Essay:Toward Rectifying the Errors of the Red Spectre

Logo of the Red Spectre.

It is, at the time of this writing, March of 2025. The Red Spectre organization has been formally non-existent for months. Its final vestige, the Communist Labor Organization, has been disbanded relatively recently, on February 22, 2025. All former members of the Red Spectre and the Communist Labor Organization are at this time split from one another, now pursuing their own activist objectives, some even now part of entirely unrelated organizations.

The source of this dissolution is the split in the Red Spectre which took place on the concluding days of November 2024. In a matter less than a week, an organization which had once prided itself on its solid ideological line and which once seemed to have a fruitful path forward to true activism and revolutionary organizing imploded completely.

We ask the question: why? The purpose of this writing is not to revive dormant drama and other ultimately futile online disputes. The individuals in this organization will not be named and only singled-out when essential. Instead, with this writing, I hope to provide examples of the practical errors made by the Red Spectre so that other communists and aspiring activists in the future may develop past them.

The errors

1. Leaderism and Overconsolidation

At its height, the Red Spectre could claim to have dozens of "active" members in its ranks. In the abstract, the Red Spectre was a rapidly-growing organization premised on democratic centralism which was doing all manners of propaganda, education, and even offline organizing. In practice, the Red Spectre was always essentially stagnate, relying on a small group of less than 5 members to do most of its work. The organization rarely attempted to cultivate productivity or engagement with the dozen-or-more other members (further details on their composition will be given later), and at least partially, there was nothing which could be done with these other members due to circumstances.

A major reason for this was the overreliance on essentially a single member, whom we shall call "T", (who had co-founded the organization) to provide theoretical guidance to the newer, less politically educated members. In essence, this one member had near-total control of the organization, having access to nearly-all of the media organs and such despite rarely ever being productive with them. Few ever attempted to challenge this one member's stances on most topics; what he said was taken as true. Initiative was discouraged among the newer members, instead "T" (and to a lesser extent the few others who were experienced and active) was expected to take the initiative in proposals, resolutions, and ideological questions.

With time, "T" made himself almost a "paternal" figure among the newer cadre, to whom they were commonly unable to argue against due to his advanced understanding of Leninist works (which he, however, corrupted to suit his careerist goals). Thus it is not unexpected that once an interpersonal dispute erupted between this one member and another, newer one, he was able to manipulate the younger members through underhanded means into thinking it an organization-wide dispute, with many of those manipulated by him not at all questioning him. After all, from their perspective, if such an intelligent, politically advanced leader was never wrong before, how could he be wrong now?

Over time, even "T" became unproductive, with essentially another member doing a disproportionate amount of work to the point of mental exhaustion.

Yet to blame all on this one person while omitting the details of those who followed him would be crass. Thus, we arrive at the second major error.

2. Member composition

It was the unfortunate reality that most of the members of the Red Spectre were not the Leninist revolutionaries, organizers, and activists as our website would suggest, but children on the internet. When I say "children", I refer to the absence of any age requirements to joining the organization — 13 and 14 year old children (as examples) were free to join! Yet age is only a component to that. Most of those recruited between May–September 2024 were brought to the Red Spectre randomly and indiscriminately from Discord servers, Twitter, and Reddit. They had no prior experience with organizing and would have little reason to view the Red Spectre as any more than yet another Discord server.

The vast majority of the members of the Red Spectre were in this camp, and did little more than occasionally send messages on our online organizational channels — never writing articles, producing propaganda, performing local organizing, or any other tasks you would expect from a self-declared "vanguard organization". In many regards, this lack of productivity was not the fault of the members themselves — they were often uneducated and had life circumstances demanding their time. Yet this fact remains.

Thus, with this and other errors (which I will identify shortly), the Red Spectre had no basis for offline organizing. The prevailing mentality was largely that an offline "solid cell" (in contrast to "liquid cells", i.e. Discord servers which were controlled by members) would be formed any day now by one of the few truly productive members.

