We are glad to introduce the new Editorial Board of The Masses, which has been operating since late September of 2025. In our current form, we are a fairly new publication, and hope to humbly report on the topics that concern the working and oppressed people of the United States. As our name suggests, we hope to be a newspaper of the masses, rather than for the ruling class. In service of this aim, we hope to clarify our history and editorial line in this article so that readers can be aware of who is behind this work.
The Masses was originally a publication of the American revolutionary movement published between 1911 and 1917, before it was shut down by the Old State during the first Red Scare. In its current form, it is a relatively new publication. Our editorial board inherited this website and name from the former owners in September 2025. Prior to this, The Masses was a defunct publication of the former Revolutionary Maoist Coalition (RMC), formed in 2023. Under the RMC, that publication was run by an editorial board composed of RMC members. During this period of time, a two-line struggle emerged within the broader revolutionary movement around the question of “intermediate organizations” and the correct basis of mass organizations, which eventually led to the dissolution of the RMC, and its incorporation into the new People’s Defense Committee (PDC).
As a result of concerted Unity-Struggle-Unity and internal two-line struggle, several organizations united into the People’s Defense Committee over the course of 2025. This included the Revolutionary Maoist Coalition and the Revolutionary Study Groups, among others. After the September 2025 PDC convention, we thus adopted the website and name for our publication, in honor of the history of the original The Masses, and as a fundamentally new organ to propagate the politics and practice of the PDC among the multinational working class of the US. Our editorial board does not contain any members who were in the prior editorial board.
With the transition to a new editorial team under a wholly new organization, we have taken steps to demarcate with the formerly eclectic line of The Masses. Whereas previously under the RMC, The Masses was used as a “message board” of sorts, wherein a variety of confused and conflicting political lines were published by a number of disconnected authors, the new editorial board has taken up a concrete political line based upon the program of the People’s Defense Committee.
We at The Masses uphold that:
- The multinational US working class has a common historic destiny, a revolutionary destiny to walk down the path of socialist revolution and national liberation.
- In pursuit of this historic task, there is a need for a sectoral movement which struggles on the streets, in the neighborhoods, and in the housing complexes and apartment buildings. This fighting movement is the strategic companion of the labor movement, which leads the fight against imperialism in the workplaces and shops, at the point of production itself.
- US imperialism is the main enemy of all exploited and oppressed people throughout the world, and it is this system of plunder and destruction that we set our sights on, and which we hope to rid ourselves of once and for all.
- The cause of socialist revolution in the United States is joined with that of national liberation, which means the struggle for the right to self-determination for oppressed nations and national minorities. The Black/New Afrikan, Indigenous, and Chicano masses, as well as the masses of overseas colonies in Puerto Rico and the Pacific Islands, demand the right to determine their own future, and comprise many of the lowest and deepest masses who strike blows against the US imperialist system through great uprisings and constant resistance.
- The patriarchal assault upon women and LGBT people must be combated through the creation of militant women’s and LGBT mass organizations, as well as the formation of formally organized women’s departmental work within organizations conducting work in other basic sectors.
As the official news organ of the People’s Defense Committee, we take the PDC Program as our basic political line, and highlight four particular class principles that guide our editorial line:
- The Masses is a Class-Oriented Publication: The Masses shall function as a publication of and for the proletariat, the oppressed masses, and their allies and auxiliaries in the neighborhoods. This principle of class, the recognition that the working class and the owning class are locked in perpetual warfare and have irreconcilable interests, is a fundamental truth from which all of our other tasks and ideas flow. In our publishing work, we strive to expose our class enemies, popularize the struggles and successes of the masses in the neighborhoods, and demarcate with the obscurantism and class collaborationism of the bourgeois press.
- Anti-Imperialism: The Masses is an internationalist publication, meaning that we understand the international character of our class in shared struggle against world imperialism. We uphold the right to self-determination for all oppressed nations and national minorities, at home and abroad. In our press, we aim to expose the common thread of U.S. imperialism in the exploitation and oppression of workers all over the world, to call attention to popular international struggles against the imperialist system, and raise up the national liberation struggles of the internal oppressed nations of the United States.
- Anti-Reformism: We at The Masses strive to always link our struggles and organizations to the ultimate historical goal of our class, the conquest of political power for the workers. In particular, we put this principle into practice through exposing the misleadership and class collaborationism of electoralists and state-sanctioned NGO “activists,” while uplifting the combative and independent struggles of the class-conscious masses and their organizations through our reporting.
