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Note: I use socialist and communist interchangeably in this article, and it is intended to be understood as not social democrats, but as people who want a socialist society in which the working class owns the means of production and capitalism is abolished.

The United States is unquestionably in a state of freefall. The question of whether future elections will be legitimate is not trivial, as Republicans have moved to consolidate their power around an increasingly draconian executive and made decisions that indicate that popular opinion is irrelevant and won’t affect their ability to rule. Despite that, nearly all of the mainstream political discourse seems to revolve around the next election or the one after that; about whether AOC will run and should the left support her, will social democrats be able to unseat corporate democrats, or should Chuck Schumer be replaced as minority leader. As soon as one election ends, all political conversation immediately jumps to the next, despite the growing crises unraveling the world before our eyes. This can be frustrating if you, like me, understand that voting cannot fix the myriad crises we face. It can feel like a diversion from our true goals: radically restructuring society.

Under a capitalist organization of the economy, socialists understand that there can be no true democracy and that even with legitimate elections, power can merely be transferred back and forth between different managers of capital, all of whom ultimately exist to protect the bourgeois state. Victories in the electoral sphere are often purely symbolic, as they cannot upset the existing order or deliver substantial material improvements to the working class. At some point, a communist might ask themselves why they would engage at all if, regardless of which party wins, real change can never be enacted at the ballot box. Wouldn’t it make more sense to chalk this entire farce up to a distraction and ignore it entirely? Historically, the giants of the socialist movement would disagree. They understood that while elections cannot deliver the future we are fighting for, they remain a useful terrain of struggle one can and should contend with, but without illusions, and with a clear goal in mind. This article is not about “voting blue” or even voting at all; it is about how to use the electoral arena to connect directly with the working class and ultimately create more communists, so we can upend this system and breathe new life into a dying world.

Criticism

The primary critique I see from the DSA-aligned left is that communist parties like the Party for Socialism and Liberation run what they call “doomed” campaigns outside of the confines of the Democratic Party. These candidates do not garner a significant enough vote share to actually win elections and "gain power” therefore, the entire project is pointless. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of engaging in electoral politics in the bourgeois state if your ultimate goal is enacting socialism. Communists understand that they are called to intervene in every struggle, including elections, which, unfortunately, remain the primary expression of the politics of the average American. By running candidates in an unapologetically socialist party, organizers can connect with people where they are and deliver a vision of what a future would look like if the working class were in power rather than the capitalist class. The goal for communists is never to integrate themselves into a capitalist government, but instead to integrate the working class into a mass movement. When tepid left liberals or social democrats represent the highest expression of the possible, when free buses or universal childcare are all that the masses' imagination can grasp, the terrain is entirely ceded to the ruling class. By not using mass attention moments like elections to bring a message to workers that we can have more - that we can, in fact, have a government that is by and for us - we are allowing discourse to be restricted to the narrow arena set out to us by the ruling class. To socialists, elections are not a vehicle for compromising with capitalists and integrating ourselves into their machinery; they are mass educational opportunities. By choosing not to participate at all, we surrender the ground to class enemies and reformists who will mislead the masses and funnel them perpetually into the same dead ends that have produced worse and worse results every cycle.

Critical Support, A Dialectic

In 2020, the Party for Socialism & Liberation offered critical support for the Bernie Sanders campaign without a formal endorsement. They encouraged people to vote for Sanders in the Democratic primary, seeing his campaign as a dynamic insurgency against the establishment. While this may appear to be a contradiction, it was actually a demonstration of how a communist party can engage in a movement of the people without dissolving itself into reformist politics. While they offered a temporary alignment with the Sanders campaign, viewing it as a revolt within the Democratic Party and, more broadly, a rebuke of the ruling class, the PSL emphasized that class independence was necessary and that true change would never be achieved within the confines of bourgeois elections. In that spirit, the party entreated its base to support Sanders in the primaries, but refused to follow him if he did not win the nomination, instead endorsing the pro-ruling-class nominee in the general. This is an explicit rejection of Democratic Party tailism. The view of PSL was that communists can critically engage in insurgent moments within the Democratic Party if they recognize that the movement is not the campaign itself, but the people who have been awakened because of it. Critical support means maintaining independence while offering temporary aid in service of a broader goal: a mass movement that is never beholden to the reactionary forces that govern our lives. Seeing an insurgent campaign within the Democratic Party as a way to move people closer to a revolutionary mass politics - without allowing that campaign to fold people back into reformism - is the central dialectic that allows communists to engage the mass base, without subordinating themselves to it.

“The Sanders campaign is, at this moment, the vessel for a progressive, vaguely socialist insurgency within the confines of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has consistently acted against the interests of working people in the United States while trying to present itself as the only option for progressive values. It is a brake on the development of an independent and militant movement in the country. Socialists who understand the Democratic Party is a ruling class party that can not be reformed should support this insurgency.” - PSL

Why Bother?

A frequent trap I see communists fall into is correctly recognizing that the Democratic Party is a reactionary, ruling-class party that is fully beholden to capital and therefore incapable of reform, yet concluding that this means there is no reason to pay attention to the party's machinations at all. This leads communists to believe that there is no purpose in acknowledging insurgencies in primaries, no reason to take note of what the leaders of the party are doing, or to attend liberal protests like No Kings or the Stop Oligarchy rallies. While this logic is understandable, I would argue that it draws the wrong conclusions and severely limits the ability of communists to reach the reachable and develop their class consciousness, leaving them prey to the same bad actors that have been funneling them back into dead ends for decades.

