Dare To Struggle

The “Organization of Communist Revolutionaries” is a splinter group of the Revolutionary Communist Party (US) that by itself is not really notable, besides their public-facing journal Going Against The Tide. However, they have a fairly widespread network of front groups, such as Dare To Struggle, Homeless Liberation Initiative, and No Tenemos Miedo. Of these, “Dare To Struggle” is by far the most relevant, with several hundred members in 9 chapters around the United States.

Front Groups

Dare To Struggle is the main public-facing front group of the OCR. They don’t publicly state this anywhere, but they do repeatedly link articles by Kites/Going Against The Tide on their website, and have their members read articles from it every week. For example, on their page “Start A Chapter”, one of the first things they tell prospective members in areas without a chapter to do is read an article by Kites, “A Call For Communist Social Organization The Year After A Summer Of Rebellion”. On their page “Principles of Organizational Function” they list out the 6 main points of their organization. These are:

Keep all criticism inside the organization, and any “gossiping” or “shit-talking” to “outsiders” is forbidden. Not cultlike at all.
Any complaints about overwork/being “over capacity” are wrong. This is an issue in many leftist groups where people are just lazy as fuck, but they go too far in the opposite direction, encouraging members (both adults and minors) to drop out of college and move into cult houses.
Leadership should be determined by commitment to the struggle, not identity. Again, doesn’t sound horrible, but without any internal democracy the only people determining who is the most committed are the ones who are already leaders.
Internal organization is a waste of time. Apparently, having an election that takes five minutes is too much of a distraction from the struggle.
Leaders shouldn’t give themselves grandiose titles. Again, not horrible, but this is probably just to make them look less cultlike.
All interactions with other organizations should be with the goal of either subsuming them or at least some of their members into Dare To Struggle.

Dare To Struggle insists that it is not a front group for anyone, however, this is transparently contradicted by them making several Going Against The Tide articles required reading for all members, and repeatedly mentioning them on their website, when essentially no one else references this obscure blog.

We view this agitation, call to action, and our overall efforts to bring masses into collective struggles as different from the dominant strategy on the Left of providing mutual aid, which may bring organizations into regular contact with oppressed people but largely fails to organize those people in collective struggle. One of our new member readings, Malcolm X Didn’t Dish Out Free Bean Pies (by GATT) , gets into criticisms of contemporary mutual aid better than we can, but for us it comes down to the question of how we’re relating to the people we meet. Do we see oppressed people primarily as individuals who are lacking certain material needs and a vague notion of “community,” or do we see them as people we should work closely with to become leaders of mass struggles? Mutual aid groups think the former, and we insist on the latter. — Face the World and Brave the Storm: Why Going to the Masses Is a Strategic Necessity

The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the crying need for a communist vanguard party today: A summation, by the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, of the communist movement in the United States. https://goingagainstthetide.org/2025/09/01/reprint-the-cp-the-sixties-the-rcp-and-the-crying-need-for-a-communist-vanguard-party-today-a-summation-by-the-organization-of-communist-revolutionaries-of-the-communist-movement-in-the-un/ — When the Poor Fight Back: the Unemployed Councils of the Great Depression

Social investigation is how we start any effort at initiating struggle. It’s a process that involves speaking to people in a certain place, gathering contacts, summing up what we learn, and establishing a basis for mobilizing people we meet. A useful overview of this is A Call for Communist Social Investigation a Year After the Summer of Rebellion https://goingagainstthetide.org/a-call-for-communist-social-investigation-a-year-after-the-summer-of-rebellion/ by the journal kites, written in 2021. — Start A Chapter

Kites/Going Against The Tide

The journal Going Against The Tide (GATT) is the OCR’s main (really, only) open and transparent means of communication. Unlike Dare to Struggle, they do not try to hide that they are controlled by that group. 1 2 In fact, OCR’s history document is hosted on this website.

