass legislation that would constrain the development of additional working class organization, or of its fortification. That is precisely what happened in the United States. The greatest period of labor struggles in US history occurred through the CIO in the 1930s at the height of the depression. The CIO exhibited incredible militancy to struggle against the then dominant AFL, which was a business union integrated into the capitalist state. The CIO formed as a committee within the AFL before splitting in 1938, and eventually merging in 1955. The CIO was unable to overcome the forces of neutralization, mainly the legal apparatus of the state.[11] 

The question then for contemporary communists engaged in rebuilding a militant rank-and-file working class would seek ways to overcome the forces of neutralization encountered a century ago, many of which are the same.

However, this type of strategy assumes the same conditions that the organizers of the twentieth century encountered, where industrial production was at its apex. Transformations in the mode of production, mainly deindustrialization and the decomposition of the proletariat, have made it borderline impossible to reconstruct the joint institutions of parties and unions. The strategy of industrial unionism was dependent on the dominance of industrial labor within the mode of production and expanding capital accumulation. Joshua Clover says, 

The correlation between strikes, taut labor markets, industrial expansion, and high profit rates is overwhelming; the causality is logically necessary. It is premised on relative difficulties in replacing labor, capital’s unwillingness to interrupt highly profitable activities, the state’s ability to purchase the domestic peace with social wages, and labor’s capacity to increase its position and its store insofar as there is social surplus to be appropriated.

In other words, the unionism of the twentieth century was only possible in a period where capital was expanding and was thus more willing to make concessions to appease workers, since prolonged labor stoppages would disrupt accumulation. There was also enough surplus to give workers a larger portion of the pie, alongside the production process being more dependent on skilled labor, and a state ready and willing to intervene.[13] 

Deindustrialization was born out of the crisis of capital accumulation and the peskiness of organized labor, and the latter began to collapse in the seventies. The main marker of weakening working class militancy was “the collapse toward zero of strikes involving more than 1,000 workers beginning in the late seventies.”[14] Or in other words, “in the United States after 1981, only three years exceed 10 million cumulative days idle’ from strike actions, with several years below 1 million. From 1947 to 1981, the figure exceeds 10 million every single year, averaging more than twice that.”[15] Clover cites an incident in Detroit in 1973 where UAW mobilized to keep a plant open, and this became the paradigm for labor. “With the hollowing-out of the industrial sector and the loss of profitability, the main threat for both capital and labor is that a given firm will cease to exist.”[16] Struggles against capitalism at this point become less about the empowerment of labor, and capital and labor instead enter into a mutual pact for survival, preserving both the firm’s viability and the labor relation which significantly hampers the possibilities of collective bargaining. Clover dubs this the “affirmation trap” where labor affirms its own exploitation in order to survive and thus fails to be the antithesis of capital.

Clover’s arguments overlap with the arguments put forth by Endnotes. Both Clover and Endnotes borrow the concept of programmatism from Théorie Communiste to characterize the organizational infrastructure of twentieth century communism, while exploring the decomposition of the industrial proletariat and the rise of surplus populations.[17] Endnotes argues that one of the flaws in Marx’s account of the period from 1870-1970 is on industrialization, and they say that industrialization created both more jobs than Marx imagined while also being more sustainable. “There was actually a lot of space within that industrializing era for workers to be integrated into the economy. And our big idea there was that, although industrialization turned out to be stronger than Marx predicted, it was weaker than what the workers’ movement needed in order to generate the kind of political power that it aimed for.”[18] Thus the workers’ movement ended up becoming an advocate for more industrialization, and this can be seen in the anecdote that Clover cites about a plant striking to stay open. They say, “The goal can no longer be to unify the working class and set up a worker society, because once you have this process of decomposition and the emergence of this large surplus population, then the part of the class that’s still growing is doing so in this negative way.”[19]

Both Endnotes and Clover argue that capitalism has shifted from production as the site of capital accumulation to circulation, and thus workplace organizing cannot effectively orient around halting production in the same way. The refusal of work is a less effective tactic in a mode of production seeking to eliminate workers.[20] Capital’s transition towards circulation means that struggles against capital must orient around disrupting circulation and distribution. Clover differentiates this type of struggle from classical workplace organizing on the grounds that disrupting circulation has historically been the task of non-workers. He says, “if labor has the immediate access and legitimacy to interrupt production in the factory, anyone can liberate a marketplace, close a road, close a port. As in the eighteenth century, rioters may be workers, but they do not appear as workers; participants are not unified by their possession of jobs but by their more general dispossession.”[21] He acknowledges that it’s both possible and inevitable that workers will organize in sites of circulation, as recent organizing campaigns at Amazon prove, alongside the recognition that people will always struggle where they are. “Our argument is that people are somewhere else. And further that the explosion of such workplaces is symptomatic of a larger restructuring which augurs poorly for the potential of such organizing.”[22] Organizing struggles against circulation in the classical sense, through the union form, would go poorly for the reasons outlined already on capital’s decline in accumulation. 

While Clover emphatically promotes the riot as the form of struggle for our moment, and positions surplus populations as a potential revolutionary subject, Endnotes denies such an interpretation of their positions. They say, “So just as we had to argue against this idea that the surplus populations could become the new revolutionary agent, we also had to argue against the idea that the riot was the [proto-revolutionary] form [of proletarian resistance] particular to our times.”[23] Endnotes instead denies any notion of there being a pre-existing revolutionary subject that merely needs activation.[24]

One might counter that Endnotes and Clover are too dismissive of labor organizing, and too pessimistic about the possibilities of workplace organizing in general. This is Tim Barker’s argument in “The Bleak Left”. Interestingly, Barker doesn’t really disagree with Endnotes, but rather charges them as pessimists. He says, “If the techno-utopian, accelerationist Marxism can resemble Silicon Valley dreams of pure automation, Endnotes’s Marxism bears traces of survivalist pessimism.” Barker tries to turn Endnotes’ pessimism back on itself. If Endnotes critique of programmatism and traditional Marxism in general, to use Postone’s concept, is that they were too optimistic about the possibilities capitalism would present for socialism, then Endnotes overcorrects and bends the stick too far back in the other direction. “What if this new horizon,” Barker asks, “leading to class decomposition and immediate communization, is accurate in some respects but exaggerated in others?”. Barker says that Endnotes ignores the ways in which the working class is still united, while noting that it’s possible to understand the ways in which capitalism has weakened the traditional working class without abandoning traditional rank-and-file organizing, like Robert Brenner, who was oft-cited in Clover’s account of capitalism. Barker, after noting how Endnotes concedes that current struggles and new waves of worker militancy could be successful, says, “Endnotes’s pessimism persists beyond what rigor and logic call for.” Barker’s critique of Endnotes fails to convince, mainly since he doesn’t disagree with their premises on the decomposition of the proletariat and the weakening of industrial labor, and instead dislikes their conclusions, which isn’t really an argument. 

Looking at the matter descriptively, the major struggles of the last fifteen years have all been riots. We thus have a chicken or the egg situation. If riots have become the major form of struggle, does this validate the need for working class organization, or rather prove that it’s become irrelevant to where people are struggling against capital?

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Reconstructing the organizational infrastructure of the twentieth century should not be the goal of communist organization. Basing politics on sociological analysis and category of class is also succumbing to depoliticization, albeit in a more subtle way. Some organizations might focus less on importing an old mode of politics and more on applying the same theoretical and political principles that drove those old modes, but this is merely attaching a new name to an old face. 

Does this mean base-building is dead? Not quite, and I believe the points that could be salvaged are two and four, which would be a conception of base-building as constructing new forms of organization, and a conception of base-building as a process that precedes politics. 

I will explore the notion that constructing working class organization is necessarily political later in the essay. For now, I will say that it’s worthwhile to critique attempts to separate the political and the economic, but the idea of base building as necessarily political does not address the limits encountered by base building in regards to fusing working class struggles into a larger political force, nor, to use the old dialectical formula, of how quantity (accumulation of working class organization) leads to quality (communism). Or in other words, the question of how to bridge the gap from the quotidian (politics, spadework, etc.) to rupture (Politics, revolution). This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t organize, or that unions are worthless, or anything like that, but rather that we need to be very honest about their limits and finitude. I would argue working class organization is essential if, and only if, there is a clear understanding of the limits of such a task. I’ll pick up these themes after assessing the concept of the party-form, since this is often posed as a solution to the problems facing contemporary organization. 

Party

The main limits to base-building encountered so far are the limits of working class organization in regards to connecting and fusing various struggles into a larger force, and of the inability of working class organization to progress on its own towards a revolutionary process. The party is often presented as a solution to base-building’s limits, as the party is capable of both connecting local struggles into a larger force while creating a force capable of intervening in a revolutionary situation. 

The main benefit of the party, as it functioned within capitalist societies throughout most of the twentieth century, is that it produces a vertically aligned ecosystem that scales throughout every layer of organization. There is a clear pathway from the very top, with the central committee, to the bottom: local committees, workplace cells, etc. The vast network that the party creates enables it to intervene in revolutionary situations, because the party is, ideally, integrated into every layer of the working class. 

Party Problems

The primary benefit of the party-form is that it is supposed to provide a solution for uniting the divided, atomized working class. Instead of unity being constructed primarily through the process of rank-and-file class formation, which Endnotes says is more or less impossible, it is instead constructed around a program which would try to appeal to the ideological interests of workers.[25] However, it’s not entirely clear how the party actually unites the working class. It seems the party functions as a way to guarantee a solution to the problems we face without actually solving these problems, especially since there is no guarantee that DSA acting like a party would produce these effects. Arguments for the party-form often rely on an appeal to the historical authority of a party, which echoes point one of the section on class. The peaks ascended by communists in the twentieth century were achieved by parties, goes this logic, so why are we avoiding building one today? Yet, like the argument for the rank-and-file strategy, this completely underestimates how drastically changed our conditions are, while failing to consider that energy may be better spent elsewhere. 

