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Red Flags: Before You Join That Org…

A Primer on Authoritarian & Vanguard Communist Groups & What You Can Do Instead

June 3, 2024

      Intro

      Common Tactics, Patterns, and Tendencies to Watch Out For

      Why Are They Like This?

      Specific Groups & Examples

      What Do I Do Instead of Joining a Vanguard Group?

        Think About Your Beliefs & Values

        Never Stop Learning

        Building Honest Relationships

        Find Existing Groups or Projects

        Start Your Own Project

      Protecting You and Your Projects with Healthy Boundaries

        You have anti-authoritarian values and have started a project. What do you do?

        So should I ever work with authoritarian communists?

      Resources

        General

        Party for Socialism & Liberation (PSL)

        Red Guards

        Black Hammer

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Intro

When we pay attention to the amount of injustice in the world, we find ourselves wanting to do something about it. And we don’t want to do just anything. We want to participate in what can most strategically stop those injustices. We need to organize together to confront what is killing us and the planet.

If you go looking for others involved in this resistance work, you might stumble across some organizations that seem to have all the answers. They say they know exactly how to bring capitalism to its knees. And they’re often recruiting new members like you to take part in the Revolution.

But when organizations offer easy answers and tell you all you need to do is step in line with their orders, it should raise some red flags.

Before we get swept away by their revolutionary aesthetics, one-size-fits-all plans, and lefty lingo, we should talk about authoritarian and vanguard communist groups. They often search for young, enthusiastic people who haven’t been warned about them yet or don’t know the warning signs. All the major ones we know of have long histories of abuse. As anarchists, we understand that their embrace of authoritarianism is exactly what makes them so susceptible to being abusive.

This zine outlines red flags to look out for, provides some history of the most well-known authoritarian communist groups’ harmful behavior, and offers a few alternatives to joining them.

We believe that the most strategic way to fight systems of oppression is by fighting collectively. We don’t need to recreate the very power dynamics we’re struggling against to win. But we do need you in the fight.

Common Tactics, Patterns, and Tendencies to Watch Out For

Here are some red flags to watch out for. You’ll probably also see some of these in non-profits, advocacy groups, or other top-down organizations that operate like a business. However, it’s the ideological motivation that sets the vanguard apart and leads to some of their worst harms. We use “vanguard” to mean a person or group who deems themselves the necessary leader of the masses toward “revolution.” If you’re noticing these red flags, it’s best to stay away and ask others about their experiences with the group.

This incomplete collection of red flags is gained from experience. Vanguardist groups may only show a few of them, likely not many of them, and almost definitely not all of them. These red flags aren’t the strict definition of vanguardist behavior, but a collection of behaviors that coalesce around vanguardist groups and practices.

These practices are very destructive for the individuals involved, the communities targeted for recruitment, and grassroots efforts to fight for a better world. Vanguard groups churn through members, squeeze them for labor and cash, burn them out, disregard their safety and autonomy, and can even serve as a pipeline into harmful conspiracy thinking or high-control groups. They turn people who are enthusiastic about radical social change into people who are better at taking orders from leaders, rather than acting autonomously and cultivating bottom-up power with others. These formerly passionate organizers’ self-directed revolutionary potential, and their development as people, is sabotaged as they dedicate countless hours to building an organization’s membership list, bank account, and social presence.

Why Are They Like This?

This isn’t simply bad habits learned in an authoritarian society re-asserting themselves. Vanguardist groups and individuals have an intentional, ideological commitment to authoritarianism. This is a large part of what drives these toxic practices, and why such groups will not change.

Political ideologies play a big role in the world of radical politics, activism, and revolutionary organizing often called “the left.” Vanguardist thinking generally (though not exclusively) comes from Marxist schools of thought. There are some corners of Marxism that move in anti-authoritarian directions, like anti-state Marxists. But today’s vanguardist largely inherits from the ideologies of Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, or Maoism, and may explicitly identify as an adherent of one. Generally, these ideologies are all considered kinds of Authoritarian Communism, in contrast against other ideologies like Anti-Authoritarian Communism, Socialism, or Anarchism. These authoritarian ideologies ignore that the methods you use for radical change influence the radical change that you wind up creating. You make the path by walking. If you want a liberating society, you need to use means that are liberating, not ones that depend on subjugation and domination.

At its core, the vanguardist’s self-assigned task is to decide what is “revolutionary,” craft a blueprint for all of society, and seize the power necessary to impose this blueprint on the world. The word “Vanguard” itself expresses the idea that this select few is the necessary leader of the unthinking masses toward “revolution,” rather than the “masses” themselves. They justify this with ideological concepts like “democratic centralism” and “historical materialism.” This highly theoretical view of human society and history puts the machinations of the vanguard above the concerns of individuals and whole societies, creating a rationalization for harming colossal numbers of people. The underlying power dynamic is hidden behind a smokescreen of ideological necessity: they claim to know the only true path to revolution, and to stray from it is to betray the struggle and lead us all to certain doom. This is great for them and bad for the rest of us, both in theory and practice.

