The capitalist class of bosses, financiers, landlords, and their cops wage relentless and violent class war upon the working class. The goal of the Defense Committees is to defend and support all working class and oppressed peoples, divided and under attack by those who wage class war against us. We therefore promote, through organization, action, and outreach, a mass, non-sectarian defense in order to build a self-organized working class that treats differences as strengths and opportunities to live in solidarity. Community self defense means we intend to build our revolutionary community by defending it and the earth on which we live from those who would see it destroyed.
Our power as a class will never come from our possession of wealth, but from our ability to organize the class to defend ourselves. We must secure defense against legal attacks, but do not imagine that legal and financial defense alone are sufficient. Any revolutionary organization that does not expect repression from the master class and organize to meet it has failed to learn from history.
We organize to defend members of the class against the different forms of oppression that structure our society. Our membership expects the Defense Committees to be an arena of mutual education through mutual struggle. Exploiters rely upon the fractured unity of the working class and oppressed. By standing in solidarity across the diverse oppressions of the class, we intend to embody the notion that an injury to one really is an injury to all, and to openly use our defense to build the resilience, strength, and fighting spirit of the working class and Oppressed.
Because the class war is not limited to the workplace or any other single arena, our defense of the class must be comprehensive. We recognize Imperialism, colonialism, and settlerism as integral parts of capitalist domination. White Supremacy and oppression around race, gender, and sexuality are the pillars on which the owning class maintains power. They degrade the solidarity we must have for one another. Their domination is helped by violence within the working class, and reinforced by structures of violence organized by the state. We are against all of these oppressions. By organizing against the diverse oppressions of the working class, and centering our revolutionary and anti-capitalist principles in a disciplined way, we intend to directly overcome those divisions. We cannot struggle against racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy without struggling against capitalism. We cannot struggle against capitalism without struggling against racism, patriarchy, colonialism and white supremacy.
Through this struggle we advance the goal of an anti-capitalist revolution by building solidarity and strength with all those exploited and oppressed by capitalism and imperialism. The oppressed do not determine the grounds of our liberation; those grounds are chosen for us by our oppressors, whose warfare upon our class and communities results in exclusion, harm, and death. We intend to meet our oppressors on whatever grounds we must, in order to complete the revolution against capitalism; because capitalism demands our exploitation throughout the world and accelerates our entire world’s ecological destruction.
We reject sterile bureaucratic or legalistic restrictions on the revolutionary demands with which our organization and our world is faced, recognizing that our history includes failed attempts to pretend allegiance to the state and capitalism. We make no pretense. We will defend and support each other.
The Defense Committees demand hope and bravery of our membership. We act amongst ourselves and the community with principle and commitment. We are our own liberators!
JOIN THE STRUGGLE! Agitate – Educate – Organize!