Dell
Class Independence and the Path to Revolution
For as long as human history has existed, so too has our capacity to think, strategize, and plan tactics. Great nations and battles have been won and overthrown by the sharpness of strategy.
From the Greeks' Trojan Horse, the Romans’ checkerboard formation, the civil rights bus boycotts, Muhammad Ali’s "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”, the Vietnamese guerrilla warfare tactics, Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad, the Bolsheviks’ methods of agitation, their Iskra newspaper, and the scientific methods of Marxism. Whenever people have fought for meaningful change, they have succeeded only when guided by correct ideas, solid organization, and the proper tactics, strategy, and long-term vision.
In the Sankofa Communist Party, our aim is the end of the capitalist system so that we join in on the spread of international revolution to smash the capitalist system globally. But organization alone is not enough; we must also be strategic, with clear short-term and long-term goals, and the ability to apply the right tactics to advance them. To do that, we must remain class-independent. But what does that really mean?
It simply means no collaboration with Democrats, Republicans, or any two-party-backed candidates. This is not only a want, but a necessity. The two-party system is controlled by the billionaire ruling class, who have done everything they can to lobby in Congress and fund these shameless, thieving, snake, cowardly, and degenerate politicians to continue to crush workers, roll back healthcare and education, cut benefits, and continue the further exploitation of workers. Workers must and can only come to power through their own self-organizations. As Karl Marx and Engels said:
"The workers' party must not only not allow itself to be led astray by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, but must preserve its independence and organisation.” [1]
No savior, benevolent politician, or wealthy benefactor can substitute for the self-organized activity of workers themselves. To do so is to place power into the hands of alien class forces that do not have the genuine interests of workers nor care for their liberation. Time and time again, we have seen this demonstrated through so-called leftist organizations, abusing socialist language, claiming to help working-class people, but behind closed doors taking money from the two-party system while never delivering on their promises for the workers they claim to want to help.
The working class can only succeed with its own philosophy and political home, which lies at the heart of Marxism.
As Malcolm X said:
“I'm one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats. One of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism. And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy – all we've seen is hypocrisy.” [2]
and further
“In Washington, D.C., in the House of Representatives there are 257 who are Democrats. Only 177 are Republican. In the Senate there are 67 Democrats. Only 33 are Republicans. The party that you backed controls two-thirds of the House of Representatives and the Senate and still they can't keep their promise to you. 'Cause you're a chump.” [3]
“Any time you throw your weight behind a political party that controls two-thirds of the government, and that party can't keep the promise that it made to you during election-time, and you're dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that party, you're not only a chump but you're a traitor to your race.” [4]
To achieve working-class power, we can only do so by strategizing independently from the class enemy.
Strategy and Tactics
What is strategy, and why does it matter? Strategy is the overall plan or direction that guides our actions toward a long-term goal. It answers the question: What are we trying to achieve, and why? It defines our main objective and the path of movement toward victory, whether that means winning a war, overthrowing capitalism, building socialism, or achieving a specific campaign goal.
Tactics are the specific actions or methods used to carry out the strategy. They answer: How do we get there, step by step? Their purpose is to win individual battles and moments of struggle that together advance the broader strategic goal.
If we fail to understand our strategies and tactics, or to correctly apply a dialectical lens to fast-paced events, we risk being disconnected from the fundamental transformation of workers’ consciousness and having no path to actual realization. There can be absolutely no shortcuts to this, as we have seen with the failures of reformism in both the present and the past. Whenever leadership has co-opted its strategy, bent backward, started taking money from democrats, or compromised directionally, their end goals were never achieved, a losing strategy by definition.
We must always remember patience, persistence, and tactical flexibility. Our basic rule of thumb is simple: whatever raises the working-class unity, consciousness, and confidence, we support; whatever cuts across this, we implacably reject. Under no circumstances can we cave to pressure from reformists or the bourgeoisie.
