A Series of Polyphasic Naps

Let’s paint a picture of the American Dream together. This will help us understand the Conservative alternative to Progressivism. We will be as inclusive as possible, while allowing for what passes for “reasonable” conservative policy because the people who produce for us the image of this dream very much include the same.

We aspire to a level of comfort exemplified by the atom; a family unit, around which all the rest of society orbit. This family is Biblically defined as brought forth to this country by people known to so wildly mis-interpret scripture as to have been largely evicted from England by the same church formed to allow the king to step out on his wife. This aspiration cannot be judged as morally correct or not as it is not a moral question, but one of nature. In the same way that a human scratching an itch is not in itself wrong, seeking solace and constancy is simply part of our animal nature, separate and distinct from the fictional area of human nature that allegedly subrogates society’s movement toward brighter futures. In this way, the Conservative mindset comes into focus for the doctrinaire progressive.

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America has, as a singular body, developed an image of our country that attempts to simultaneously shore up legitimacy and correct the failures of the past by simply performing the maximum version of it. Coupled with our shared human conditioning to seek lasting comfort, it becomes obvious how your previously level-headed, but constantly “economically anxious” uncle went from loudly wondering why so much was deducted from his paycheck to straight-up publicly defending pedophilia. We do not approve of it. We simply understand it.

Our understanding and disapproval must still interact with these people, so we must work out how to talk with them in such a way as to bring them back to correct ways of thinking and finally to conclude with us that the American experiment as conducted by Reformation era tax-dodgers is finally prepared to mature into the bastion of freedom and equality that they pretended to build initially.

Let us now drift into our dream, or for clarity, 2 dreams. We’ll examine together the ideal life of an American boy and an American girl. Follow them throughout their lives and see if we can discover together how we can ourselves hew closer to that ideal line or if the line should be erased in favor of better line-work.

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Our little hero is conceived late summer or early fall and for 38 weeks, gestates within Mom, getting ready to come see what we’ve done with the world (we’ve done… a lot).

His social conditioning, the first education, begins long before birth with ~60% of parents opting to learn the baby’s sex before birth. This begins the process of color coding and socializing the new guy into the culture. He will shortly come to one of the first things we learn about ourselves in relation to the world, some people are boys, others are girls. Of course we know that there are more categories of sex and even more for gender expression, but babies are stupid. They don’t understand this. Over the period between birth and starting school, the child learns to walk (well, toddle), talk (well, babble) and navigate at a basic level. This new measure of independence is where socialization really takes place and we already need more space to discuss it.

Subscribe now so that you can be notified when our boy starts to really find the person he is destined to be. You and our hypothetical guy are in for some adventure!

We at the California Worker are involved around the state on the ground, in the air and in your pocket. We travel the internet, talking with all the workers of the world to find out what exactly we need to do to accomplish the real American Dream. We came to this Party from various parts of the American workforce, among us are the usual suspects, tradespeople, service workers, a few full-time revolutionaries as well. We represent a wide cross-section of the country. Truly the widest tent. Doesn’t every Party pretend at this though? It all sounds exactly like something the CIA would present with their narrative and is a widely shared criticism of the Party. Throughout the internet, folks who consider themselves whatever shade of leftist attack the American Communist Party (ACP), having heard inflammatory speech by its members.

Look again, potential Comrades. Casting the widest possible tent will absolutely cover folks who still use reactionary language, have reactionary beliefs, say gross, reactionary shit. It’s bad, and that is exactly the point of the ACP. Communists in America have no idea how to combine theory with praxis and it has (ironically) permitted the CIA’s perception of Communists to permeate our culture so thoroughly that the actual performance of building Communism looks too messy to engage in.

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Okay my snarky internet leftoid friend, you may argue that we cannot find common cause with racists, sexists, homophobes and the like and we have only to make a cursory Google search to find clear examples of each on an official ACP channel. We would ask this question of you when you next prepare to denounce the ACP for this, tell us what your plan is for the current reactionary population? The workers who would need convincing if the chosen one finally found whatever magic ring in the cave of wishes and made it so we were done with capitalism and everyone knew it, tomorrow. Many of them believe that we would intend to line them all up on the Great Wall of China and perform the largest, (physically) longest massacre in history. The way some of you denounce them and us with them, I’m beginning to suspect that may be your plan. I’ll publicly denounce that as does the Party. We will need to educate them and there is no point in educating from the beginning the already educated. We can’t kick students out of the class for not knowing the material, we at the ACP understand this and believe that it is currently the job of the Communist Party to be that teacher. They’re vulgar. They believe nonsense. Expelling them from school for disrupting class will only lead to shitty halls.

They, as we, have been propagandized so heavily that there survives a great cold war era joke about it. A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink:

“I have to admit, I’m always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up,” the CIA agent says.

“Thank you,” the KGB says. “We do our best but truly, it’s nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them.”

The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. “Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There’s no propaganda in America.”

Unfortunately both Liberal parties in the US with their own color coded echo chambers have been able to easily replace the Soviet with the other American party and make the scenario real. A simple swap and our old Comrade now works at the New York Post. Our CIA agent is actually Cenk Uygur suddenly, but the rest works just fine. Why? Well it’s just built into our national character. Brought along with an economy that at once respects the ability of people to generate wealth independently (they find work individually and secure wage that way) and removes the humanity from the same endeavor so totally that it begins to make sense for mammals to forgo reproduction. I know you’re happy without kids, it’s still a rare choice among species.

In order for a system which will disallow any expression of humanity that does not generate wealth to make sense to people about whom it is understood will never experience wealth, they must not be made aware of what wealth actually is and from this basic principle, we come to understand the Rotating Villain.

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The specific verbiage I use is that, “capitalism requires a permanent underclass.” Consider a few types of people that you may be familiar with. Economic struggles among Republicans mirror those of Democrats. Work is hard to find, hard to keep and always pays just under enough to keep you running after the next paycheck, but consider comfort. What would you do with the ability to sit back, take a breath and do a thing that you aren’t required to do to be here?

Recall instead that we must always be at the ready. All of our time must be consumed either generating wealth or generating data, which we do when we pop around the internet, watching babies mumble swear words on Facebook.

The absence of class consciousness leaves plenty of room for different solutions to what we perceive as problems and to whom do we turn to find our solutions? American media is all either under capitalist control, or enjoys only very limited exposure. Most receive only what they are mass fed and even those who are still able to conclude that the society is broken can only choose conclusions based on what they know. Well what do they know? We know that racism has been used since before the formal founding of this country to convince non-Black people that they could receive respect and privilege, so long as they remained unmarred by the Black germ. An even further correct analysis reveals that this was and remains false. Whether the Cherokee fight with the Confederacy, the Black kids fight the Puerto Ricans at the flagpole after school or a cohort of Asians take up the fight against affirmative action, non-whites who fight for the white supremacist cause only tokenize themselves for the only real player, and tokens are made to be spent.

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The idea of societal distraction isn’t novel or at all unique to American life. We recall the fall of the Roman Empire was accompanied by the massive spectacle on display at dozens of places like the Colosseum. Cheap and regular merriment walked hand-in-hand with rot so public that they entirely stopped hiding slavery and predation that formed the basis of their prosperity. Not that it would have been possible given the overspread nature of the empire. Bread and Circuses as governance during the Imperial Fall is Biblically old so when I tell you that it remains the only way to ride a falling empire, perhaps you can understand why it is best to eschew the game.

The difference between the reactionary Liberal position on these matters and that of the ACP is that where their solutions to societal ails center around removing the offending people, the correct Communist line must be to develop them into better people. In this way, we then disagree on who the offenders are. Recall that reactionism is based around responding to incorrect information. If we can be convinced that I can’t keep a job because they hired a Mexican for cheaper, I can be convinced that Mexicans are the problem. The correct analysis proves that the penny-pinching employer shutting off my livelihood to save money is the culprit. But in our new times, such blatant racism cannot exist on only one Liberal side. Conservatives have begun to recognize just how many minorities will sign on to their puritanical control program if only they could join the oppressor side as well. With increasing questions around white blood purists and their ethnic wives, talking directly about race is passe because the transgender community sure are weird aren’t they? The focus shifted. We saw it happen and can indeed point to other groups that were auditioned to be the new, Rotating Villain that we should all pay attention to and discuss at length, despite being at most like .002% of the population. No, you probably don’t know whether you’ve seen one irl, but you statistically have never met one and won’t. It’s literally impossible for the entire transgender community to destroy civilization so why did Dave Chappelle perform 3 whole hour “comedy” specials and why did we need to vote on whether to hire people to look at penises at restaurants? This is a side-show. Not transpeople. They are valid. They’re having some trouble and the least a decent human can do is leave them alone. The circus has shifted. Now a Party dedicated to growing class consciousness through organizing and building bridges by displaying Community power to the lumpen and reactionaries is having to explain to so-called leftists that gross language is needed to speak to the gross. They will not listen to your well-reasoned, 12-point plan to feed the homeless. They are convinced all women are generally against them and THAT’s why they have no sex. Not the fact that their rugged individualism has rendered them personally repugnant.

The words are rough, but the language is sound. When they rotate to the next villain, someone must be ready to talk with the disaffected in language they know so they can learn better ways to speak.

Like many of us, I put a lot of miles on my car. Between commuting to work, taking the kids to school, and grocery runs, I definitely feel the pain of higher gas prices.

As our daily struggles intensify, the politicians pretend to care while they pursue the very policies that are making our lives more difficult.

These political actors have auditioned for a role. They have proven themselves capable of representing the billionaire class while pretending to care about the oppositional interests of the rest of us. They have learned their lines perfectly – but the script was never written for us.

They use terms like “inflation” or “supply chain issues” or “global instability.” They use jargon to hide the fact that they start wars to help the elites they serve. They expect us to choose between food and rent while big corporations get bigger and rake in windfall profits. They laugh all the way to the bank.

Trump says he’s surprised gas prices aren’t higher. Trump said he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation – “not even a little bit” – as he negotiates an end to the Iran war he started. Trump says the federal government has no money for healthcare or childcare – only for war. Europe echoes his call. They empty our pockets while they fill up their own.