The OCR Itself

The OCR website itself is extremely sparse, containing only a link to Kites, their “manifesto”, an email address to contact them, and their Membership Constitution. This contains many sections on expected standards for members which would be appropriate for an army in wartime, but in present material conditions just make members paranoid and primed to accept whatever leaders want them to. In the section on “Units”, which are the basic organizational structure, they make each unit extremely close knit and reliant on each other, with all major personal decisions needing to be ran by the unit first.

History of OCR

Evidence for being a split of the RCP

A 5-part series of articles on the history of communism in the USA was published over several months in the journal Kites in 2023.1 2 3 4 5 Despite the RCP never reaching beyond a thousand members, and its only somewhat notable accomplishment being a lawsuit in 1981 that confirmed the right to burn the American flag, they place it as one of the two legitimate vanguard parties to exist in American history, alongside the CPUSA from 1920–1940 (which had around 100 times more members, and was viewed as enough of a threat to be severely repressed). The fourth article in this series covers the RCP exclusively. They massively over-exaggerate the RCP’s impact on politics, with the following quotes showing this:

The RCP continued to play a leadership role in significant class struggles. In July 1976, in the face of a bourgeois patriotic propaganda offensive celebrating the bicentennial of the US, the RCP staged a major demonstration in Philadelphia under the slogan “We’ve Carried the Rich for 200 Years, Let’s Get Them Off Our Backs!” Having the demonstration at all involved a significant political struggle against the city government of Philadelphia and its notoriously racist police commissioner Frank Rizzo, who tried to deny the protest a permit, called (unsuccessfully) for the National Guard to be mobilized to confront it, and deployed sharpshooters to rooftops around the demonstration. In the face of this repression, the RCP mobilized thousands, including unemployed workers and Vietnam War veterans, for the main demonstration in Philadelphia and other actions.

Fairly small and legal demonstrations like this are exactly the same as what other communist groups, like the PSL, do, and get criticized and threatened with execution in the OCR’s text output. But, since it’s a group related to them which is doing that, it suddenly becomes revolutionary. They also think Bob Avakian was a serious revolutionary leader and not a cultist grifter, although they disagree with the RCP in not viewing him as a completely infallible prophet:

Avakian’s intellectual methods, and his propensity for giving lengthy speeches rather than writing well-researched articles and books, veer towards a conception of genius disconnected from the collectivity of the Party, the masses, scientific research and intellectual debate, and the ongoing class struggle. This conception of genius puts the wisdom of one individual over and above the sources of its wisdom.

Even after their split, they view the RCP as far more important than it actually is. In the GATT article “When do we get angry? Igniting a mass movement for abortion rights in a post-Dobbs world”, they state that the RCP and its front groups are the main pro-choice movement in the United States today. This statement is completely ridiculous, as they have neither the numbers and political connections of establishment groups like Planned Parenthood or the militancy of smaller direct action groups like Jane’s Revenge:

Before virtually every pro-choice organization and activist had the chance to insist on capitulation to Dobbs, there was a wave of militant protests in 2022 that attempted to harness the outrage of young women and foment political resistance to abortion bans. The most serious attempt was spearheaded by the Revolutionary Communist Party which, despite having stagnated and deteriorated into dogmatic irrelevancy over the last couple decades, did the correct thing in pulling together more confrontational protests and giving fired-up young people something better to do than join parades. At the RCP’s initiative, Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) was formed in early 2022 by people who were at least wise to the increasingly serious existential threats to Roe. RU4AR organized protests in large metropolitan cities across the US, including one that took the fight right to Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s home, and used high school walkouts to pull teenagers into political life.

They also share the RCP’s penchant for using language that out of touch white suburbanites think will make them “look hip with the blacks”, as evidenced by them writing a rap-themed “diss track” article directed at the New Communist Party of Canada ((N)CPC) after their collaboration on Kites ended.

Kites and OCR/(N)CPC Split

Kites was originally a shared project between the OCR and the New Communist Party of Canada. This coalition fell apart sometime in 2024, with Kites being shut down and the OCR starting Going Against The Tide. In 2025, GATT published an extremely cringe article about the split, “They not like us — On the NCPC’s descent into a self-made swamp of economism, syncophantism, Trotskyism, and opportunism.”