Elections under a bourgeois state are, at minimum, a great diagnostic tool that helps us understand where the minds of the masses are. They can help us determine which messages resonate with people and what ideological terrain we are operating in. While we should never subordinate ourselves to reformist politics, we can and should critically support insurgent primary campaigns that may push class consciousness forward and disrupt the machinery of the ruling class, while still maintaining that no number of elections can fundamentally change the nature of a capitalist system. By maintaining our independence outside the confines of the party system in the United States, we are able to both support tactically and criticize ruthlessly, politicians and systems. We can recognize that unseating powerful democrats can put cracks in the stranglehold of our rulers, but we must maintain that while the system remains intact, there will never be radical change. The only way to bring about that change is to overthrow the entire order.

If we check out of engaging in this arena at all, we lose. We lose visibility into the current state of mass consciousness, we leave the political terrain that currently exists completely uncontested, and we remove ourselves from moments where millions are politically activated and ready to hear us. Trying to lead the masses starts from a place of deeply understanding where they are and where the gaps in their consciousness lie. The middle path between disengagement and reformism is to maintain complete independence but be deeply visible and connected to the places where people are activated, bringing an uncompromising revolutionary message into their awareness over and over again. It is a politics of “yes, and”: understanding that the masses may be on the right track but can still be easily misled, and that it is your job to intervene and prevent this.

Lenin: Correcting The Misread

The critical difference between the approach of communists like myself and that of parties like the PSL, and that of democratic socialists, is the maintenance of independence and the refusal to be integrated into bourgeois parties. A common justification for the latter approach is often based on a misreading of Lenin on ultra-leftism and on participation in parliament. While it is correct that Lenin had ruthless criticism of ultra-left abstention in elections and refusal to engage in political struggle, it does not mean he would've supported operating within the Democratic Party:

“it undoubtedly signifies that parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses. Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags.” - Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder

The emphasis here is on “party of the revolutionary proletariat”. What Lenin is saying is that there should be an independent political party willing to enter the hostile terrain of bourgeois institutions, with the primary purpose of agitating and educating. This is fundamentally different from winning elections, becoming embedded in reactionary parties, and trying to change the system from the inside. In contrast, when running candidates within the Democratic Party, a democratic socialist organization’s survival depends on the relevance and upward trajectory of their electeds. This inevitably results in the organization making excuses for a politician’s compromises, adapting their messaging to maintain their alliances, and being in a constant tug of war for influence against the ruling class on the inside. The constant pressure to win the next election and stay viable often overrides the impetus to stay principled, blunting the sharpness of positions to keep them in alignment with other party members. The whole organization is then pulled rightward by its obligation to these representatives and by the need to continually align with what the system considers acceptable. Operating within the confines of a reactionary political party will reliably reproduce this outcome.

“Opportunism means sacrificing the fundamental interests of the masses to the temporary interests of an insignificant minority of the workers or, in other words, an alliance between a section of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat” - Lenin, The Collapse of the Second International

Synthesis

As unbearable as watching two awful parties compete for voters - trapped helplessly ping-ponging between them with no real avenues for change - can be, it is imperative that we don’t check out entirely. These are hostile terrains that we can, and should, act upon, while being clear-eyed about their limited utility and ultimate function. Elections are a tool by which to understand the mass base we must reach and how to reach them. The danger is not in the elections themselves, it is in the illusions, misplaced hopes, and demobilization they often engender. For a communist, an election is just another place we can intervene in struggle while maintaining our independence and showing voters there is another way. We know that restructuring society for the working class can never come through the ballot box, but from ordinary people becoming an organized force that can bring the system to its knees. Engaging in elections should never be confused with supporting the Democratic Party; it means identifying where the spark of class consciousness is emerging and guiding those masses towards true change, rather than allowing them to be misled. If we do not show up with a revolutionary program, if we disengage and surrender this ground, we will render ourselves irrelevant and forfeit all that energy back into the very system that seeks to destroy us.

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I haven’t been writing as much as I feel like I should lately. Between working mandatory overtime and business travel, when the day is done my brain can barely summon the energy to read a novel or even play a video game. I used to play a lot of video games. But there’s another reason I haven’t been writing as much; I just am not sure how much I have left to say. This statement would come as a shock to anyone who has known me for a long time. I always have something to say. But I started this project to give myself a place to write about the world and how to make it better, and to try to make sense of the things that don’t make any sense at all. In short, to try to instill a sense of revolutionary optimism and hope in people that we can find a way to pull ourselves back from the brink and right the ship. Current events have left no shortage of catastrophy to opine about but I find myself questioning if I have anything new to say about it at all. On Twitter, it can feel like we have all been stuck in an endless discourse loop for the past several years. We react to outrageous crimes, we express our anger, we condemn the butchers and monsters and corrupt leaders, and so often each other. We let minor squabbles over irrelevant bullshit distract us for a week or two. Rinse and repeat. This is so far from what it felt like even 6 short years ago. There was still this pervading sense of hope in the world back then. Like yeah, it was bad, things were bad and hard and unequal and unfair, but there was a feeling that we could change it. No more. Now it often feels like the only thing we have to cling to is our rage. Impotent rage. We use our rage as the barometer of the extent to which we have maintained our humanity in the face of such inhuman conditions. And I would argue that this is a fair metric - if you’re not outraged you are either a barbarian or a fool - but it feels sometimes that this is all that’s left. Absent the hope for something better, all we have to cling to is an anger at what is and will perhaps always be. I feel it too.

If I squint, I can still find the places the light shines, but these places are fewer and further between every day. More and more it feels like the future is one of dead ends and devolution. The bad guys are winning everywhere you look. I’ve found this inextricable from the conditions of my own life as well. I feel like I’m in constant mourning for what my life could’ve been if I weren’t forced to produce profit for someone else, ever teetering on the brink of being back at my lowest and most immiserated, while Silicon Valley sociopaths threaten the very source of my ability to care for myself and my family. Of wishing my daughter, who will be entering college soon, wasn’t on the precipice of entering a world of infinite struggle and hardship and chaos and uncertainty. A little over half a decade ago, I was among the cohort of people who thought things could change if we won an election, or maybe several. Now it feels like “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is the liminal space that my mind occupies most of the time. While revolution is technically possible, the likelihood of it feels impossible to imagine. And the rub is, of course, that revolution has never been more urgent. Everything we care about is slipping through our fingers, and trying to gain hold of it is like trying to contain the water rushing out to sea.