Most people intuitively know all of this even if they can’t articulate it. Most people know their voice does not matter and that both parties serve the same elites. What results is “did not vote” wins every state in a landslide.

This “two-party” system ensures our revulsion. And that revulsion has itself become a currency that billionaire-backed candidates pander to. Obama sold us “hope and change.” Trump sold us “drain the swamp.” Both won. Both did the opposite.

Obama bailed out the banks, not the homeowners. Trump started a war with Iran – and gas prices skyrocketed.

They know what to say. They know what you want to hear. They have no intention of doing any of it. They work for the billionaires. They don’t work for you.

A government that represents workers would not be starting wars to control global energy supplies. It would not be destroying market competitors so oil executives can price-gouge you at the pump. A truly representative government would break up the private energy cartels – not do their dirty work.

We need a government that represents the working class majority. We need truth tellers that don’t say one thing and do another. We need a party that stands up for our interests. We need a party that stops pretending that the interests of billionaires are no different than the interests of workers. We need a party that is unapologetic about picking our side. We need a party willing to speak this truth, fight the entrenched billionaire interests, and not pretend that they care about workers while they throw us under the bus.

The American Communist Party (ACP) is doing just that. If you are interested in organizing with your neighbors, strengthening your community, and building the power necessary to take our government back from the oligarch class, reach out to the ACP and join a local chapter. Together, we can build a government that works for regular people, not just billionaires.

Source: @ACP_California

The California gubernatorial race has been a chaotic spectacle, and with it comes a familiar refrain from establishment-adjacent “progressive” organizations: this is the most important election of our lifetime. Again. As always. Forever and ever, amen. The California Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has now deployed this well-worn script to justify one of the most ideologically fraught endorsements in recent memory. California DSA is urging their members and sympathizers to vote for Tom Steyer, a billionaire with a profitable record on fossil fuels, private prisons, and Israel, while simultaneously discouraging votes for Dr. Butch Ware, a candidate who represents precisely the kind of platform DSA claims to stand for.

California’s jungle primary system sends the top two vote-getters to the general election, regardless of party. This structure creates a perennial anxiety among Democratic-aligned organizations: what if two Republicans advance? In a state as reliably blue as California, this scenario has occurred before, but treating it as a near-inevitable catastrophe in a statewide governor’s race requires a significant stretch of political imagination. California has not elected a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger over two decades ago. The Republican base in California is fractured, underfunded, and deeply unpopular outside of a shrinking geographic footprint. Even if a Republican was elected governor, could we expect any worse from them?

Yet California DSA leans into this fear-mongering with enthusiasm, warning voters that “the chance of the top two candidates both being Republicans is still very real.” Socialist organizers do not concern themselves with a red vs. blue capitalist governor. It is the same rhetorical maneuver that has been used for decades to funnel left-wing energy into the Democratic Party’s waiting arms, election cycle after election cycle, producing precious little in the way of material gains for working people. When socialists adopt the logic of lesser-evilism wholesale, they become indistinguishable from the centrists they claim to oppose.

To California DSA’s credit, their voter guide does not pretend the Democratic field is healthy. The guide accurately catalogs a depressing roster of establishment candidates. Eric Swalwell, once a frontrunner, exited after credible accusations of sexual assault and misconduct. Xavier Becerra was quickly adopted by the establishment after Swalwell’s collapse, and he brings decades of public office experience and a platform that DSA rightly describes as “milquetoast,” more of the same corporate Democratic non-governance Californians have endured for years. Antonio Villaraigosa is flush with oil lobby money and carries the endorsement of the scandal-ridden Karen Bass; he is perhaps best remembered for accelerating the privatization of Los Angeles public schools. Katie Porter, despite her firebrand reputation, has refused to support the DSA-endorsed billionaire tax, has a documented history of supporting genocidal Israel, including praising Benjamin Netanyahu, and has faced her own staff abuse scandal.

The picture California DSA paints of the Democratic field is, frankly, damning, and it raises an obvious question. If the Democratic Party’s bench in the most “progressive” large state in the country has produced this field, why is the solution to hand a billionaire the socialist seal of approval?

Who Is Tom Steyer, Really?

Let us be clear about who California DSA is asking you to trust. Tom Steyer is a billionaire. Not a millionaire. Not a successful small business owner. A billionaire. He built his fortune at Farallon Capital Management, a hedge fund with documented investments in private prisons and coal mining; these are industries that have caused immeasurable harm to working-class communities, communities of color, and the planet. California DSA’s own voter guide acknowledges this directly, noting that “his wealth was earned through the exploitation of the working class” and was “accumulated by the same things he now decries.”

And yet they endorse him anyway. Because he supports the billionaire tax. Because he has endorsed state-level Medicare for All; a reversal of his previous position. Because he has called ICE a “violent extremist group” and outlined prosecutorial strategies against ICE agents as governor. Because he has been endorsed by politically powerful labor unions including the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers, AFSCME 3299, Unite HERE, the California Nurses Association, and the California Labor Federation. These seem like something, but further buying out already-bought-out unions, which lack working class consciousness is not enough. These reasons must be weighed against the totality of who Steyer is and where his wealth came from, and that weighing is one California DSA performs too quickly.

The guide’s own language is telling. Steyer is described as “somehow running the most progressive campaign.” The word “somehow” is doing enormous work there and concludes with the caveat that “time will tell whether he’s truly a class traitor.” This is the bar DSA has set: not that Steyer is a class traitor, but that he might eventually become one. The DSA is crossing their fingers as an endorsement.

On Palestine, California DSA deserves genuine credit for not looking away. Their voter guide directly addresses Steyer’s refusal to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, and his claim that he “honestly does not know what genocide means.” The guide calls this “pulled from the same Zionist playbook that motivates genocide denial across the political spectrum” and states plainly that “playing dumb about the daily horrors and atrocities Israel commits is not ‘progressive’ in any way.”

This is the right analysis. And it is precisely why the endorsement that follows it is so logically jarring. California DSA correctly identifies Steyer’s genocide denial as ideologically disqualifying by any honest standard, and then tells you to vote for him anyway. The guide notes that Steyer has “disavowed AIPAC’s influence on Democratic primaries,” but also points out that AIPAC does not involve itself in non-federal races, making this disavowal cost him nothing. For socialists, for organizers, for the communities directly impacted by U.S. complicity in genocide, this should register as more than a footnote.

The Charges Against Ware Don’t Hold Up

California DSA cites specific criticisms of Butch Ware to justify their illogical endorsement. Even though Ware blocked me and many other communists on x.com for questioning his stance on the “Uyghur genocide,” we will examine the criticisms honestly because DSA does not.

DSA cites a MoveOn piece regarding abortion, attacking Ware for saying, “Of course, there have to be limitations.” This is presented as evidence of an “anti-abortion” position. Read in full context, Ware was responding to a broad question, and DSA dishonestly frames him.

DSA cites Ware saying “I don’t think that biological males should play in female sports.” This may be a legitimate point of criticism. However, DSA’s cited source also includes Ware’s position when asked specifically whether he as governor would ban transgender student athletes: “The governing bodies of sports should make those decisions. Why would I, as the governor, be involved in a conversation about who gets to play which sport? There are people whose job that is.” Calling this a “doubling down” strains credulity when the candidate explicitly declined to support any government-level ban.

On the "house slave" comment directed at Shirley Weber: Butch Ware is a Black man invoking the language of racial betrayal to describe a Black official he believes is doing the bidding of a capitalist political establishment. That is his prerogative. The history of such a critique is long, legitimate, and has been made by Black thinkers and activists across generations. [Editor's note: This article's editor is Black and agrees that the good Lady Weber's behavior around freezing out another Black candidate in service to the likes of Gavin Newsom rise to the level of house slave behavior.] California DSA's framing emphasizes that Weber is "a Black woman" as though that fact settles the moral question, while omitting that she is also the Secretary of State whose office is currently the subject of a lawsuit filed by Ware's campaign over what his team describes as a politically motivated disqualification. The DSA is silent on the substance and loud on the packaging.

The Ballot Suppression That DSA Won’t Mention

Here is what California DSA’s voter guide does not tell you. Butch Ware did not simply “fail to qualify for the ballot.” His campaign was notified of a disqualification challenge with ten minutes remaining before the close of business on a Friday afternoon which marked the deadline for submissions. The reason stated was an unredacted phone number on a tax document; a redaction that, under California law, is the legal responsibility of the Secretary of State’s office, not the candidate. The Secretary of State is Shirley Weber; that “house slave” Ware mentioned.

The campaign responded with two separate legal actions within 24 hours, represented in part by the same attorney who successfully defeated Weber’s office on a nearly identical challenge in the 2021 recall election. Dr. Jill Stein, Ware’s former running mate, called it “the kind of lies and treachery the Democrats have used for decades to silence the opposition they’re terrified of.”

California DSA’s voter guide describes Ware as someone who “failed to qualify for the ballot” and “has lashed out against Californian Left,” without a single word about the procedural circumstances of his removal. Their omission is not neutrality; it is used to uplift a genocide-denying billionaire.

The DSA Is Not an Honest Actor

Let’s dispense with the charitable reading. California DSA’s voter guide contains all the information needed to reach a damning conclusion about Tom Steyer. DSA recognizes his billions extracted from private prisons and fossil fuels, his genocide denial dressed up as philosophical uncertainty, his class position that no amount of policy positioning can dissolve — and then they endorse him anyway? They possess the analysis and abandon it at the moment it matters. Meanwhile, Ware’s rhetorical choices apparently warrant explicit voter warnings, while the circumstances of his ballot removal (a ten-minute Friday afternoon deadline, a legal obligation the Secretary of State’s office failed to meet, and two lawsuits filed within 24 hours) warrant no mention at all?

The Republicans-could-win panic deserves one final word before we let it go entirely: Republicans and Democrats are two management styles in service of the same capitalist order. The choice between a Republican governor and a billionaire Democrat who made his fortune on private prisons and coal is not a choice between harm and safety. Steyer has spent over $100 million on this race and remains behind the top two in recent polling. The working class of California has not been inspired by his money. They should not be manipulated into voting for him either.