The primary issue with the party-form, historically, is that it tries to subsume everything under it, which is why it becomes a neutralizing force in emancipatory struggles. If organization is about developing the capacity to act (potentia), then there is always the risk of that power transforming into potestas. Or in other words, the power to do things (potentia) becomes power over others (potestas) when organization becomes an excess.[26] There are many examples of communist parties neutralizing struggles by trying to subsume new organizational experiments into its sphere. The Bolsheviks subsumed the Soviets after the Russian Revolution in the creation of the party-state; the PCF became a neutralizing force during the events of May ‘68—which was initially driven by independent student groups—because they wanted to impose their own agenda onto the struggle; and the Chinese Communist Party neutralized the independent workers organizations created during the Cultural Revolution. Even in the United States, the CPUSA, despite being a marginal force by the explosive sixties, sought “to neutralize or destroy any independent left formation it could not dominate.”[27] In the CPUSA’s case, this is often the problem of a false vanguardism, where communist parties believe they have a divine right to being the vanguard in a movement. This can not only be observed in some of the large, historical CPs of the 20th century, but also in contemporary Marxist sect organizations which aspire to be mass parties, like the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation), IMT (International Marxist Tendency, since rebranded to Revolutionary Communist International), or SA (Socialist Alternative). In these organizations, the logic goes that since the organization is Marxist and possesses the correct analysis and theory, then they are naturally the vanguard of the movement and end up feeling that they have the right to dictate the strategies and tactics of concrete struggles.[28]

Another underlying premise of the party argument is that communist revolutions have historically been driven by parties, but this is not really the case. The Russian Revolution and its legacy is the biggest reason for this misconception, since the party as driving force of the Revolution was codified into the founding myth of the party-state. However, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolutions of both 1905 and 1917, and the Cultural Revolution were all spearheaded by new inventions/experiments by agents external to the existing organizational framework. The Commune was led by workers who formed a new mode of self-organization, the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions were spearheaded by the formation of the Soviets, and the Cultural Revolution was driven by organizations like the Red Guards and the independent workers organizations which were external to the Party. So why do communists still insist that parties are necessary to serve a vanguard function, when the vanguard is often located outside of it? Even May ‘68 and the Hot Autumn in Italy[29] were led by groups external to the dominant party and unions. Since forms of self-organization are usually produced during revolutionary sequences (for Badiou, the Event), this means that communist organization needs to be flexible and adaptable to changing conditions and new inventions (granted, communist organization will usually play a role in the construction of these new forms). The issue with representative forms like the Party is that it usually results in a fixed form that is unable to adapt to new conditions, and can actively stifle new inventions (as seen in May ‘68 especially). 

The Party’s Limits

The twentieth century communist movement revealed two limits for the party-form: parties become easily integrated into the bourgeois state apparatus due to their intrinsic logics, and parties and unions cannot sustain communist construction following the collapse of the old regime. The first is a limit specific to the party-form’s functioning within capitalist or bourgeois societies, while the second is a limit reached in the rare cases where crises escalate to the point of bourgeois collapse, where the opportunity to establish communism presents itself. 

The communist party-form, as it functioned in the United States and Western Europe throughout the twentieth century[30], is not much different to the bourgeois party-form, and they share the same underlying logic. The party exists to represent the interests of its base, or at least it’s supposed to, and this relation itself presupposes a separation between those who do politics and those who are represented by politicians and political processes. Communist parties are always fighting to survive if they are existing in bourgeois societies, and they encounter a wide range of obstacles; from ideological smear campaigns waged by their opponents, to legislation designed to weaken their base and ability to organize. Thus, the longer a communist party exists in bourgeois society, the more it concedes to its opponents in order to survive.[31] A communist party steadfast in advocating for revolution and armed insurrection would never be able to last. The interests of party leaders slowly diverge over time, regardless of whether they had a revolutionary commitment, and high level party agendas evolve to stake out a role in bourgeois society. The PCF was so concerned about the student revolts in May ‘68 because they were worried it would disrupt their parliamentary agenda. The point here is not to criticize these parties for failing to possess a revolutionary will, but rather that a communist party in bourgeois society cannot really exist as such. They are forced into functioning like social democratic parties that grow more concerned with mediating class conflict, just like unions, rather than trying to overthrow capitalism. One can devise all the mechanisms they want to mediate this relation, whether the right to recall representatives, the methods of the mass line, and so on, but this relation fundamentally presupposes a distinction between leaders and led. The whole point of communism, on the other hand, is to abolish this distinction. 

Lenin identifies revolutionary situations in moments of rupture, where the situation is the result of a crisis and exceptional mass activity. He identifies three symptoms of a revolutionary situation: 1) crisis among the ruling class(es) leading to mass discontent and the destabilization of the status quo; 2) mass suffering growing more acute; and 3) a rapid rise in independent mass organization. Even for Lenin the party does not create revolutionary situations, but rather finds itself thrown into one.[32] If socialist or communist parties find themselves in a revolutionary situation, then there is a possibility for intervention. The Bolsheviks were well-positioned to intervene in the Russian Revolution in part because of their grasp of the conjuncture which allowed them to formulate strategies, tactics, and slogans that resonated with the masses.[33] Communists know by heart where the story goes from here: the Bolsheviks lead the October Revolution to become the political leader of the Revolution and set about constructing a socialist society, but, due to the overwhelming obstacles they face, they largely retain the bourgeois political and economic apparatus.[34]

Germany encountered a similar situation to Russia during this period, which unfolded much differently for communists. Unlike in Russia, the communists weren’t able to intervene in the same way, in large part because of the SPD’s role as a neutralizing force. The SPD was the gold standard socialist party in the late nineteenth century due to their electoral success, Marxist political program, and integration into working class life, but by World War I it had been drifting towards reformism and nationalism. The SPD supported World War I and voted to support war credits.[35] This perceived betrayal contributed to the collapse of the Second International, where the international socialist movement split between socialists and communists, and this split would dominate the period of revolution (beginning with the February Revolution in 1917 and ending around 1923). In late October of 1918, naval mutinies sprouted in Kiel leading to a general strike and seizure of power by workers and soldiers councils. Workers and soldiers councils rapidly spread throughout Germany, culminating in a revolutionary government in Munich and the abdication of the Kaiser. Just like in Russia, the German State collapsed and a German Republic was proclaimed, with the SPD as the leading party with Ebert (leader of the SPD) as Chancellor. Almost immediately, the SPD became a neutralizing force. “Rather than harnessing working-class militancy, the leaders did their best to suppress it. The SPD upheld the constitutional reforms of late September 1918 in the hour of Germany’s military defeat, as the old regime tried to legitimize itself for negotiating with the Western Allies.”[36] Unlike in Russia, the socialists triumphed over the communists, famously culminating in the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the Freikorps, authorized by Ebert, although the Revolution and council movement would continue through to 1923. 

For Jan Appel, a German council communist of the period, the vanguard of the period was the workers councils, not the party or pre-existing unions. Parties and unions were the products of the nineteenth century and emerged as defensive forms of struggle from within capitalism and were thus incapable of building something new. The workers councils were the political invention of this period, first sprouting in the 1905 Russian Revolution before roaring back to life in 1917 and spreading like wildfire throughout Europe. Appel still maintained the party in his organizational framework, but as a junior partner to the council. Jasper Bernes, expounding on Appel’s arguments, says “The emergence of the workers’ council, which has the capacity to organize the entirety of the working class and allow it to participate directly in the revolution, obviates these antiquated mechanisms [parties and unions]. The role of the party must be to assist the transition to council power, not negotiate or temporize.”[37]

Parties do not create revolutions, nor do they necessarily ensure their completion towards a new, communist order. Worst yet, they sometimes crush the emancipatory experiments that emerge in a revolutionary situation.

Party or Organization?

Many communists conflate the party with organization in general. This position is residual from the old distinction between spontaneity and organization in the history of leftist politics, with anarchists favoring the former and communists the latter. In this framework, the only political form available to communists is the party — without it, we would have nothing. In other words, if communists reject the party, they are likely lapsing back into some form of spontaneity or tailism, where communists would merely follow the direction of the mass movement in a struggle. 

Rodrigo Nunes argues that political forms should be analyzed not through what they say they are (their intentions), but through their functions and effects. The communist party, as concept, is unique in comparison to other socialist and bourgeois political parties in that its important functions — vanguardism, analysis of the conjuncture, and cadre development — aren’t really specific to the party. Or in other words, it’s not entirely clear why a party would be necessary to carry out these functions. The typical function of a party is to represent the interests of the group they claim to represent in parliamentary or electoral systems of governance. For most bourgeois parties, there are vague claims about representing ‘the people’, while for socialists, it’s usually the working class. Communist parties also claim to represent the working class, or masses at large, but their essential functions, the ones that communists defend when defending the party-form, aren’t specific to the party — you don’t need a party to develop revolutionary theory or to train cadre.

Nunes argues that the vanguard function is also not unique to the party-form, and that it is a relational concept. He says, “A vanguard is a vanguard only if there is something else that follows and eventually fuses with it. It is an ‘advanced detachment’, but only temporarily; unlike an elite, which seeks to remain in place, a vanguard should by definition exist in order to abolish itself.”[38] This conception displaces vanguardism as conceived through a fixed position, and instead as a function. 

