In spring 2022 I authored a piece entitled Collapse, which was first published without my permission by a defunct group “Revolutionary Study Network” and then briefly by own initiative on an anonymous Twitter profile. Comrades and friends have used this document uncritically to understand the history of the US Maoist movement, but it has become necessary to discuss this document and issue self-criticism due to the impact it has had. Not only does it contain factual inaccuracies and half-correct information provided by poor historians (or even by deliberate fabricators who are politically unreliable), but the method driving the paper itself adopts certain harmful fallacies that need to be unpacked and understood more deeply.
Before diving deeper into those fallacies – I consider it necessary to make some introductory comments and explain why Collapse was released in the first place. There has been much compiled at Red Library website regarding the matters surrounding the attempted liquidation of efforts at the reconstitution of the Communist Party of the USA (CR-CPUSA), and I encourage all to study these documents to understand the development of the trend of liquidationism and the errors of previous leaders.
As a supporter in Pittsburgh and writer who had been active since 2015, I was in the headquarters of where the liquidation efforts were launched. Initially backing what I thought were efforts to remove unqualified leaders due to their subjectivist errors which had exhausted activists involved in positive practical work around workers and supporting families of those killed by the police, I had suddenly realized I was being used. People who I had thought were my comrades suddenly became cold, and I was told that I would now no longer be able to be involved in discussions, in organizing and that I had to do “check ins” with one of the Right liquidationists representatives. This person posed as a friend, inviting me out for drinks or to eat, but used these meetings to collect information on me, which was then forwarded to one of the chief architects of the split. This person then issued directives on what I could say and do. While I was initially offered a “trial” where I could discuss my errors, that offer was reneged on, and I was told that I had to keep my mouth shut.
I had heard from several comrades formerly involved with Tribune of the People News that the liquidationists had organized the formerly active elements who were active after 2020 into a committee known as the “National Working Group,” or NWG for short. After I had heard that the group of Right liquidationists were using the NWG not as a means of reorganization but as a means of dispersal, splintering links between leaders and rank-in-file activists, dismembering all organizations and penetration into existing struggles, and destroying communication lines, I took to writing Collapse as a guide and call to action. Collapse‘s only positive aspect was its initial criticisms of Avakianism and postmodernism, but it fundamentally failed to break from those incorrect forms of thinking.
Collapse is still a principally incorrect document – it passes a liquidationist line itself in a ‘Maoist’ framework and disregards Maoist principles. It’s my responsibility as its writer to redact it and urge future readers and viewers to understand the complex fullness in summating that stage. It likewise is the responsibility of readers and viewers who are genuinely committed to Party reconstitution to understand that people and events do not come with clear and easy-to-read labels and signs – if there is a label, it should read “investigation is required for assembly.” The right liquidationists are not interested in investigation, in two line-struggle, their focus has never been to rebuild a new around the collection and systematization of correct ideas and standpoints but at destroying any attempt to do so.
The failure to appreciate how messy the split is can be seen in how the document did not respect proper channels. It was released based on the presupposition that there was no organizations or Center for me to consult with, no leaders or comrades urging me to not release it for purposes of more collective self-criticism and summation. This reveals a pessimism but also a problem of perspective: presuming that the organization was dead when even after the supposed “collapse” it was living on even as, because of the split, there were now separate organizations which persisted in some way opposed to one another. This is crucial in understanding and expressing processes of development, and seeing them in a dialectical manner: many revolutionaries today who were once more or less organically unified, be it in Tribune support committees, student organizations or in worker factions, were suddenly broken apart into different parts that now must struggle towards unification.
Principled struggle for unity requires unwavering commitment to addressing the contradictions that led to the split, by engaging collective analysis and mutual accountability. Errors and deviations must be understood in the context of the movement’s historical development, with an emphasis on their material roots and lessons, not on theories of personality or rumors. By not rejecting the temptation to publicly air rumors or personal grievances, I helped contribute to division and mistrust among comrades.
This papers main errors stem from its demagoguery in obtaining information from politically unreliable sources, including from liquidationists, with the fallacy being that accusers (even second, third, fourth hand allegations) are always right, and that the more passionate someone is denounced, the more trustworthy one must assume that source is! It also takes on subjectivism in its approach and in its prescriptions for resolving certain errors, a necessity given how I as the writer was often working with information that was incorrect. Finally, it should be pointed out how the piece was basing some of its criticism on what the Left had already been criticizing all while passing an attack on the Left.