Lenin himself emphasized discipline, endurance, and sacrifice for the revolutionary cause. Famous for this, the Bolsheviks were known to survive only on black bread and potato gruel when times were rough. In our case, bread is expensive, so we will have to eat canned beans, but the point still stands. This expresses a revolutionary determination: communists must be willing to endure hardship to achieve socialism.
In pursuing this, comrades must lean on each other as brothers and sisters. No organization is immune to internal conflict and disputes. But we must behave comradely with dignity, respect, kinship, and high morality toward each other to ensure that no one stops rowing toward our goal of seeing capitalism overthrown for egotistical reasons. When disputes arise, we must resolve them within the organization democratically.
Class independence is not an option — it is a principle.
Modern Reformism: The DSA, AOC, Bernie, and Mamdani
Reformism is the siren trying to crash our boat. It wears many faces. Sometimes it’s polite and polished — the liberal politician promising to “fight for workers” while assuring Wall Street their profits are safe. At other times, it hides behind bureaucratic Stalinism, telling workers to “wait patiently” while leaders negotiate with capital and the bourgeoisie behind closed doors. The outcome is always the same: the ruling class survives, the system endures, and workers are told to be grateful for scraps. Reformism is a snake wrapped in Gucci and BAPE.
Today, we can even see the nature of reformist behavior with the DSA, AOC, Bernie, and Zohran Mamdani. The Israeli genocide against Palestinians has been ongoing for two and a half years now, and is an issue that the working class globally deeply cares about. Back in September 2025, Italians were willing to call for a general strike after the interception of the flotilla. Two million Italians participated in protests against Israel, and many more joined protests worldwide calling for an end to the genocide and for their governments to stop sending weapons to Israel. One would have expected Bernie or Zohran to call for a strike, considering the large following they have amassed, but instead, they offered sympathy and condemnation towards Israel, as if that could stop the genocide. Reformists believe capitalism can be regulated if we just elect someone who “understands” but it has never been enough and never will be.
Again, even in our times, Zohran Mamdani has fallen back on a lot of his own promises. Abolish the police? Now wanting to work with them. Saying Israel was committing a genocide? Now saying Israel has a right to exist. Saying billionaires shouldn’t exist? Now, saying private property apartments need to be transferred into the hands of a nicer bourgeoisie. He even went so far as to delay payments into the pension funds of millions of New Yorkers to fund his programs.
Mamdani also initially pitched raising taxes on the rich, but was met with hard opposition from Governor Kathy Hochul, who told POLITICO:
“He inherited a financial shortfall that could hurt the bond rating of the city and result in a loss of confidence of investors as well as the business community, and I couldn’t let that happen — that was my motivation this year. Now they have their own team in place. They control the budget. They need to look hard at spending.” [5]
Mamdani has since failed to raise taxes on the rich; instead, he secured a pied‑à‑terre tax — an incremental property tax on unoccupied second homes valued at more than $5 million. Mamdani expects it to generate $500 million, though the city comptroller estimates a lower range of $340 million and $380 million. However, to get around this, these homeowners could simply sell off these second homes or restructure ownership to avoid paying the debt.
Not only is he barely scraping money together to fund his programs, but he is also having to take that money out of working-class people’s pockets to pay for his programs. He has already drained the city’s reserve funds.
As we have learned from the crisis in Greece, the elected democratic socialist party, Syriza, attempted to adopt a similar model. They came to power in 2015 by promising to raise the minimum wage, food assistance programs, write off a large portion of Greece’s debt, provide free healthcare, and more. They attempted to achieve this through Keynesian economic policies and printing money to resolve their debt crisis. Make no mistake: Keynes himself said, “The class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.” This shows the true class nature of such policies. Of course, this method failed due to the fact that Greece was already in severe debt. When Syriza went to ask the Troika (the banks) for money, they looked upon Greece with contempt, as the contradictions in capitalism (Marx had pointed out) had caused a debt crisis too severe for additional reforms to be implemented. Pensions were cut, unemployment insurance was cut, youth unemployment skyrocketed, businesses closed, and there was mass suffering amongst working-class people, leading to large uprisings.
