To: 

Len Cooper, ILPS international chairperson
ILPS US steering committee

* * * 

The US-Israel genocide has raged for more than 300 days. Every day we wake up to videos of more children murdered, to the reports of concentration camps where Palestinians are systematically tortured and sexually assaulted. Thousands of churches, schools, homes, and mosques have been annihilated; entire blood lines have been wiped out. In the US, business as usual continues. It should make everyone sick. People have marched, sat in, shut down roads, and blocked weapons manufactures. Yet the genocide hasn’t slowed. It’s only ramping up.  The only moral and political imperative in the face of this unimaginable slaughter is a mass rebellion against US imperialism led by people who are determined to end US imperialism, not reform it. After the people of Palestine have sacrificed everything to defend their homeland, how dare people in the US make excuses for not doing what needs to be done. Over 100,000 people are dead, and millions more lives are on the line. The stakes could not be higher. 

The “March on the DNC” (march), of which the US chapter of the International League of People’s Struggle (ILPS) was an early endorser, absolutely failed to live up to that responsibility. In fact, the march and the months of preparation leading up to it represent a qualitative step backwards and a victory for our enemies who were gathered undisturbed inside of the convention center. While thousands of Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers were present for the march, their presence was unnecessary, as the march deployed hundreds of volunteer police with ridiculous hi-vis vests to do the dirty work of the warmakers for them. These marshals worked to keep anyone attempting to steer the march towards the convention or trying to confront the barricades out of the march and handed over to the police.

Numerous videos exist of these volunteer peace police physically attempting to push defiant protesters out of the march. Most damningly, when some brave people broke the barricade between the protests and the convention center to attempt to confront the actual convention, these peace police led the crowd away. Their actions ensured that the convention would be safe, leaving the courageous ones to the police.

On Tuesday night, Behind Enemy Lines organized a protest in front of the Israeli consulate that was brutally attacked and repressed by Mayor Brandon Johnson’s thugs in the Chicago Police Department. While many of our comrades were still in jail, some with injuries from the police, four organizations affiliated with the march put out a statement slandering Behind Enemy Lines and other people who went to the march with the intent to confront the warmakers. This slanderous statement amounted to pig work, and reinforced every trope used against people who genuinely want to resist. At least some of these four organizations are led by members of the opportunist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), and at least two of them are ILPS member organizations. 

For months now, BEL has been organizing against the DNC, and in the process coming up against smears and repression. We were the subject of a right-wing media onslaught following a protest in March, when reactionaries on twitter tried to doxx our members. In the lead up to the DNC, the local news reported on a joint law enforcement report falsely naming BEL as a possible national security threat to the DNC, the dangerous precursor to the state repression of our protest. On Sunday evening, two BEL volunteers were arrested leaving a protest, one who had to seek medical treatment.  And on Tuesday our protest was viciously attacked by Brandon Johnson’s thugs in the CPD, resulting in dozens of arrests and injuries, and some people spent up to 20 hours in jail. 

All of these months, while BEL was growing, going out to the people on a near-daily basis, organizing neighborhood speakouts, we heard nothing from ILPS. No one ever reached out to ask about our anti-DNC campaign, to share our requests for jail support on social media, or even just to ask how we were doing after mass arrests at our protest. Given that ILPS-US has an open tolerance for revisionism and opportunism, allows attacks on its own membership from other members, and uncritically participated in the march, and given its lack of human compassion and basic decency, Behind Enemy Lines is officially resigning its membership in the US chapter of ILPS. 

We have always viewed our participation in the US chapter as contradictory, and our enthusiasm for engaging in unity and struggle with principled anti-imperialists was always tempered by the presence of opportunist organizations in the membership and leadership of the US chapter. Nonetheless, we have sought, over a period of years, to engage in good faith in the work and campaigns of ILPS, including attending conferences in the US and Canada, joining calls, submitting events for sponsorship, holding joint events with ILPS members regionally, and volunteering at the second national assembly.

We have also sought to engage in good faith and principled struggle over the very real political questions that are hampering the ability of an anti-imperialist movement to grow in the belly of the beast. Every time we have sought to raise political questions about the positions and practices of ILPS, we have been met with a wall of silence backed up by an occasional bureaucratic non-answer. It’s precisely the atmosphere of “all-unity-no-struggle” that lets the opportunist organizations flourish. To give some history of anti-democratic practices in the US chapter: 

– To this day, there is no single vehicle for the development of internal discussion, debate, or struggle in the US chapter. Monthly chapter meetings are dominated by reports of ongoing activities, with little time for questions, much less discussion or debate, and there is a massive group chat mainly for announcements of upcoming events. The national assembly failed to publish resolutions ahead of time, leaving only a single morning for the debate of important questions. We are unclear of what official channels even exist for criticisms and questions to be raised, or of any channel to raise criticisms or questions to the membership outside of the steering committee. 