Salar Mohandesi makes similar arguments in “Party as Articulator”, which was written in September 2020 following the George Floyd Uprisings. Mohandesi’s point of departure is that the US Left, primarily concentrated in DSA, was not only unable to meet the moment, but it wasn’t even prepared for it in the first place. He says socialists both inside and outside of DSA struggled due to the, “glaring limitations in the dominant ways that socialists are thinking about the meaning of organization – in particular, how organizations relate to the diversity of mass unrest, the contingency of political time, and the temptation of state power.”[39] Mohandesi instead proposes a different conception of the party as one organization amongst others, aka the party in an ecology, defined by an articulating function, “which unites disparate social forces, links struggles over time, and facilitates the collective project of building socialism beyond the state.”[40] This conception of an articulating function seems to replace the historical role of verticality that the party has historically played in vertically integrating an apparatus of cells and committees, leading all the way up to the central committee at the top of the ladder. Mohandesi still defends the party, but essentially empties it of all of its historical functions. His version of the party would be one organization amongst many that seeks to unify the rest of the organizational ecology, and would ideally self-dissolve once its job is done.[41]

However, can we not separate the party, as concept, from its functions? Why do these functions have to be performed by a party per se? These questions are symptomatic of a larger tension, which is that communists are still locked into the language of traditional Marxist theory, even though new concepts that actually map onto what we’re doing are begging to be created. We’re trying to use old names to express new concepts, rather than just taking the extra step of creating a new name. This may seem like a semantic quibble, but it’s part of a larger issue in the history of communist politics where a reliance on old concepts can block the inventions necessary to carry out struggles. The Soviets, for example, refused to seize power because they believed that would disrupt the dictates of theory, where there was supposed to be a bourgeois revolution before there could be socialism. Additionally, even if one were to embrace Mohandesi’s conception of party as articulator, how would the distinction between this conception and the dominant one, play out? Would the party as articulator tendency, if it were to manifest in an organizational form, have to explain to new recruits how their conception of the party is different from others? The transmission of theory into political organization always entails modifying the theory to make it more digestible to wider swaths of the population, but does retaining old concepts while transforming their meaning really simplify matters, or does it complicate them further? Would it not be clearer to use new ones, especially in order to draw a line of demarcation? 

An issue in the history of Marxist politics was that there was never a proper theory of politics as such, and political concepts were imported from the existing theories of the times. Althusser argued that Marx, and consequently Marxism, failed to provide a theory of politics. He says, ​“You will not find in the Marxist heritage any real theory of the organizations of class struggle, and above all of political parties and trades unions. There do of course exist political, therefore practical arguments concerning parties and trade unions, but nothing which really allows us to grasp their functioning, including the forms of their malfunctioning.”[42] This dovetails with Appel’s arguments on parties and unions, or as Taylor B says in his article on politics after the 2020 Uprisings, while Marxism provides valuable tools for social analysis and the theory of class struggle, “Marx does not tell us how to apply this emancipatory framework.”[43] Marxists following Marx thus mostly borrowed political forms from the bourgeois system, outside of rare cases of egalitarian inventions like workers councils in the heat of struggle. A crucial task in our moment is to construct a new political vocabulary to replace the saturated Marxist framework, which I understand to be a conjunctural approach to politics.[44]

Politics

The party and union historically form the twin towers of Marxist political practice, and both are united around a conception of the working class as the subject of politics. Some models of self-organization which assume the working class as the subject of politics are based on epistemological or ethical claims where workers have privileged knowledge of the production process or deserve to be in control of the production process since they’re the ones doing the work. The epistemology underlying these frameworks is that knowledge comes through the experience (Operaismo, Socialisme ou Barbarie) or consciousness (Johnson-Forest Tendency) of the working class, and both rely on forms of empiricism where knowledge is the direct result of experience. In this conception, the working class is the revolutionary subject, in part, because of their privileged knowledge of production. 

However, for the bulk of the Marxist tradition, and for Marx himself, the working class was the revolutionary class due to necessity. Nunes summarizes Marx’s view on this, and demonstrates that he arrived at this conclusion through three deductions: the first is logico-conceptual, the second historico-materialist, and the third is transitivity (that there is a necessary relationship between social position and ideology). The first one concludes that the proletariat, defined as those without property, is the only class that can overthrow capitalism because it has no investment in the system. The second one concludes that the proletariat will necessarily overthrow capitalism because all other classes will assimilate into it due to the internal logic of capitalism. Lastly, transitivity guarantees that the proletariat will assume class consciousness. Nunes says, “These three steps – a position of universality determined by social structure, a capacity determined by historical development, a consciousness determined by accumulated collective experience – give us the full breadth of transitivity.”[45]

Asad Haider likewise argues that Marx had to face the crucial problem of how the proletariat could achieve a unity if market society reduced them to atomized individuals. The Communist Manifesto is Marx and Engels attempt at reconciling this problem, which Nunes outlines, by placing the proletariat in a historical process by which the conditions of capitalism themselves would generate this unity. Haider says: 

While the Manifesto suggested that the forces of historical necessity would cause this to continue into a revolution against capitalism, it became clear that there was no such automatic process. Actually, class alliances between the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat began to fracture, democratic demands did not lead to a movement against private property, and the programs of different class fractions came into open conflict. So, the defeat of 1848—when the liberal forces of the middle classes turned against the interests of the working class—introduced a crisis in the automatic conception of revolution.

Marx would become suspicious of his own theory, and while Capital presented a totally new conception of capitalism, he did not present a new theory of organization corresponding to his insights, as Althusser elaborates on in “The Crisis of Marxism”. If the proletariat cannot organically unite as a class, then it cannot be a revolutionary subject.  

Metaclassism and Hyperclassism

Before proceeding further, I would like to return to the political episodes of the sixties for a final time. As I’ve noted already, the political movements of the sixties saw emancipatory struggles reacting either against or in spite of the existing communist parties and unions. This dynamic was only possible through a recognition of the limits of the existing organizational framework on behalf of the political agents of this period. Alessandro Russo conceptualizes this framework as ‘classism’, which doesn’t refer to class based discrimination or prejudice, but to a political framework based on class where communist parties guarantee the political existence of workers. Classism isn’t defined in specific terms but it refers to the entire conceptual edifice of class politics: class analysis, class struggle, class antagonism, class party, etc. His conception is similar to Endnotes’ notion of programmatism or to Postone’s traditional Marxism. For Russo, the political singularity of the sixties cannot be interpreted through the categories of class and class struggle, and the entire period was actually a political test of classism. He says, “the political laboratory of the sixties, instead, proved that the main obstacle to egalitarian politics was that, under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, organizational invention had become indistinguishable from the governmental circumstances.”[47] Or in other words, communist parties in power either ended up reproducing the political and economic logics of bourgeois society, as in the USSR and China, or those still operating in bourgeois society were integrated into the parliamentarian system, as in France and Italy. 

Russo identifies the same political tension in Marx that has already been observed in this essay, which is that while class organization became the model for emancipatory politics in the era of programmatism, it is not necessarily the only form that emancipatory politics can take. More specifically, communism necessarily entails the abolition of class. The sixties saw this tension emerge in full force, as the limits of the traditional Marxist framework were being fully realized at the same time as the tectonic plates of the capitalist system began to shift underneath the surface of industrial labor. Thus, a form of meta-classism emerges in the sixties, which Russo identifies as conceiving of an emancipatory politics beyond classism. This can be seen in the persistent search for new revolutionary subjects, whether in black people, women, students, or even within different sections of the working class. 

The problem is that new concepts can never be forged immediately to replace the old ones. As Althusser argues, the development of any theoretical practice is forced to work with existing concepts.[48] Marx had to work with the categories inherited from Hegelian philosophy and classical political economy while forging his own concepts. Political agents in the sixties did the same, and this produces a different dynamic Russo calls hyperclassism, which entails the radicalization of classist categories. Russo says, “when the revolutionaries borrowed the old concepts, they often emphasized an even more radical class standpoint, in order to defend their inventions from prevailing political discourses, and to avoid being confused with them. However, the more the arguments became hyperclassist, the more they lacked distinction from the cultural framework that operated to annihilate experimental politics.”[49] In other words, if the sixties revealed the limits of the traditional Marxist framework, then any attempt to appropriate classist categories would be impossible to distinguish from orthodoxy. A good example is in the amount of Maoist sects that proliferated in the seventies that would all accuse each other of revisionism, and in fact this still happens today. Instead of realizing that existing categories are insufficient for understanding the political situation, political actors would double down on the existing categories in order to distinguish themselves from orthodoxy. China is not communist you see, they’re just not properly Marxist-Leninist. What this type of analysis misses is that the experiment of the sixties called into question the entire validity of traditional Marxism, and specifically whether new political experiments needed to be authorized by the then dominant communist parties. 

To provide one example of the oscillation between metaclassism and hyperclassism, Russo analyzes the political language used by Mao at various points in communist China.  

In 1957, in ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’, he [Mao] proposed a political category that we can consider the first expression of a new political vision, at the very beginning of the ‘long sixties’. The ‘contradictions among the people’ are not ‘class contradictions’ in principle. Mao argued that class antagonism alone was not sufficient to define revolutionary politics, and that communist organization needed to deal with a huge range of contradictions that were not dependent on the categories of class and class struggle. These contradictions did not involve class antagonism, but an infinite multiplicity of non-antagonistic relations. In this sense, we can say that Mao assigned metaclassist tasks to communist politics.

However, a few years later, in 1962, he declared: ‘Never forget class struggle.’ In this case, class struggle was synonymous with politics. He surely meant that egalitarian inventions were essential, and was opposed to those who insisted that the task of the Communist Party was to govern the ‘development of the productive forces’. However, for the purpose of fighting de-politicization, he resorted fully to a classist perspective, declaring even more peremptorily: ‘Never forget.’ 

The dynamic between metaclassism and hyperclassism can be boiled down to the realization of the limits of existing social categories, on the one hand, while lapsing back into a new form of social analysis which can replace these categories. For Clover, for example, the social analysis that defined traditional Marxism no longer applies to our current moment. Instead, he offers a new form of social analysis that generates new political categories: riot, surplus population, etc. 

Returning back to our conjuncture, Haider observed the same phenomenon in the discourse emerging out of Occupy. He says,

The Occupy movement pointed to the possibility of class struggle in a manner that seemed unprecedented in my lifetime, with the language of the 99 percent. But this was really a word without a concept, an empty space where we hoped class struggle would emerge—statistics are not a concept of class. And there was considerable debate in this period about precisely what class concepts would be adequate for the present: the old proletariat, the new proletariat, the precariat, the multitude, the surplus population. Just as we tried to draw knowledge from the days when class struggle was a universal referent for revolutionary politics, we were faced with their historical limits.