Build Power Where It Lives

Electoral politics, at best, is one limited terrain among many. At worst, and California DSA’s performance here illustrates the worst, it becomes a mechanism for disciplining the left, absorbing its energy, and returning it to the Democratic Party on a four-year cycle with nothing to show for it. The answer is dual power: tenant unions, mutual aid networks, labor organizing, community defense, and the construction of institutions that serve working people regardless of who sits in Sacramento. The American Communist Party is working on all of the above.

The California governor’s race will resolve itself one way or another, and the working class will wake up the morning after in the same housing crisis, facing the same landlords, the same wage theft, the same food insecurity, the same genocide funded by their tax dollars. California DSA has shown you who they are. Maya Angelou said “believe them,” so let’s build something they cannot co-opt.

What do you think? Is there still a role for socialist electoral organizing in California, or has the DSA’s capture by Democratic Party logic made independent institution-building the only honest path forward? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.

Just finished watching this and all I can say is hallelujah. Over the years I have tried to tell the truth about the western left as it was given to me by my father and his friends, real Stalinists who were around in the original time. The told me all about this.

I've talked with various RTSG people over the years, they asked me questions, and here is the result: the long overarching plan the US rentier elites did to Marxism Leninism now has an authoritative and beautifully made video.

Of course it will be simultaneously attacked and ignored—but now it exists as a thesis—and I will be referring people to this video forever.

Thank you, and the soul of my dead teacher thanks you.

Originally published on x.com.

On May 11, 2026, Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, California, was charged with acting as an agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and agreed to a plea deal in federal court. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), she was accused of working as a foreign agent of the PRC. The specific conduct at issue was sharing articles deemed propaganda under the direction of an unnamed PRC official on a website called US News Center.1

According to the DOJ report, the articles were specifically related to the Xinjiang autonomous region in China. Xinjiang has long been a strategic area in China, from the Kuomintang’s use of Muslim and Kazakh forces against the People’s Liberation Army in the 1940s to the contemporary fomenting of Islamic terrorist groups culminating in the Urumqi attacks and of course the large oil and material resources in the region.2 Given that the Xinjiang genocide story has been thoroughly debunked at this point, with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation refusing to condemn China and even praising its treatment of Muslims and even the imperial US State Department lawyers stating they lacked evidence of genocide, this story reeks of the US media trying to blow up any single instance of PRC “influence” into a national story meant to justify absolute enmity.34

While it is obvious that any sovereign government will protect itself from foreign influence, mainstream foreign policy analysts have long noted that all governments engage each other through covert means. One of the “wise men” of US foreign policy past, George Kennan, described this explicitly in his 1948 text “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare” where he argues that nations utilize “all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert.”5

Given this context, Eileen Wang’s case is illustrative of larger US strategy. Even if we accept the official narrative that she was acting at the behest of a Chinese official, which is indeed a serious crime, the case appears minor compared with the scale of covert and overt influence operations that powerful states routinely conduct.

Wang’s case is among a number of other anti-China policies and domestic political actions aimed at portraying China as a uniquely dangerous foreign threat. While anti-China positions are nothing new among the US ruling class, indeed, we are already at war with China in the Clausewitzian sense, the desperation to elevate this story to national importance is one of a number of signals indicating that the US would prefer a confrontation with China sooner rather than later. This is likely because in the next few years China will definitely pull ahead of the US in every conceivable way and at that point be effectively untouchable.

The consequences of Wang’s case will likely be similar to those previous anti-China actions, namely a growing anti-Chinese paranoia amongst the populace to drum up support for more aggressive actions. Yet at the same time, some Americans are waking up to the various double standards and contradictions at play. The top comment on the FBI’s own facebook post states “Does this mean you're going after AIPAC?”. A number of other commentators also suggested that the DOJ should instead be looking into Israeli foreign agents in the Trump administration.6 These tendencies highlight a new developing perspective among Americans, one that is sympathetic to China and intensely hostile to our own ruling class. In other words, a perspective ripe for revolution.

To find an alternative to AOC’s (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) “democratic socialism,” we must investigate why exactly these politics are harmful to Palestine, and all other areas in the popular struggle. Putting forth such an alternative is an important part of critiquing social democrats, because without presenting a credible solution, we’ll fall into ultra-leftist patterns. When I decry social democrat politicians as a Marxist, I am doing so with the awareness that these figures are the only version of “socialism” which their supporters have overall been exposed to. And to draw these working-class Americans away from social democracy, which is now a highly urgent task, we must explain which forces of popular revolution the socdems have set themselves up against.

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In global terms, these forces are the mass movements that have been waging wars of resistance against U.S. imperial aggression, with the Palestinian resistance being the foremost struggle that leaders like AOC oppose. We know they oppose this struggle because every one of these “progressive” leaders, when they’ve come across opportunities to align with Palestine’s fight for liberation, have done what the occupier prefers. They’ve served as “progressive” launderers for Zionism at a moment when Zionism is in unprecedented existential danger, is surrounded by a world that hates it more than ever, and needs spokespeople who can put a friendly face on it.

Because the bulk of Gen Z have come to understand why Zionism is irredeemable, every time these politicians betray the Palestinian cause they further alienate themselves from their primary base. Bernie Sanders and AOC have voted to continue funding the Zionist occupier’s “defensive” military equipment, and Zohran Mamdani has taken the Zionist position by affirming the occupier’s supposed right to exist. Now, AOC has again shown a lack of commitment to fighting against aid to the occupation by stating that due to existing U.S. foreign aid policies, “I believe the Israeli government is well able to fund the Iron Dome system, which has proven critical to keep innocent civilians safe from rocket attacks and bombardment.” This was how AOC qualified her pledge not to continue voting for the Iron Dome aid, which evidently still comes with a fundamental desire to counter Gaza’s resistance coalition; AOC’s language clearly implies that this choice comes from a confidence in the occupier being able to wage its colonial war without her help. When this changes, AOC will get behind the occupier, along with every other “soft” Zionist leader.

Because of how transparent AOC’s opportunism is, it’s harder for AOC to keep up a “pro-Palestine” image than it is for someone in Zohran’s position. These figures are always going to play a gatekeeping role in relation to Palestine, though. And one indication of this is that Zohran still doesn’t appear to be pursuing his campaign promise of having New York City implement BDS (boycott divest sanction).

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Instead he’s taken a position in the middle, and revoked a previous anti-BDS measure while not going all the way. And we should draw attention to this failure, as it illustrates how much of an impact these figures would have if they were to truly act principled on Palestine; NYC adopting BDS would have a gargantuan domino effect, encouraging other cities to do the same. It was exciting prospects like this one that gained Zohran such a large base. Yet these prospects are not materializing, which isn’t something Marxists are glad about; we we don’t want it to be true that the biggest “socialist” faction is obstructing the fight against the Gaza genocide. We aren’t here to be ankle-biters against these leaders, but to offer a mode of struggle where the popular masses are truly in control.

I’m not just talking about my own communist party, the American Communist Party; a party is only a vehicle for advancing the interests of the masses, who are the core drivers of the struggle. And in the case of the Palestinian liberation struggle, the primary masses who we must account for are the Palestinian people themselves. This is something that the Palestinian community’s internal critics of reformism and capitulationism have stressed. One example of this is a statement from March 10, attributed by Al-Akhbar to numerous Palestinian and Arab thinkers. They explain how:

Concepts of liberation and the national project must be formulated from the real material conditions of resistance environments: the refugee camp, the village, the prison cell, the trench and the tunnel. We reject imported liberal frameworks and ready-made formulas designed according to the preferences and interests of comprador forces and the colonial core. These models are used as tools for social engineering to freeze and neutralize Arab social and political forces from the real struggle, while the enemy continues to pursue its goals ruthlessly to their conclusion. True liberation begins with dismantling epistemic colonialism as a prerequisite for full liberation…

This charter calls for reclaiming national decision-making from elites accustomed to acting as intermediaries and agents, and returning it to the masses and the social environments that sustain resistance and shape history through their sacrifices. It is a call to move beyond the politics of begging towards the dismantling of colonial structures.

This is the posture that the Palestinian resistance takes, and our own movements must adopt the equivalent of this posture in order to succeed. We have to take example from Palestine’s liberation movement, and the other Global South struggles, by rejecting the false allies who are collaborators with capital.

After the 1967 Zionist land grab, Palestine’s communists concluded that they had to identify who their cause’s core allies were among the different Palestinian economic classes, with the enslaved proletarians and the imprisoned masses being the ones they decided to prioritize. And this reckoning with the question of class has allowed the struggle to get much further since then. In the case of the American popular struggle, applying this practice looks like aligning ourselves with such working-class forces within Palestine and all other countries, while recognizing who our foremost class allies are domestically.

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We must reject the compatible left politics that seeks alignment with the professional-managerial class, which is the element that these pro-imperialist “progressives” most seek to serve. There are indications that our ruling class will soon act to expand the PMC (professional managerial class) by bribing many more U.S. workers with imperialist super-profits, thus creating a larger social base for the empire’s next wars. But this strategy will fail if we don’t cede the working class to the socdems, and bring them into the proletarian struggle before our enemies intercept them; while also reaching into the parts of the American masses who won’t be given these benefits. Rural America is where we must especially look while undertaking this mission, because though our ruling class can rebuild the labor aristocracy, liberalism inevitably exacerbates the contradiction between the metropole and the countryside.

It is in these parts of the masses where we’ll find the most reliable allies of the Palestinian resistance, and of the wider effort to overthrow monopoly financial rule. The socdems seek to build an alliance between the bourgeoisified American workers—who they may soon create more of—and the comprador elites who protect Zionism with the rhetoric of progress. We will overwhelm them from below, building an alliance between those who share an interest in the imperial order’s destruction.

The Material Reality of Motherhood in California

While California overall has an infant mortality rate of approximately 5.41 per 1,000 live births (as of late 2025), this number is a deceptive average that masks a deep class and racial chasm. Working class and impoverished neighborhoods experience infant mortality rates that are up to three times higher, exposing the deep class divide underneath the Hollywood glamour.