While the piece partially argued based on errors, as a whole it failed to delineate between Yenan and Sian, between revolution and reaction – it engaged in the sloppy labeling of ‘revisionism’ with very little analysis into defining what this was the ideological, political and organizational line of those accused. It attacked those who provided service and sacrifice to revolution, against those who in spite of their errors, never turned their backs on Maoism. When it comes to those comrades who have made mistakes, the solution is Maoist unity, not a unity that rejects comrades who are facing serious repression and isolation and brokers peace with liquidationists or social democrats.
To start, one can easily see how the piece is filled with speculative claims about personal lives that are harmful and politically counterproductive. Not only is it unprincipled and not keeping with the spirit of Marxist criticism-self-criticism, but it is misremembered. From rhetoric around suspecting the class backgrounds and history of those involved, to sport commentator-like musings around individual motivations based on pop culture or historical topics these people allegedly had interests in. This vulgarization of criticism is one of the movement’s oldest errors, connected to subjectivism, sectarianism, and postmodernist trends which were introduced to the movement from its inception in 2013 and that was never truly rid of, fixated on individualism and the personalization of problems rather than collectively addressing problems on a wider level. Because the liquidationists emerged from the Right of the US Maoist movement, it is no surprise they picked up this method.
The title “Collapse” is incorrect in of itself and reveals a lack of investigation. “Statement On the Situation of US Maoists,” released by the Communist International, clarifies what happened in March 2022. It simplifies a complex and ever-changing situation to label it this as a collapse. Many continued to organize as Maoists even after the split, even if the period initially after the split led to some, including myself, to become demoralized.
In reference to the demographics, the data is incorrect, and furthermore a cautious reader can see self-contradictory claims made here, which is that members did not know one another, yet are suddenly knowledgeable about who is and isn’t in the organization. Likewise, not shared in “Collapse” or on the liquidationist’s website, are how most of those who were part of the “clique” (just like most of the movement) were women. Yet we see with the doxing by the liquidators this over-representation of women was not included. I cannot pretend to know the motivations for not sharing the pictures and names of these women leaders, but suspect that it’s because it is contradictory to the claims that this a “patriarchal” men-led and operated movement made by them.
Upon deeper investigation, including from legal documents from the state and reactionaries, many of the claims made in Collapse have proven to be inaccurate. We should take time to reflect on these claims, so chronologically these will be discussed in the sections below. For purposes of levity, not every incorrect claim in Collapse can be touched upon. Also of note, as the author I did not interview anyone from Los Angeles or Oxnard, nor anyone from Charlotte, I was entirely reliant on information provided from those who were avowed opponents of the movement – the absence of corrections from the original article related to these cities is not suggestive of endorsement of previously stated claims, but of a need for ongoing investigation there.
The facts remain that the US Maoist movement, especially for newer generations who have joined it, has had its history obfuscated by its enemies. Correction of historical inaccuracies as so is important, as part of setting the record straight and rising to the defense of revolutionaries.
The prelude sections itself contain several noted historical inaccuracies. The real roots of the “Liaison Committee of the New Communist Party” (LC-NCP) go back all the way to Occupy Wall Street in 2011, which marked a shift towards class consciousness and regrouping among dispersed Marxists under conditions of postmodernism, social democracy, and revisionism (of Avakianite, Marcyite, and Trotskyite varities) having hegemony on the U.S. mass movement. Founded first as the “Organizing Committee of the New Communist Party” (OC-NCP) in 2013, it had split into the LC-NCP and also into the Maoist Communist Group (MCG).
The Red Guards (RG, or RGs for short) movement emerged with a sectarian Left and a postmodern Right, however the Left did not (as “Collapse” claims) have an “eclectic and empiricist distortion of Maoism”: it was in a process of development in understanding and application of Maoism. Studying published writing from this period allows a more critical reader to see how there was a right and left, correct and incorrect ideas. There was a struggle between the right and left, but the struggle was not always organized or handled properly. There were also moments where the left’s actions were informed by its uneasy relationship to the right.