– Despite our repeated suggestions, there is still no public or internal list of what organizations are members of ILPS-US in good standing, meaning that any cooperation between organizations, either to take up ILPS campaigns, to support each other, or to struggle inside of the chapter can only be facilitated through the leadership. 

– Resolutions that were passed at the national assembly (including the two that BEL submitted) with action items have not been acted on. In fact, even after two resolutions that we submitted to the assembly were approved, we never heard from a steering committee member about the process of implementing them. 

– The decision to not only endorse, but become an early and enthusiastic supporter of the March on the DNC, was made by the steering committee without any consultation with ILPS member organizations in Chicago (of which BEL was one of only a few). In fact, we were only made aware of this endorsement once it was publicly announced. At that time, we privately raised our questions and criticisms to the steering committee. The response we received detailed the byzantine bureaucratic decision making process of the chapter, but refused to engage the political questions we were raising. 

The political questions raised by the last 10 months of struggle against the US-Israel genocide are at the heart of the contradiction between opportunism and principled anti-imperialist struggle. The march and its organizers concentrate clearly the opportunist side of that contradiction. The full support from ILPS-US for the march unfortunately places ILPS-US squarely in the opportunist camp. 

Despite the fact that the DNC was coming to Chicago in the midst of both a heinous ongoing genocide and the largest mass protests against imperialist war in decades, the march and its leadership from FRSO decided to trot out the same playbook they have used at political conventions for decades: work with the city and police for months to secure a long, boring, permitted march, and concentrate outreach on existing leftist organizations. This playbook was read out and clearly already decided at the first and only public meeting to plan the march in January of this year, where the leaders clearly articulated that they weren’t open to struggle or criticism, but would go full steam ahead with the same tired plan. At the time, they also indicated that they had no interest in opposing the DNC in any way that would be effective: in either calling for the DNC to be canceled in the first place, trying to shut it down, or in condemning the Zionist mayor who was inviting the convention in the first place. 

The position of the march on Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson is particularly revealing. Many of the leaders of the march had actively campaigned for Johnson and stood to benefit financially and socially from his administration. These leaders refused to take a stand against Johnson, including not calling for the DNC to be cancelled and lying to people that he was somehow a secret supporter of the march. This meant lying about the fact that he is a Zionist, that he brutally suppressed Palestine student encampments, and that he was welcoming the criminal convention to come to Chicago, and in fact spoke inside of the convention to the butchers of Gaza. 

All spring, as the genocide continued and the campus encampments swept the country, the march stayed the course, issuing pathetic demands for permits, longer routes, and portable toilets. The march continued to collaborate with the police and Zionist mayor along the way, making it clear to people that they had no intention of actually challenging the convention in any meaningful way. As the summer approached and Biden withdrew from the ticket, march leaders did not even specify that they were opposed to voting for Killer Kamala, but their safety marshal plan did reveal that volunteer “safety marshals” would be happy to hand any unruly protesters over the to the police. 

March leaders at various times said that they expected attendees in the tens of thousands, throwing out estimates like 25,000 or 50,000 attendees. The actual march fell well short of that number, and failed to live up to its stated goal of being within “sight and sound” of the DNC. What the march did accomplish was to make it clear that the organizers are adamantly opposed to the urgent tasks of escalating for Gaza. Ample video (including from independent media outfit Unicorn Riot) exists that shows the peace police assaulting people for agitating to confront the convention. When a few brave people actually knocked over a security fence separating the march from the convention, organizers and the peace police actively encouraged the march away from the confrontation, leaving the most defiant of the protesters to the police. In fact, the superintendent of the CPD, Larry Snelling, repeatedly praised the peace police and the march for keeping the crowds in line! 

Following the Monday march and the mass repression at BEL’s Tuesday protest (sponsored with Samidoun and Palestine Action US), some organizers of the Monday march issued a slanderous statement against BEL that echoed the statements made by CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling – that we were the ‘bad’ protesters, the outside agitators, and they were the good protesters, continuing an ongoing campaign of rumors and smears about BEL and other people who dared to push the protests forward. 

To be blunt, the march failed the assignment. If now is not the moment to abandon politics as usual, when is? If now is not the moment to abandon the NGO’s, bourgeois politicians, and union bureaucrats and try and confront the warmakers, when is? We cannot in good conscience be in an alliance that includes those hi-vis vest peace police who repress dissent in the interests of the imperialists. We cannot in good faith be in an alliance with people who are more interested in their careers than resisting imperialism. 

We still believe in engaging in serious process of unity-struggle-unity with people who have proven to be principled anti-imperialists in word and deed. Unfortunately, we can no longer put ILPS-US in that category. The only road forward that we see for the ILPS-US chapter to abandon opportunism is for the steering committee to self-criticize for participating in the march, and expel the FRSO-led groups that worked with the CPD to suppress dissent. The question is, is it right to rebel? 

Behind Enemy Lines 

8/25