One of Mao Zedong’s most oft-quoted remarks is, “I’m once again reminding you that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
There’s nothing metaphorical about that. There are no hidden meanings. It’s as straightforward a statement of intent as any revolutionary has ever uttered.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) like to portray themselves as peaceful advocates for change. What isn’t well-known is that there is a growing faction of the DSA that rejects a peaceful way to power and is advocating the use of violence to achieve the party’s ends.
“A revolution is not a dinner party… a revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another,” Mao said. Some DSA members are taking that to heart.
The party created the “Red Rabbits Security Commission” to train members in “unarmed community defense” against ICE and local police. According to a DSA website, “Red Rabbits builds on a reference in the allegorical Watership Down by Richard Adams, in which the creator of the world says to the rabbit leader, ‘Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.'”
One member of Red Rabbits is a Maoist internet personality, Christopher Winston. He has a history of violent, incendiary revolutionary rhetoric. He once called for the “execution” of leftist writer Shaun King.
The DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) called for a new security commission to tame the radicals. They tried to remove Winston from the commission but failed. This points to a growing divide in the DSA between members who want to turn the United States into Sweden and those whose rhetoric suggests a taste for violent revolution.
Winston was elected despite, or perhaps because of, his long history of Maoist comments. He runs a YouTube account under the alias “BlackRedGuard,” which features interviews with other socialist organizations, critiques of the Left, and commentary on current events.
A scan of videos in which Winston appears reveals his radical views. In one video, Winston claimed that “burning a Waymo is not political violence.” In another, he seemingly boasted of having “brainwashed” DSA members to embrace Maoism. In a third, he called Shaun King an “albino snake” and threatened, in the first-person plural, to “execute” him “after the revolution.”
Sometimes, his conversations became explicitly revolutionary. Winston has hosted various socialist gun organizations on his livestream, one of whose members said he was “not at all opposed to the separating of the current establishment that is the so-called American government.” In the same video, Winston said “the ultimate form of international solidarity is to make revolution in the United States.”
Winston is a member of DSA’s Liberation Caucus, a faction in the DSA that critiques the broader DSA for not being radical enough. The caucus advocates for revolutionary change and wants to push the party toward supporting “the proletariat, the colonized, the masses of queer workers, working-class students, the undocumented, prisoners, and other militants who have no stake in this system and work for its end.”
The caucus claims the United States is “not a nation” but a “prison-house of nations” and advocates for the “national liberation” of America’s “colonized peoples.”
The pernicious influence of Winston and other gimlet-eyed radicals in the Liberation Caucus led the NPC to try to prevent the radicalization of the new security commission. NPC member Katie Sims made a formal motion to remove Winston from the Red Rabbits.
Sims’s motion provoked sharp disagreement. “You can’t overturn a democratic election because you don’t like what somebody said on Twitter,” said Cliff Connolly. Connolly further said that the notion of political power growing out of the barrel of a gun was a “pretty common saying in DSA and throughout the Left,” and reflected the state’s monopoly on the use of force. He argued that none of the material presented by Sims constituted an “endorsement of violent or illegal tactics” and said that Winston had been a “moderating voice” on the commission. Attempting to remove Winston, he suggested, was “bureaucratic freakery . . . motivated by political cowardice.”
Another NPC member also spoke in Winston’s defense, claiming that “a majority of Americans had a favorable view of the Minneapolis Police Department burning after the murder of George Floyd.”
This is what passes for intelligent debate at DSA meetings.
In fact, power growing out of the barrel of a gun has nothing to do with the “state’s monopoly on the use of force.” There are 350,000,000 firearms in the hands of private citizens in the United States that give the lie to that idiotic statement. Beyond that, the threat of violent revolution is inherent in that saying. You can try to finesse the meaning, tame it, civilize it, and it still ends up meaning exactly what Mao wanted it to mean.
Some NPC members at the meeting pushed back on support for Winston and his incendiary rhetoric.
NPC member Cara Tobe characterized Winston’s posts as “more than just tweets.” NPC member Jeremy Cohan added that while he has never been on X, he was familiar with Winston’s comments about Elias Rodriguez, which brought the group unfavorable attention. (Winston had called Rodriguez, who allegedly murdered two Israeli embassy employees, a “political prisoner.”)
NPC member Sid Carlson White then rallied to Winston’s defense. “Chris is a Black Maoist; he comes from the Black liberatory tradition.” As a black man, White argued, Winston lives under “settler slaveholder capitalism” and is inherently vulnerable to smears and political attacks. “His race makes him a target.”
There’s nothing more tiresome than using race as a defense mechanism to shut down debate. In this case, it worked. Winston maintained his seat on the security board.
The growing radicalism of the DSA has turned some leftists against the party.
“Despite some prominent members’ insistence that DSA pursues moderate Scandinavian social democracy, the reality is that Venezuela and Cuba, models marked by hunger, refugees, and corruption, have become the explicit standard,” labor commentator and former DSA supporter Jake Altman said. “DSA rarely encounters a brutal regime it is unwilling to defend. The United States of America has become their great enemy, and the foes of democracy, life, and freedom seem to have become their dearest friends.”
Is Winston just a radical clown? Most successful revolutionaries were seen as clowns until it was too late to stop them. I’m not worried that Winston or his Maoist pals at the DSA will take over the government. It’s what they’ll do to achieve that goal that frightens me.
Related: The Return of Class Warfare to the Political Arena
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