The theories of class struggle in the Marxist tradition were situated in the era of industrial production, and Haider notes that the Italian workerists already confronted this problem. The workerists response was to say that the figure of the industrial worker had been superseded by a new figure of worker, like the socialized worker, etc. Haider says that this stops short of confronting a deeper problem: “was it a viable theory to identify a hegemonic figure of the working class in the first place, to view the historical process as a succession of class compositions?”[52] 

Haider says his encounter with Lazarus displaced his own theoretical framework of focusing on class as a sociological category, and towards “a political investigation of the successes and failures of the twentieth-century revolutions. This set of sequences, I came to think, framed the challenges of maintaining an emancipatory politics today.”[53]

Severing of Politics and Social Analysis

The problem is the assumption that politics must be deduced from social analysis[54], and this assumption haunts the entirety of the Marxist tradition and most forms of left politics.  Marxism typically derives politics from a historical process, or bases it on an analysis of the social formation. In the latter, politics become invariant.[55] The former can be seen in Marx’s theory of organization as presented in the Manifesto, covered earlier in the essay, where he deduced that the proletariat is the revolutionary class because of its structural relation to capital and the class’s impending universality (capitalism would spread to the entire world, creating proletarians everywhere). Even though there are many forms of Marxism that don’t necessarily deduce politics from historical necessity, they are still reliant on forms of social analysis that base politics on an analysis of classes, their relations, which ones possess revolutionary potential, which ones are reactionary, etc.[56] Russian Marxists, the most rigorous stagists ever produced, did the same thing, attempting to generate a new analysis which would correspond to their conditions. In that case, it was a backward imperialist country with predominantly feudal social relations, which meant that  a bourgeois revolution would first be necessary before socialism could be developed. This assumption can be seen in every Marxist political formation where political strategies are preceded by social analysis. 

The problem is that politics doesn’t work like this, and revolutions never follow the sheet music of theory. Knowledge of the social formation really has nothing to do with actual political processes. This isn’t to say that revolutions explode out of thin air, and Marxists are usually correct when they identify the contradictions that lead to them, but this knowledge is really only useful after the fact. Or in other words, social analysis is well and good when it’s restricted to analysis as such, but it shouldn’t be used to determine the tasks of politics. The premise that politics must be deduced from social analysis produces complacency and results in Marxists being caught by surprise when mass activity erupts. Mohandesi observed this of the US Left during the Summer of 2020, and I would argue that this was partly a result of this entire mindset. Every revolutionary sequence is triggered by ‘unexpected’ events. The Russian Revolution of 1905 began after a few workers were fired from a factory for belonging to a police union. May ‘68 began after some rebellious students were disciplined. The Cultural Revolution began with a discourse on a play.[57]

Althusser’s concept of overdetermination, which while applied specifically to the Russian Revolution, is used to demonstrate that revolutions are the result of a multiplicity of contradictions that fuse together at the same time to produce an ‘exceptional’ situation. The thrust of his argument is that the Russian Revolution didn’t follow the Marxist schema at all, and it in no way was a result of the basic contradiction between workers and capital. The first communist revolution happened in Russia because it was the weakest link in the imperialist chain. “It had accumulated the largest sum of historical contradictions then possible; for it was at the same time the most backward and the most advanced nation, a gigantic contradiction which its divided ruling classes could neither avoid nor solve.” Russia was thus “pregnant with two revolutions.” Althusser continues:

The whole Marxist revolutionary experience shows that, if the general contradiction (it has already been specified: the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, essentially embodied in the contradiction between two antagonistic classes) is sufficient to define the situation when revolution is the ‘task of the day’, it cannot of its own simple, direct power induce a ‘revolutionary situation’, nor a fortiori a situation of revolutionary rupture and the triumph of the revolution. If this contradiction is to become ‘active’ in the strongest sense to become a ruptural principle, there must be an accumulation of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ so that whatever their origin and sense (and many of them will necessarily be paradoxically foreign to the revolution in origin and sense, or even its ‘direct opponents’), they ‘fuse’ into a ruptural unity: when they produce the result of the immense majority of the popular masses grouped in an assault on a regime which its ruling classes are unable to defend. Such a situation presupposes not only the ‘fusion’ of the two basic conditions into a ‘single national crisis’, but each condition considered (abstractly) by itself presupposes the ‘fusion’ of an ‘accumulation’ of contradictions.

We can distill two main points from Althusser’s argument: 1) revolutionary situations do not result from the basic contradiction between workers and capital. 2) If this contradiction is to become a rupture point in a revolution, it must be due to its fusion and accumulation with other contradictions. Thus, class struggle is not political, in the strong sense, in that it doesn’t necessarily lead to revolution. Revolution requires something extra. 

While Althusser’s conception of overdetermination still holds a place for determination in the last instance by the economic, Haider argues that notion “is conceptually vacuous, its content already ruthlessly destroyed by the concept of overdetermination and immediately undermined by the beautiful and mystifying formulation of the lonely hour which never comes.”[59] I would argue that the bulk of Althusser’s work is strained by a tension between attempting to insulate Marxism from its weak points while simultaneously producing a conception of politics that goes beyond it. This is why Haider says that “Althusser presented a distinct method and practice of social analysis, and a distinct concept of history, represented by terms like overdetermination, conjuncture, structural causality, and the encounter.”[60]

Lastly, a reliance on theory to guide politics results, at times, in Marxists missing the moment because they’re unable to come to grips with the dynamics of the mass movement. What’s remarkable about the Russian Revolution was how insistent the socialists were on the necessity of a bourgeois revolution, despite the movements of the masses screaming in their face that this was neither desirable nor necessary.[61] Throughout the Revolution, whether in the period of February-October 1917 or after it, the insistence on the necessity of bourgeois revolution was an obstacle to establishing communism. The Petrograd Soviet didn’t want power and ceded it to the Provisional Government, the latter of which was grossly incompetent and insisted on fighting a deeply unpopular war. All of the left-wing parties also insisted on a bourgeois revolution, although only the Bolsheviks were really opposed to the Provisional Government and advocated for all powers to the Soviets, which itself was an ambiguous slogan.[62] Even after the Bolsheviks took power in October, they were still limited by a moderate political vision. The lesson here is that there was a massive discrepancy between the politics deduced from prior social analysis, bourgeois revolution, constituent assembly, etc., versus the politics that organically developed from within the situation: workers committees, soviets, etc. The inability, or delay, to grasp this dynamic hamstrung the development of communism in Russia. This is not to suggest that all of the obstacles encountered in this period would have been overcome if there was a greater ability to grasp the situation, but the insistence on adhering to prior analysis and strategies were itself an obstacle to the Revolution. 

As touched on earlier, every revolutionary sequence witnesses its own forms of mass invention. Throughout Europe in 1917-1923, it was the workers councils. For the Parisians half a century prior, it was the Commune. In the Cultural Revolution it was the independent workers and student organizations that formed outside of the CCP. These forms of organization that emerge during the heat of struggle form the revolutionary core of the sequence, and these can’t be predicted or willed into existence in periods of peace. In a recent article on the party, Phil Neel writes, “in the midst of struggles and rebellions of various intensities, myriad forms of organization (often mischaracterized as ‘spontaneous’ or ‘informal’) emerge from the tactical puzzles posed to the collective intelligence of participants and, only once this practical substrate of popular power is formed, can more ‘strategic’ or theoretical forms of larger-scale coordination and power-building begin to take shape. In other words, those who enter into the rebellion demanding that ‘we get organized’ presume a ‘we’ that does not yet exist.”[63]

Rupture

The volcano is still rumbling underground—tomorrow it will erupt and bury them all in ashes and lava! — Karl Liebknecht, “Despite it All!”

All the world must suffer a big jolt. There will be such a game that the ungodly will be thrown off their seats, and the downtrodden will rise. — Thomas Müntzer

One must continue to find the rupture. — Sylvain Lazarus, “Notes on Post-Leninism”

I have already broached two important points to be made about rupture. One, to use Lazarus’ dictum, they happen rarely and infrequently. A glance at history alone is enough to testify this, as there have only been a handful of communist revolutions. The other point is that genuine crises, the kind that could provoke a revolution, don’t happen all that frequently either. Perhaps we could say they happen once a generation (2020, 2008?, etc.). This often catches Marxists and communists by surprise, since they are usually bogged down in the painstaking work of organizing against capitalism every single day, and sometimes struggle to see the trees for the forest. The contradiction for organizers is that revolutions aren’t possible without the daily, often mundane work of political organization, yet the actual rupture displaces the old problems that occupy us and throws new, explosive ones at our doors. We always have to be ready to dramatically switch gears[65], and in this sense an over reliance on social analysis to guide politics can become an obstacle. 

It’s sometimes helpful to make a distinction between politics and Politics—the former referring to the everyday struggles that are intrinsic to capitalism, and the latter referring to the moments of rupture that we understand as revolution proper. There is something extra that produces revolutionary situations and the exception to the stasis of everyday life is periods where the entire mode of production becomes destabilized and everyday life is dramatically transformed. Communists can certainly try to facilitate these conditions, but they are exceptional for a reason. Instead, communists must prepare for when these exceptional conditions unfold.[66]  

Capacity

In Italian, power roughly translates to capacity. To have capacity is to be able to do something. When you say you can do something in Italian, you use the verb “potere”, which means power. With this in mind, we can re-frame the question of building power, which often dominates left discourses[67], as building capacity. As Nunes writes, organization “concerns the problem of assembling, expanding, coordinating and deploying the collective capacity to act.”[68]

A theme of this essay was the left’s impotence during the Summer of 2020. We didn’t see it coming, we weren’t ready for it, and we weren’t even close to being organized enough to do anything. While mass action unfolded, police stations burned, and autonomous zones were created, socialist organizations were both unable to mount an effective intervention, and unable to quantitatively and qualitatively transform themselves in the aftermath. You would think that a summer which displayed that much militancy against the police-state would have led to membership spikes in radical organizations, or even DSA, nevermind transforming the activities and strategies of organizations in the aftermath. Yet here we are, five years later, still wondering whether an electoral campaign can catalyze a serious left-wing force. 