Environmental Racism and the “Freeway Legacy”

The geography of California was designed with class interests in mind. Working-class neighborhoods were often bisected by massive freeway systems to facilitate the movement of capital, while affluent enclaves remained protected.

• Airborne Disease: Mothers in neighborhoods like Vallejo or East L.A. breathe air with double the traffic density of their wealthier peers. This leads to higher rates of asthma, low birth weight, and chronic respiratory illness during critical developmental stages of life.

• Epigenetic Trauma: Chronic stress from poverty and environmental toxins doesn’t just affect the mother; it is “programmed” into the child’s biology through epigenetic changes, predisposing the next generation to metabolic and stress-related disorders.

The “Communist Program” for Maternal Liberation

From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, these issues are not “glitches” but features of a system that prioritizes profit over the reproduction of life. A communist program would seek to socialize the labor of “mothering” and eliminate the profit motive from survival.

1. Socialization of Childcare: Rather than childcare being a private expense, it becomes a state responsibility. This includes 24-hour high-quality nurseries and “Milk Kitchens” (publicly funded nutrition centers) to ensure every child receives the same caloric and developmental start, regardless of their mother’s income.

2. Abolition of the “Food Desert”: Replacing the anarchy of the market with a planned distribution of resources. Under a communist program, high-quality, organic nutrition is treated as a public utility, like water, distributed through community-run centers rather than for-profit grocery chains.

3. Environmental Transformation: Aggressive dismantling of polluting infrastructure in working-class areas. Moving away from pollution-producing car-centric freeway culture toward massive public transit investment and the “greening” of urban centers to ensure the air in Compton is as clean as the air in Malibu.

4. Maternal and Paternal Leave: Comprehensive paid leave (often 12–18 months in historic socialist models) with a guaranteed return to the workforce, ensuring that the bond between parent and child is protected from the “market logic” of productivity.

Statistics for Reflection

• Single Mothers: Roughly 19% of California households are headed by single parents (mostly mothers), who represent a vital but exploited segment of the workforce.

• Labor Force: Single mothers have an employment rate of roughly 78%, yet many remain at the median wage of $18/hr, which is insufficient for the cost of living in most California counties.

This Mother’s Day, we recognize that true appreciation for mothers requires more than flowers—it requires a fundamental restructuring of society to ensure that the “struggle” of motherhood is no longer a requirement for survival.

What does it mean that many still think we can change the Democratic Party, even after Gen Z turned on Kamala for the Gaza holocaust? It means bad ideas don’t simply go away on their own. The only way to defeat these ideas is by actively struggling against them, without waiting for a hypothetical moment when the masses have become ready to hear the revolutionary positions.

This doesn’t mean taking an ultra-left posture, and treating the supporters of “democratic socialism” as enemies. There’s a layer of opportunists who need to be combated, but they aren’t most of the socdem base. It means gaining the skills to go into the masses, which here looks like showing why the Democratic Party is inseparable from the imperial state. The DNC (Democratic National Committee) will remain genocidal, no matter the efforts to change this. If we can explain this, while building an independent infrastructure for the working class, we’ll defeat the project to recapture today’s popular upsurge.

We have to become so learned in the nuances of mass work because reformism holds a unique kind of potential mass pull. Pull that can only come from the masses having a real material reason to want bourgeois electoralism. As Ken Lawrence said in his critique of the Italian ultra-leftists, who thought they could bring the people out of reformism by merely activating armed struggle: “While it is true that reformism is the bourgeoisie’s carrot and repression is its stick, that is not the whole story, nor even the most important part. Reformism is the aspect of capital that the working class has internalized. It is an alien class ideology, yes, but it is precisely because it has been internalized, and represents a pole within the proletariat’s consciousness, that it constitutes such an effective tool of bourgeois hegemony.”

To see an example of success in overcoming reformism, we can look to the most obvious case, this being the Bolsheviks. And to grasp why they were successful in this, we have to recognize how they refused to “bow to spontaneity,” and passively reinforce the reformist ideas that workers will initially come to. In What is to be Done, Lenin said that the Marxists who rejected reforms as the end goal were “dissatisfied with this worship of spontaneity, i.e., of that which exists ‘at the present moment’. We demand that the tactics that have prevailed in recent years be changed; we declare that ‘before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation’…In a word, the Germans stand for that which exists and reject changes; we demand a change of that which exists, and reject subservience thereto and reconciliation to it. This ‘slight’ difference our ‘free’ copyists of German resolutions failed to notice.”

These historical insights are so indispensable for unpacking today’s “democratic socialist” movement because if we don’t learn from history, we’ll end up tailing behind the Democratic Party, as the biggest “Marxist” orgs are doing. “Democratic socialism” relies on historical illiteracy; the whole purpose of choosing this name for it was to assuage concerns about past and present socialist states being “dictatorships,” while reinforcing such anti-communist nonsense beliefs. For many who got behind Sanders in 2016, as soon as they pulled back the veil of anti-communist propaganda, they successfully developed to the next stage of consciousness.

Their journey of critical thinking could not end there, though. For decades, socialism in the USA had been just talk, unable to escape the niche that it had been forced into during the 20th century. And to truly break out of this niche, American communists would need to relearn their own working-class history. To rediscover trade unionism, party-building, unemployment councils, and the other working-class practices that had made their forebears strong.

Even the most advanced among American communists are in the very early stages of learning what these things look like, because we’ve needed to start up from absolutely nothing. We are determined to stick with the mission for the rest of our lives, though. And when we show this dedication of ours to the masses, they’ll see a clear alternative to the socdems who’ve seemed so compelling. Or rather when they see the material results of our dedication—the worker struggles we’ve led to victory, the services we’ve provided, the popular infrastructure we’ve built—they’ll have a good reason to take our side.

The next confrontation within the left will be between the aesthetics of the reactionary NATO Dems, and the tangible workers power-building of the proletarian movement. And this aesthetic vs. material theme has special relevance to the direction that our culture is going in. Because now that the youngest generation has only ever known the social media age, we are going to see an increase in the proportion of people who are compelled by aesthetics in themselves. This shrinking of intelligence is the logical outcome for the cyberpunk age.

When Hasan Piker uses the image of himself reading Lenin, he’s marketing towards the individuals who’ve already been conditioned to think through a mainly superficial lens, taking advantage of how successfully our ruling class has replaced actual left-wing politics with pure counterculture vibes.

There is a larger battle going on right now, though, that has players who are capable of overcoming oligarchic propaganda power. In these last four years, we’ve been mainly seeing the enemy fight this battle against the armies of resistance throughout West Asia—Gaza’s guerrilla movement, Yemen’s patriots, Iran and Lebanon’s heroic fighters. Soon the Chinese people will likely join the fight, according to the plans of these left “populist” neocons who desire war over Taiwan.

All of this is going to further the systemic breakdown that our government has catalyzed, and all of it matters for where the class war goes next. There will be many who respond by entering into the political struggle, and won’t be intimidated into inaction by the state’s police tactics. If we provide this layer of dedicated freedom fighters with the structure they need, the entire game will change.

Within the left, the next main line of demarcation is going to be between the pro-imperialist reformists, and the actual working-class movement. We know this because the “democratic socialists” have been adopting a strategy that’s capable of actually drawing in a mass base for their politics: discard the woke rhetoric that used to be predominant within the left, and appeal towards a broader audience via economic populism. The new posture of the “progressive” Democrats is one where they copy the MAGA Communist strategy, i.e. reach a mass base that includes the conservative workers.

It’s a bourgeois diversion from Marxism, one that may be very deliberate depending on just how directly our movement has inspired this recent pivot by the socdems. They’re omitting all of MAGA Communism’s anti-imperialist aspects, while solely promoting policies that will uplift the workers in the empire’s core; which always amounts to an effort at strengthening capital, and at condemning the world’s people to more imperial violence.

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To unpack social democratic ideology, and figure out how Marxists can defeat it, we must investigate why social democracy always benefits the bourgeoisie. And when speaking to the masses about why social democracy should be rejected, we must illustrate why victory for the bourgeoisie always means defeat for the proletariat. Because according to the worldview that social democrats draw from, supposedly the workers and the capitalists are able to achieve a mutual triumph. Supposedly we can come to a “class peace,” where the proletariat has been lifted up to an extent where it no longer matters that the proletariat is exploited.

Such is the ideal that H.G. Wells had in mind while he was interviewing Stalin, and posing to him the social-democratic liberal view of class. Wells was coming from the same perspective as the “American exceptionalists” within the socialist movement, who believed U.S. capitalism is so uniquely advanced that the workers had come to no longer be in material conflict with the capitalist class. Such was the perspective of the camp that viewed Roosevelt’s pro-worker reforms as being part of an actual path towards socialism, rather than as an effort to stave off socialist revolution. In response to the statement from Wells that such reforms could let Roosevelt abolish the financial oligarchy and bring about socialism, Stalin said:

What will this “socialism” be? At best, bridling to some extent, the most unbridled of individual representatives of capitalist profit, some increase in the application of the principle of regulation in national economy. That is all very well. But as soon as Roosevelt, or any other captain in the contemporary bourgeois world, proceeds to undertake something serious against the foundation of capitalism, he will inevitably suffer utter defeat. The banks, the industries, the large enterprises, the large farms are not in Roosevelt’s hands. All these are private property. The railroads, the mercantile fleet, all these belong to private owners. And, finally, the army of skilled workers, the engineers, the technicians, these too are not at Roosevelt’s command, they are at the command of the private owners; they all work for the private owners. We must not forget the functions of the State in the bourgeois world.

The State is an institution that organises the defence of the country, organises the maintenance of “order”; it is an apparatus for collecting taxes. The capitalist State does not deal much with economy in the strict sense of the word; the latter is not in the hands of the State. On the contrary, the State is in the hands of capitalist economy. That is why I fear that in spite of all his energies and abilities, Roosevelt will not achieve the goal you mention, if indeed that is his goal. Perhaps, in the course of several generations it will be possible to approach this goal somewhat; but I personally think that even this is not very probable.