The selection of the very name “Red Guards” reflected an undeveloped political line that was not only suggestive of it being a youth organization, but that also suggested making cultural revolution without having conquered power, an Avakian criteria which is still present today, including in doxing people and painting this as the same as putting a dazibao exposing a revisionist up. “Condemned To Win,” a position paper taken in this period, promoted the federalism model for developing Party unity that originated with Bob Avakian’s Bay Area Revolutionary Union. It also called for forming STP charity programs based on the Panther’s survival programs. “We Will Not Integrate Into a Burning House” showed how the contradiction between the left and right took place in this period: while the LC-NCP had several problems and there were leading opportunists taking incorrect positions, the Left of the RG compromised with the Right because they considered the LC worse. The poor foundation (organically, politically and ideologically) the LC was founded on caused it to easily split, but “Burning House” was not good politically. The problems of the federated model, call outs masquerading as polemics are repeating themselves today in other organizations.
What is not accounted for in “Collapse” is how, while the Left did not always struggle correctly against the right, this did not mean they did not identify these errors and seek to overcome them. It was the “clique” that identified postmodernism, vulgar “antifascism”, gentrification, services programs and federations. Important to note, the Left was who introduced Chairman Gonzalo within the RG movement. The teachings of Chairman Gonzalo began to be applied while there was also, from the start, those who were followers of Avakianism without Avakian, the latter being influential due to the LC influence (whose leaders had attacked the “Gonzaloism” of the RG movement). But given how the US movement lacked international connections and experienced veterans, with the RCP controlling solidarity work and the MPP lacking in the US, there was a failure to adequately engage and certain ideological shortcomings. But while this limited development, Collapse suggests this limited development was evidence of no development, which is false.
An important addendum is also needing to be provided over reports related to the repression contained in the article as well, as much of the information related to the repression against Red Guards Austin (RGA) was obtained from a liquidationist who was a suspected informant, as well as from other untrustworthy sources. This individual was involved in student activism and was on felony probation for drug offenses while he was involved in the movement, before he suddenly disappeared and traveled abroad. First and foremost, the action against Alex Jones did not force anyone to move to Los Angeles. Upon investigation Infowars” coverage, if anything, boosted the profile of the group and led to people looking into what Red Guards Austin was all about.
“Collapse” claimed that an officer “attempted” to break “Dallas’” neck, this is false—they succeeded in breaking his neck, and then did not even initially treat it after his arrest. The claim that it was a “completely preventable arrest” was inaccurate, as this protester that had his neck broken was involved in leading protest marches from the previous nights. The “stealing” of a hat from a Trump supporter never happened and the police never claimed this happened, what happened was that a six foot tall man with no tattoos tried to set a sign formerly held by this Trump supporter on fire. The charge was fabricated against Dallas to pardon police violence as necessary. All charges incurred that night were either dismissed or beaten in jury trials. To play up a false caricature of adventurism (which critics of the RGs did frequently, often with little evidence, to play up a defense of their own pacifist and social democratic events and organizations that sought to integrate the masses into the government) is deserving of self-criticism. What happened that night was a police riot started by DPS and APD just as counter protesters were escalating against protesters, which led to the violent attack on the protesters and on one who was nearly murdered at their hands.
The Marduk protest was also wrongly reported by me. In the Riverside neighborhood of Austin there was neo-Nazi organizing and recruiting by a fascist named Colin, who was a fan of black metal. Colin was determined to be there at the Marduk show, so antifascists went to scare him out of the neighborhood, and he was rightfully physically confronted. While it was poorly planned and carried out, and the orientation towards fascists was wrong, the campaign was successful in forcing this fascist to move out of the neighborhood ending his organizing efforts there completely. This antifascist activism did not “open the movement up to repression,” general revolutionary activism will always open revolutionaries up to repression. The state is a repressive machine and it is there to engage in counter revolutionary violence. In May 2020 in Austin they arrested a nonviolent car caravan demanding a rent freeze, as well as attacking and attempting to arrest revolutionaries participating in the red march after they fought reactionaries who were attempted to block the protest. “Collapse” attempts to frame the accomplishments of the movement as its faults, which is wrong. While there were deviations that can and should be discussed in regard to propaganda, this should be grasped clearly.