In order to intervene in moments of rupture, there needs to be some level of pre-existing mass organization. There can be no revolution without mass organization, and communists need to be integrated into every area of life. The question is really what this mass organization looks like—how it forms, the practices it develops, etc. Two of the main currents in base-building today, rank-and-file labor organization and tenant organization, are both essential in this regard if understood properly. To be more specific, communists should approach these terrains with the understanding that nothing will really come out of it, at least contained to the struggles themselves. Communists advocating for revolutionary intervention in these terrains would have to base their strategy on external goals or functions, such as producing the capacity for a total revolutionary struggle. If these site-specific struggles are to be revolutionary, they must necessarily go beyond themselves. Their political value is instrumental. 

Mass organization ought to be understood as a process of transmitting the communist hypothesis and harnessing the skills and habits of collective struggle. In tenant unions, the goal for communist organizers is to help tenants harness their own organizing skills, and to transmit the communist hypothesis, which can be done in a million different ways. In this case, it is not necessary for housing to be organized like this. It is not necessary to devote large chunks of your income to parasitic landlords. It is not necessary for your dignity and comfort to be subjected to the whims of landlords or the state. And additionally, something can be done about it. There has to be some kind of relationship between politics and social analysis, and while invoking mass organization could drag us back into the problematic critiqued earlier in the essay, identifying current potential organizing nodes within our conjuncture does not imply a broader social outcome within this framework. Or in other words, rank-and-file organization is possible without maintaining belief in a pre-existing revolutionary subject, usually the working class, since any notion of a revolutionary subject can only be forged from within an event. 

Another key feature of mass organization is the negation of the separation that defines bourgeois politics: the separation between those who think and make decisions versus those who decisions are made for. In bourgeois politics, this crystallizes in an organizational model defined by a hierarchy where those on the top make decisions, while those at the bottom merely carry them out. This type of organization can also be observed in the vast majority of workplaces. Communism, on the other hand, is premised on an egalitarianism which rejects this kind of hierarchy. In political organization, this would mean that everyone has a say in making decisions. This doesn’t entail complete horizontal leadership, but rather that leadership wouldn’t be a fixed position that specific groups of individuals monopolize.[69] 

Anticipating the Rupture

Every political sequence ends—this is essential to the theory of depoliticization. Depoliticization, and in our case the termination of the communist movement of the twentieth century, haunts our conjuncture. We copy the practices and habits of old organizations without nearly the same stakes. We split, argue, and attack each other as if we’re actually on the brink of civil war, and not just small groups of individuals debating the minutiae of small-scale tactics. We carry the banners of organizations that were destroyed long ago. Many twenty first century communists are merely practicing forms of political LARP (live action role play). 

But if every political sequence ends, then every political sequence must also begin somewhere. In his article written after the Summer of 2020 uprisings, Taylor B explores this concept of beginnings. He says all beginnings “struggle against an antagonistic force, which seeks to neutralize emancipatory forms.”[70] Taylor identified four potential beginnings over the last decade (he was writing in 2020): Occupy, Ferguson, the Bernie Sanders movement, and the Summer of 2020 Uprisings. Occupy, Ferguson, and the Uprisings were all continuous and coalesced with the Black Lives Matter movement. Taylor, wondering why specifically the murder of George Floyd provoked the largest urban uprisings in the US since the sixties, says:

What set off this beginning? Was it the video of George Floyd’s murder? Was it the one in 2,000 deaths of African Americans due to the COVID-19 pandemic? Was it the concentration of unemployment in communities of color that are forced to live in greater numbers in substandard housing? Was it the failure for meaningful reform following Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 and the Ferguson rebellion in 2014? I think we can say the event was the moment in which these realities fused in thought for people. This fusion, this rupture, led to the discovery that a past truth is still true: that in the US, Black lives largely do not matter. And it is this truth that has led a heterogeneous mix of people in Minneapolis and around the world to take to streets to combat it: to say that if life matters, Black lives must matter.

Thus for Taylor, Black Lives Matter is the name of an anti-racist movement against the police and the state. There were obviously conflicting trends within this movement, and plenty of politicians and individuals were able to profit off of it, both politically and personally, but this doesn’t negate the potential beginnings signaled by the rupture in thought.  

Political energy is produced in beginnings. One of the biggest obstacles to communist organization is burnout, which is inevitable in a society that forces us to work in order to survive, and any organizer knows that it’s incredibly difficult to sustain organizational energy over time. Political beginnings produce a surplus of initiative and excitement, they’re a surge of adrenaline that overpowers fatigue from everyday life.

But beginnings usually do not expand into an actual political sequence, since those are rare. To use Althusserian language, we could say that encounters are always possible at any moment, but the fusion of an encounter is rare. This encounter would be between people and a rupture in subjectivity provided by the crisis. I think the Palestinian crisis has also been a beginning, but what would it take for it to become the start of a new political sequence? To briefly sketch out a theory, there needs to be a fusion of a revolutionary situation and an organized political subject (this subject might not pre-exist the situation, and will likely form during it). A revolutionary situation itself is a product of a crisis in the ruling class which makes the status quo impossible to maintain and of when the suffering of the masses has grown so acute that they’re willing to do anything to change the state of affairs. Taylor adds that every political sequence faces forces of neutralization, most of which are unique to the situation. 

Since Taylor lists the Bernie Sanders movement as a possible beginning for politics in the past, one might naturally wonder whether Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in NYC can serve a similar function, but I don’t think so. For one, the scale is significantly reduced since his movement can only encompass one city, even if people across the country are energized by his victory. The Bernie campaigns were so significant because they were nation-wide movements at a higher scale and oriented around the highest level of office in the entire government. The second reason is that the beginning opened up by the Bernie campaign was caused by its failure. If Bernie won, it might not have had the same impact in radicalizing generations of young people. It likely would have morphed into a version of liberalism, continuing the dominant narratives at the time on the arc of progress. It would have been a vindication of the liberal mindset where things get better over time and that our institutions are built for us. It was precisely Bernie’s failure that exposed not only the limits of social democracy in the twenty-first century United States, but of the entire liberal mythology itself. Additionally, as Taylor writes, “the reason a beginning of emancipatory politics could occur in a presidential primary is that Sanders was an insurgent candidate. To vote for him was to agree that some form of political organization was needed beyond the DNC. This is epitomized by his call for ‘political revolution.’”[72] Zohran does not represent the same level of insurgency because he’s running as a Democrat. While Zohran’s candidacy points to the failure of the Democrats in the same way Bernie’s did, his candidacy is not necessarily calling the entire party’s existence into question. Additionally, Zohran’s support for the NYPD and his shifting rhetoric is increasingly mitigating any insurgent status that his candidacy could have posed. 

Ruptures aren’t just a break or fracture in the way society is organized and who holds power, but also in subjectivity. When people’s entire way of thinking about the world is changed, and when they question the necessity of the status quo while expanding what they think is possible. Even though the Summer of 2020 never became a true rupture, I had political conversations with people that I never thought were possible. I was able to explain why burning down a police station was a genuine political tactic without being dismissed immediately by people who would normally never entertain the validity of such an action. When life is completely destabilized by a pandemic and you’re already questioning the entire state of the world, you’re much more willing to entertain ideas that would normally be considered out of bounds. 

Lazarus thus locates politics in subjectivity for this reason, and political sequences for him are defined by what people invent. While we can’t prescribe what form this thought will take until an actual ruptural situation, we can explore potential beginnings for politics in moments where subjectivity seems to be inventing something new. Communists thus need to be attuned to the thought of people. In his letters to Maria Antonietta Macciocchi of the Italian Communist Party, Althusser makes an analogy between an organizer and a psychoanalyst. He says, “the militant is somewhat analogous to a psychoanalyst: he ‘knows’ more than the person he listens to, but what he ‘knows’ is on a different level than that which the speaker ‘knows’, which is the specific contradiction. The militant does not ‘know’, a priori and in specific detail, just what the lives of the persons he listens to are made up of and what the major contradictions are; he learns this by listening to them and discovering a great many things he previously did not know.”[73] The organizer and people thus engage in a discourse where the former listens to the latter in order to incorporate their ideas politically, and to better understand them. The organizer, “must raise pertinent questions of his own in order to break down these silences and make the speaker discover things that he knows, but that he is not aware of knowing because they are disguised—clouded over, repressed—covered over by causes that go to the very heart of the conditions in which these people live and to the heart of the pitiful means by which they try, in spite of everything, to get by.”[74]

Anyone who organizes knows that the vast majority of the population does not possess anything close to a coherent political belief system. To engage in mass organization by discussing formal politics will likely lead nowhere, and will more likely lead back into the echo chamber of dominant political discourse. Instead, the organizer must listen to what people actually think, not affirmatively per se, but in order to ‘speak their language’ and better transmit the communist hypothesis, which can really be communicated in so many different ways.[75] Nunes makes similar points about the relationship between organization and listening, saying that organizers should never try to explain to people what they should believe or think. “To be a good leader, therefore, one must first of all be a good listener.”[76]

In the Rupture

The masses are in the streets clashing with cops and burning down police stations. Businesses have shuttered due to the fear of violence. Production has been shut down by a general strike. Classes are cancelled, but the students still congregate on campuses. Daily life grinds to a halt. Demonstrations of all kinds are organized. Slogans are spread. Graffiti is painted. People organize, whether with their neighbors, friends, or classmates. Everywhere people are wondering what is going to happen, and what might be possible. This is the rupture. The crisis. The revolutionary situation. Once you’re in it, there’s no exit, no return to normal. 

The situation is dying for someone to take the reins. To intervene. To provide leadership. And many raise their hands. Many organize marches, give speeches, and declare what needs to be done. But is anyone listening? This is the vanguard party’s time to shine. To emulate Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who emerged from the pile as the true revolutionary party that could appease the will of the masses spilling out onto the streets of Petrograd. 

