In the face of the intensifying capitalist offensive on the masses in our country and world-wide, it is with revolutionary optimism that we are excited to announce the creation of a wave of local People’s Defense Committees (PDCs), as well as a national PDC coordination body: the PDC Admin Committee. As US imperialism falls into greater and greater crisis, its State lashes out more and more with violent attacks on the workers and oppressed nations of the world, seeking to salvage itself by increasing exploitation and repression. To defeat this offensive and raise up a mighty offensive of our own, we must fight the capitalists in every struggle, in every trench and on every battlefield. It is in this context that we announce our organization. It is an organization built for struggle against the enemies of the working class and the oppressed peoples of the world.
Unlike union or shop-floor organizations, the national PDC and the local chapters are mass organizations of the working class that operate on the neighborhood or community level. The PDC’s sector of work is to organize the proletariat and the oppressed masses where we live and spend our time outside of work. The people’s defense committees thus have a dual purpose:
- they mobilize, politicize and organize the tenant masses around their demands using the tenant union/committee form and
- they use the popular assembly form to mobilize, politicize and organize the broader masses around their community grievances, whether those be related to austerity and infrastructure neglect, national liberation, defense of the rights of oppressed groups such as women, migrants, oppressed nations, LGBT people, etc.
Especially in this early stage in the development of local PDC chapters, their main work will be organizing investigations into their communities, a class-conscious assessment of these investigations and the struggles that come out of them, the conducting of mass meetings, and carrying out extensive neighborhood and street agitation. From the results of this investigation into the needs and issues that our neighborhoods face, we will begin more organized and larger-scale campaigns to struggle for these demands. From this great wave of campaigns that we are initiating this spring and summer, summations will be made, organizational expansion and consolidation will occur, and eventually sub-committees and other organizations will be created to specialize in particular trenches of struggle as they emerge.
PDC emerged as a joint project from a struggle in multiple revolutionary organizations over questions of what street- or community-level revolutionary work looks like in the mass movement/united front. After much struggle, PDC chapters and observer organizations united on the need to oppose the sectarian and unprincipled stance in the revolutionary movement of liquidating mass work for sloganeering; and for us to unite on the basis of class-conscious principles, program, and practice.
PDC is a class organization, which recognizes the principle of class against class, relying on the strengths of our own class, the working class, to accomplish our goals. We are anti-reformist, do not work with NGOs, the old state & its politicians, or opportunists of any kind. The long term goal of PDC is to establish people’s assemblies in the working class neighborhoods, where through making revolution real workers democracy can be built and we can lead our neighborhoods collectively. These people’s assemblies are an important form to raise in the construction of a New State, based on the political power and democratic will of the multinational US working class and its allied masses, that will replace the old decaying and repressive Imperialist State through a socialist revolution. PDC is an anti-imperialist organization and as such recognizes US imperialism as the number one enemy of the oppressed peoples of the world. We uphold the rebellion of the working class and the oppressed people’s of the world against the international imperialism, and study and propagate the ideology and history of the proletariat to guide the revolutionary mass movement.
PDC is transitionally led by the Administrative Committee whose main task is to organize a first People’s Defense Conference that will discuss and unite on a program and elect a leading body and officers in the coming year, and to organize the initial wave of SI/CA, campaigns, and reports. If you are interested in forming a local chapter or incorporating an existing street- or neighborhood-level working class organization, please reach out to the Admin Committee at PDCnational@proton.me. Observer organizations without voting rights are also permitted to participate in certain functions of the PDC call, if your organization is not yet sure about formally affiliating and adhering to PDC’s democratic centralism. The work of PDC does not occur in isolation, and as such we are also happy to work with fraternal organizations in our own sector and in others, such as New Labor Organizing Committee, Revolutionary Student Union, and others.
Signed, May Day 2025
People’s Defense Committee – Admin Committee
Charlotte Metro Neighborhood Defense
People’s Defense Durham
People’s Defense D.C.
People’s Defense Columbus
People’s Defense Austin
People’s Defense Rhode Island
People’s Defense South Bend
Borikén Liberation Front Chicago
People’s Defense Northeast Ohio
The Masses 