This debate happened in 1934, when essentially the whole capitalist world was reckoning with the crisis of overproduction which had produced the era’s economic collapse. The United States, which had become one of if not the biggest world monopolist centers, was facing the choice to preserve capitalism through reforms or undergo a workers revolution. And by that point, the American masses had come to have enough revolutionary consciousness for proletarian victory to be quite plausible. But the opportunist forces, the actors who sought to tail behind the Roosevelt wing of the ruling class, would win out within the communist and labor movements. This enabled Wall Street to fortify its control after Roosevelt’s death—which there’s evidence to suggest was an assassination—and crush the country’s working-class organizations.

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It was in this next decade or so after World War II that America would undergo the cultural shift which ultimately made the MAGA movement viable. What happened was that in the midst of the McCarthyist paranoia, the conservative forces which aligned with capital’s lower levels redefined “communism” as being synonymous with the designs of monopoly finance capital. According to this narrative, propagated by groups like the John Birch Society, any sentiment within our institutions which aligns with social progressivism is evidence of Marxist infiltration. And what solidified this narrative was the co-optation of Marxism by the academic “critical theorists,” who’ve divorced Marxism from the class struggle so that they can treat identity politics as “Marxist.” ACP chairman Haz Al-Din explains this in his article which clarifies MAGA Communism’s role:

Leftists sneer at MAGA Communists owing to the supposedly unbridgeable rift between Communism and the MAGA movement. But they are themselves the prime cause, and the greatest beneficiaries of such a rift in the first place! It is the betrayal of the revisionists, and the traitors to the working class movement - career climbing through institutional academia, NGOs and ultimately the highest levels of government - that has earned Communism the dirty name that it has now acquired in America. The ‘communists,’ sitting at their posts as the most vicious representatives of the professional managerial class, are themselves chiefly to blame for the unpopularity of Communism. It is thus inevitable that the greatest enemies of the MAGA Communist movement will be leftists, who stand the most to lose from the unity of Marxism with the worker’s movement. It will outmode them into irrelevance, and turn the ideology that has for so long been the sanction of their parasitism and evil into the weapon of social forces disposed with the intention of liquidating them as a class.

If communists had stopped these charlatans from taking over Marxism, many if not most of today’s right-wingers would now be aligned with our cause. We know this because during the pre-war era, much of what would become the modern Republican base had been part of the masses who were suffering under the Wall Street-created crisis; the American working class has collectively lived through these historical struggles, and the presence of reactionary ideas among the working class hasn’t negated this shared nature of their experience.

At that time, racism and nativism were on the rise compared to a generation earlier, as the ruling class had successfully revived the Ku Klux Klan and popularized its propaganda. William Z. Foster pointed out how this rising fascist menace showed “the working class must retain the initiative, and establish and maintain its leadership over all of the oppressed masses. It must impress its program and its goal upon the minds of the lower middle class and farmers, as the only substantial hope for the solution of their problems, and thus establish such sympathetic contact and alliances with these classes that their support or neutrality in the revolutionary struggle is secured.” Due to a combination of the reformist leaders winning out within the workers movement, and this movement being overwhelmed by the repressive strength of capital, the communists were set back in this goal. Which allowed the capitalists to reach much of these petty-bourgeois and working-class whites, bringing them into what’s now the modern American conservative movement.

A famous peculiarity about this movement is that originally, it was the Democrats who represented its primary home. As it’s commonly phrased, the Democrats and the Republicans “switched platforms” when the Democratic Party absorbed the Civil Rights movement, and the Republicans captured the “Dixiecrat” whites. This was the moment when the brand which would become MAGA solidified, making the rise of Trump into an inevitability. But all throughout this process, even as the workers movement was dismantled and capital went on an unprecedented offensive, America was being haunted by the specter of communism (specifically MAGA Communism).

Among the conservative masses, there remained that desire to fight against the liberal social engineering projects, which were more insidious than even they could have anticipated. The schemes of monopoly finance capital are bipartisan, with America’s people having never truly had any powerful allies within their government’s leadership; and now that America’s collapse has become so advanced, many former Dems and Trump supporters are realizing this.

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The psyop to cast communism as the driving force of monopoly finance capital, like the psyop to co-opt the left, was about seizing upon real contradictions within the peoples they were targeted at. The John Bircher narratives and their fascist predecessors were about exploiting the pre-existing racial inequalities in American society. And the campaign to insert idpol liberalism into Marxism took advantage of ultra-leftist tendencies that were already there within the left. These efforts to cut the working class off from communism have been effective, due to the real conflicts inside American society that can nurture anti-Marxist trends. Yet all the while, these trends have been struggling against their shared nemesis, which is the immutable potential for revolutionary consciousness. It’s immutable because it arises from the struggles which these material contradictions create, inexorably pushing society towards confronting what’s been ignored.

Every enemy that Marxists face must reckon with the fact that they are fighting against the scientific recognition of material reality. Marxism cannot be refuted, so consistently what the anti-Marxists do is try to divert the masses from getting exposed towards Marxism’s analyses. This is what we’re seeing from the socdems, who will soon become our main enemies. They’re having to take care not to present a message that’s too class-conscious, that may bring the people further towards anti-imperialism and actual working-class organization. What they’re putting forth is crude economism, where someone exclusively focuses on workplace or social welfare benefits while disregarding the actual class war.

By employing a bastardized version of the MAGA Communist strategy, the socdems have shown they understand MAGA’s separation from Marxism is not unbridgeable, and in fact could easily be resolved if the underlying contradictions are reckoned with. The socdems have been sent in to keep the American working class from having this reckoning, and figuring out its true history and interests. We are here to expose everything that they seek to keep hidden, and give the workers a path to final victory.

In many ways it's even worse than this. The Marcyites, like all Trots, view the AES (actually existing socialism) world as fundamentally illegitimate. They may use the pretense of these "degenerate workers states" as a basis of some form of anti-Imperialism (at least in relation to the Imperial Core) but they have no interest in launching any kind of copasetic movement to achieve a proletarian dictatorship outside of their project within the Imperial Core.

This is called "defensism": appearing to defend AES projects whilst secretly undermining them and heightening the contradictions for the "real" and "true" revolution inside of the west.

This is the consequence of Trotsky, who demanded that the western industrialized powers lead the revolution while also demanding that revolution also occur again in the USSR.

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This thought system leads to all kinds of new frontiers of eschatological predictions. All of it boils down to accelerations from within the Imperial Core. Any aspect of derailing a spontaneous and organic proletarian movement from a Marxist-Leninist engine is therefore bad. We can, and should, as Trotskyists, sabotage these movements from within while simultaneously sharpening all contradictions from within the body politic (usually the DNC).

Fascism as a result of the contradictions within the Imperial Core is good, and this is simply a realization of the original contradiction Marx proposed. In other words, barbarism is tolerable as long as it produces the underlying revolution they so desperately crave to come from within the "global north".

This is completely unknown to the rank and file. The leadership operates like the damn Scientologists, you need to be a 9th level Thetan to be given this knowledge. Instead, the average member is never told much of Leon Trotsky or his machinations. It's bog standard "Leninism" and red flags and university students who really want to piss off their boomer Republican parents. It piggybacks off of Bircher red scare propaganda demonizing Stalin.

Agitprop reified from 1917 slogans and bad historical oversimplifications appears everywhere. So many otherwise intelligent and well meaning people fall into the effective Bolshevik larp like fanaticism. Because their radicalism is limited in the aggregate to a few years in their early twenties, the Trots achieve their ultimate aim through adventurism, sloganeering, and appeals to pathos and emotive psychology through the false pretense of revolutionary language and logic. The wet blanket approach. The jouissance of big terms, big thinking, PMC (professional managerial class) axiomatic processes, and bureaucratic logistics.

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Many many Trots I have known, over drinks and after some long conversations, have revealed similar eschatologies to me over the last 40 years. They are so high on their own supply they break over the most nuanced of differences in perceptions and party programs, etc. In many ways this deep pathology of knowing that the object of the process is complete futility allows for the over the top attitudes, adventurist mentalities, and personal individual egos to thrive.

Another way to put it: let's get drunk at the big party, at least we can act it out. That's why there are more left Trot orgs than there are elements in the periodic table. They split as a matter of individualized particularities down to the simplest deviation of opinion.

Imagine arguing endlessly about whether the USSR was a DWS (Degenerated Workers' State) or if it was never socialism at all in the first place, but this is the reality of the difference between Cannon, Healy, North, Grant, Taaffe, Woods, Pablo, Mandel, Cliff, Marcy, Robertson, Shachtman, Mendel, and Moreno. There are many many more, these are just the major org henchmen.

But make no mistake, they all align on the theory that anything that accelerates the "true" revolution is a good thing. The right wing trots are much more cohesive and focused (the Neocons) and don't have as many atomization problems, and they have just resorted to claiming finance capital is as good an engine as any to get them to the finish line - and to do it completely openly. Therefore they are successful and have real institutional power.

Meanwhile the reality is that revolutions have occurred, the AES world is the real movement of socialism in world history, and simple appearances and forms align perfectly with essences. These kinds of gnostic heresies and demiurgical paradoxes are simply the projections of bourgeois reality and are the quintessential example of anti-Communism.

Why does all of this pathology have such a strong grip in the western urban Imperial Core and amongst the literal inheritors of the "upper middle class" in the universities? It's because the underlying contradiction is simply the class politics of an urban menial service class, whose interests more or less directly coincide with the ruling elite, who want to accelerate finance capital to its final conclusion so they can be the true inheritors of the legacy of Marx and Engels. They can lead the real final "revolution" and have their cake and eat it too.

Stated simply: the global liberal universalized version of bourgeois socialism and unproductive rentier fascism.

Originally published on x.com.

Part V

Let us seek to understand each other. In the next few parts, let’s define exactly what much of our political, economic and sociological terminology means, at least within the contexts that we’ll use them. I promised to explain what was going on when the leadership or public figures from the ACP use what could be considered MAGA coded language. This will provide much context because much of the consternation comes from progressive Liberals mistaking Communists for progressive Liberals. Their ideals are a propaganda package deal. They’ll say, “Only our language is correct. All Other is aberration.” In truth, Communists can be progressive or conservative, the idea that they are exclusive against each other unsoundly conflates social policy and economic policy where such a link does not exist in the Liberal economy.