There came a point some time into the genocide in Gaza where I felt like I had spent every word, every synonym, I could possibly muster to describe the barbarity of Israel. I didn’t stop speaking out, but I felt like there was nothing sufficient to describe the horror. That, despite the half a million words or so in the English language, nothing could come close to capturing the depravity of this crime. I often feel like this about the quotidian horrors of life in this moment, too. What is there to say? Does there really need to be another voice telling you how awful this all is, or that we have to mobilize to stop it? Don’t you already know that?

In some ways, the left nihilists are at least directionally correct when they distrust the next leftish politician running on the Democratic ballot line. They are at least directionally correct to be skeptical that million man marches that make no demands can’t move the needle in any way. Of course I could sit here and tell you that it is your responsibility to go there and talk to those people and organize them and bring them to your side. This is true and I’ve said it before. But who can really blame people for feeling frustrated and helpless and powerless when we’ve lost battle after battle after battle and time is running out? An estimated 30 million people participated in Black Lives Matter protests, and the police killed even more people the next year. The mass protest era has very little to show for it in an age where politicians are totally unresponsive to any demands, unaccountable to the people, fully captured by capital, with a stranglehold over civic engagement. I know the purpose of protest isn’t actually to make change but to connect people and move them into something useful… but do they? How many have received the message that nothing they do will change things, internalized that, and stopped engaging whatsoever?

I still firmly believe we have a moral responsibility to intervene wherever we can and bring others around to a better understanding of the world and our place in it. This hasn’t changed for me. And maybe I’ll keep writing in the hopes that one or two people on the margins will read something I have to say and begin to understand the stakes. They really could not be higher, and yet the terrain before us couldn’t be more uphill. We are dangling over the edge hanging on by the tips of our fingers, before the gaping maw of an abyss too awful to even imagine, with the worst people in the world ensuring that we free-fall.

I think the thing that has changed for me is that existential dread has overwhelmed me, and I don’t feel compelled to sugarcoat that or act like the task before us is easy or guaranteed to win. I wish that I could reclaim the naive optimism I felt 6 years ago, when it seemed so easy to just prevail and fix this, but this moment requires so much more from us than that. At the same time, we still have to tend to the daily minutiae of our lives and do so many little things that don’t even fucking matter just to survive under this system for as long as we are able.

Sometimes it feels like the only thing keeping me going is rage and the spite of knowing that giving up is exactly what the monsters want. The only thing that differentiates us from them is that we have managed to maintain our humanity. We haven’t sold out the living earth for a temporary bump in our own material conditions. We can grieve for people we have never met and perhaps will never meet. We aren’t willing to sacrifice our souls for personal gain. We care about the people inhabiting this planet, whether they can do something for us or not.

Life is not a fairytale, and not everything has a happy ending. In real life, the bad guys often win and win and win again. There are no guarantees of victory or karmic score settling. The universe won’t mete out punishment, and there’s no retribution in some afterlife that will right the wrongs. It’s all we can do some days to not forfeit the part of us that is ensouled; to not give in to the pressure to seek comfort for ourselves and our own at the expense of others. Maybe our rage will be enough to keep us going on the days that our hope can’t. Maybe not giving in to the forces that want to destroy us isn’t enough, but it’s not nothing either. If a critical mass of us did that then things could change. So I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it’s easy, or not to despair, or that we will win. I can’t know that. The only thing I know is that you still being here, that you still being able to muster that rage or mourn for those you do not know, it is something. It might be all you have, it might not even be enough, but it’s something. And you should hold onto it with everything you have.

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ICE murdered a man this morning in broad daylight. Alex Pretti, 37, a registered nurse, was filming ICE actions in Minneapolis just a day after a historic protest and general strike, and was accosted by agents for filming, thrown to the ground, held down, and then executed by an agent unloading his full clip into this observer. Alex had committed no cri…

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If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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Since Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump in 2024, a deluge of articles have been written about the factional battle inside the Democratic Party between the centrists / moderates and the progressives. Some of the people most responsible for the direction of the party writ large but more specifically the direction of Harris’ failed campaign have done everything they can to distance themselves from her, to claim that “real centrism hasn’t been tried” and to convince everyone that actually it wasn’t her platform of war with Iran, “the world’s most lethal military”, campaigning with Liz Cheney and inviting Leon Panetta to speak at the Democratic National Convention, doubling down on support for a broadly unpopular genocide, that harmed her. It was the answers she gave to an ACLU survey in 2019 about transgender care for incarcerated individuals that sealed her fate. Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Chait are among the worst offenders. Tweet after tweet, article after article, they’ve tripled down on their notions that “wokeness” was to blame for the broad loss of some seven million voters between 2020 and 2024. They insist that what the party has to do is to moderate even harder. To give up on more marginalized groups. To abandon even the few popular policies the party is known for and, hopefully, pick up enough racists and bible thumpers to make up the difference.

To anyone who has been following the trajectory of this party over the last four or five decades, “move to the center” is hardly new. From the dawn of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in the eighties, the prescription for what ails you has always been “move right, move right, move right”. This year, after the hard launch of the airport book that wants to be a political ideology “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the liberal intelligentsia has flooded the media with thinkpiece after thinkpiece about how there’s really no need to pivot to economic populism, the party just needs to give up on a few key marginalized groups, deregulate housing development, and ??? profit! Klein in particular posited that it might be a good idea to run anti-abortion Democrats in red states (states that have overwhelmingly supported ballot measures to keep abortion legal, mind you) in order to somehow pick up mythical evangelical voters who like everything about Democrats except their views on abortion.