As I’ve argued before, this understanding of history, revolution, and the vanguard all take as a given many of the founding myths of the USSR, codified into official state history. Revolutions don’t unfold in such a way, and every revolutionary situation witnesses a confluence of actors combining together in some cases, and clashing with each other in others. But the larger point, the need for communist intervention to seize the opportunity opened up by the rupture, stands. With that in mind, the following points elaborate on vanguardism in the rupture: 

1. There is always a vanguard. A comrade once shared an aphorism, in support of the vanguard, that even when crossing a street there is always someone who is the first to start walking, signaling to the others that it’s time to go. There is always someone, or a group of people, leading the way at a given time, but this leadership status is temporary and can change at any time. This ties back to Nunes’ notion of vanguard as function.

2. The vanguard position is earned, not preordained. No group necessarily has ownership of the vanguard function, regardless of whether they have the correct analysis of the situation, or whether they believe themselves to be the ideal leaders. Communist intervention in moments of rupture is dependent on its relationship with the masses, or the section of the masses leading struggles against the mode of production, the state, the armed forces etc. While it’s possible for this relationship to be forged in the heat of struggle, these relationships need to be constructed ahead of time. There’s no guarantee which social groups will take action, but the more diffused amongst the social formation that communists are, the more relationships that can be built. Communists are never exterior to the masses, as the merger thesis will have you believe, but are usually integrated amongst them. The goal of a conjunctural approach to politics is to forge a path for action from within a situation. 

3. The vanguard can be formed anywhere—a party is not necessary in the classical sense. Vanguards within revolutionary sequences can historically be located in workers or soldiers councils, communes, independent worker and student organizations, and revolutionary militias. 

4. Communists need to form the tip of the spear in the rupture. Or in other words, the mass movement only has a chance of success if it’s directed towards communist ends. We wouldn’t be communists if we believed otherwise. The state must be smashed and dismantled, the old regime toppled and ousted from power, the organization of social life taken over by the masses, etc. It’s theoretically possible for communist ends to be achieved without an explicitly communist vanguard, but as we have seen, theoretical deficiencies can be exposed further down the line when the time comes to establish new social relations (or to establish the conditions for new social relations to develop).

5. In many cases there are sections of the masses that are further left than socialists, who historically approach ruptures with fear and caution. As Liebman says, the Russian Revolution, “was the result of a dialectic so complex that one is equally justified in saying that the Leninist Party seized power by the October insurrection and that the vanguard of the masses forced the Party to adopt an attitude towards the conquest of power which these masses alone manifested with constancy and persistence.”[77]

Back to the Concrete

A common response to the theories presented by Lazarus, Endnotes, or any of these figures is that it must entail the abandonment of contemporary organization since these theories hold a very high standard of what constitutes politics, but I don’t think this is the case at all. This essay began with an assessment of the strategy of base-building in our conjuncture, and I argued there were four ways of interpreting base-building politically: 

1. Base building as the reconstruction of the organizational infrastructure of the twentieth century, which had eroded by the beginning of the twenty-first leaving us in a state of widespread proletarian disorganization. 

2. Base building as the construction of new forms of organization, primarily tenants unions, which both map onto existing contradictions in capitalism, while also more concretely connecting organization with everyday life.

3. Base building as a process that is political in itself, not only because contradictions faced in base-building projects (contradictions between workers and capital via the exploitation of surplus value, etc) are themselves political, but also because working class organization will develop working class protagonism. 

4. Base building as a process that precedes politics, which can be understood in two ways: one is premised on a distinction between the economic and the political, and since base-building is relegated to economic struggle, it thus precedes political struggle. The other way of interpreting this is by distinguishing politics in an everyday, quotidian sense from politics as rupture. Marxism historically posits that the former leads to the latter, but there is no necessary correspondence between the two or of how one necessarily leads to the other. Politics, in the revolutionary sense, is about producing something extra. 

I reject the first interpretation entirely. Nostalgia for the twentieth century and for lapsed political sequences is endemic amongst the Left, and this tendency needs to be stamped out of politics. It’s one thing to admire and be interested in these sequences on a personal level, but this cannot lead to an uncritical acceptance of their theories of politics at best, nor a reapplication of their political strategy at worst. We shouldn’t necessarily snip the red thread of our history, but our gaze, in politics, needs to be turned forward.

The second interpretation I agree with, and I would also defend worker organization as well, even if it’s not a new form of organization. I’ll also add that it doesn’t even make sense to defend worker organization as such since it’s something that will always happen under capitalism, and the politics of such organization aren’t always clear — there can be many kinds of politics driving worker organization, like Solidarnosc in Poland.[78] Labor organization is starting to make inroads in new territory, like cafe workers, Amazon workers, etc., and these trends are undoubtedly good things for the Left. A line of demarcation should be drawn if such organizing becomes seen as a revolutionary end-in-itself, rather than being seen as one terrain of organization amongst many. Forms of organization should be explored if they facilitate mass organization and provide opportunities to transmit the communist hypothesis. 

The third and fourth interpretations collide with each other, although the two aren’t necessarily incompatible. The relation between the two can be represented by the following question: how do we transition from everyday struggles to the rupture which can pave the way for communist construction? While everyday struggles can be political, and communists should absolutely seek to transmit the communist hypothesis through forms of organization stemming out of everyday life, there is no guarantee that these struggles will bridge towards revolution proper. Worse yet, an over attachment to forms of organization produced under capitalism can become obstacles to intervention in revolutionary situations. Instead, the work of politicizing everyday life, of producing working class organization, and of developing mass protagonism should instead be seen as preparation for the event, i.e. rupture, i.e. revolutionary situation. I therefore also reject the first interpretation of point four, which is premised on a distinction between the political and the economic.

…

I began this essay questioning whether the US Left feels any more equipped now than it did in 2020 to adequately intervene in our conjuncture. I think slightly, but the bar was on the floor to begin with. There have been glimmers of optimism, with one such example being LATU’s role in mobilizing against ICE’s deportation machine.[79] Yet the Left largely feels stuck in the same role of being relegated to the margins, unable to penetrate through the debilitating paralysis induced by widespread disorganization and atomization, even while genocide rages on in Palestine and fascism intensifies domestically. Of course it would be unrealistic to expect our fortunes to completely reverse within five years, but we still clearly have a mountain to climb. 

While I’m just an individual, meaning I can’t really formulate political strategies and tactics as such, I thought I’d conclude with a few thoughts on communist organization.

Communists should be forming cadre organizations—whether locally or nationally doesn’t matter right this moment—whose essential functions would take on what are traditionally the benefits of the party-form, which I already argued can be separated from it: analysis of the conjuncture, cadre development, and mass diffusion of organizers positioning communists to serve as the vanguard in moments of rupture. The first function, analysis of the conjuncture, seems to be in tension with my argument on the severing of politics and social analysis. After all, if social analysis shouldn’t be brought into politics, then why would communist organizations bother with analysis of the conjuncture? Maybe I overstated the necessity of severing. It’s not that social analysis is irrelevant to politics, but that politics shouldn’t be deduced from social analysis. Politics has to have some kind of relationship with social analysis, and I think mainly in the sense of anticipating ruptural situations while preparing the conditions for communism. Communists must understand the conjuncture if they are to intervene, and while this often entails understanding the thought of people, it also includes understanding movement within the state, the economy, and so on.[80] To make a rough distinction, we could say that Marxism is a form of social analysis that can aid communist politics, but that politics should not be deduced from prior social analysis. So there’s still a relationship between the two, but not one of absolute necessity from analysis to politics. 

The ultimate question is really how to produce unity in a society ravaged by atomization, and I don’t think it’s in the effort to reproduce something approximating the organizational infrastructure of the twentieth century. I think a limited form of unity can be constructed through cadre organizations, by producing organizational and political unity amongst communists while also struggling against the obstacles to unity that dominate our conjuncture: burnout, ego, and social atomization. The goal of cadre organizations should be to create and maintain a network of communists that is widely diffused throughout the social formation so that when a rupture appears, we will have the capacity to act. There is always the threat of state repression, and organizations should be thinking of practices to evade counter-insurgency. Division is the rule, unity is the exception.

