Against Trans Vulgar Materialism, For Trans Peoples’ Democratic Rights

Samsagaz el Fuerte
Policarpa Salavarrieta
Policarpa Salavarrieta, 1855

The position which Amos characterizes as “class reductionism” is not the focus of this essay. It is enough to conclude, for now, that, aside from being a pretense for chauvinist apathy towards trans rights, it is a form of economism whose internal logic would preclude any embrace of the (also currently minoritarian) position that the proletariat, as a class-for-itself, should seize political power.

The position which Amos characterizes as “trans liberalism” is actually closer to material reality than Amos’ confused attempts to argue that trans oppression is “a material part of the patriarchal reproduction of capital and the state.” Communists should indeed fully support the democratic rights of trans people for the very reason that it “enable[s] [their] participation in (Western) capitalist society.” Amos’ position is a form of vulgar materialism that flattens democratic and socialist struggles into a single chimera, and does a disservice both to the struggle for trans peoples’ democratic equality and to the cause of revolutionary socialism.

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Social Reproduction Theory as Vulgar Empiricism: Jaffe’s Attack on the Process of Abstraction

Tibor Szamuely
Shop Girls
Shop Girls, 1912

When we refer to Social Reproduction Theory, it is necessary to clarify that our target is not the theorization of the reproduction of the social totality or of labor power within that totality per se. Rather, the term here denotes a specific iteration of this theoretical practice which developed a certain hegemony within some spaces of academic knowledge production in the 2010s.

This iteration, we argue, is inseparable from a broader preemptive neutralization of proletarian politics among progressive intellectuals in favor of the continued hegemony of a radical petty bourgeois democratic idealism which forecloses the possibility of constituting a social subject able to contend for class power, with the objective of transformation of the relations of production through seizure of state power.

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Adventures in Revisionist Ideological Corruption: How YDSA’s The Activist Trains Socialist Youth to Respect Bourgeois Order

Tibor Szamuely
YDSA
YDSA Banner

We, as at least halfway competent dialecticians, welcome the rise of democratic socialism, in the same spirit with which any lover of truth welcomes the spread of the most flagrant error. It is only in the struggle with error that the truth comes to assume a concrete content. And in this spirit, we feel compelled to reflect on some recent contributions in the media organ of the Young Democratic Socialists (YDSA), The Activist.

Like Jacobin and Cosmonaut, it is another nodal point in the network of publications that express the democratic socialist sensibility which has spent the last decade becoming ever more hegemonic among the oppositionally minded, against the backdrop of secular weakness in the labor movement and the protracted decadence and fragmentation of revolutionary socialist organizations. In dark times, the soft bigotry of low expectations comes to the fore, here in the form of a complacent assumption that democratic socialism is at least an interruption in the reproduction of the universal Third Way that seemed destined to set the mood of our ongoing post-Soviet malaise, at least till the incoherent ruptures of 2016. Adherents of this assumption would insist either that we refrain from criticizing democratic socialism entirely, or at least dilute said criticism to a point where it can be judged palatable to the devotees of this overwhelmingly dominant political fad.

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How the Left Wing of the DSA Deludes Itself

Tibor Szamuely
Mamdani
Mamdani, NY Not For Sale Rally

We agree completely that it is unfair to accuse Mamdani of betrayal. Like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, or any of the leaders of democratic socialism, Mamdani has been perfectly honest and forthright about what he is going to do, manage the bourgeois state in the interests of the bourgeoisie, while providing some token benefits to the working class, with which he hopes to build a governing majority; all while proving his fitness for power to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Mamdani never lied about this during the campaign. He is not betraying his program, but fulfilling it. There is indeed a betrayal in this scenario, but not by Mamdani. The betrayal was the one carried out by the socialists with Marxist education who choose to deepen the historic demoralization and disorientation of our class by insisting, to the politically naive and uneducated, that this sellout program of kneeling and cringing before the millionaires like a castrated farm animal would be sufficient to change the balance of force between the classes in a manner substantive enough to restore some dignity to our lives.

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The Communist Party and the Intellectuals

Edwin Hoernle
Mode of Production
Mode of Production

The capitalist economy draws a sharp line between mental and manual labor, between leadership and execution in production. The “intellectuals” or mental workers here form a particular social strata, a strata which economically occupies an intermediate space between the capitalists proper and the mass of the exploited. By their social position and their attitude to life, the intellectuals can be counted as belonging to the possessing class; their economic situation, however, pushes them year after year ever more hopelessly down into the proletariat.

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Manifesto of 21st Century Communists

Rudolf Prikryl
Specter Haunting Europe
A Specter is Haunting Europe

A spectre is haunting the world: the spectre of communism. All the powers of the old order have joined in a holy alliance to drive it out: the President at Mt. Rushmore and the President in the Kremlin, the palaces of the Gulf and the parliaments of Europe, the cable network and the hedge fund, the think tank and the masked men marching under the Confederate flag, the social democrats and the foundation-funded activists alike.

In 1848, when the Communist Manifesto was first written, the spectre haunted one continent, because that continent was then the whole of the capitalist market. The market grew until it covered the earth exactly as the first writers of that manifesto told it would. The spectre grew with it. Its writ now runs everywhere the wage is paid, which is everywhere. Wherever the market went, the attempt at exorcism followed it.

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The Revolution of Operational Art

Rudolf Prikryl
War Wreckage in Ukraine
Ukraine War Wreckage

Two current wars furnish the primary evidence for this exercise of scrutiny. The first is the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and which, as of this writing in early 2026, continues without operational resolution along a 1,000 km front, now running longer than the duration of Eastern Front operations during the Second World War. The second is the Iranian-US/Israeli conflict that erupted in June 2025 with Operation Rising Lion and expanded into a broader regional war by early 2026. These conflicts differ enormously in geography, political character, and the correlation of forces, yet they begin to blend, and share a common underlying condition: in both, the material and technological environment of combat has again transformed the relationship between the offense and the defense, between fire and movement, and between the front and the depth, in ways that compel a re-examination of operational categories Commander Isserson established.

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Karl Marx and German Classical Philosophy

Lyubov Akselrod
Nude Philosopher in Space-Time
Nude Philosopher

On March 14th, 1883, Karl Marx passed away. On that day the proletariat of the entire terrestrial globe lost its brilliant and devoted leader.

In the current moment, even fierce enemies of the proletariat and opponents of scientific socialism are forced to admit that the spiritual creativity of the author of “Capital” and the practical activity of the father and leader of the workers International, firmly connects the great events of the second half of the 19th with the dawning promise of the 20th century. Karl Marx himself represented a rare exception even in the ranks of the great individuals, with whom nature does not often indulge history. A deep thinker and genius, he was at the same time a practical man of action, a passionate, tireless, selfless warrior in the great battlefield of the history of humankind. His choice of a practical revolutionary path was clearly illuminated by the light of theory, but the fruits of practical revolutionary activity filled theory with living substance, instilling new fresh forces in it.

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United Front with Whom? How the Tempest Collective Reimagines the United Front as Bourgeois Populism

Tibor Szamuely
'Stop ICE Terror' rally in Minneapolis, MN on January 20, 2026
'Stop ICE Terror' rally in Minneapolis, MN

Earlier this year, Aaron Amaral, a seemingly prominent member of the self-proclaimed revolutionary socialist organization, the Tempest Collective, saw fit to share what his organization considers to be the “united front approach”. Since variants of this “approach” are common currency with the opportunist left, regardless of whether they visualize themselves riding or ambushing a tank in Budapest in 1956, it is perhaps worth our while to dissect how Amaral characterizes it.

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