There have been countless iterations of “how to remake the Democratic Party” published this year from the same old mouthpieces with the same old politics that has landed us here, in a desperate bid to shift the blame from themselves and onto “the groups” or trans people or immigrants or the elusive concept of “woke”, but whether it’s Welcome PAC’s missive in Deciding to Win that insists Democrats just need to move away from “unpopular ideas” like Medicare For All (entirely based on shoddy push polling), or Klein and Thompson’s insistence that the silver bullet to fix the housing crisis - and society at large - is deregulation, every single one of these arguments boils down to trying to technocratically determine who is worth saving and who is worth throwing away, in service of the nebulous goal of “winning” (what we win and for whom is an open question).

This is because the very concept of centrism is a lie.

The foundation of centrism is built on the delusion that there can be a middle ground between exterminationism and an ideological commitment to the sanctity of human life. The fundamental premise of centrism requires you to classify violence as the things independent, rogue, non-state actors do to one another, and to ignore the monopolized violence of the state; whether at the hands of police, the military, or the guy at Aetna with a spreadsheet of claims rejections. Centrism believes that politicians who are bribed by capital to deprive workers of fair wages, of healthcare, of housing, of food, can continue to do so and still represent the workers that they are (in spirit if not in practice) tasked to represent. Centrism thinks that trillionaires and wealth inequality are unrelated phenomena. Centrism believes that you can reconcile blatant election meddling and corruption with abundance for everyone (although I doubt they really care about that last part). Centrism believes as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

While great minds on the left spin their wheels debunking specious argument after specious argument from the centrist hive mind, the centrism intelligentsia laughs all the way to the bank to cash another handsome check from another billionaire funded think tank. I could spend this entire article going through why Medicare for All is actually popular, how people turned to Trump because of economic pain that Democrats refuse to address, how corruption is so total in American politics that any kind of course correction that doesn’t include taking money out of the equation is useless. I could do that but the Centrist Hive would just vomit out another ten or twenty articles or PACs or think tanks next week. In truth, debunking arguments that are made not because someone believes them, but because someone is being paid really well to make them, is futile. So what I will argue instead is that centrism is a fiction.

To put it bluntly you either think all people deserve the right to life or you don’t. It may sound outlandish to claim that the centrists, the “moderates”, think there are people who simply don’t deserve to live, but when you put aside the five dollar words in the thinkpieces from the thought leaders, when you reduce the arguments to their truest form, what else are they saying when they tell you that housing should not be a human right? Are they not saying that if you don’t have dollars in your pocket - if you are not useful to the GDP - you should endure freezing to death? When centrism tells you that Medicare for All is a pipe dream are they not telling you that you shouldn’t be able to get cancer treatment if you get laid off or if your claim is denied? Are they not telling you that the 68,000 people who die every year for lack of healthcare (saying nothing of those whose claims are routinely denied) are an acceptable price to pay for the given system?

A thought experiment: During the government shutdown, imagine Trump gets on stage at one of his rallies and says this “Healthcare is too expensive and diabetics are 11% of the population. They account for $1 of every $4 spent on healthcare in the United States. My administration is signing an executive order that ends the production of insulin. If you are diabetic, I’m sorry but you are costing us too much folks, too much money, and we will no longer help you”. Can you predict the outrage from the centrist media class? The pearls that would be clutched? Yet how is that so different from saying that if you don’t have a full time job and $500-$1000 a month, you shouldn’t have the ability to get insulin? How is saying “kill the poors” fundamentally different than saying “it’s ok if a million people sleep outside and have no access to food and shelter in the winter. Them’s the breaks”?

What is called centrism is really just a decency filter on the abominable. Dressing up anti-human policy in a human suit. It requires you to completely overlook all of the ways the organization of society deprives the average person of the necessities of life and considers this - at best - a necessary evil. Whether it’s deciding that data centers need to be built at the cost of a livable planet or even drinkable water in low income communities or it’s deciding that children should not be entitled to food as a basic guarantee, it’s an ideology built on the demand that every human life justify its own existence. You are not entitled to anything just by the virtue of being born a human on this planet that should belong to us all, you have to consistently demonstrate your utility in society to qualify to drink the water or breathe the air or have a shelter or get that mole looked at.

As our society tumbles endlessly towards the darker and more horrifying vision of the future that some of the most nefarious in our ruling class have planned for us, the compromises the centrists are willing to make become more and more heinous. Because the “center” to them is the center of the prevailing forces, whatever those forces may be, it must constantly shift towards the cruel as our politics continues down a path that fails to meet basic needs and the masses find a consolation prize in savagery. Finding the middle ground between deploying a secret police force that is kidnapping documented, undocumented, and native born alike and simply not doing that, is where you make the masked thugs unmask, but you do not stop the thuggery.

As we careen off a cliff, the wretchedness of “centrism” demands that you overlook more and more overt violence against your fellow citizens and try to find a compromise where we collectively decide exactly how many lives are worth nothing to us and can be thrown away to achieve our goals. Worst of all, this sort of Faustian bargaining is nearly invisible to us because it’s something that has been a part of the fabric of capitalist society since before we were born. Indeed, we are trained from a very young age to overlook the innate violence that is ever-present under capitalism. We are not trained to see the man begging for change on the street corner as a victim of an inscrutable universalized system of violence. We are taught that if you need food stamps or welfare, you didn’t play by the rules, you are a victim of no one but the consequences of your own bad decisions. At its most indelicate you are told “someone has to scrub the toilets” which is a polite way of saying that we need an underclass that lives lives of quiet desperation in order to make it so that others can take lavish vacations, have big houses in the hills, and keep the whole thing running.