While State attacks are meant to disorganize and disperse revolutionaries, and these can make internal contradictions worse (including in creating “high control” in certain areas, when surveillance and arrest risks are present), the idea that the movement was repressed into becoming bad has no merit. One of the most important aspects of this is the attempt to rehabilitate the image of the snitch who provided information to the police, leading to federal gun charges. This individual who informed on “Dallas” was registered as a Republican while carrying out anti-election and anti-Trump organizing, he had abundant redacted interactions with law enforcement which was not explainable, and he made threats against comrades which led to severed relations before the alleged assault occurred. There was no witness present for this except his ex-girlfriend, who refused to go to court, leading to the case being dropped. He also confronted lawyers who were defending revolutionary activists to intimidate them from defending the movement. Collapse regurgitates the liquidator normalization of this snitch, based on the state narrative that didn’t even hold up in their own courts.
Most egregious are the claims regarding “Dallas” in federal prison, which are speculative claims provided to me by one of the Pittsburgh liquidationists after she and another local leader-turned liquidationist returned from Austin. There was a suggestion Dallas was attempting to organize and lead the movement from behind the bars, indirectly providing information to the State regarding organizational problems. The facts are as follows: in Federal prison there are several levels of confinement and due to this comrade being accused of affiliations to “Antifa” and being a “Communist” during pre-sentencing investigation, with information provided based on original police reports mentioning a “violent incident” that suggested the comrade “posed a danger to the surrounding community” and belonged to a “terrorist or criminal organization,” he was placed in a Medium security facility surrounded by double fencing with two-man cells with an added degree of high control and monitoring. All phone calls were listened to by a Lieutenant in the Bureau of Prisons within 23 hours of being made, when possible were monitored live, and all emails outgoing and incoming had to be read first. The State knew very well that “Dallas” was not making any decisions from prison, and he got out early due to First Step Act credits and a lack of disciplinary write ups.
In fact, there were several moments of Dallas which revealed the intent of control by the State. Guards retaliated over the calling of a person his contact list and him asking to speak to another person, also on his contact list which did not violate Bureau of Prison policy but that CO leadership threatened him over. They withheld the book Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel as being potentially dangerous, initially refused to let his wife and child visit due to “posing a danger to the institution” and so on. There was an entire year of them fishing for reasons to place him in disciplinary solitary confinement. In prison this comrade maintained his post and maintained his revolutionary spirit by holding study groups and even helped initiate a food strike, worked a legal clinic for undocumented people, and read.
Given that the liquidationists have united around attacking this comrade as part of their counter insurgent strategy of dispersing forces, they saw to it to lie and place blame at the feet of this person, who was the most repressed and injured member of the movement, next to only Garrett Foster and his partner. To repeat this lie in Collapse reveals why the document needs to be repudiated: whatever aspects of it are helpful in re-circulating criticism already made by the Left, as a whole it was produced and has been used by the liquidators to provide ‘Maoist’ cover to their attack on unification efforts.
“Three Fields” should be read and studied by the movement as the proper foundation for understanding the events that led to this split, and to deepening movement-wide self-criticism. It is where the responsible comrades took ownership for their actions, and this approach must extend to us all. Both the ranks and leaders must collectively assess their work (action or inaction) since the split and draw general lessons from it. Reducing criticism to an individual level is marked with the class content of the petty bourgeoisie, with the postmodern ideological tendency to elevate the interpersonal to the realm of class struggle—a significant ideological error which was embedded in our thinking. The recounting of March 2022 was provided to me as the author, by second hand, from the woman leader in Pittsburgh who was the one of the chief architects of the liquidation attempts, but both me and this individual shared a simplistic presumption initially, before she moved to advocate destroying the organization altogether: there were no differences between left and right deviations, there were no right deviations that consolidate into right opportunist lines over time and left deviations that can be corrected, there were just a few bad actors. While both me and this local leader shared subjectivism, with me sharing an administrative view that divorced the ideological-political from the organizational and envisioned simple solutions to complex problems that needed to be investigated, the other leader went further in calling for destruction of the organization altogether, only to embrace classical anti-communism. There were three responsible in Pittsburgh, I being one of them. “E” was what I will call the woman leader, a young activist who moved here in 2020 and initially came to lead efforts among women and students. Then there was “A” who came from Austin to lead and oversee regional and local work.