Specific Groups & Examples

What Do I Do Instead of Joining a Vanguard Group?

Think About Your Beliefs & Values

What do you value? What do you find beautiful? Your values and beliefs guide your action. They shape the goals you have, and how you try to achieve them. Having some idea of this is a crucial first step. You don’t need to have everything figured out, and you don’t have to pick an ideological label, but you should have a basic idea of yourself before you start. This helps direct you, helps you find others, and helps guard against joining a group in an impressionable state where you could be taken advantage of.

Activities and groups that align with your values are where you can be most impactful, build authentic relationship with others, find some fulfillment, and grow as a person. Groups and activities that don’t align won’t be as rewarding and can have impacts on the world that are actually against your values and the changes you want.

The world is in motion and so are you! Your values don’t have to be permanent! You don’t have to figure out every one of your values before you can do something. You can see how they work out in practice, discover new beliefs and values from others, see if they make sense, and how they fit or conflict with beliefs and values you already have. You may find some things come and go in importance for you, while other values are important and long-lived.

We can learn from our elders who used to be committed to Marxist values and participated in militant formations like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Black Panther Party, and Black Liberation Army. Black radicals like Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, JoNina Abron-Ervin, Ashanti Alston, Kimathi Mohammed, Modibo Kadalie, Donald L. Cox, & Kuwasi Balagoon each spent years throwing down in the struggle before developing values that were at odds with the top-down theory of change imposed by authoritarians—some eventually became anarchists later in life.

Never Stop Learning

The societies we live in also drive our action. If we want to act against the injustices we see like houselessness or transphobia, we need to understand how our societies produce them. That’s radical change: getting to the root of things!

This is often where people turn to political ideologies and schools of thought: Marxism, Socialism, Feminism, Anarchism, and so on. These can provide useful, new ways to analyze and think about our world. But beware of easy, totalizing answers. The world is a complex and chaotic place. No single political theory can capture it all and become the eternal, correct view of all human society. Political theories also have histories of impact that we can study together and learn from so we don’t repeat the same harms and blindspots.

Learning is best with others! You can enrich each other with your different perspectives and experiences. Our direct experiences are at least as useful as abstract political theories.

Building Honest Relationships

Interpersonal relationships and communities are at the root of any group. It’s the substrate the group is built on, its foundation, and what resilient groups come out of. Sometimes a focus on the formal structures and internal processes of a group hides this fact, leading to neglecting interpersonal relationships or ignoring power dynamics between members.

Don’t stress about jumping into a group and “getting active” right away. Building relationships with others in ways that align with your values will lead to action. This is also how trust is built between people, which is necessary for almost any action aiming for social change.

The informal networks of well-tended relationships can be very resilient, and a fertile foundation for radical action, change, and life. Often the communities and complex webs of relationships that formal radical groups throughout history sprang from and relied on get invisibilized, but they made these groups possible. History is bigger than powerful organizations and charismatic leaders.

Find Existing Groups or Projects

This can be tricky if you’re totally new to this scene, and there’s no one way to do this. The writers of this zine all got involved in completely different ways. One way to start can be by poking around in social spaces. Local radical, indie, and DIY spaces sometimes have fliers and zines that might tell you about upcoming events where you can meet people. Ask around and reach out. Learn to see things that aren’t “leftist” as radical. There are powerful social spaces that aren’t legible to the state—like auntie networks—that will always be the backbone of social life. Build relationships on the fringes!

Keep in mind your values. You likely won’t find a perfect fit, but you can find good ones. Using groups to search for people can be helpful, but joining groups in search of values or beliefs can be dangerous.

Trust your gut. A group can claim anything in their mission statement, platform, points of unity, etc., but what really matters is how they move and operate in reality. Referencing the list of red flags from earlier can be helpful, and this is also where relationship comes in. You can ask people who aren’t in the group their experiences with them to help sniff out warning signs.

You may find yourself in a group that, while not explicitly vanguardist themselves, has some vanguardist members or tendencies. You may not see it right away, or it may be a shift that happens over time. You could try to push back against this, but it may be too embedded in a group’s culture to change. It’s ok to leave! It may feel disappointing or sad, but a commitment to revolutionary action and change is not the same as a commitment to a group. Having relationships outside the group you’re active with can help you not feel trapped.

Start Your Own Project

You might decide that you don’t even want to work with an existing group. Maybe you’re seeing a need that isn’t being filled in your area—for example, maybe the only free meal distribution happens at your local Catholic church and they make you listen to a Bible story first. Or maybe you wish existing work fit your politics better; for example maybe the only immigration support group frequently works with cops, or the main anti-gentrification group in your neighborhood has been hijacked by a vanguard group. You can try something new!