3. Dogmatism

The Red Spectre prided itself on its unyielding ideological line of anti-revisionist Marxism–Leninism, its principled and scientific outlook. Yet the stances of the Red Spectre ultimately degenerated into reckless dogmatism and sectarianism.

The Red Spectre towards the end of its existence adopted a quasi-religious, dualistic conception of Marxism — believing that the four "classics" of Marxism–Leninism — Karl Marx, Frederich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin — were incapable of making mistakes and perfect in every way. On the contrary, those who did not belong to these "classics" and made mistakes (such as Enver Hoxha) were ruthlessly attacked and rejected, regarded similarly to Deng Xiaoping or Nikita Khrushchev.

Marxism, to much of the Red Spectre, was distorted from being a scientific framework into a mere rigid body of quotations to throw at others when expressing disagreement — quotations sourced and selected by the member "T" (previously mentioned when detailing the first error). An instance of this would be in the contents of the articles written by the Red Spectre (most of which blandly titled "Against..."). Most Red Spectre articles (often authored by "T") were "infected" with arguments from authority and other fallacious reasoning; here is a (usually contextually irrelevant) quotations from one of the four "classics" such as Lenin, therefore, this person is inherently totally horrible!

Another instance would be the Red Spectre article addressing Cuba. The vast majority of this article was quotation upon quotation from a "classic", or quotations from Fidel Castro or Che Guevara which said something supportive of Khrushchev. This article contained no economic data, reference to state policy, or any other information to prove its claim that Cuba was capitalist. Rather, its logic was that because X and Y leader said this or that, this state is inherently capitalist! This unscientific reasoning prevented what could have been a meaningful anti-revisionist analysis on Cuban revisionism.

4. Sectarianism

In brief, the Red Spectre more defined itself for what it was against rather than what it was for. There were only articles titled "Against...", none titled "For...".

The Red Spectre, particularly towards the later part of its existence, would never align or even compromise with those who did not adhere precisely to our ideological stances on historical questions. A major instance of this being our position on Enver Hoxha, detailed in the article Against Hoxha. This article, while addressing some meaningful criticism, nonetheless left little availability for discussion, gave us a condescending, hostile public image, and conflated new, less educated Marxists who support Hoxha with outright anti-communists and revisionists. This article further divided us from other revolutionary activists and prevented many potential members from having any sort of interest in the Red Spectre again. The YouTuber "Socialism For All" refused to support or endorse the Red Spectre in any way following this article's release.

The members of the Red Spectre cared little for the separations this caused or the counter-criticisms other Marxists had, instead believing that those who were critical of our line were nearly as bad as revisionists and thus not worthy of our concern. The Red Spectre carelessly divided itself from so many revolutionaries and placed a rather arcane, historical matter with little relevance into the center-stage, above modern concerns such as fascism and genocide.

Rectifying these errors

These errors, though having truly destructive consequences which are still felt to this day, can and must be learned from for us to progress to true revolutionary organizing. Thus I, briefly, suggest the following rectifications:

1. A Marxist–Leninist party or organization must be composed of educated, dedicated members. Initiative must be cultivated among all cadre, and "cults" venerating individual party members must be combated.
2. Members of a party or organization should have the means to perform revolutionary activism, organizing, and otherwise be materially productive. Cadre must have "a foot" in class struggle, not be passive observers in it as far as possible with consideration to their personal circumstances and limitations. Age requirements must be present and enforced.
3. Marxism–Leninism must be followed not as a dogma or scripture but as a science; a mode of analysis to which we apply. Great revolutionaries such as Lenin or Stalin hold value into the present, yet they were imperfect (as we all are), and that fact must be understood. Revolutionaries must creatively apply Leninist theory into present circumstances.
4. A revolutionary organization must define itself on the basis of what it is for (socialism, revolution, people's power, etc.) rather than what it is against, while understanding the relationship between the two. Historical questions which are irrelevant to much of the modern working class must not be overemphasized to cause divisions and conflicts between other working class organizations.

Workers of the world, unite!