Cultish behavior

Behavior control

Dare to Struggle has a habit of recruiting people in vulnerable situations and positioning themselves as saviors. In practice, this leads to them recruiting people in extremely vulnerable situations, such as minor high school students in abusive households, and getting them completely reliant on and committed to the cult. This has gotten worse in recent times, with a May 2026 article fairly blatantly trying to appeal to people in abusive relationships.

This editorial began with a few sketches of how patriarchal relations play out at a very intimate level every day. Here are a few small glimpses of what relationships might look like when we draw our strength and wisdom from collectivity and dare to create new ways of relating to each other:

A young woman opens up to the comrades she organizes with and tells them that her abusive ex is stalking her. They don’t just comfort her; saying, “this isn’t just your problem, it’s our problem,” they go with her as a group to confront him.

A teenage girl with an abusive father joins a revolutionary study group. She meets people there who treat each other with love and respect because they really believe a different world is possible. Our girl starts to hope that one day, she’ll be part of making that new world. — Love, sex, and collectivity: how should a communist be?

As stated earlier, members aren’t allowed to publicly criticize the organization, and this is quite literally the first rule of Dare to Struggle.

Put all questions, disagreements, and criticisms on the table to be aired openly within your organization. Today among groups on the Left, gossiping, shit-talking, spreading rumors, and factionalizing are all standard practice. Who hasn’t heard members of leftist groups like DSA and PSL routinely talk shit about their own organizations? Even if these organizations were to be taken seriously in the first place, the shit-talking is unprincipled. Beyond any particular organization, this is the culture leftists are trained in and take with them to every dead-end leftist organization they join. This behavior is also how FBI agents wreck political groups, and it’s a playbook the Left has effectively taken up today. Indeed, the contemporary Left has adopted the tactics of COINTELPRO as their own, not because they’re government agents, but because they’ve adopted opportunism as their modus operandi. (For a lesson on COINTELPRO, watch the 2019 movie Seberg to learn how the FBI created a rumor about Jean Seberg’s personal life to undermine the Black Panther Party and drive her to suicide.) In Combat Liberalism, Mao Zedong wrote that one type of liberalism is “to indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one’s suggestion to the organization. To say nothing to people to their faces but to gossip behind their backs, or to say nothing at a meeting but to gossip afterwards.” How do we prevent this corrosive shit from holding sway in our organizations? People shouldn’t talk shit or gossip about their own organization. Questions, disagreements, and criticisms should be aired openly, discussed and debated, within the organization you are part of, not gossiped about outside of it, and this should be a part of daily practice. — Principles of Organization

Despite them being an completely legal and civic-oriented organization, with members not even doing minor vandalism at protests or learning Boy Scout tier military skills like basic wilderness survival and gun safety, Dare to Struggle and especially the OCR instill a sense of militancy, risk, and paranoia in their members, encouraging them to think of themselves as soldiers in a life or death battle. This is done to make members more reliant and unquestioning of OCR leadership, and more committed to the movement.

6) Communists approach the class struggle from the standpoint of advancing the world revolution as a whole, not just in our particular country or sphere of political work. We must be willing to make all necessary sacrifices to advance the world revolution, up to and including death.

7) Being a communist means subordinating your life to the revolution and to the masses. This takes organizational expression in subordinating oneself to the communist vanguard and acting under the principles of democratic centralism. — OCR Member Constitution

Each member must have a willingness to do whatever is needed to advance the revolution. Our starting point is the needs of the revolution, not our individual desires or particular strengths. The OCR, and especially its leadership, must “use cadres well,” i.e., utilize the strengths and individual desires of all comrades to advance the revolution, but that is the secondary aspect of the contradiction.