Throughout the year and a half leading to 2022, Collapse doesn’t account for the real contradiction existing internally between organization and disorganization, tied to flawed conceptions of two-line struggle and a neglect of the processes by which contradictions develop. For example, let’s touch on the question of “overwork” or exhaustion that the liquidationists harp on. The issue was not over the fact that comrades received directives and were expected to work, as part of voluntarily submitting to the discipline of the organization—in fact most comrades did not experience excessive control and were able to retain considerable autonomy in their local work. Especially among those wrapped into the rightward shift, these individuals even casually broke with the discipline of the organization to do their own thing, and did not provide criticism of directives until the liquidationists carried out their attempted attacks.
This disarray resulted in a lack of quality, with fronts of struggle opening and closing unpredictably. In Pittsburgh, with the murder of a homeless man named Jim Rogers by the Pittsburgh police, the workers at both the Amazon sorting and distribution facilities taking an interest in organizing, the tenant struggle, as well as the fight around the defense of abortion rights, there was an increasing objective need among the people for the subjective forces of revolution to catch up in order to better mobilize, have better discipline and a better disposition to lead. The serious issue here in Pittsburgh was, in spite of what I feel was initially a real and genuine impulse to serve the people in accordance to directives from the center and to the ideology, A and E used that autonomy to focus in auxiliary fronts of work (among the petty bourgeoisie—students interested in abortion rights) and treated work among the deepest proletarian masses as peripheral, often compelling unqualified and untrained activists who were originally told they were to be focused on learning to do work at Amazon, to now overextend themselves into serving that auxiliary front’s work around organizing students and those interested in abortion rights. This periphery would be abolished as the liquidationists launched their attacks.
In this example (of which there were many other issues locally) of errors of the work, we saw an emerging situation where right deviations were consolidating in preparation for an attack, yet the left was completely unaware or otherwise unprepared. E (who had been heading the “Revolutionary Women’s Study Group” among middle class students and was organizing actions around abortion rights) had been increasingly adopting postmodernist positions, from endorsing queer theory, ‘womanism’/separatism, and aspects of bourgeois feminism that rejected socialist revolution and Marxism, and was using her position of leadership to call for abandoning integration into the proletariat at Amazon and elsewhere in exchange for focusing on her front. A had become demoralized and completely abandoned his post, acquiescing to E and I regarding communicating with the center and directing local work in the 3 months before the split precipitated. E oversaw most of this local work, with me continuing to assist efforts at Amazon, and seeing as I only met with E once a week and did not receive reports on her work, had little clue of how deep her degeneration had evolved into years later. During this time, there were calls for reorganization and recall from the left, not just in Pittsburgh but in Austin, Los Angeles and elsewhere. An error of the left however was not carefully planning this, and thus conceding ground to a better organized and prepared right to attack. So while there needed to be strategic retreats from certain fronts because they were over-extending limited forces, and this call was coming precisely from the left, there was no real plan in place to enact this. The March 1st meeting and its aftermath that coincided with the dates around International Working Women’s Day marked the opening of the attack by the right—A and E, who began implementing anti-communism while resting on their communist laurels, directing activists in generating organizations in this area to attack comrades. The rest they say is history.
Most of those activists who were most stealthy and sophisticated in initially attacking the center of the movement have resigned or retired to the shadows. “Maoist Cult Exposed” is ultimately the project of a small handful of former comrades mainly connected to Pittsburgh who have embraced anti-communism, revisionism, liberalism, and postmodernism, who have persisted in police work while the split leaders have vanished.
“Maoist Cult Exposed” has reshared “Collapse” and allowed it to remain on their site despite the conclusion section containing warnings around liquidation because it, in many ways, is an article that provides a ‘Maoist’ aspect to the conspiracy production they have taken part in. While this website and its authors have been clear in rejecting Maoism they still are interested in maintaining the Basis of Unity with the Right within the Revolutionary Student Groups (RSGs) and Revolutionary Student Union (RSUs) by nominally taking certain positions as it suits them.