Notes

1. Negation recently published an article by X. Rivera Maya and Richard Hunsinger which provides a critique of electoral strategy in relation to Mamdani. They write, “In the present balance of forces in the class struggle we find a split social movement, perhaps best symbolized by this present excitement over, yet again, a Democratic Party nominee promising reforms from a municipal executive office, and how it stands in tactical opposition to the uprising against the deportation regime’s military occupation of Los Angeles by the proletarians of that region. The geographical distance of these two political moments mirrors the practical separation of these strategies, and the lack of any organized coordination between partisans on these fronts. Such a distance provokes us to evaluate this situation and identify where indeed the real movement of communism resides, and to further develop the critique of bourgeois democracy and the state in these institutions’ relation to the emergent revolutionary proletariat.”
2. Asad Haider, “On Depoliticization”, Viewpoint Magazine, December 16, 2019.
3. Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism, (London: Verso, 2008), 116-117.
4. Tim Horras was one of the early theorists of base-building, and he expounds on the strategy here. 
5. Jean Allen wrote a comprehensive account and analysis of the Marxist Center’s collapse. I don’t think the failures of the Marxist Center are an indictment of base-building per se, but rather the strategy encountering specific limits based on how it was conceptualized initially. In, “The Premise of Organization,” I argued that this dominant conception of base-building was built on shaky ground like the conceptual separation between organizers and unorganized, the merger thesis, and an absence of the basics of mass self-organization (which emerges during crises). Some of the critiques and arguments outlined in this may overlap slightly. 
6. Mainly the Communist Caucus (CC) and, less explicitly, the Marxist Unity Group (MUG). Many individuals active in the Marxist Center have since joined MUG, but would maybe not describe their current work as base-building. Additionally, many in CC would likely be more inclined to describe their political practice as a form of spadework. 
7. CC argues that disorganization is the central problem from which all other problems flow, such as the rise of reactionary politics, political nihilism and abstention, and the impotence of the contemporary left. “Our Moment”, April 27, 2022. MUG likewise acknowledges the weakness of the workers’ movement today, and they argue that deindustrialization is the primary problem of our time. “Tasks and Perspectives”, Paragraph 2. 
8. Base-building can be framed as the reconstruction of the organizational infrastructure of the twentieth century, which had eroded by the beginning of the twenty-first leaving us in a state of widespread proletarian disorganization. After all, if there used to be a robust network of working class organization, and if our moment is now characterized by proletarian disorganization, the logical conclusion is to reconstruct this. If organization is about producing the capacity to act, then the twentieth century was a time where communists had a greater capacity to act because of a more robust organizational ecology. This recognition often leads to the rank-and-file strategy. The labor movement was the fulcrum of twentieth century socialism, and while it has dramatically transformed in our moment (mostly for the worse), it’s unclear how intervening in it will not end up, at best, reconstructing the organizational forms of the twentieth century. Or to state it more plainly, building labor unions does not constitute new forms of organization, even if they are in new industries, especially when this intervention necessarily has to take place within or against the business unions that were founded a century ago, but still persist today. 
9. Tenant unionism is another major frontier of the base-building strategy, and it aligns more with the second interpretation on the necessity of building new organizational forms. And unlike with labor, the tenant movement is afforded more organizational flexibility since there isn’t a dominant network of bourgeois tenant associations already, even if there are non-profits in larger cities like Boston. Or in other words, the tenant movement is a less contested organizational terrain, which means communists can intervene and construct organizations according to our own principles (independent, member-run, democratic, etc). 
10. To use just France for example, May ‘68 exhibited all of the hallmarks of the classical communist revolution: a mass movement leading sustained insurrections, a general strike of over a million workers, and a communist party (PCF) with millions of members. Yet the PCF and its affiliated union, the CGT, actively neutralized the mass movement and sought concessions with the state. In the end, the movement fizzled out with only minor gains for workers. Daniel Singer, in his account of May ‘68, observes how the pivotal negotiations between the CGT, the communist union affiliated with the PCF, and the government yielded a disproportionate amount of concessions considering the situation. He says, “Judged by normal standards, the unions could welcome the agreement as very successful. But the times were not normal. The unions could not claim to have obtained anything spectacular, nothing comparable to the forty-hour week or the holiday with pay of 1936,” Prelude to Revolution, 183. 
11. “Radical organizers who had built their unions in the 1930s were cast in the cold war’s new demonology—not just by bosses, politicians, or leaders of the old AFL, but by their own former comrades. Employers on the attack, hostile politicians in power, ideological division in its own ranks—the cold war was too much for the CIO,” Andrew Elrod, “Fragile Juggernaut”, N+1 Mag, January 24, 2024.  
12. Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot, (London: Verso, 2016), 107.
13. This thesis strikes similar notes to the classical Leninist theory of the labor aristocracy, where superprofits generated by imperialism allow the Western bourgeoisie to ease the exploitation of workers enough to where they no longer feel compelled to engage in class struggle with the same intensity. Give workers cars, houses, refrigerators, and washing machines, and they will no longer feel compelled to struggle. In this conception, unions were a critical component to capitalism’s functioning since they served as middlemen between workers and bosses. Despite the differences between Clover’s account and the Leninist labor aristocracy, both view twentieth century social democracy as necessarily a temporary arrangement.
14. Clover, 146. 
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid, 146-147.
17. Endnotes says: “Programmatism” is one of TC’s key concepts of historical periodization, which they define as “as a theory and practice of class struggle in which the proletariat finds, in its drive toward liberation, the fundamental elements of a future social organisation which become the programme to be realised. This revolution is thus the affirmation of the proletariat, whether as a dictatorship of the proletariat, workers’ councils, the liberation of work, a period of transition, the withering of the state, generalised self-management, or a ‘society of associated producers’. Programmatism is not simply a theory — it is above all the practice of the proletariat, in which the rising strength of the class (in unions and parliaments, organisationally, in terms of the relations of social forces or of a certain level of consciousness regarding ‘the lessons of history’) is positively conceived of as a stepping-stone toward revolution and communism. Programmatism is intrinsically linked to the contradiction between the proletariat and capital as it is constituted by the formal subsumption of labour under capital.” According to TC, the period of programmatism ended in the 1970s, after capital’s real subsumption of labor became so complete that the proletariat no longer had any positive essence that could be affirmed in the form of a revolutionary program to be implemented after the seizure of power. Instead, now communist revolution can only be conceived as the proletariat’s collective self-negation of its being as a class.” Cited in “Much Ado about Nothing” by Théorie Communiste in Endnotes 1 (2008).
18. Chuǎng, “Neither Prophets nor Orphans: An Interview with Endnotes,” February 22, 2025.
19. Ibid.
20. A recent dispatch in Long Haul Mag took stock of a strike of the Graduate Student Researchers union at UC San Diego. In the conclusion, the writer notes that the workers were so burnt out from their contract struggle that they had little capacity for Palestine Solidarity organizing. While workers are obviously justified in forming a union and struggling over a contract, it does beg the question of whether struggling over the conditions of everyday life in the university prevented them from engaging in struggles that were aimed at an imperialist social formation at large. Did they miss the trees for the forest? 
21. Clover, 151.
22. Ibid, 144.
23. Chuǎng, “Interview with Endnotes”.
24. “To be a partisan of the rupture is to recognise that there is no collective worker—no revolutionary subject — which is somehow hidden but already present in every struggle,” Endnotes, “Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture”, Endnotes 3. 
25. MUG’s Jean Allen makes this argument, and they take the limits of base-building as their starting point while arguing that socialists ought to articulate a program that will unite the class. 
26. Rodrgio Nunes applies the Spinozist terms potentia and potestas in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, (London: Verso, 2021).
27. Paul Saba, “Lessons from One Left to the Next: Revolution in the Air Reissued”, Viewpoint Magazine, July 19, 2018.
28. A good example was during the summer of 2022 at the Starbucks strike, where SA organizers tried to dictate the tactics of the workers, which only alienated themselves from the movement. A communist approach, or an organic vanguardist approach, would be for organizers to support the movement and build relationships with workers. Or better yet, for communists to be integrated within the union already. Once relationships are established and there is mutual trust, then we’ll be in a better position to provide input. Some readers may be confused at how I’m invoking the strategy of the rank-and-file, but as I make clear, it’s only a strategy that can be politically viable if the goal of base-building is to precede politics, or to better enable communist intervention in periods of rupture. 
29. David Broder, who translated Verso’s 2019 edition of Mario Tronti’s seminal Workers and Capital, says, “Such a spirit was embodied by the extra-parliamentary left, which amounted to some tens of thousands of militants in this period, outside the ranks of the two-million-strong PCI. Its growth was impressive in a country where other kinds of dissident Marxism such as Trotskyism were weakly rooted, and left communism limited to tiny numbers. This desire for new forms of organization owed in part to the lack of renewal in the PCI.” Asad Haider, in his exploration of the Poulantzas-Miliband debate of the ‘70s, details Fernand Claudin’s assessment of the sixties, saying, “the CPs gave no indication that their conduct would differ in any way from May 1968 and the Italian Hot Autumn, when they acted ‘as a brake, limiting the growth and autonomy of workers’ self-organisation, channelling it into the constraints of institutionalised politics so that there should be no conflict between the two.’ Claudín named factory and neighborhood councils, as well as autoreduction of utility prices, as examples of grassroots democracy which advanced ‘anti-capitalist goals of struggle.’ But since these forms of struggle implied ‘the rejection of formal legal limits set by the existing political system,’ and the strategy of the parties revolved around respecting these limits, the two inevitably entered into antagonism.” Lastly, Rossana Rossanda details the PCI’s conservatism throughout her memoir, The Comrade From Milan, (London: Verso, 2010), and specifically touches on their approach to the Hot Autumn movement in the last chapter. 
30. There is a large discrepancy in the history of communist parties between what they say they are versus what they actually do.
31. A defensive strategy for communists isn’t really possible, it just leads to organization undermining itself and transforming into something different. Communists have to anticipate waves of offense instead. If one offensive fails, prepare for the next one. The war of position forces communists into permanent retreat, leading to different obstacles down the line. As Haider observes, while detailing Perry Anderson’s “The Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci”, “While Gramsci had never given in to the reformist temptation, those who claimed his legacy in the 1970s privileged the ‘war of position’ in civil society over the seizure of state power. While the character of Western democracy had rendered any direct transposition of the Bolshevik strategy in the East – insurrection against a shaky and hybrid state-form – untenable, the mistake of the reformists, Anderson now argued, lay in their failure to recognize that the very structure they thought could be used to extend their counter-hegemony – the parliamentary process – was actually the primary means of securing consent.” 
32. The Bolsheviks were in a position of weakness at the beginning of the February Revolution. 
33. Despite the Bolsheviks’ ability to grasp the conjuncture, they weren’t exactly an organized political force entering 1917. Their leaders were scattered in exile, and their membership wasn’t close to the peaks reached a decade before during the 1905 Revolution. For this reason, Liebman emphasizes that the party that would crystallize throughout 1917 was very different from the party pre-1917.