There will be times when it is necessary to take orders, and there will be times when it is necessary to function on a war footing (politically and sometimes literally). Principally we rely not on orders, but on the principle of “grasp revolution, promote production.” Leadership needs to correctly distinguish between what is necessary in any given situation, but built into a communist organization is a chain of command and the ability to wield the entire membership towards our objectives, especially at times when quickly going into motion can mean rapid advances for the revolution. — OCR Member Constitution

Major life decisions (jobs, living arrangements, relationship and family commitments, etc.) as well as physical absences (vacations, family obligations) of unit members should be discussed with the unit as a whole to ensure these decisions are the best ones possible under the circumstances to enable our comrades to serve the revolution and physical absences do not substantially hinder our political work. At the same time, people’s personal lives should be respected, and units should strive to enable comrades to have happiness and fulfillment in their personal lives. — OCR Member Constitution

Uncritical support for Shining Path

Unlike the CCP or USSR, the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) under Chairman Gonzalo doesn’t have a complicated legacy, where their positive accomplishments somewhat make up for their crimes. The only thing the Shining Path accomplished was killing thousands of peasants and poor workers for minorly disagreeing with them, and completely discrediting communism in Peru. They wrote an entire article in GATT on how great Chairman Gonzalo was, completely glossing over all the atrocities they committed and blaming everything on the Peruvian military junta (which, to be fair, killed a comparable number of people as the Shining Path). One of the things they praise the most about Shining Path are their attacks and assassinations against other-left-wing groups, nonprofits, and charities, even thought this clearly didn’t work for creating a successful revolution in Peru. Not only did these attacks waste resources and soldiers that could have been used to fight the Peruvian government, it also weakened other anti-government groups that (if nothing else) would have created more chaos for the government to deal with and stretched their resources further, and turned people against them since they were murdering people for operating food kitchens and other institutions that were actually helping people despite their flaws. Despite this obviously being a stupid idea, they constantly refer back to how based the Shining Path were for doing this. section “A Third Periodist/Senderista strategic approach with some Nepalese tactics”

Threats against other leftist organizations

Like the RCP which they split from, Dare To Struggle/GATT/the OCR constantly makes empty but very belligerent-sounding threats against other leftist organizations. Following examples here:

We should also educate people about how such public speculation (on if a given group is a front for a “communist” “party”), intentionally or not, feeds into bourgeois state repression of communists, with “red tagging” of individuals and organizations often initiated by Leftists and carried to repressive and murderous ends by the bourgeois state... For this reason, anyone engaged in red tagging should be considered no better than a snitch. Sendero Luminoso had excellent methods for dealing with such people... — All Roads Lead To Revolution

Sometimes satire needs nothing more than a headline because the reality requires no embellishment or exaggeration to be parody. Seriously, fuck those Piece of Shit Leftists who praise militant resistance outside the US while working to prevent it inside the US. Your days are numbered. — While staying safely behind police barricades at permitted protests, PSL members praise Gaza resistance fighters for breaking through apartheid wall

Since self-righteous woke capitulation has become a scourge in all mass movements and radical organizations over the last decade, normalized as acceptable behavior through its repeated victories, we will need to fight battle after battle against it to set a new standard and put it on the defensive. While defeating it politically is principal, to really win, eventually there will have to become consequences for opportunism. The Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path demonstrated the importance of doling out such consequences for the advance of any revolution. As long as opportunists have nothing to fear, and much to gain, from their opportunism, they will continue to thrive. — Self-righteous woke capitulation or revolutionary resolve?

Picking up and dropping campaigns

Dare to Struggle has a habit of focusing on whatever is getting a lot of attention in the media, for as long as it’s getting attention in the media. Several examples of this in different chapters are listed below.

