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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.
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.
Goldstone, Jack A. Revolutions: A very short introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Bevins, Vincent, and Andrés Pabon. If we burn: The mass protest decade and the Missing Revolution. New York: Hachette Audio, 2023.
Kamrava, Mehran. “From Rebellion to Revolution.” A Concise History of Revolution, September 26, 2019, 11–41. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108662581.002.
Everyone has a role to play in the revolution and for some of the more inspired and ambitious among us, their roles are to serve as those revolutionary leaders who guide our movement and struggle towards collective liberation and the construction of a better world. This piece isn't you calling for us to believe in some singular messiah but instead, to build and create our movements with intention, brick by brick; establishing both our clear-eyed, uncompromising vision and the conditions for those leaders to emerge. Folks like Zohran are anything but our end points (they're more akin to an avenue for temporary and immediate relief and reform for workers while the struggle to independently organize continues) but they serve a purpose of helping to expose those core capital contradictions for folks who may not have otherwise known they exist. Similar to No Kings or Bernie's Fighting Oligarchy rallies, these are first steps for folks towards revolutionary politics and it's our job to intervene and meet these folks where they are to help guide them further along their paths of revolutionary learning and growth. The loud proclamations of genuinely revolutionary leaders that explicitly details what is happening can serve as the clap of thunder in people's minds that becomes immutable and impossible to ignore. While they haven't made themselves known yet, I fully agree that revolutionaries are the leaders we need in this moment to propel our movement and struggle forward. We need to create the conditions from which those revolutionary leaders can emerge, and that starts by having "an intentional and deliberate focus on the lessons of the past." Learning from the past informs how we act in the present and proceed into the future, and I think you've articulated a clear vision for what it'll take for our movement and struggle to truly take those next steps towards collective revolution and liberation. Keep proclaiming loudly what is happening Scarlet. I know I sound like a broken record whenever I round out these comments but what you routinely present is the kind of clear-eyed vision we need moving forward, so thank you, as always, for providing that for us. Your work is invaluable; never let any fools or haters tell you otherwise.
I love it but I think you'd better support your position by seeking out more Camilos… because by allowing the Camilos to flourish and in his devotion to the masses is what made Fidel.