It is not only possible, but in fact nearly total in the modern day for conservatives to be liberal. Believe it or not, even most progressives are liberal. That’s because the economic style in use today, capitalism, represented an opening up, a liberalization of the previous feudal economy. The system where status was tied to your Lord and (secondarily) to a trade was stabbed to bleeding when the French communards established the commune in Paris. It gave up the ghost and totally became Liberal to all when the failing empires divided the rest of the world among themselves following the Great War.

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Meet the Liberals (It’s a Room Full of Mirrors)

On top of this new system the natural contradictions between progress and conservation rose in entirely predictable ways. Some come to believe that the economy ‘works best’ when the state enacts policies that protect the populace. Establishing robust social safety nets to allow for social integration and migration. In times of economic crisis, these people believe that the government should guide monetary policy to push it into a different, non-crisis state.

These people are the social incrementalists that Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr bemoaned in his meme-status famous, “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” They remain among us in fact, much of online “leftist” discourse revolves around this reality. Revolution is scary and makes people mad. Bumping things forward, inch by inch will see steady gains over time that will lead us into a brighter future. A beautiful dream that relies on the enemies of progressivism to allow such a window to move continually… leftward; but we’ve discussed the Overton Window in Part 3 so we know that discourse will only really slide in a single direction, it will rarely jump. Envisioning the Window as a point on a spectrum line, we understand that it must stop entirely in order to begin moving in the other direction. Progressives, failing to solve the paradox of tolerance (from back in Part 3 as well, it was a busy section), will attempt to appease the enemies of this path by offering compromise to them. It only leads to the victory of conservatism, which is uninterested in compromise, unless it is to them. “‘Meet me halfway,’ says the unreasonable man. You take a step forward, he takes two steps back. ‘Meet me halfway, says the unreasonable man.’”

A recipe for malformed policy and performative agitation for sure. If the other side is competent though, there is nothing to worry about right? Subscribe right now and we’ll answer that hilariously misguided question next time!

A recent article published by The Grayzone reports on Stephen Curry’s business ties and financial investments in technology companies connected to former Israeli military intelligence personnel. This news came as a surprise to many, especially since Curry has a reputation for being outspoken on social justice issues.

Endorsement deals with major companies like Chase, Rakuten, Fanatics, JPMorgan Chase, Callaway Golf, CarMax, Panini, Google, Subway, Brita, and Simplicity apparently have not been enough for him. Investment in Zafran Security, a tech startup led by former Israel Defense Forces operatives, has also been added to the portfolio, further expanding Curry’s range of business ventures.

What is more surprising is not that an NBA superstar can be politically inconsistent or even hypocritical, but that many people still have not come to terms with a deeper reality: the same forces that shape the rest of society are also found beneath the glamour and spectacle of professional sports.

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The $132 Billion Machine

The NBA generated a record $11.3 billion in revenue during the 2023-24 season, continuing its strong post-pandemic recovery. At the same time, the 30 teams in the league are worth about $132.8 billion altogether, showing how massive and valuable the league has become globally. Every aspect of the league—from the games themselves to the players and the branding—is organized to maximize revenue.

The sponsorship world around the NBA is massive, featuring:

• More than 1,700 brands.

• Over 2,600 deals including team partnerships and player endorsements.

• A heavy presence on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Much of the recent growth is coming from industries like technology, healthcare, and cars, which are spending more to be part of the league.

The Golden State Warriors, in particular, blend sports with Silicon Valley-style thinking. Under owner Joe Lacob, the team is run more like a startup than a traditional sports franchise, focusing on data-driven decision-making and a corporate culture that mirrors a tech company.

The Fan as Idealist

Deep down, most fans understand that professional sports are driven by profit, yet they still hold on to the belief that the game is about teams competing and athletes striving to win. A sports fan is an idealist at heart. In Sacramento, tens of thousands of fans show their loyalty to the Kings, insisting every October that “this is our year,” despite evidence to the contrary.

Unlike the routine grind of everyday life, professional sports are filled with redemption arcs and miracles. As Ljubodrag Simonović writes:

“A sports fan is ‘lifted out of everyday dullness by an athlete in whose dribbling and drive toward the goal he recognizes his own life path... What an adventure for a person who exists like a tiny grain, mercilessly tossed by the winds of history, who, by identifying with the unattainable, seeks to reach his own social worth...’”

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The Path to the Dark Side

Professional athletes may start out like the fans who follow them, driven by a love of the game. Early in their careers, they are much like a young Jedi guided by values such as service and balance. But as success grows, so do the pressures of fame and the fear of loss. That’s when “Emperor Palpatine-like” figures step in, whispering, “Why just play the game when you can own it?”

Just like Anakin Skywalker, who sought more control and certainty, Stephen Curry likely sees good reasons behind each new corporate deal: security for his family and his future. However, the shift from Anakin to Vader happens slowly. Eventually, one might find themselves presenting as a voice for social justice while simultaneously investing in entities connected to systems of apartheid.

In professional sports, the capitalist system reduces everything to profit. Even though athletes drive the machine, they are pushed into serving a fixed goal where they can be replaced at any moment by media companies or corporate sponsors. Under these conditions, athletes are reduced to tools for profit.

If this is simply how profit-driven sports work, why act shocked when a superstar follows that logic to its harshest conclusions?

Works Cited

• Ljubodrag Simonović. Profesionalizam i/li socijalizam. Mladost, Beograd, 1985.

• SponsorUnited. “NBA Marketing Partnerships Report 2024-25.”

• Sports Value. “NBA Teams Surpassed US$ 11.3 Billion in Revenue in 2024; Total Valuation Reached US$ 132.8 Billion.”

• The Grayzone. “NBA star Stephen Curry’s ties to Israeli intelligence exposed.”

• The New York Times (The Athletic). “Warriors in the Arena Where Silicon Valley Merges With Steph Curry and Co.”

A striking post has been circulating in leftist social media spaces that deserves serious attention from anyone invested in building a genuine revolutionary movement in America.

X.com user @jccfergie (Fergie Chambers), a wealthy self-described “Tankie shapeshifter” has published what he describes as firsthand knowledge of the organizational structure of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), including a hand-drawn diagram by PSL leaders Ben Becker and Vijay Prashad themselves. The diagram maps PSL’s relationship to a constellation of organizations including The People’s Forum (TPF), BreakThrough News (BTN), ANSWER Coalition, the International People’s Assembly (IPA), and Cuba solidarity and international project organizations. Beyond these “external” organizations are references to United Fronts that PSL leads, rather than participates within. For many on the left who have engaged with these spaces in good faith, this is not entirely surprising, but the specificity and the sourcing of these claims demands that we take them seriously.

The core claims from Fergie Chambers are pointed and specific. The People’s Forum, widely regarded as an independent radical cultural and organizing space in New York City, is described as being “WHOLLY funded, staffed, and controlled by PSL, whose office is in the same building upstairs.” The monthly rent for that building was reportedly $90,000 as of late 2023. BreakThrough News, a media outlet with a significant following among socialist and anti-imperialist audiences, is similarly described as staffed and controlled by PSL’s central committee from within the same building. ANSWER Coalition, one of the most visible anti-war coalitions in the country, is identified as part of PSL’s broader formation. The International People’s Assembly, which presents itself as a global grassroots convergence, is described as “fully under their control.”

These are serious structural claims, not interpersonal grievances. The poster is explicit about this distinction: *”I would not divulge all this based solely on ‘beef.’ I do it because I firmly believe they are counterinsurgency, and a danger to our movements; in terms of containment and co-optation, they are THE biggest danger.”*

What makes this thread particularly significant is Chambers’ account of being personally courted by PSL leadership. He describes having land in Massachusetts where he was running small agriculture, a gym program, housing, and political education. PSL reportedly proposed building a country-based project modeled on The People’s Forum using those spaces. He writes:

They misplayed their hand, and I think they thought that I was a little stupider than I am, and maybe a little less reckless than I am. Because of that they showed a lot of their cards to me really fast, because they were enthusiastic about me collaborating financially with them.

This account of PSL figures approaching high net worth individuals and proposing to incorporate their projects into the PSL network under the banner of collaborative left organizing fits a recognizable pattern. The organizations in the diagram are not presented to the public as PSL front groups. They are presented as independent spaces. That gap between presentation and structure is at the heart of the concern being raised.

The mention of Vijay Prashad, a prolific writer, director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and one of the most widely-read figures in the international socialist left, is notable. Prashad is beloved in many circles for his anti-imperialist writing and his work connecting Global South movements. His alleged role in drawing up an organizational diagram meant to court financial and material support raises uncomfortable questions about the relationship between his public intellectual work and PSL’s organizational agenda.

@HakawatiSunbird commented simply: “Prashad is not to be trusted,” to which Chambers responded: “Prashad has never had a principle that wasn’t for sale.” These are sharp words, and they reflect a growing frustration among leftists who feel that high-profile intellectuals functioning within these networks lend them a credibility that obscures rather than illuminates their actual structure and funding.

One of the most clarifying comments comes from @samhusseini, who described repeatedly attempting to engage PSL-connected organizations around UN protest actions, specifically around using the “Uniting for Peace” mechanism to overcome the US veto, a campaign that Colombian President Gustavo Petro eventually pursued in September 2025. The response from PSL-aligned organizations was “always a brick wall.” Chambers’ reply is instructive:

100% and beyond these kinds of shady things, their insistence on gatekeeping or at least totally dominating anything they’re remotely involved in is part of what made me turn hard on them.

This is a crucial point. The problem is not simply one of organizational opacity or funding sources. It is a political method, one in which a centralized party apparatus presents itself through multiple seemingly independent faces, while systematically blocking, absorbing, or marginalizing any organizing efforts it does not control. This is not movement building. This is movement management.