- Anti-Opportunism: The editorial team of The Masses seeks to draw firm lines of demarcation with the legion of opportunist organizations in the neighborhood movement through highlighting correct paths of struggle in our movement and unapologetically exposing the sell-outs, traitors, and con-artists who attempt to lead our class down the dead-end of collaboration.
We view our publication as an “informational” one, serving to provide writing on contemporary movements, events, and political questions. This type of publication has a long history in the revolutionary movement not just in the U.S. but also internationally. We can see Jose Carlos Mariátegui of Peru say the following on the matter all the way back in 1929:
Labor, which on one hand is an extension of the work of Amauta, and on the other hand tends toward the type of an informational press. Their function is not the same. As information, especially in our case, cannot be understood in the narrow sense of a chronicle of events, but above all as a chronicle of ideas, Labor has with respect to its readership… obligations of comprehensively shedding light on contemporary questions and movements, which a doctrinal press does not have.
As an informational press, rather than a doctrinal press, we eschew lengthy polemics and theoretical pieces, and focus more on the details of the day-to-day struggles of the masses, which are left sorely untouched by the bourgeois press. We hope, in our new publication, to serve this purpose to the fullest extent possible.
We also hope to clarify our differences with the prior editorial board. There are numerous examples of articles written by the old publication which are completely non-representative of the editorial board and line of The Masses, as well as the People’s Defense Committee. We will therefore bring a couple examples based on the archives of the old publication.
As part of its prior function as a “message board”, numerous articles were published by various opportunist organizations, as well as members of the former RMC, which are simply incorrect. For example, the Maoist Communist Union’s article “On Communist Work in the Working Class Movement” was republished without an editorial comment criticizing its backwards and opportunist positions. There are many other such cases, and in general all articles published by the former RMC, or republished by editorial board of the former The Masses, should not be considered reflective of the current editorial line of the new The Masses or the PDC.
In an article titled “Building A Revolutionary Students Movement: Lessons from the Issaquah Students League”, the interviewer asks the following question:
Q: Is ISL an explicitly Maoist students organization?
A: No, the ISL is not an explicitly Maoist organization however it is an organization formed and led by Maoists. It is our view that mass organizations should be organized by Maoists, and guided by Maoist Principles.
It is clear that the prior editorial board did not understand the distinctions between a mass activist and a Maoist. Otherwise, they would not publish this article in the first place. To quote from a recent opinion piece in The Partisan:
To be a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist one must not only adhere to, but also practice, the ideology—which means actively carrying out work such as militarization and concentric construction. This means that politically-organizationally there are no “Maoist” members of the mass organizations, only activists who are students of the ideology. Similarly the task of establishing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the command and guide of the entire revolutionary movement is lead by the Communist Party and its antecedents, not the legal mass organizations who should embrace within their membership all those masses who can do work and submit to basic class-conscious principles, including those masses who are not Maoist or who have not even heard of Maoism before.
Either the ISL was amateurish, or did not fundamentally understand the distinctions between Maoists and members of legal mass organizations. If they did, they would have not said they were “an organization formed and lead by Maoists”, or later in the same interview openly state “There’s a reason concentric construction is so important!” as if they truly embody leadership through this principle. And similarly, the editorial board of the old Masses was completely irresponsible and clearly also confused to have decided to publish such an article.
Another example is that of the article titled “Interview with Students for People’s Democracy – On the Mishandling of Sexual Misconduct within Nazariya”. This article was an interview by a former editor of the prior editorial board with the Indian organization Students for People’s Democracy (SfPD). SfPD is considered by many in the Indian revolutionary mass movement to be engaging in liquidationism, opportunism, and red-tagging. This interview concerned a case of sexual harassment within the publication Nazariya Magazine. This article, written and published at the discretion of the prior editorial board, did not engage in a full and comprehensive review of the facts and parties involved. Instead it haphazardly intervened from afar into the internal two-line struggle of another country’s revolutionary movement in a haphazard way which was fundamentally incorrect and did not seek truth from facts. Thus, for the prior editorial board to have uncritically platformed SfPD, was to platform liquidationism, and we reject the prior article.
We hope this helps to clarify the differences between ourselves and the editorial board of the The Masses that existed before September of 2025. We had no involvement in that project, and take up the name in honor of the original The Masses, and The New Masses which followed it. Our organization serves to provide relevant information and analysis to the broad masses of the U.S., while ensuring our editorial line is upheld throughout our writing. We uphold the principles of our class and the program of the PDC as the foundation of our editorial line. We are resolute in our determination that The Masses will be a publication which is by and for the workers and oppressed peoples of our country.