In both “Collapse” and in “Ezra’s” musings on Maoist Cult Exposed, there is an uneasy problematic: the fact that the Party structure inevitably must Bolshevize, that is, develop a “high control” environment as part of conducting clandestine work against a State that moves to repress it. They are forced to deal with the reality that far from being a “cult” that involved a self-perpetuating hustle or was a money-making “spiritualist” apparatus, it was an organization of sincere and serious revolutionaries, who voluntarily made sacrifices in regards to their individual freedom in the collective effort of making revolution. To them the only alternative to the “cult” and it’s methods are the opposite of secret organizations: they forward a theory of transparency that is Menshevik, exaggerating the supposed legality of political work, the supposed democracy of bourgeois democracy, the supposed protection of protected speech, and have downplayed the viciousness of our enemies. This Menshevism that they perhaps always held before officially breaking with Marxism doesn’t excuse their police work, but it does show how liquidationist thinking has found its way into the ranks of other organizations.
“Collapse” follows the Exposed website in claiming abuse and allegations of abuse were “legion” by uncritically accepting many claims, such as that someone was sentenced to being “beaten” – a vile rumor. One instance of someone being humiliated, which should have been prevented, involved a person targeted by the liquidationists who would be later lumped in with the so-called “clique,” who’s punishment is used as evidence of the violence of the “cult” while also hypocritically and simultaneously treated by these same liquidationists on their website as someone who wasn’t punished enough! In fact, the bad line on engaging “struggle sessions” which was connected to the incorrect understanding of the cultural revolution, were often most passionately carried out and participated in by the liquidationists. “E,” for example, criticized me and other comrades for not more aggressively insulting and attacking a young activist during one such struggle session. Proletarianization and reporting and honoring agreements was often misreported as “abuse” by the Right, as if practicing the three withs and modestly seeking to integrate in with the masses was mistreatment.
Worth mentioning is that it has not been the “clique” which has engaged in beatings, extortion and theft of funds that were promised to assist the people, it has been the liquidationists! There is no need to go into every detail – the reader can investigate what happened in the aftermath of the split and hear from those themselves who have been impacted by their actions. Where there are concerns about specific claims made in “Collapse” or on the liquidationist website, one should do as I have done: ask questions and investigate in an all-sided manner. Do not take the word of those who have proven themselves to be anti-communists at face value, speak to multiple sides of the split, speak to as many as possible and base your position on who is upholding, applying and defending the ideology of the proletariat, and who is promoting conspiracy theory, practicing revisionism and provoking splits, saying one thing but then acting in the other, continuing to violate the trust of their comrades, etc.
To conclude, “Collapse” should be repudiated as part of an effort to set the record straight, in the interests of truth. We should see how many good meaning comrades have been tricked and have had trust abused by the liquidationists to turn friends against each other to serve the interest of liquidation, which serves the interests of our enemies, those imperialists, police and fascists which are happy to see organizational disarray. “Collapse” like the website of the liquidationists names people and associates them with groups publicly, it went outside of appropriate channels and the urging of comrades, and this is a real error, as not only does it put people at risk, but it prevents two-line struggle and the long process of bettering the whole movement.
These liquidationists were people who I called comrades, who I worked every day for years with. I developed a false sense of trust and belief that they were partisans for a socialist world, that they wanted to serve the people, and suddenly and without much explanation they became their political opposite and used their influence to first shun and then threaten me. How could this have happened, people who I thought I knew so well, who I shared hundreds of hours of conversation with, to turn on me? And not only to turn on me, but to threaten me with social death if I were to act against them? Despair, confusion, fear, loneliness and nihilism were the voice of the writer when I wrote “Collapse” – still with one leg solidly standing in their rotten, old world hoping that they would stop their persistent attacks and seek out unity, and the other leg barely dangling on to the new, which calls for reorganization and continuing to uphold and practice Maoism. Even though “Collapse” verges on police work and was an ultimate prefiguring to the greater intrigues of the liquidationists to come, my mistakes are not unique, there are many who have engaged in similar rumor mongering and gossip. We can humbly admit when we are wrong and take steps to correct our errors – this must be done.
Now more than ever, as the needs of the masses for organization appears as the objective situation becomes more favorable for revolution, do we need to recognize who are the real enemies of the people and who are not. We can learn from our mistakes and provide those who have made errors a way out, “call out culture” is not only broadly rejected by the broad masses but should be and must be rejected by those who aspire to be Communists. While our differences may be great now, and there may be discomfort in the misunderstandings of the previous years, we can and must transform these through struggle, a real struggle for unity.