We’re not challenging the world in successive steps on a linear trajectory over 500 years. We’re not fighting Israel, so we can move on to fighting to US after, and face capitalism only at the end of the journey. We fight Israel to fight the US to fight capitalism in one motion. No stages. Everything is those multiple “stages” made into one moment and one movement. It is always a 2-steps-at-once maneuver, at least. Each blow registers in multiple dimensions.

We attack the enemy through whatever available non-self-undermining means, and simultaneously shift the ground under their feet, where that ground conditioned behavior antagonistic to communism. It will be the case from here until eternity that revolution can only break the infinite linear sequence towards a goal, that it necessarily cuts itself off from practically, by making a movement work in multiple dimensions at once.

That is likewise a refusal of the successive phases model. Everything an ML says has to happen in a structured linear sequence over hundreds of years has to, in terms of practical logic, be brought into the same present. That does not mean communism is “achieved” in terms of a finished project in the present, but communism is in fact not a finished project at all, ever.

We establish the basic starting premise of communism by negating capitalism’s practical logic, which secures the society we will need in order to face non-static existence together. MLs have the social premise of communism suspended as a far off goal, where the practical logic behind communism is the only engine we could rely on for change, and what must be secured for us to have free existence at all. Sure, securing needs seems utopian under capitalism, but that is in fact a demand for a minimal standard.

The freedom of communism comes after needs are secured. The society that comes in the wake of securing needs is what must be left open for us to dream open. If the injustice of capitalism is that we are deprived for its model to work, then we can establish no practice that doges the matter of deprivation. We certainly can’t forestall it simply because deprivation would also be a convenient tool for aspiring Communist leaders.

We can not treat alleviating hunger as a utopian dream. We can and must embed a practical logic in a movement within this world that would challenge all of capitalism’s deprivation. You cannot secure the elimination of deprivation by setting up a new regime of deprivation and throwing some red paint on it. Yet refusing to end the deprivation as the baseline of a movement will also sustain every form of perverse power in this world that we want to overthrow. All these forms of power, even ones that predate capitalism, are based on deprivation and hierarchical control.

Which is all why calls for abstract unity are so ridiculous. Some people in that block of would-be unity need to have their basic assumptions about political organizing challenged, as what they advocate for would replicate what we want to be unified against. As if we can talk about the “Epstein class” when most Communist orgs in the US have endless abuse allegations. If you “unify” without consciously delineating the separate premises of political organizing among the broad left, you have just bypassed the portal we must move through to bring revolution into being. The call for unity is itself a demand to camouflage antagonism, that can only open space for top-down modes of organizing to cement themselves. That would be a potential revolutionary energy forfeiting contestation out of the gate.