When you’re little you might even question this. You might wonder why we can’t just feed and house everyone. You might wonder why humans can’t just share. Why are there children starving in Africa, you might ask. If you do, you’re told that a collectivist society is “a great idea on paper but goes against human nature” but that we humans are just too selfish and self-interested to ever share the earthly spoils of our labor with each other so that everyone has enough. Maybe you’re told there actually isn’t enough for us all and not to believe your lying eyes. Be realistic, they say. But in the greatest sense of irony, the more the veil is lifted, the more you begin to see that the childlike impulse to - simply - care for us all, was the right one.

The more the veil is lifted the more you begin to see that our “normal” would be considered insanity if we weren’t so close to it. Our normal is one where we keep armed guards by dumpsters full of food while letting the man down the street starve. Our normal is one where we are so inextricably obsessed with a human invention, currency, that we are willing to kill ourselves, our home, and each other over it. Our normal is one where the people that are lauded as the “adults in the room” are willing to make detached proclamations about who should live and who can go ahead and die for all they care.

Of course, the rational conclusion is that none of this is normal at all. And in realizing this you start to see that you are living in a world gone mad, not guided by calculated logic or reason, but by a forgetting. A forgetting that we all belong to one another and that we owe something to each other. That we were all thrust into this world and that it could be anything, it never had to be this. That this society came about because of decisions made long ago but that it requires our consent to keep running. That there are only two possible outcomes in our future: socialism or barbarism. Moving towards a future of socialism is a process of remembering everything you forgot. And in that cold light, with new eyes, you can see that what is called “centrism” is a deception. It’s an attempt to cover over the obscene with academic words and self-serious declarations. It is nothing more than a thin coat of paint on a system that will eventually destroy us. There will never be a middle ground between extermination and liberation. Centrism does nothing but sell a comforting lie in the hopes that you get too confused to start remembering that we all inherited this earth and we all deserve to be here. The true danger to the centrist is not in losing an election, or having an untruth debunked. It is in exposing centrism itself as an illusion, a mirage. The promise of the a future worth living in will never be found in trying to seek a reconciliation of human life with its antagonist, it will be found in walking a path towards liberation, with each other, remembering that it was always ours to take.

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Joy has become almost a dirty word on the left lately. Sullied by people like Kamala Harris and her centrist counterparts talking about embracing joy while fervently supporting a genocide and promising the working class absolutely no relief from the crushing status quo, the concept of being joyous has started to become associated with being totally disconnected with the suffering all around us. The Zohran campaign and subsequent victory has something to say about that. The campaign’s embrace of boundless optimism has been critical to its success. The difference between this type of joy and the the kind embraced by Harris et al is in its authenticity. It isn’t a positivity that is predicated on intentional ignorance of our material conditions, but one that sees those conditions and feels relentlessly optimistic about a vision to resolve them. It is a joy that is fueled by a vision for the future that is so much better than our current reality. It is a joy that is grounded in a recognition that we can be more and in a faith in the average person to break their own chains. I think the left can learn a lot from this.

For too long the revolutionary left, (especially in online spaces, but also in real life) has adopted a posture of dour realism that seems to embrace the idea that authenticity is found in being the sober truth teller that can’t possibly express happiness or hope when things are so bad and suffering is so total. While it’s legitimate to reject the superficiality of a joy rooted in just “hoping for the best and ignoring the worst”, too many seem to believe that this also means rejecting optimism or joy of any kind. While anger can be a powerful motivator to spur one into action, it can also be paralyzing without its dialectical counterpart. With no joy, no hope, no optimism, there can be no future. With no feelings of great love centering your movement, there can be no victory. If we want to grow a movement that can truly break our chains we must become the type of movement that others want to join. If we instead revel in raining on every parade, on scolding people who feel hope or excitement (even if misguided), we become repellent to normal people who are desperate to find something to cling to as it all falls apart. While social democrats are partying we stand in the corner with a surly expression on our faces, arms crossed, chastising people for daring to smile, and then turn around and wonder why no one is asking us to dance.

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” ― Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Yes, And.

There is a way to thread this needle that doesn’t require you to be a pollyanna who cannot speak to the truth of our material realities and still to be a welcoming force that is infectious in its ability to move and inspire. Abandon the binary that says you must either be blissfully ignorant or aware but miserable. The key is to focus not just on what is wrong, but also on how wonderful it will be to live in a society that fixes it. Learning to not say “no” to misguided workers, but to say “yes, and”. Successful movements do not scold people into thinking their way, they speak to the pain of the working class but also to their sense of optimism. They say “yes, the election of Mamdani is a victory for working people because it shows we can take on capital and win, and there is still more work to do, here’s how to start”. No one has ever been won over by smug condescension and superiority complexes.

What was so extraordinary about Mamdani’s campaign was his ability to talk to anyone and acknowledge their point of view, and tell them what he could do for them without judgement. Even to non voters, to triple Trump voters, to Cuomo voters, to anyone at all. If the revolutionary left wants to even be on the same playing field, it cannot adopt a posture of being too good for the the rubes. There is value in critique and criticism of course, yet it holds an almost mythic quality among the left. It has in itself taken the place of actual praxis in the minds of so many. Being a critic who stands on the sidelines and spends more time throwing tomatoes than it does changing minds is not the work. Extreme hypervigilance has replaced action in near totality. Scanning every word spoken by social democrats for the faintest trace of betrayal cannot replace the duty of going into communities where people still like Bernie Sanders and AOC and their counterparts and talking to them - not to tell them that they’re wrongheaded, but to show them an even broader vision of the possible. It would be nearly impossible to build the numbers we need to truly change the structure of society by acting like a bunch of miserable assholes all the time.