@thestustustudio made a comment that is worth pausing on: “This picture is going to live rent-free in my head forever now. It’s honestly wild how closely it lines up with my own research on the Singham Network.” The Singham Network refers to the financial and organizational network connected to Neville Roy Singham, a tech millionaire whose funding connections to various left and socialist media and organizing projects have been a subject of significant investigative journalism. The alignment between PSL’s alleged organizational diagram and research into that network is a thread that independent press should continue pulling.

A separate but related post from @notXiangyu raises a pointed question directed at both PSL and The People’s Forum regarding their promotion of Kat Abughazaleh (D), a recently progressive candidate for Congress. The post asks why Abughazaleh is being “upheld as some fighter for socialism” given her stated position on “defending Taiwan,” which is code for the continued US use of Taiwan as a geopolitical wedge against the People’s Republic of China. Whether or not one agrees with that specific framing, the question illustrates a broader concern: if PSL-controlled organizations are platforming figures whose politics are inconsistent with anti-imperialism when it is inconvenient, that reveals something about how these PSL spaces function as political instruments rather than principled movement infrastructure.

The word “counterinsurgency” is used deliberately by Chambers, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as hyperbole. Counterinsurgency in the domestic political context does not require government direction. Co-optation, containment, and the management of radical energy within controlled channels are functions that can be performed by well-funded private organizations operating within social movements. The history of the US left is full of examples — from foundation-funded nonprofits that absorbed energy from militant labor organizing, to sectarian formations that built impressive-looking infrastructure while ensuring that no independent radical force could consolidate outside their control.

The question Chambers is raising, and that many in response are affirming from their own experience, is whether PSL and its network of affiliated organizations serve the function of absorbing, directing, and ultimately containing left political energy rather than building toward any genuine rupture with the existing order. @ThatKid1871 captured the absurdity of the dynamic with dry clarity: “Ben Becker and Vijay Prashad pitching socialist organizations to a rotating pool of ultraleft venture capitalists is such a funny image.” Funny, yes, but also a serious description of how organizational infrastructure on the left gets built and who it ends up serving.

@rainer_shea quoted Lenin in response, and it is worth sitting with:

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.

The call for left unity is frequently weaponized to suppress exactly the kind of critical accountability being raised in this discussion. Genuine unity requires transparency about organizational structure, democratic accountability within organizations, and honest debate about political line. None of those things are served by a formation in which multiple organizations present themselves as independent while being controlled by a single party’s central committee.

The left does not need more managed spaces. It needs accountable ones.

This thread raises questions that cannot be answered by one post or one person’s account. They require collective investigation, honest conversation, and the willingness to follow evidence wherever it leads — even when it points at organizations and figures we have respected or relied upon.

Share your own experiences with PSL, …

… The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, ANSWER Coalition, or any of the affiliated organizations described. Have you encountered the gate keeping dynamic described here? Have you seen these spaces function to absorb or redirect organizing energy? Have you been courted, pressured, or pushed out? Do you have information about the Singham Network connections or funding structures?

We cannot build what we need to build while navigating controlled infrastructure that we mistake for our own. The first step is naming what is in front of us clearly, specifically, and without flinching. Drop your thoughts, experiences, and research in the comments. This conversation is overdue.

All quotes in this article are drawn from the public X posts. Readers are encouraged to follow through to the original sources and assess the claims directly.

All of Marx's written material was literally financed by direct exploitation of workers in Engels’ Salford factory. During Marx's life, Engels gave Marx around the equivalent of $3 million dollars. This is just an inflation adjusted number—if we drill down into the PPP (purchasing power parity) aspect it was more like $6 million easily.

Engels inherited around $6-7 million, again adding PPP and other factors he was definitely the equivalent of a contemporaneous HNWI (high net worth individual - meaning a person with $1 million in fluid assets alone).

Engels had around $15-$20 million by the 1880's - that was his value adjusted for purchasing power. Without his patronage, Marx's theory would not have existed. Marx would have been likely a beat writer always a step away from the poor house.

Without Marx's distance from and isolation to proletarian labor, he would never have had the time to sit in the round reading room at the British library for 10 hours a day. He would never have had the mental dimension of separation from proletarian consciousness necessary to objectively analyze it.

Neither did Marx have to worry about administering production from the factory floor—this was Engels cross to bear. For nearly a decade Engels used his family stipend (salary basically) to give to Marx- around $200,000 a year.

Chinese Marxist Leninists, in the oddest way, do the same thing on a societal level—they isolate themselves within the party cadre from the national bourgeois class—they use their ability to seek out markets and competition and integrative ability in the global economy (dollar system). Then they take this "salary" and feed it back into a centralized industrial planning model. They exist both outside the system and right on top of it's command structure.

Engels is most likely the most important functional part of Marxism, his class betrayal is what gave us the civilizational movement of Marxism Leninism.

Just as Christians "win" by imitating Christ, the CPC "wins" by imitating the Engelsian process.

Originally published on x.com.

The price of eggs, bread, and produce has been impossible to ignore at the checkout line lately. For many families, grocery bills have become one of the most stressful line items in the monthly budget. But what if part of the solution was sitting right outside your back door? The American Communist Party (ACP) is helping people rediscover an age-old tradition that helped communities survive some of history’s hardest times — the victory garden. And the good news is, you don’t need to be a farmer or have a sprawling piece of land to get started.

Victory gardens first took root during World War I, continued through the Great Depression, and reached their peak during World War II, when the U.S. government encouraged citizens to grow their own fruits and vegetables to reduce pressure on the public food supply. At their height, an estimated 20 million victory gardens were producing roughly 40% of the nation’s vegetables. These weren’t just practical measures, they were a symbol of community strength, resilience, and collective purpose. Today, as grocery prices climb and supply chains remain unpredictable, that same spirit is more relevant than ever.

Let’s talk dollars and cents. A single packet of tomato seeds can cost as little as two or three dollars and yield dozens of pounds of tomatoes over a growing season. The cost of tomatoes at the grocery store run a two or three dollars for one single tomato. Leafy greens like lettuce and spinach are among the easiest crops to grow and among the most expensive to buy. Studies have shown that a well-maintained home garden can save the average family hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per year in grocery costs. When you factor in the quality and quantity of food you can produce in even a small raised bed or container garden, the return on investment is remarkable.

Beyond the savings, growing your own food means you are in control. You decide what goes into the soil, what touches your plants, and when your food is harvested. No more wondering whether your strawberries were sprayed with chemicals you can’t pronounce, or whether your spinach traveled 1,500 miles before landing on your plate. Homegrown produce is picked at peak ripeness, which means it tastes better and delivers more nutritional value than anything traveling in a refrigerated truck. Once you’ve tasted a tomato still warm from the vine, it’s hard to go back.

Most of us remember the unsettling feeling of walking into a grocery store during a supply chain disruption and finding bare shelves where bread, canned goods, and fresh produce used to be. Those moments were a wake-up call for millions of Americans. A victory garden may not replace your entire food supply, but it will provide a meaningful buffer during uncertain times. When you have a garden producing zucchini, squash, beans, potatoes, corn, tomatoes, and herbs, you are less vulnerable to the price spikes and shortages that ripple through the corporate food system. That kind of self-reliance is not about paranoia; it’s about being prepared and empowered.

The victory garden story gets even better. Gardens have a funny way of producing more food than one household can eat on its own. That surplus zucchini, those extra tomatoes, and the overflowing herb garden don’t have to go to waste; they can become the foundation of something truly special in your neighborhood. When you bring a basket of homegrown vegetables to a neighbor, you aren’t just sharing food. You are building trust, starting conversations, and creating connections that strengthen the fabric of your community.

Imagine a block where five families each grow something a little different. Suddenly, those five families have access to a diverse, locally grown harvest that none of them could have achieved alone. This is the natural evolution of the victory garden spirit: from individual effort to collective abundance. Community gardens, neighborhood produce swaps, and local food sharing networks are all growing in popularity, and they all start with someone deciding to put a seed or potato in the ground.

One of the biggest misconceptions about gardening is that you need a large yard, expensive equipment, or a lifelong green thumb to be successful. The truth is, meaningful food production can happen in a five-gallon bucket on an apartment balcony, in a small raised bed on a patio, or in a modest patch of backyard soil. Tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, radishes, green onions, and herbs are all well-suited to small-space gardening. Starting small and building your knowledge season by season is the approach most successful gardeners take. You don’t have to do everything at once. You just have to begin. And the American Communist Party wants to help.

When one person in a neighborhood starts a garden, something interesting tends to happen. Curiosity spreads. Neighbors ask questions. Kids get involved. People start sharing seeds, tips, and harvests. What begins as one family’s effort to cut grocery costs quietly becomes a neighborhood movement. This is exactly the kind of grassroots momentum that has the power to reshape how communities think about food, resilience, and connection. A single raised bed can plant the seed — pun intended — for something much larger than itself.

The challenges we face today — rising food costs, uncertain supply chains, and a growing sense of disconnection from our neighbors and our food — are real. But so are the solutions available to each of us. A victory garden is not a radical act. It is a practical, proven, and deeply human response to uncertainty. It puts food on your table, money back in your pocket, and goodwill into your community. Generations before us understood this. Now it’s our turn.

ACP Is Here To Help

You don’t have to figure it out alone. The American Communist Party is here to help you take that first step, whether you’re a first-time gardener with no idea where to begin or someone looking to expand an existing garden and connect with others in your community. From guidance on what to plant and when, to connecting you with local resources and like-minded neighbors, ACP is dedicated to helping the people build the food resilience they deserve.

Ready to grow? Reach out to ACP today and let’s get your victory garden started. Because the best time to plant was yesterday. And the second best time is right now.

Part IV

Babylon Falls, Confusing Our Tongues

Let’s take a short breath. Things get tense in political discourse and we don’t want to say things we don’t mean so let’s collect ourselves and remind ourselves of who and what exactly we’re talking about because all this is complicated. There are a (figurative) million working parts to piece together and dammit if Joe Rogan and The Five are going to recontexualise and “just ask questions” until none of them connect in any real way or make any real sense. It’s best to make perfect sense here so that together, we can understand how we need to understand.