This is not to say that communists do not support genuine reforms for working-class people. We do. Anything that improves workers’ lives, we support. But we also understand that reforms cannot be the stopping point; we must go further, or else what is given with one hand can be taken away with the other.
In today’s conditions, the capitalist class has been slowly eroding long-fought-for reforms by the working class, dating back to the Great Depression, the post-war boom era, the civil rights era, and the Obama administration era. Medicaid has been rolled back for millions of Americans under both the Biden and Trump administrations, social programs and services have been cut, organizations feeding the poor and elderly defunded, and now even Social Security is under threat. According to the SSA administration, we have until 2037 before Social Security runs out. To curtail this, they will need to raise taxes on Americans from 12.4 to 14.4 percent to continue funding SSA for only an additional 75 years. This is happening in a time when Americans are struggling to put food on the table, living paycheck to paycheck, Black people are losing their voting rights again, and police brutality against innocent children in our streets is happening. Rest in peace Kohen Riley.
Because of these conditions, it is only natural that populism has emerged in the form of AOC, Sanders, and Zohran. A 2025 poll by Politico found that 53% of Americans prefer candidates like AOC, Sanders, and Zohran, while only 33% favor those like Schumer, Jeffries, and Pelosi. 74% of likely Democratic voters preferred democratic socialism over private sector capitalism. Many want higher wages, more corporate taxation, affordable housing, healthcare, and utilities.
Let us be frank, people like Zohran Mamdani don’t just thrive because they have a program. They thrive because there has been a genuine shift in workers’ consciousness toward socialist policies.
Trotsky himself details this process in the revolution betrayed:
“A political struggle is in its essence a struggle of interests and forces, not of arguments. The quality of the leadership is, of course, far from a matter of indifference for the outcome of the conflict, but it is not the only factor, and in the last analysis is not decisive. Each of the struggling camps moreover demands leaders in its own image.” [6]
Yet figures like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Zohran consistently funnel people back into the Democratic Party to be let down again. Many wonder why Sanders continues to work with the Democrats after his 2016 defeat, when the establishment backstabbed him and his base in favor of Hillary Clinton. The capitulation to Biden and Hillary left his base fractured, and the Gen Z youth were involved in a deep shockwave that opened their eyes to the system.
Trotsky again later explains how, without reforms, there is no reformism because reforms can only be given so long as capitalism is in its boom cycle, and as we Marxists know to be true, every boom cycle is only setting the stage for a deeper crisis, just like how Obama set the stage for Trump.
“Viewed historically, reformism has lost completely its social hosts. Without reforms, there is no reformism; without prosperous capitalism, no reform. The right-reformist wing becomes anti-reformist in the sense that it helps the bourgeoisie to smash the old conquests of the working class.” [7]
Other Left Parties, Entryism, and Class Collaboration
The majority of Sanders’ base eventually turned to the DSA, which grew from 5,000 mostly inactive members in 2015 to 50,000 in 2019. Unfortunately, the DSA has maintained its collaboration with Democrats, leading to the exodus of its most revolutionary elements and comrades.
Since building the SCP, we have met many young people on the left in multiracial coalition spaces. We have aimed to go into every space, even when the leadership is reformist, because we at Sankofa understand that young people are looking for answers and a way out of their situation. It is never their fault that they have been led astray by reformists, opportunists, or political lackeys.
What we have found is that once we bring our revolutionary program to them, many are immediately interested and eager to learn more. This highlights the importance of maintaining a friendly, patient, and open attitude toward the people we meet in and around the DSA and other organizations.
Most of the young people who volunteer or join these groups are far removed from the leadership and their dealings with politicians. More often than not, they have nothing to do with those decisions. They are simply searching for a way to fight injustice and change the world.
As Lenin said, one must "patiently explain."