34. Liebman argues in Leninism Under Lenin that the Bolsheviks largely ended up retaining the bourgeois political apparatus, in large part because of the economic collapse that occurred in 1917 which ended up plaguing socialist construction. Charles Bettelheim carries the critique further and notes how the Bolsheviks retained the “enterprise-form” in capitalist production, allowing the commodity-form and law of value to persist in the USSR, which facilitated the reinstatement of capitalist social relations.
35. The Great War saw an immediate and astonishing rise of nationalism and xenophobia, and this even spread to the social democrats. Many social-democratic parties embraced the nationalist fervor, and this was pretty remarkable since internationalism was a core tenet of pre-war socialism. The war was impossible to stop for the social-democratic parties, and they knew it. Since they were powerless, they chose to support it to maintain their legitimacy within the existing systems. The causes for support varied from resignation, fear of the German state and military, doubt that party militants would support an anti-war call, and the state’s framing of the War as a fight against Tsarism. Geoff Eley says, “Most SPD leaders evinced a hardheaded but class-conscious pragmatism, infused with nationalism. They expected a reformist breakthrough once labor had shown its loyalty… The wartime emergency promised the lasting basis of the labor movement’s acceptance into the nation. ‘Purely’ nationalist motives were inseparable from this reformist calculation,” Forging Democracy, 126. 
36. Eley, Forging Democracy, 165.  
37. Jasper Bernes, The Future of Revolution, (London: Verso, 2025), 103.
38. Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, 191-192.
39. Salar Mohandesi, “Party as Articulator”, Viewpoint Magazine, September 4, 2020.
40. Mohandesi, “Party as Articulator”. 
41. “Won’t the political leaders, comfortable bureaucrats, and high-ranking military officials of the Party-State always decide that it’s too soon for their power to wither away, and that all arguments to the contrary are 'ultra-democracy' or 'anarchism'? In what situation would a post-revolutionary Communist Party conclude that its best course of action is self-abolition, gracefully handing its power over to the autonomous mass organizations which strive to replace it?”. Josh Messite, “Who Needs a Party?” Negation Magazine. 
42. Althusser, “The Crisis of Marxism”, Viewpoint Magazine.
43. Taylor B, “Beginnings of Politics”, Cosmonaut Magazine, November 12, 2020.
44. Like Althusser’s philosophy of the encounter, a conjunctural approach to politics has many antecedents, both within Marxism and outside of it.  
45. Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, 99.
46. Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology, (Verso: London, 2021), 128.
47. Alessandro Russo, “The Sixties and Us” in The Idea of Communism 3, (London: Verso, 2016), 167.
48. See, “On the Young Marx” and “On the Materialist Dialectic” in For Marx, (London: Verso, 2005).
49. Russo, “The Sixties and Us”, 174.
50. Russo, 175.
51. Haider, Mistaken Identity, 117.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid, 120. 
54. I’ve borrowed this position from Haider. In our 2021 interview with Haider, he said, “Hall’s idea of a politics without guarantees is that politics is not determined by the laws of history and is not based on a stable foundation of some already existing object, like the sociological object of class, or the experience of identity… I wanted to take the step of bringing this together with the political theories of Lazarus and Badiou, which also share a point of origin in Althusser’s classic interventions, but went much further in order to address problems that had been left unresolved. What is the relationship between the idea of ‘politics without guarantees’ and the severing of the link between politics and social foundations? However you define it, and however you analyze the social, it will not yield for you the forms of politics or the emancipatory character of a politics. That is not Hall’s own point, but I believe it helps us to elaborate the implications of Hall’s ‘without guarantees.’ In the other direction, I think Hall helps us to understand, in a way that Lazarus and Badiou do not, how politics gets sucked back into the social, which is the problem of ideology.”
55. This primarily applies to variants of Leninism and Maoism where politics is conceived of in a scientific manner. Since the Bolsheviks “succeeded” in conquering state power and overthrowing the old regime, this elevates their political strategy to that of a science. In this conception, the strategies and tasks of organization remain the same over time. Neel’s conception of communist politics is invariant too, although in a different sense. Neel distinguishes between the historical party, the formal party, and the communist party. He thinks the historical party is invariant, in the sense that it is almost always-already present and functions as the “subconsciousness” of the proletariat. While Neel’s approach to theorizing the party in relation to politics is very different from mine, I do think there is something invariant about communism as a concept. The tasks of communism remain the same regardless of the conjuncture, but I don’t think this is necessarily incompatible with a notion of politics as rare and sequential. The conditions of emancipation are always the same, but the way the sequence unfolds (and its strategies, forms of organization, and concepts of politics) will always be different. It has to be. 
56. I mention this in part because this form of thought animated how I used to think about politics and organization. 
57. Part One of Alessandro Russo’s Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), expands on this. 
58. Althusser, For Marx, 99.
59. Haider, “Althusser, Or Forgetting”, Décalages (Volume 2, Issue 4), 380.
60. Haider, “Marxism and Emancipation”, Cleveland Review of Books, June 17, 2022.  
61. It’s well documented that the socialist movement in Russia unilaterally believed in the necessity of a bourgeois revolution prior to a socialist one. Lenin was the first high-level Bolshevik to side-step this schema since the events of 1917 demonstrated that the Russian bourgeoisie was too weak to govern, and the Provisional Government led by Kerensky was deeply unpopular. By September Lenin was threatening the Bolshevik Central Committee with his resignation if they did not start preparing for an insurrection with the aim of seizing state power via the Soviets.† What would transferring all power to the Soviets, who by mid-1917 were dominated by Mensheviks and other parties that still believed in a bourgeois revolution, actually do?  However, sections of the masses had already come to this conclusion before Lenin and sought to make matters into their own hands. By June, the Provisional Government was in deep crisis due to the collapsing economy and the strain of war (and deep discontent at the front lines). On July 1, the first machine gunner regiment was recalled to their barracks for further instruction by the Soviet, but they, recognizing Lenin and the Bolsheviks as their political authority due to their positions on the war, were planning a demonstration/uprising instead. The Bolsheviks voted to suppress the insurrection, and the Kerensky government rebounded and suppressed the Bolsheviks, scattering them into disorganization until September. Mieville suggests that the Bolsheviks could have taken power in July when the masses seemed ready, as does Marcel Liebman in Leninism under Lenin (although he’s more ambiguous on this). My impression is that the Bolsheviks were also marred by the theory of stagism, and this prevented them from seizing the situation earlier. Lenin seemed to understand this at certain points before oscillating back into conservative positions about the time not being right or about consolidating the gains of the revolution.
    † While Lenin’s April Theses signalled a shift with the theoretical-political framework of bourgeois revolution, he really advanced a more radical version of the same framework. Stephen A. Smith [not joking] argues in Red Petrograd that Bolsheviks maintained the problematic of the Second International, and that despite Lenin's arguments in The State and Revolution, they viewed the capitalist mode of production (not the capitalist state) as having a neutral, progressive character. They thought that a socialist, worker-led government in charge of a capitalist mode of production would be sufficient for revolution.
62. What would transferring all power to the Soviets, who by mid-1917 were dominated by Mensheviks and other parties that still believed in a bourgeois revolution, actually do? 
63. Phil Neel, “Theory of the Party,” Ill Will.
64. Quoted by Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch, (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2014), 21. 
65. Mieville finishes October with an anecdote about the concept of switchmen, which was referenced in John Reed’s journalistic account of the Russian Revolution. Reed had no idea what the word referred to, but Mieville had an idea. He cites Chaim Grade, who was one of the world’s leading Yiddish writers, who records the following: “Forest Shack: Term for the switchmen's booths along the railway tracks in the vicinity of Vilna. Before the Revolution of 1917, the area around the Forest Shacks was the clandestine meeting place for the local revolutionaries …’ A nickname from a meeting place. It seems likely that the word Prokopovich deployed as epithet was a disdainful term for revolu­tionaries.” Reed heard the term used in a speech by Prokopovich, who was initially a Menshevik before becoming a liberal. Mieville says, “There was a kind of bleak rigour to their stageist dogmas, in which the epochs must succeed one another perforce, like stations along a line. Little wonder he would scorn the Bolsheviks as switchmen.” The Russian Revolution was supposed to be a bourgeois revolution that overthrew the monarchy and transferred political power to the bourgeoisie, as Marxist theory dictated. Yet the situation in Russia was ‘exceptional’ and the masses did not want to hand over power to the capitalist class. The Bolsheviks were those who eventually dared to recognize this. Mieville says, “The revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains. History proceeding in screams of cold metal. The tsar’s wheeled palace, shunted into sidings forever; Lenin’s sealed stateless carriage; Guchkov and Shulgin’s meandering abdication express; the trains criss-crossing Russia heavy with desperate deserters; the engine stoked by ‘Kon­stantin Ivanov’, Lenin in his wig, eagerly shovelling coal. And more and more will come: Trotsky’s armoured train, the Red Army’s propaganda trains, the troop carriers of the Civil War. Looming trains, trains hurtling through trees, out of the dark. Revolutions, Marx said, are the locomotives of history. ‘Put the locomotive into top gear’, Lenin exhorted himself in a private note, scant weeks after October, ‘and keep it on the rails.’ But how could you keep it there if there really was only one true way, one line, and it is blocked?”, 318-319. 
66. Bernes suggests in The Future of Revolution that careful study is necessary to understand the complex system of capitalist logistics and supply chains. This would be a project of counter-logistics, which entails, “mapping capitalist circulation and seeking out its chokepoints, places where a blockade can interrupt production”, 172. 
67. The frequent refrain of progressives to those skeptical of electoral campaigns, whether democratic socialists like Zohran Mamdani or right-liberals like Kamala Harris, is that the far left is not interested in building power. The left reply is always: what power are they actually building? How does holding positions within the capitalist state, which often forces even the most well-meaning politicians into brutal compromises, actually increase the left’s capacity to act? 
68. Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, 11. 
69. Every communist or socialist organization I have been in, for example, emphasizes rotating leadership. If I were to run a committee, for example, it would only be for six months to a year.
70. Taylor B, “Beginnings of Politics”.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Louis Althusser, Letters from inside the Italian Communist Party, (London: NLB, 1973), 51-52.
74. Ibid, 52.
75. This way of framing the relationship between organizers and people may strike similar notes to the merger thesis, but it’s not premised on an inside/outside relation via organizers and the people (or working class) as is the case in the merger thesis. Any inside/outside here is more about communists vs non-communists where the task is to transmit the hypothesis to everyone (their social status isn’t at stake here).
76. Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, 211.
77. Liebman, Leninism under Lenin, 199.
78. Solidarnosc was simultaneously anti-communist, or anti-communism if understood as existing in the form of the Soviet Union, and “an almost chemically pure” form of workers’ thought. Badiou, Can Politics be Thought?, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 57. 
79. Recent events in Minnesota have challenged this, and I think it’s proof that forms of working class organization can assist intervention in crises, while also demonstrating that forms of organization (potential egalitarian exceptions) will always emerge from within the concrete situation. But it’s too soon to tell. 
80. I think this is what will be most revealing about Zohran’s mayoral candidacy — what it reveals about the contemporary capitalist state, whether mass organization blossoms outside of the mayoral castle, or whether new limits are revealed about current political strategies.