I mentioned that the Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan. You’ll hear white supremacists parrot this same line. It’s a rare instance of truth from their ilk. A single grain of truth doesn’t sweeten the rest of the salt though and they either ignore or are wilfully ignorant of the intervening 180 or so years since, but even this position isn’t entirely genuine. It is true that the early Klanners were Democrat. Let’s recall though that the overt racism inherent in the southern tradition; codified in the Confederate Constitutions and Declarations of War had shifted intra-party sentiment so gradually, but totally that by the time Tricky Dick Nixon (President Richard Nixon) employed the Southern Strategy, the remnant Dixiecrats were primed and ready to jump ship to the new racist party. Modern in form. Where the Democrats of old enjoyed the privilege of white life in the high castle away from and above the ‘undesirables,’ off to suburbanize and gentrify. The new Republican Party, led by a fellow who isn’t afraid to lie about who the enemy was for his own gain, walked down a dead end path that had become so normal that other paths seemed absurd.

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The point here is that what one person may mean when they say, for example, “Democrat” can be entirely different, depending on with whom you are talking and exactly what you are talking about. This is not only unhelpful for us, it’s by design, because it is unhelpful for us. This is typified in the above scenario. Maybe you don’t believe me though. Dear reader. I try very hard not to make claims that can’t reasonably be proved and I don’t even have to try very hard with this one, let’s have Mr Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist architect of the Southern Strategy walk us into the outro for this series’ segueue. In a 1981 interview, he recalled,

“Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

In the next few parts, we’ll get Communist-level specific with our terms so that we can be certain that we understand each other. That’s how we build community right? Subscribe now to join us next time!

Been watching “Invincible” and reading some of the comics along the way. This damn thing is all about rentier capital and millennials and gen Xers dealing with their boomer land owning enfranchised parents. It’s really hilarious.

I do like how it makes the Viltrumites this complete shadow empire; one that is supposed to be the most powerful ever (dollar hegemony) that plays out as a dying husk without the ability to create anything, and their progeny realizing there are only 37 of them left and it’s this giant paper tiger.

It’s primary opponent is a multipolar consortium of aliens and earth desperately trying to kill off the last of the boomers (to inherit their wealth) but they just won’t die.

Too bad I know how it ends, with some form of reconciliation- another huge cop out. Would be one of the great comics if they just succeeded with the genocide of the Viltrumites and the Mark kid just flew into the sun and ended it.

Thaddeus is the Communist, the allusion to Jude the Apostle, and he is on a mission to simply destroy the financial oligarch boomers, himself one. He warns of corruption in the church.

Mark is the social fascist looking to make a deal.

Can’t help but read into the “Thragg” character as Freddie Mercury, the name also meaning the F slur, who represents the rentier realist position—the usherer of bourgeois socialism.

Originally published on x.com.

Food insecurity in Sacramento has been a major focus of research for ACP Central Valley members over the past year. We found that in Sacramento, more than 300,000 people now rely on food banks, up from about 150,000 before the COVID pandemic. Among them are over 80,000 children, along with a similar number of seniors. Churches and food banks where we’ve volunteered report an unprecedented surge in people seeking food assistance, while also facing growing challenges in trying to meet that need.

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Over roughly a dozen volunteer visits at church-run food banks, we’ve watched lines of cars wrap around parking lots for hours. Volunteers move quickly, handing out boxes filled with essentials: canned goods, protein, fruits, and vegetables. For these congregations, this work grows directly out of their religious commitment to serve those in need. Yet, these church-run food programs seem caught in a difficult balance of delivering essential help while functioning within a system that continues to create the need for that aid.

Church food pantries are rarely standalone operations. They are embedded in a multilayered system of public and nonprofit support. At the federal level, programs source large quantities of food, while state systems augment and coordinate distribution through regional food banks. These food banks, in turn, partner with local institutions (churches), who rely on volunteers to deliver food to communities. Churches serve as critical access points within this network. By hosting food programs, they become visible and trusted community hubs, building relationships with families, schools, and local organizations. These activities also strengthen institutional credibility with donors, partners, and public agencies.

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While both The ACP and the ministry leaders agree on the importance of providing immediate help, perspectives diverge when addressing the causes of poverty. Some religious leaders we have interviewed emphasize that poverty is a persistent, even inevitable condition, and that the primary response and solution are spiritual rather than political.

At The ACP, we do not see poverty as a permanent feature of human society but a product of specific economic arrangements. Wealth is created collectively, yet concentrated in the hands of a few. From this perspective, treating poverty as inevitable risks overlooking the structural conditions that give rise to it.

Contrary to common misconceptions about Karl Marx’s views on religion, he approached the subject with care and nuance. He saw it as a source of comfort and meaning, particularly in a system that leaves millions in hardship, while also recognizing how it can be used to divert attention away from the material causes of suffering. Applied to modern food distribution systems, this critique suggests that while food banks provide essential relief, they often operate within a framework that discourages deeper questioning of the economic structures behind food insecurity.

Food banks, including those run by churches, clearly meet urgent needs, and that work deserves recognition. However, if the conditions that create food insecurity remain unchanged, the demand for these programs will continue, and likely grow. This, again, does not diminish the value of the work being done. Rather, it highlights a structural dynamic: relief efforts can coexist with, and sometimes stabilize, the systems that produce the need for relief.

When asked how the local government could better support their programs, we noticed some leaders were hesitant to offer even constructive criticism. That hesitation makes sense when we consider the realities they operate within: many church-based food programs depend on partnerships with public agencies, access to government-supported food supplies, and close coordination with regional food banks and nonprofits. These relationships provide the resources needed to sustain large-scale distribution, but they can also create incentives to remain cooperative rather than critical in interactions with local authorities.

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Additionally, the internal priorities of religious institutions, such as maintaining stability, serving their congregations, and focusing on pastoral care, often shape how political issues are approached. An emphasis on values like humility, patience, and endurance can support individuals facing difficult circumstances, but may also encourage a less confrontational stance toward their underlying causes. It is important to note that religious responses to poverty are not uniform. Both historically and today, different movements have interpreted religious teachings in ways that call for systemic change alongside direct aid.

Liberation theology in Latin America, which combined religious doctrine with analysis of economic inequality and support for social movements is one obvious example. At home, faith-based participation in labor organizing and civil rights campaigns have been the key components of some of the brightest moments in our country’s history. Church-run food banks play a vital role in addressing immediate needs. They provide food, stability, and a point of connection for thousands of individuals and families. Their work is grounded in genuine commitment and deeply held moral convictions.

At the same time, their position within a larger system raises important questions. When poverty is treated as inevitable and political engagement is limited, relief efforts risk becoming part of a cycle in which symptoms are managed while underlying causes remain intact.

The challenge, then, is not to question the necessity of feeding those in need, but to consider how such efforts relate to broader discussions about why that need exists, and whether it must continue at its current scale.

From the Overton Window to the Wall

We can examine the decomposition of societal discourse by examining it through the framework of the Overton Window. Identified in the 1990’s by political observer Joseph Overton, it was supposed that what we accept in society is indeed reflected in politics. While a large antisocial act would instantly have an actor vilified, smaller acts of unfavorable behavior in high frequency will inure the public to larger and larger feats of tragedy.

The year 2000 saw Presidential candidate George W Bush readying a stump speech in Naperville, IL. He spied a journalist with whom there was some apparent animosity and was heard on the hot mic remarking to Vice-Presidential candidate Dick Chaney, “There’s Adam Clymer, a major league asshole from the New York Times.” Despite the “backstage” nature of the remarks, this was big news. He was asked about it several times in subsequent articles and interviews. He refused to offer apology.

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In the 2004 Presidential campaign, Democrat Howard Dean was seen as a shoe-in not only for the Party’s nomination for Presidential candidate over rivals John (Swiftboat) Kerry and a man you’ll only ever remember forgetting, John Edwards; but indeed the Presidency itself. It seemed increasingly likely that George W Bush would again enter the race as the incumbent on the Republican side and the prevailing wisdom was that Dean would eloquently wipe the mat with the coked out bumpkin. Whether he would have won is anyone’s guess (he would not have, America doesn’t replace a President in what we can be convinced is a war and he wasn’t historically unpopular enough to change that yet), but Dean was unable to recover and was mocked out of the race due to an odd rallying cry he tried out at the end of the Nevada primary, which he had lost to both of the above.

Contrast this with NC Representative Joe Wilson taking the opportunity during a televised Presidential address to inform the country what he thought of the President (yelling, “You lie” during a rare speech for a joint session of Congress during the ACA debate). Contrast again with TX Representative Jasmine Crockett’s request for clarification of whether describing fellow Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (who had since resigned because it turns out that Donald Trump is probably a child predator) as “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body” would be considered “engaging in personalities” which is against the rules for the minority party.

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While we see example after example of this phenomenon, we still have not really discerned a cause. Let us consider with this the paradox of tolerance, especially in the context of American political discourse. Whether you’d like to think of America as a melting pot (a thought exercise that supposes that very different peoples come together, assimilate down the same path as a cohort and become one, homogeneous mass), or a salad bowl (in which all elements live among the others but maintain their own characteristics), it seems evident to me that the ability of the different people to live together in some sort of harmony rests with the ability of the society to exude and practice a level of tolerance. People will come and be different. At least leave them alone.

But how much is too much? This is the question asked by our MAGA cousins. If the differences lead to societal detriment, at what point do we abandon the failed regime of accepting any and all comers, regardless of their desire or ability to assimilate. Is this even a valid concern? The answer to that is a matter of opinion. What we must examine are facts. Let us come to understand that the paradox of tolerance is that we must allow maximum participation by all interested parties except the intolerant. There is in fact, no paradox here. It is an answerable assertion. The intolerant marginalize those eligible for marginalization. Who that is may change, but whoever it is cannot be left to the whims of those who would casually extinguish human life due to dislike of change.

But what of our Democrat cousins? Surely they’ve mounted vigorous defense against the forces of bigotry. After all “the Party of the Klan” has experienced a near universal turnaround since drunken traitor Nathan Forrest tilted at slavery’s stupid windmill right? Subscribe so you can join us next time and we can discuss what the Democrats see from the high road.