Everything is in motion. We must remain flexible in our tactics, but uncompromising in our class independence.
The same applies to figures like Zohran Mamdani. We are going to consistently get questions about him. Marxists must not conflate what we know about him with the broader movement of the masses. Most of his supporters are not committed reformists — they are workers animated by his personality and democratic socialism; their honest illusions are tied to class issues such as inflation, housing, healthcare, and transportation. By engaging with them honestly, we can connect their immediate concerns to broader class struggles while pointing out how he has backtracked on his promises — first wanting to abolish the police, now cooperating with them; first opposing billionaires, now aligning with private equity.
By connecting these dots, we show that meaningful reforms can only come through breaking with the Democrats and mobilizing the working class. Should Mamdani ever do that, we would support him.
Sectarianism and Opportunism
Sectarianism and opportunism are two sides of the same coin. Sectarianism, also known as ultra-leftism, is the fear of being tainted by the reality that social revolution is not pure. It is the belief that if the masses do not adopt the same dogmatic conclusions as the sectarian, it is the fault of the masses, that they are simply not ready for a revolutionary task, let alone revolution itself. The sectarian believes that the masses just need to wake up and realize that the sectarian's program is right. That if the masses just poured enough time into this program, it would liberate everyone.
As Lenin said:
“Whoever expects a pure social revolution will never live to see it. Sectarians pay lip service to revolution without understanding what it truly is." [8]
Because sectarians cannot connect with the masses, when the dial of austerity turns and the working-class temperament rises, desperation sets in. Seeing the masses moving towards revolution without them, sectarians often manifest this desperation into opportunism, a tool to control the energy of the masses for their own short-term gain. This is a watering down and blurring of principles, rooted in petty-bourgeois indecision and instability. Opportunism, like sectarianism, seeks a shortcut to the masses and to revolution ( even assuming they genuinely favor revolutionary goals.)
As we, Sankofa Communists, row our boat towards revolution, sectarians and opportunists are the sharks swimming beneath us, while reformists are the sirens on the rocks, singing to lure us off course. We must maintain discipline and understand the class nature of these alien forces. On this boat, many comrades may be tempted to turn toward the sirens. Sometimes, after a close examination of the conditions and using dialectical analysis, rowing through a storm—rather than waiting for calm winds—is necessary to reach revolution more quickly. Sectarians, however, attempt to sail through all conditions blindly or even just waiting for the storm to pass, often losing more ground than they intended to gain. They confuse rigid formalism with principled politics. With all-or-nothing thinking, they turn Marxism into sterile dogma, class reductionism, a distortion, mixing and matching all types of alien ideas with it, rather than a living method for understanding and changing reality.
On the surface, sectarians may appear radical, vocal, knowledgeable, and disciplined. Yet, as Trotsky explained:
“Sectarians counterpose a ready-made schema to reality; but since the masses live in reality, the sectarian schema makes no impression upon the mentality of the workers.” [9]
The sectarian method is weak at its core. It assumes that if we build our own disciplined organizations, put resources toward specific ventures, or perfect our practices in isolation, liberation will naturally follow. We see this example today with PSL, which exists today as a marketing sect within the left. In reality, this formalism wraps around dialectics like a snake crushing its prey, squeezing the living method out of Marxism and injecting its venom into the pulse of Marxism. This hostility has persisted throughout every epoch of history and remains present today. We must be implacable in combating it. Trotsky summarized:
“A sect is a term I would use only for an organization of a kind that is forever doomed, by virtue of its mistaken methodology, to remain on the sidelines of life and of the working-class struggle.” [10]
How Sankofa Communists Plan to Win The Masses
Whether we like it or not, Marxists have not yet won the leadership of the working class. We do not have to beat around the bush, we must say what it is as Trotsky did.
The facts are that the masses are still deluded by the system. We live in a chokehold of a duopoly, the nonprofit industrial complex, and at every angle, the capitalist will smash, distract, infiltrate, and use propaganda to eviscerate any small organization or party that seeks true liberation for the working class.