While we know the shortcomings of reforms and social democracy, our knowledge isn’t the same as power. Power comes from having the people on our side. Getting the people on our side requires us to create the type of movement that is so infectious, so exciting, that people can’t help but be drawn in. Centering our movements in optimism and love isn’t just some feel-good pablum, it gets to the heart of the matter: if we do not believe in our class, if we do not believe that workers can rise above their oppression, then why do we even call ourselves communists in the first place? If - on the other hand - we believe in the working class, we will approach them with a sense of revolutionary patience, knowing that consciousness is a continuum, and that they have the capacity to evolve as we ourselves have. Having a head full of theory but a heart that has hardened itself totally to the possibility that others can be changed is worse than useless, it’s a betrayal of the people who inspired you and who actually believed that they could act on their conditions and inspire and move their class to victory.

If there’s anything worth taking away from the campaign that went from 1% to triumph in the heart of global capital it is this: stop underestimating people’s capacity to move towards a future that is worth fighting for. Stop thinking each individual you meet is frozen in amber and cannot expand. Look for the future revolutionaries in the taxi driver, the cashier, the dock worker, the everyday people all around you. You were once a liberal and you are not that special and that is wonderful news! That means millions more can see the world as you do one day. Instead of an emphasis on “I told you so’s” and “this will never work” focus on the infinite potential contained in the working class just waiting to be unleashed. Believe in them and they’ll believe in you back. Set aside your egos and your pessimism and start looking to what the future could be if there were millions more of us. Show people what's worth fighting for by struggling alongside them with an open heart and mind and build the future together. That is how we win.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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The United States in 2025 is the image of a society that is coming apart at the seams. That which was set in motion long ago finally seems to be reaching its nadir. Climate crisis, extreme unaffordability, social unrest, coming to a crescendo with a right wing authoritarian takeover of government that has deployed military and gestapo to our city streets and made every citizen a target. A sweeping agenda of rooting out dissent making its way through our institutions. A corrupt and moribund political party as seemingly the only available opposition against a further descent into fascism. If things seem really bad lately, it’s because in virtually every way that matters, they are.

Out of this, what seems like a new left populist momentum has emerged. The meteoric rise of outsider Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race has inspired many across the country and made people feel that a new kind of politics is possible and even inevitable. While Zohran’s success has made him both a target of the Zionist media and our entire political body, it has also in other ways made him a darling. Hundreds of think pieces about whether this or that candidate is the “next Zohran” have been churned out week after week. Even moderates running for office have sought to rebrand as millennial outsiders who are nothing like their ideological peers in Congress. Just as the rise of Bernie Sanders and later AOC was in many ways earth shattering to the status quo, the resurgence of left populist momentum in electoral politics is the same. The largest single-day protests in US history are taking place in the midst of this - the liberal-oriented No Kings protests which has turned out anywhere from 3-6 million people nationwide. Something is happening amongst the people - that is undeniable. The masses are not happy and are not afraid to say so. This is undoubtedly a welcome change from the neoliberal coma most have been in for their entire lives, but the question then becomes how do we make sure that the hope-turned-disappointment of the Sanders run doesn’t get recreated in this new groundswell? I think the answer lies in not relying on the systems and institutions that brought us here to bring us out.

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In that vein, while Zohran’s candidacy will be good for the people of New York and perhaps even good for the cause of socialism in a roundabout way, he is not the type of leader we should be looking for. He is heavily constrained by his participation in bourgeois institutions. He cannot say the police should be abolished, he cannot say that it is right to resist occupation by force, he cannot say that capitalism must be overthrown, he cannot say the means of production should be seized and the wealth redistributed. We cannot defeat fascism when we are being boxed in by the rules of the capitalist imperialist system that brought us here. The leaders we need in this moment are visionaries who work outside the system to spread a revolutionary message to the masses. Who do not have to hedge and mince words. Who never capitulate to the bounds of acceptable discourse within the captured arena of bourgeois politics.

As much as the resurgence of electoral populism is a welcome change, it is not the way. What it is useful for is to gauge the sentiment of the people we need to win to socialism. In that way the prognosis is somewhat rosy. Liberal and apolitical people are far more open to leftwing messaging than they have ever been in my lifetime. They are angry. They are activated. They are looking for a better way and are sick and tired of the status quo and the Democrats it rode in on. The missing piece is the revolutionaries. While there are thousands of rank and file revolutionary cadre in the streets every week, natural leaders have yet to emerge. With this dearth of grassroots leadership it’s predictable that people would seek that leadership within the left wing of electoral politics, and in that way may become easily mislead back towards the same structures that have failed them time and time again. Until we find our revolutionaries I fear we will be stuck creating and recreating the same outcomes with reformists in a system that is incapable of being reformed.

To be clear, this is far from a confession that I subscribe to Great Man Theory. I don’t believe any one person can own a revolution. But it is undeniable that in every successful revolution there were leaders who emerged who knew precisely how to inspire the masses by articulating the failures of the current society and supplanting that with a vision for a society that was more just, more fair, more humane. In Jack Goldstone’s book Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction1, he says leaders have been historically necessary for the success of a revolution because they “create a portrait of the injustices of the old regime and of the absolute necessity and inevitability of change that is capable of motivating and uniting diverse groups to support the revolution. During the revolution, visionary leaders continue to inspire and guide the revolutionary forces.”

Why revolutionaries have not emerged from our many attempts at organized dissent over the 21st century is a complex inquiry that calls into question the strategies, tactics, and character of these movements. In successful revolutions of the 20th century, the typical pattern was a crisis of the old regime giving rise to a revolutionary movement with a vanguard party at the head, and from this one or a handful of leaders emerging who guide the masses to capture power and become the heads of the new state. In the new century, this pattern is less visible as mass protests are often spread via social media without clear leadership or a solidified party formation. What these movements gain in virality - their ability to spread across nations almost instantly - they lose in the necessitation of figureheads, or even clear cut goals or demands.

