From a talk given by Arjae Red, an initial organizer with Starbucks Workers United and an anti-imperialist fighter, at the panel on “Internationalism Today — A Global Struggle, during the International Assembly against Imperialism in Solidarity with Palestine, held on Jan. 21 in New York City.  I

Leninism is not just a tool we use to analyze the world we live in and the class forces at play. It is a doctrine of action. This commitment to our immersion in the struggle and taking on the vicious capitalist-imperialist system headfirst is what sets communists apart.

We are not just critics and theorists. We are organizers, fighters and partisans for the global working class.

Once we understand that we are not passive spectators to our own exploitation, we become the pivotal factor in our collective liberation — and we are ready to embrace Leninism.

Frantz Fanon said: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Leninists do not shy away from the fight. We understand that there is no way to reach a better world but through a fight. What Frantz Fanon said is what the people on the front lines against [neo]imperialism intimately understand — in Palestine, in Yemen, in the Philippines and all places where the masses of workers and colonized peoples are waging a people’s war for their liberation.