No matter how correct the ideas of the working class are, they will often try the reformist path of least resistance multiple times, due to wanting comfort and avoiding even minor disruption in their lives. This we understand, nobody wants to put their life on the line for something they are unsure of, let alone risk their socio-economic standing. The masses will try more DSA candidates if they wish, participate in more protests, and even go to the homes of politicians to plead their case — all before reaching the fateful conclusion that it is revolution or nothing.
Evidence of this is that current labor and political leaders still hold their positions because a sizable layer of the working class still believes these leaders represent their best interests even though they do not.
The task of the SCP is to help working-class people shatter these illusions by showing up regularly to assist in the fight for genuine reforms while denouncing reformists. At the same time, we must build a strong core of Sankofa Communist cadres by recruiting the most politically conscious and aware youth and workers among the working class. We have been and will continue to root ourselves in every major working-class workplace and neighborhood, especially the most oppressed.
We have been very clear about our strategy from the beginning: turning to the youth most impacted, namely the PGM (People of the Global Majority) youth. The disregarded Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth. They are the ones who have been facing the highest levels of extreme exploitation, racism, systemic abuse, and the lowest-paid workers. They are angry and have been walking around looking to organize; many have already even started self-organizing. Unlike class reductionist organizations such as the RCA, we don’t distance ourselves from our people. We go towards them and build a genuine community with them because we understand their true revolutionary potential and how they can act as a ferment to bring in the broader working class, regardless of background.
The difference between 5,000 and 50,000 trained and active members in a pre-revolutionary situation is not minor. We must build quickly, but prioritize quality, winning over the brightest, most high-potential layer of the working class by patiently explaining our ideas and maintaining a friendly, engaging attitude.
Experience is the best teacher. As the capitalist crisis worsens, bringing increased economic stress and burden to the working class, many more will awaken, and we will win hundreds, then thousands, of new members to our program and organization. As Lenin explained:
“Revolution is impossible without a change in the views of the majority of the working class, a change brought about by political experience of the masses — never by propaganda alone.” [11]
The role of the revolutionary party is not simply to oppose reforms crudely, but to build a bridge between revolution and reform. It is not to scoff at the working class like sectarians, nor to insult, yell, or force our ideas upon them. Rather, it is to avoid the pitfalls of opportunism and sectarianism while being professional, strategic, tactful, and showing genuine revolutionary optimism and friendliness towards the workers.
Before we can explain patiently and correctly, we must first learn deeply, listen carefully, understand where others are coming from, and apply what we have learned in practice. Only by layering our knowledge and experience over time can we acquire the breadth and depth necessary to truly master the Marxist method.
Let us continue to identify points of agreement with the working class and work tirelessly to win them over to our program and organization in a positive and uplifting way.
Let’s Go Sankofa!
Sources:
- [1] Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League." March 1850. Marxists Internet Archive
- [2] Malcolm X. "The Ballot or the Bullet." Speech delivered in Cleveland, Ohio, April 3, 1964. Reprinted by American RadioWorks. American RadioWorks Transcript
- [3] ibid
- [4] ibid
- [5] Jeff Coltin and Emily Ngo, “Mamdani Gambled in Albany and Won. Can He Hit the Jackpot Twice?” Politico, June 17, 2026, Politico.
- [6] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1937; repr., Marxists Internet Archive), chap. 5, “Why Stalin Triumphed,” Marxist Internet Archive.
- [7] Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (1938; repr., Marxists Internet Archive), accessed June 20, 2026, Marxist Internet Archive.
- [8] Vladimir I. Lenin, “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up” (1916), in Collected Works, vol. 22 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), accessed June 20, 2026, Marxist Internet Archive.
- [9] Leon Trotsky, “Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth International” (1935), Marxists Internet Archive, Marxist Internet Archive
- [10] Leon Trotsky, “The Dutch Section and the International” (1935).
- [11] Vladimir I. Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/.