This can be daunting and require a wide variety of skills, but it can also be as simple as starting an effort with some friends and learning by doing. It’s very smart to work together among the people starting a project to figure out common values and initial foundation and direction for the project.

A lot of the logistical tasks of starting and running projects have been written about. It’s worthwhile to do research on existing groups doing similar things, and determining what practices and organizational structures and methods match up well with the values and goals that were collectively arrived at for your project.

Be humble! Odds are you’re entering an ecosystem of radical projects that already has many different skills, experiences, and knowledge. Different kinds of projects require all kinds of different skills, and there may often be people doing the same or similar work that you just don’t know about. You can learn lots of things from other people without having to sacrifice all your values; take what aligns and works.

Protecting You and Your Projects with Healthy Boundaries

You have anti-authoritarian values and have started a project. What do you do?

Radical groups with a “come one, come all” approach to organizing might see vanguardists showing up to their meetings and efforts. We’ve seen authoritarian communist cliques and reading groups decide to start collectively integrating themselves into a given project. They can discreetly build a power block within a group, and we know of many examples of such members taking control over projects.

Building points of unity and talking explicitly about your group/project’s values is an essential way of protecting your group from not just authoritarian, but also liberal cooptation. Collectively writing out an explicitly anti-authoritarian point of unity provides an opportunity to discuss why that value is important to a group and how it’s intertwined with your other values and goals. This would be a great time to share this zine with your group and talk about what the group’s approach to authoritarians attempting to join the group could look like.

Ensure that new members are on board with your points of unity. If your group has been around for a while, consider having older members reflect on these points together with newer members. Being able to explain why your group is committed to its anti-authoritarianism can be impactful in newer radicals’ own journey of discovering their values.

Saying “no” is an important skill for any organizer to have, both to avoid your own burnout, but also to keep your group sustainable by preventing “mission creep.” Being comfortable saying no to someone trying to get involved in your effort can be difficult. But being prepared to stand up for your group’s values will help keep it on track toward its liberatory goals.

Beware the authoritarian who’s comfortable using the language of anti-authoritarianism to advance their position in a group. We’ve seen them argue that opposition to their approach or involvement is authoritarian and isn’t consensus based. One counter to this is to point out that protecting your group and its values is your collective responsibility.

So should I ever work with authoritarian communists?

It depends on the proximity. The writers of this zine won’t intimately organize with them because we have seen too many efforts go sideways once authoritarian communists flood the membership. And at the end of the day, we’re ultimately working toward different goals with very different tactics. But our aim isn’t to be purists, and we don’t want to silo ourselves into obscurity.

A lot of movements and mass efforts are composed of leftists with all kinds of political affiliations. It’s very possible to participate in coalitions and broad organizing efforts with liberals and authoritarian communists alike without losing sight of our liberatory values. In fact, we can have a really positive impact in those spaces by encouraging anti-authoritarian practices in them. Helping people who don’t identify as anti-authoritarians see the practical value of supporting a diversity of tactics, not falling into the trap of following charismatic leaders, making decisions collectively, and forming deep relationships of trust and mutual care can be really beautiful outcomes of our involvement.

But above all, we recommend finding a few comrades whose values you fuck with deeply so you can roll with and learn alongside them. Having these people in your life as you confront the hydra of fascism and injustice will make your efforts more sustainable, dynamic, and help bring us closer to true liberation.

Resources

General

The Cardinal Rules of Not Getting Cult’d
https://www.tumblr.com/timemachineyeah/646587752285077504/my-hypothesis-is-that-in-like-10-years-gen-z-is

Ideological Intransigence, Democratic Centralism and Cultism: A Case Study
https://www.whatnextjournal.org.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext27/Cults.pdf

How to Form an Affinity Group
https://crimethinc.com/2017/02/06/how-to-form-an-affinity-group-the-essential-building-block-of-anarchist-organization

A Step-by-Step Guide to Direct Action
https://crimethinc.com/2017/03/14/direct-action-guide

Means and Ends
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchist-affinity-means-and-ends

Party for Socialism & Liberation (PSL)

Documentation of Corruption, Institutional Bigotry, and High-Control Group (Cult-Like) Behavior in the Party for Socialism and Liberation
https://web.archive.org/web/20240130021959/https://medium.com/@jacobscb/documentation-of-corruption-institutional-bigotry-and-high-control-group-cult-like-behavior-in-6afa65b8072e

Red Guards

CR-CPUSA Exposé
https://maoistcultexposed.wordpress.com/cr-cpusa-expose/

Black Hammer

Ex-Black Hammer members detail Gazi Kodzo’s abusive ‘cult’
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/black-hammer-gazi-kodzo/


Revolution isn’t a game of follow-the-leader.

— Andrew Sage


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