A Just Act, Just Not a Correct Act

Opinion | Tommy Johnson

Revolutionary action must be both just and correct action in the interests of serving the people and their struggle for political power. It must be based on the just and correct ideological line which decides everything.

Part One: PSL and Elias Rodriguez

The Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Trotskyist-revisionist organization based in the United States has come under attack by monopoly and right wing media outlets. According to the far-right and Zionists, the suspected shooter of the employees of the Israeli Embassy is a member of the PSL. This claim is made on sparse evidence which only supports the notion that Rodriguez was once quoted as a member in the organization’s newspaper, Liberation News. PSL rightly rejects the attempts to link them to the action; it insists that the suspect had no contact with them for the past seven years, and states clearly that they do not support the action. Nonetheless, the reactionary spin on the situation continues to be that the organization and, more specifically, communism is responsible. This poses a serious threat, not remotely exclusive to revisionists, but to the active masses.

The entire fiasco conceals the real practice and policy of the PSL in opportunistically attacking them, yet it cannot fail to highlight the problems with their ideological, political, and organizational line; this just needs proper examination. Liberation News, which in a sense are our colleagues on the journalistic front, have also contributed to the problem. In 2017 the publication released a speech given by Rodriguez, crediting him as a member of the PSL. Without comment the article was removed from their website, but not before the right had gotten a hold of it and used it to cast aspersions on the entire organization.

While it is foolish to condemn an organization for unsanctioned activity of one of its members, removing an article quietly and without comment only aids the enemy in doing so. Since the PSL itself has distanced themselves from their ostensibly former member, very well, what are the main problems?

The ideological line of the organization—rooted in the teachings of the revisionist Leon Trotsky—is muddled and eclectic. There are almost no ideological standards or training and what there are is bourgeois. This leads to disunity on the most important question of ideology. Among the established leaders there is mainly adherence to Sam Marcy, a confessed follower of Trotsky, and among the ranks one encounters everything from liberals to so-called Marxist-Leninists, to anarchists and more. Many among them are genuine young people who desire revolutionary change, who, absent correct leadership, end up defecting from the organization in a few years, only for the organization to grow again in the next mass movement. It is a revolving door as well as a small-time factory for revisionism.

Lenin firmly demarcated between the social democracy of the Mensheviks and the communism of Bolsheviks, and PSL has completely rejected this demarcation and attempts to blur the two into an unholy combination. Along with this trickery, the organization rejects the Leninist principle of the clandestine Party of the proletariat, opting for an open, legal, social democratic Menshevik form of organization, in which members openly proclaim their membership along with their legal names.

This problem, combined with the problem of ideological disunity, means that when people leave for ideological, political or personal reasons, their activity can still come back around to affect or harm the organization, opening the legalist and hence defenseless organization up to legal and political repression from the reactionaries. This more than anything else represents the lack of leadership, which is a significant problem stemming from the ideological problem.

Good people, when faced with a lack of immediate options, often make bad decisions and sometimes join bad organizations. It makes no sense to blame the masses, nor to direct the struggle against revisionism toward every member of a bad organization like PSL. Why the new recruits make these decisions comes down not to the success of revisionism (it has none—just look at its polling results!) but due to the failures and impatience of revolutionaries to do the necessary revolutionary work of generating real organizations, and above all, of reconstituting the Communist Party. The dispersal of revolutionary forces only means that revisionist organizations will increase through trafficking with the people’s struggles.

The clearest sign that Elias Rodriguez was not “an active member of the PSL” as the reactionaries have claimed is that he did not suffer from the aversion to violence that the PSL is well known for; their similarity is only in the lack of tactical and organizational revolutionary principles. The fact is the recruiting standards are very low, the idea of the professional revolutionary is rejected, and so all manner of people join the organization for a time, put in work and then leave, going years with no contact, making PSL’s statement appear true. It is also true that as a result of the low standards of recruitment, members seldom actually adhere to the organization’s discipline, and there is no shortage of accounts of this, meaning that local groups and individuals cannot be judged by one standard. In this sense, it is plausible that members reject discipline and carry out actions their organization would otherwise condemn. This includes but is not limited to righteous acts of rebellion.

In the end of it all, it does not matter a bit whether Rodriguez was a former member, or an “active member” as some suggest, or if he was never really involved; more important than any of this is the mechanism of the reaction which snaps into action over the course of real life events, which responds cruelly with repression and attack, which seeks to red-bait, to destroy legitimacy, and which uses an organization’s completely legal actions to destroy or ban it.