In If We Burn2 by Vincent Bevins, Bevins discusses movements across the globe in the last decade or so and how their horizontal structure made a vanguard capable of leading impossible to form. “The particular repertoire of contention that became very common, almost appearing to be natural, from 2010 to 2020—apparently spontaneous, digitally coordinated, horizontally organized, leaderless mass protests—did a very good job of blowing holes in social structures and creating political vacuums”. Unfortunately without leadership, without a vanguard, the worst political actors can step in easily and fill the void (as with the Democratic Party during the Black Lives Matter protests).

From my own experiences as an organizer, I’ve seen first hand how the diffuse organizing structures that have become the new paradigm for protest have weakened the possibility of a united front that even understands exactly what it wants. In the months where students across the nation were setting up encampments for Palestine, while their demands of the university administrations were clear, the leadership structures within these campus insurgencies was not. There were power struggles on an ongoing basis, constant disagreements about strategy, and even internecine factional battles with one side demanding less visibility and less hierarchy, while another wanted clear chains of command and designated figureheads to speak to the university and press.

In the successful revolutions we often admire such as the Russian, Cuban, or Chinese Revolution, a party with leaders and a very well articulated vision of the future of the country were critical to organizing and educating the masses, building trust amongst the workers of their respective countries, and speaking with one voice. In this way their goals and their demands were always clear and agreed upon across the party strata. This left no room for ambiguity when communicating to the masses, and more importantly when communicating to the state about what the movement wanted to achieve. In the protest movements globally across the 21st century, it is often clear what the masses are unhappy about, but inarguably less clear what the people want to do about it. Eventually, without a disciplined message and clearly delineated goal, the protests fizzle out and the energy dissipates into the ether.

In From Rebellion to Revolution3 Mehran Kamrava argues “planned revolutions will not appear unless several highly dedicated individuals commit themselves to planning, organizing, and leading a takeover of power […] The party sees itself as the revolution’s vanguard. Among the planners involved in this vanguard, usually an individual with greater ambitions, or better organizational skills and opportunities, or through sheer chance, emerges as its leader. While planned revolutions cannot succeed without the work of an organized revolutionary party, the party’s leader becomes the face of the revolution, and, if the revolution succeeds, he then becomes the leader of the country.” With neither leader nor party our attempts are doomed to failure as they constantly recreate the same power vacuums that have allowed the worst actors to co-opt the message of liberation for their own ends.

While there is valid frustration among the left of the way liberals often seize control of the narrative when our movements reach critical mass, the blame ultimately rests squarely on our shoulders. Expecting liberals not to funnel people back to their own narrow vision of the possible is like expecting a billionaire not to suck you dry. That’s just what they’re built to do. It is up to us to intervene in every single place where there is discontent and wrest the narrative away from reforms and away from the dead end bourgeois politics that have brought us to this unfortunate interregnum. We cannot shy away from meeting the MSNBC libs, the wine moms, the disaffected reactionaries, the apolitical wherever they are, and giving them a taste of what could be. But moreover we must understand that a movement is only as good as its leaders. If we merely turn up to a protest here and there, moving independently of a party, without tangible and explicit demands, the only outcome will be more of the same.

We are in the fight of our lives right now and while we are seeing welcome signs of a sea change in the thinking of the average American it is absolutely crucial that we do not repeat the mistakes of the last half century, and that we build our movements brick by brick with an intentional and deliberate focus on the lessons of the past. With attention to structured formations and an elevation of those who emerge as natural leaders, we can protect our movements from exhaustion, from cooptation, from becoming merely a pressure valve for our aimless outrage. We can instead distinguish this mass movement as one with that knows exactly what it wants to achieve, rather than a formless blob that cannot articulate a point of view. If we create our movements with intention I believe we will once again find our revolutionaries, and they will be people who represent the least of us, who do not funnel us back into the same dead ends, who do not settle for modest reforms, but instead inspire us and lead us to a new society that is truly free.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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The assassination of Charlie Kirk has unleashed something unholy on the right. In the wake of this event, the empowered right wing has finally let out their barely contained desire to do anything and everything possible to crush the liberals and the left once and for all. A heap of the contradictions of a capitalism that has been inching towards collapse for decades have finally sharpened and the pointy end is aimed at us all. The last 8 months of this presidency have accelerated a collapse timeline that was all but written during the second Red Scare. Late night hosts are getting removed from television for mild jokes about Kirk, people are losing their jobs, the administration is even threatening to deny visas to potential immigrants based on their public social media posts about the man. The utter absurdity of course being that the people that constitute the most violent faction of the American society are the ones clutching pearls and crying foul over anyone who does less than lionize a man who made a career of spreading hate. A man who called the civil rights amendment a mistake and believed that we should bring back public executions. A man who felt that flying with a black pilot would be less safe and that it was preposterous that a black woman could be qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. It is not even enough to say nothing, mourning will be compulsory. Just make sure you never quote his actual words. Wouldn’t want to do that.

While this extreme lurch forward to true authoritarian fascism seems to be happening all around us, one might ask “where are the liberals? Where is the opposition?”. The leaders of the Democratic party, true to form, have been all but silent on these direct attacks on our constitutional rights. In fact, Hakeem Jeffries whipped votes in the House for a resolution that honored the “life and legacy” of Charlie Kirk and 95 Democrats voted along. The liberal “thought leaders” are just as bad. Ezra Klein wrote a gushing essay for the New York Times that declared that Kirk practiced politics “the right way” and whitewashed his history as if he was merely a man who sought to debate his beliefs in the marketplace of ideas and not the man who helped bus people to the Jan 6 insurrection. Schumer and Jeffries could barely muster a strongly worded letter when Jimmy Kimmel was suspended from his late night spot for a joke the Trump admin didn’t like at the behest of the Trump-appointed FCC chair. If you haven’t noticed, there is no resistance to be found. There is no constituted body with the will and the numbers to stop this. It’s full steam ahead for fascism and nothing will stand it its way.