Chapters Across The Country

Austin

The Austin chapter focuses its work on immigrant rights, and calling out the federal and Texan government’s extreme repression against anyone who opposes ICE. Starting in 2025, they started publishing articles about how we need more militant resistance against ICE than permitted protests. They haven’t done this themselves, due to the cowardice of their leadership, but instead cheer on spontaneous resistance in California as an example. They are trying to recruit high school students to do these riskier actions for them, due to minors being less able to pick up on them being a cult and more willing to take risks. Since the ridiculous federal charges and conviction as terrorists of 19 people in the Prarieland case for things such as moving a box of zines, the Austin chapter has made them their new cause celebre, doing actions that generate a lot of noise, but nothing like raising money for legal assistance in their appeals.

California (Bay Area)

This is one of the newer and less active chapters, mainly focusing on bringing attention to police brutality.

Southern California

Like all other chapters in the country, they look at whatever group they think is “most revolutionary”, aka treated like shit while still being fairly numerous. They wrote the article “Caught on the Threshold” about undocumented farmworkers in Ventura County. https:// The Chumash and other natives from here are completely ignored, as they don’t have the numbers to be cannon fodder for their movement. From 2024 to early 2025, they wrote a lot of articles and interviewed many homeless people, which is notable since there are a lot of homeless people here that are treated like shit, and few other leftists bother to talk to them since they don’t have money or political power. 1 2 Since the large protests against ICE there started in Spring 2025, they have completely abandoned this in favor of dedicating all of their resources to hanging on to the coattails of this movement. They have massively overstated the impact and militancy of these protests, as well as their own role in expanding them. Indeed, they were so focused on exaggerating the impact of these protests (which are around as militant as the average Saturday in Paris, Rome, or Barcelona) that they essentially stated that Trump’s crackdown was justified.

Right-wing media spun a narrative of unruly crowds of “anarchists”, likely outside agitators, battling police and committing violence for the sake of violence. They correctly charged that Downtown LA was out of the control of the LAPD and the liberal politicians who they serve. Politicians like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom put aside their different approaches in how to use police to brutalize the homeless in order to stand fast against protestors and more effectively defend ICE. They made a war room to plot the battle (apparently these are some pretty amateurish generals!) They defended themselves against right-wing attacks, laughably claiming that they “had the situation under control” and that the national guard was “unnecessary”. They somehow tried to position themselves against the deportations and against Trump even while sending pigs to shoot anybody with the audacity to criticize ICE to their face. — Dispatch from the Battle of LA #1

They also criticize other leftist groups for doing exactly the same opportunism that they are, except with less “radical” rhetoric and a larger audience:

If you open up social media, the answers you will find are usually just as bankrupt. Most organizations are unwilling to defend the actions of the most daring and defiant protestors. As a result, the actual rebels who brought down the wrath of the government are largely isolated, while most Leftists are busy saving their own skin. The NGOs are still letting everybody know about the rights they supposedly have, and failing to expose how the government has been violating those rights. Anarchists and professional protestors are still giving tips for “protest safety”, or how to wear ninja costumes and dress for war to go to protests that now barely exist. Grifters and Leftist influencers love to share the spectacle of mass militant resistance with their armies of followers and clicktivists. They are most concerned with keeping you glued to your phone screen so they can wrack up clicks and watch times and sponsorships and merch deals, making money off a movement they had nothing to do with while fooling you into thinking you’re a revolutionary because of the Reels and TikToks you watch on your phone. — Dispatch from the Battle of LA #6