In other words, the real lesson is how completely-aboveground “socialist” organizations, those who claim to challenge the power of the ruling class, have disarmed themselves and lack all ability to go underground as the revolutionary sequence advances. They are at the mercy of the reaction; they capitulate or liquidate or both—the point is these organizations are already dead in the organizational sense, in the revolutionary sense, and the obituary was already written by revisionism in words and deeds.

As the class struggle becomes more and more intense within the worsening economic crisis, especially in the process of the reactionization of the imperialist state, these lessons will be painful, but revolutionaries must learn them well; the masses clamor for leadership in their just rebellion, their explosive energies must be converted into stable revolutionary organizations, and most importantly they need to be guided by the ideology of the international proletariat, Maoism. For the masses of working people to make war, people’s war, they require the unfading leadership of the Communist Party, which has been reconstituted, having militarized itself in action, and having constructed around itself an army and united front.

It is the lack of a revolutionary center which drives courageous young people into individual acts, the same lack which drives them first into the organizations which can only fail them.

Part Two: Elias Rodriguez’s “Manifesto”

Elias Rodriguez became one of the most important US political prisoners today the moment his name was released in association with the annihilation of two Zionists complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people through their involvement with the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC.

However we feel about the action, this much is true: the combined forces of reaction want blood. Both ruling class mafias, both Democratic and Republican want his head, and they must have it in order for their genocidal ambitions to proceed unchallenged. Revisionism in its main type, for its part, can only applaud the blood-lust of the old state or remain ambivalent, aloof, crossing its arms and denouncing “both sides.”

Support for the Palestinians and their rights is almost alone in its ability to be a shared principle among the entire left and all progressive people. Next to this was, and should be, support for political prisoners, and this should unite all the combined forces of the people—it is sacrosanct for anyone calling themselves a revolutionary.

Video released by the monopoly media depicts who the police have identified as Rodriguez shouting the slogans of the Palestine Solidarity Movement as he is being led away to the dungeons of the reactionary state, and in short time independent journalist have produced what they claim is a “manifesto” of the shooter. This 900 word document threads a history of oppression and resistance; its principal value is that it reveals the distortions of the ruling class and their lackeys. As the old-state, run by its old mafias, prepares for enhanced “hate crimes” charges based on the specter of “antisemitism,” the document, when examined by any rational person, reveals that no such motives exist in the author. In its entirety there is nothing disparaging against Jewish people. What is there is condemnation of Zionist, colonial, and genocidal oppression. The writer defends what is referred to in the document as “an armed demonstration” which the writer demarcates from “a military action.” This indicates that the writer is at least aware of the need for, if not seeking, mass understanding.

Marxists must not fail to divide the matter into two. On one hand, it was a just act, just in the sense that the genocide in Gaza is unjust, and that some who supported it, aided and abetted it, faced the reality of what they were supporting. On the other hand the action itself was a premature, disorganized, and individualist protest, which is harmful to the role of the masses who make history and who require organization. The action can only be condemned on the basis that it is insufficient, that it was not “a military action” led by the forces of the people capable of winning, that it did not rely on the masses and their infinite creativity, that, in conclusion, it was not revolutionary.

It is worth commenting that the author uses the phrase of the Weather Underground: “bring the war home”, a phrase which cannot serve as the correct revolutionary slogan. Then as now it represents the impatient and vacillating class perspective of the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie recently awakened to suffering, and not that of the stalwart, patient, and disciplined revolutionary proletariat, the class which makes and leads the revolution, a class which was born in suffering. Between these two perspectives is all the difference of mistaken tactics and correct strategy. It was a just act, an understandable and brave one, but it was not a revolutionary one, and hence it was not a correct act.

There are those who attempt to make this a foolish argument, one about violence and non-violence; they are hopeless, it has nothing at all to do with whether the act is violent or not, but whether or not it furthers the revolutionary destiny of the working class and oppressed masses of the world, whether or not it was both just and correct.

It is necessary then to study not only the action but the reasons and motivations behind it, and for this purpose it will be reproduced here in full:

“May 20, 2025

Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here’s an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those “ten thousand” under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in “Protective Edge” and “Cast Lead” put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians’ forgiveness. They’ve let us know as much.

An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they’ll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they’re doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can’t let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.

The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who’d been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.

Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha’s Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry’s lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara’s ‘very posture, telling you, “My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you’ll have to lump it.”’ The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying ‘Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn’t so fine, was it?’

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn’t exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****

Free Palestine

-Elias Rodriguez”

Image: Eyewitness footage alleged by monopoly media to be of Rodriguez in custody, Katie Kalisher social media

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