Just yesterday Neera Tanden of the Center For American Progress (who was given a makework job in the Biden administration and once famously wrote about extorting Libya for money because of their vast oil reserves) commented on yet another Ezra Klein coal post essay that suggested that the Democrats could win a coalition to defeat fascism by recruiting anti-abortion candidates. That’s right, we have to defeat fascism by supporting fascist policies. First it was the immigrants, then the transgender people, now it’s women writ large. Shocking to no one, the party that stands for nothing has no sacred cows. Anyone’s rights could be on the chopping block next if it means the insulated political actors who have gotten very wealthy trading on our futures get to keep doing so. The only thing, it seems, that is off the table for Democrats is doing literally anything that materially helps the people of this country. Even as we watch immigrants get disappeared into black sites, even as we watch random boats of fisherman get illegally bombed in the Caribbean, even as we watch a full scale takeover of the airwaves by the fascists, even as our own people are threatened and jailed and coerced, the Democratic Party is still too addicted to their corporatism and backroom dealing to even contend with the present reality and offer a compelling alternative.

If you are a Marxist, none of this should surprise you. There are troves of books of Marxist theory that explains exactly how capitalism leads to fascism and how liberals serve as its handmaiden. Still, whether you predicted it or not, living through it is another thing entirely. The sheer lack of so much as a survival instinct by bourgeois liberal institutions is alarming. The ease at which these people throw out all of their professed values and tend towards appeasement is unsettling. “It was always going to end up here” is truly an insufficient balm for the horror of watching it unfold.

In 2016 and 2020, the main pitch from the Democratic Party was along the lines of “we won’t address your material conditions, your economic stress, your financial ruin, but hey we promise to protect the girls and the gays. We promise to protect multicultural democracy. You can count on that”. In 2024 Harris ran a campaign that threw at least some of this out, promising to out-Trump Trump on the border and promising the “most lethal military" in the world while holding steadfastly to their commitment to genocide. In 2025 its women’s rights on the chopping block too, as they also capitulate to anti-trans hysteria. The pitch went from “we’ll at least protect you on social issues” to “ok no we won’t but we will manage your obliteration more responsibly”. Needless to say this message won’t win. And that is in the very unlikely scenario that elections remain free and fair (as imperfect as that was in a managed democracy).

The unfortunate truth is that the Marxists were right and the liberals won’t save us. While so many seem to be sleepwalking their way through the fourth reich, the worst of the calamity has not even happened yet - but it has been written. The actions being taken right now cast a long and horrifying shadow and the darkness is coming for us all. The worst thing we could do right now is continue to entrust the people that got us here to get us out. They have neither the tools nor the will nor the mere inclination to do so. They would sell their grandma for a bump in their stock value and they are not going to save you. The Marxists were right and that also means the Marxists are right about the way out. The only thing capable of successfully pulling us back from the brink is the organization of the working class. We are the ones who grease the wheels of capital, we are the ones who can shut shit down. They can’t have or do or be any of this without our willing submission, without our consent by silence, without our contribution to the machine. It can’t run on billionaires and CEOs alone. It takes us to keep it lurching forward and we are the ones who can make it stop running at all, but only if we are willing and ready.

The painful reality is that there is no “one weird trick” that undoes this. It’s the long and boring and tedious slog of turning a fully zero-class-conscious society into one where people know what their class interests are and who the enemy is. A president AOC can’t fix this, a slow takeover of our rotted institutions via elections can’t fix it. It’s still a person by person step by step process that should’ve started 50 years ago but at the very least must start now. There’s not even a guarantee that it’s not already too late, but we must try. After all, it’s this or oblivion. Step one is to stop getting distracted by the political efforts that are doomed to fail. The electoralism when elections are likely ending as we know them. The legal challenges when the law is meaningless. This is war. We’ve always been at war but only the capitalist class knew it. It’s up to us to realize that the war has already started and it’s time to take up our arms and fight or die on our knees.

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Much has been written over the last half decade about the “male loneliness epidemic”, a social crisis where men are less likely to find partners, have social networks, are increasingly isolated from each other and their communities. This framing has always rubbed me the wrong way because I think its focus on a single gender misses the true crisis: lonel…

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With so few people willing to tell the truth about our politics, independent perspectives are more vital than ever, but I can only keep this work paywall free with your help.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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With so few people willing to tell the truth about our politics, independent perspectives are more vital than ever, but I can only keep this work paywall free with your help.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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This week I wanted to highlight some of my favorite but less loved pieces of the last 7 months. Sometimes the algorithm doesn’t work to our favor, but these pieces are some of the ones that have meant the most to me. I hope you enjoy!

This was my first ever post on Substack and it was a reaction to seeing a left that often likes to brag about their lack of empathy.

This one is about the future that was promised and never delivered

I wrote this about letting your broken heart light your way in a broken world

I wrote this one because I think the path to a better world is in our commitment to one another

Here are a few more that I hope you’ll give a chance:

Thank you for being here and I’ll see you next week!

-Scarlet

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With so few people willing to tell the truth about our politics, independent perspectives are more vital than ever, but I can only keep this work paywall free with your help.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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Support Me Through Ko-Fi

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With so few people willing to tell the truth about our politics, independent perspectives are more vital than ever, but I can only keep this work paywall free with your help.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

Upgrade to Paid

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