Even though we didn’t have a great plan and were left scrambling, we still managed to lead some actual confrontational acts of protest against ICE and the police repression, drawing a sharp dividing line from the peace police who aggressively protected the cops from the rage of the masses. The next day, we held a protest that started at Pershing Square, took the streets, and confronted the Hilton Hotel, part of a chain that has housed ICE agents and forms an integral part of the mass deportation machine. Happily, the Hilton was recently redecorated, and two flags were burned in a defiant act of protest, despite the aggressive attempts of Hilton staff to stop it by assaulting protestors. These actions struck a political blow against a despicable corporation that has willingly accepted the blood money of ICE, collaborating with the assault on immigrants just to line their own pockets.Having made our point, we returned to Pershing Square and took the intersection, disrupting downtown traffic to say that business as usual cannot continue while the Trump administration is kidnapping immigrants, putting them in concentration camps, and throwing them out of the country... We must insist that it is right to rebel against ICE, defend the LA 30 inside and outside the courtroom, and fight against the disgusting bourgeois propaganda that insists it was wrong for the people of LA to fight back against state terror. We must go to the people, listen to how they’re understanding the protest movement, and challenge them to join the fight to drop the charges. We must stand with the rebels facing charges and support their struggles, and promote the righteous acts of rebellion that have shaken the ruling class and knocked the mass deportation machine on its ass. This is crucial to winning the battle of public opinion in support of the rebels who shook this country to the core, defeating the government’s continued repression of protest, and creating sustained organized resistance to the mass deportation machine based among the people. That way, when the next flame of mass resistance catches, it will become a wildfire that can finally melt ICE and burn down this mass deportation machine. — Dispatch from the Battle of LA #6

The fact that no Dare to Struggle members were part of the 30 people charged, despite them posting about what they supposedly did afterwards, shows that they were not actually leading the more militant protests. Just like the other groups they criticize, they take credit for other people’s bravery and risk-taking, a classic form of opportunism. They have also started another front group here entirely focused on opposing ICE, No Tenemos Miedo.

Chicago

In Chicago, their designated “most revolutionary group” are African-Americans. Not that Black people aren’t severely discriminated against in Chicago and indeed the United States as a whole, but they ignore discrimination against Hispanics and Natives there too, probably because they’re outnumbered by African-Americans. They have been fairly good in actually talking to people unjustly charged by the state, for example Adrian Rucker, who was charged with murder when a dumbass CPD cop tried to murder him but ended up fatally shooting another cop. Still, in terms of their material actions, they are no different from dozens of other small leftist organizations.

Connecticut

The main group they focus on here are homeless people, and unlike the chapter in Southern California they didn’t completely abandon it to hop on a more trending issue. The Dare to Struggle chapter here has a heavy overlap with a smaller OCR front group, the Homeless Liberation Initiative. In one of the few good things they have done, they called out a homeless shelter in New Britain, Conneticut, for treating its residents like shit.

Dallas-Fort Worth

Also a very new chapter, they have mainly reposted articles from the Austin and New York chapters so far.

New York City

This is the oldest chapter, and many of it members were sent out to to other states to start chapters there. They wrote the article “Doomed to dash, forced to fight” about migrant gig workers in New York City. They also repeat right-wing talking points about the public housing system in the city. It sounds like there are serious issues with the public housing projects there, but getting them shut down would merely make the residents homeless, as they should know from their SoCal chapter.

New Mexico

The New Mexico chapter is one of the newer and smaller ones, but due to the fact that New Mexico is one of the most culturally distinctive and also most exploited areas of the United States (its life expectancy is only 73 years, and in many counties and reservations it’s lower), they have placed a lot of focus on it. In fact, they’re holding their 2026 national conference there. Much like their heroes in the Shining Path, they seem to think they can use the Indigenous peoples there as cannon fodder in their “army”, although unlike Sendero Luminoso they seem to have failed in recruiting a single one of them. This can be seen in one of GATT’s recent articles, “We fought the United States before and will have to do so again”. Despite their clear efforts, from their Instagram posts all their members seem to be white college students and adjacent activists, probably because despite their racism Native Americans are just as smart as white people and can realize that these settlers are trying to trick them into dying for their cause, just like the Confederates. It’s interesting that they mostly ignore the Hispanics there, even though the state is majority Hispanic and a combined Hispanic-Native rebellion against the United States took place there in 1847.

Seattle

Another new chapter, the Seattle section was founded in February 2026. Their activities so far include trying to pressure elected politicians in the area to reject contracts with ICE, the same liberal faith in the American government they hate other leftist groups for. Since there are not enough of these minority groups in Seattle to be a serious force in their eyes, they don’t talk about the struggles of Black, Hispanic, or Native American people in the Seattle area at all.