“The right enemies”: An interview with Matei Alexandriu
Noah Rogers
Platypus Review 177 | June 2025
On October 12, 2024, at the Platypus Affiliated Society’s 2024 East Coast Conference at Boston College, Platypus member Noah Rogers interviewed Matei Alexandriu of the Congress of Workers’ Organizations, New Hampshire. An edited transcript follows.[1]
Noah Rogers: What was your backstory on the Left? What made you become interested in socialist politics?
Matei Alexandriu: My first experience with the Left was mostly aesthetic and very little about it had to do with politics. The definitive starting point of my thinking about capitalism more deeply came in seventh grade when our English class read this book about a teenager who was an internet personality and had this deeply anti-consumerist message. That was my first introduction to the prevailing sentiments of the Left. From there I was introduced to the concept of Marxism. By eighth grade, I’d gone to the library and grabbed a copy of the Communist Manifesto (1848) and accomplished a grade-school understanding of the text. I called myself a socialist or communist throughout my high-school years. I was a liberal, attached to the aesthetic of socialism.
It was only by 2016, during the first Bernie Sanders campaign, that I decided that it would be important to start studying socialism, and particularly Marxism, more carefully. In 2016, I had gotten involved with Socialist Alternative (SAlt), and I organized with them in the Lowell, Maine and Salem, New Hampshire area for a year or so. Then a handful of us decided that a different organization that allowed for more local decision-making and flexibility would be a better way to build up the movement in our area, so we left Socialist Alternative and got involved with Socialist Party USA (SPUSA), and I’ve been with them since 2017.
NR: What were the experiences in SAlt and SPUSA that led you to think there was a need for the Workers’ Congress?
MA: At the time that I was going from SAlt to SPUSA, I was mostly going where people that I worked well with were also going. There were a lot of instances where we were being told what to do from a higher level of the organization which didn’t have a keen understanding of what was going on below. We were mostly limited to distributing a paper and going to whatever local protests we had learned about. There was a lack of kineticism. We were taking part in a passive way. What really drove my participation in the group that left to go to SPUSA was reading the writing on the wall: we weren’t able to be as flexible as necessary to organize our community.
About a year into that, we were falling into the same pattern of passively involving ourselves in things and sparingly going out of our way to organize them ourselves. We were more content to be a part of an environment than the center of a network. Since 2018–19, we’ve been in a position — unlike SAlt — to make a majority of our own decisions. We were much more kinetic. We felt the need to be in a state of constant motion and we translated that into relationship-building that would establish a network that SPUSA is involved in and, in time, puts the SPUSA at the center.
NR: What is the relationship between the Workers’ Congress and your local branch of SPUSA?
MA: Our Socialist Party local is one constituent organization among several in the New Hampshire Congress of Workers’ Organizations. The organizing philosophy at play in the Congress put all of these like-minded organizations into the same forum. We gave ourselves time to learn to play in the same sandbox, to learn to be independent organizations making agreements together and respecting those agreements. The Workers’ Congress is much more the result of all this organizing experience than the guide.
NR: What has the Workers’ Congress been up to for the past two years?
MA: We have a network of organs within the Congress: committees that deal with specific issues of organizing. One of those committees is the Committee of Public Utilities, Resources, and Services, which is charged with developing tools that workers can use to translate into economic power and later into political power. What we are working up right now is a landlord database. This is our first foray into what will become a more sophisticated network of services.
Alongside that, we have another committee that deals with security. We have been able to put together a group of comrades to answer all of the security needs for the most active organizations across New Hampshire, which has become a hallmark of what secure Leftist operating can be. It has gained a lot of attention for the Congress, which is now sought after to provide safety in a sometimes unpredictable environment.
The Workers’ Congress started two years ago in conversations between me, another comrade in Workers’ Democracy, and our comrades in the Communist Party USA. We discussed how — if we look at the history of socialist movements — we have to understand that the vanguard party that we imagine is an idealized, romanticized version of revolutionary history. There wasn’t just one singular organization that built the Soviet Union or communist Cuba or China. There may have been leading elements, but there were many organizations that came together and restructured into the communist parties that we know today.
We understood that our parties on their own were powerless, and we pulled together the core of a coalition, and as we concretized that coalition, it became an institution. Throughout the past two years, we’ve been eager to accomplish that institutional nature, while understanding it as part of a goal for building the means to create socialist state power. We understand that the ultimate goal of a revolutionary movement is the seizure of state power, and individual organizations are never going to make that happen on their own no matter what they think of themselves. Working together, we stand a chance. We can break out of the prison of getting people elected to positions of influence in a liberal republic and start to think about what a workers’ republic looks like.
NR: Does the Workers’ Congress see itself as the seed of what would become the workers’ republic?
MA: Yes. The Congress as it exists, as it’s structured, is not the workers’ republic, but it is an evolutionary step to an organization that could become one.
NR: What exactly does the Congress’s security committee do?
MA: It keeps our functions safe, and maintains a watch on the environment of Right-wing organizers who are the primary threat to those trying to organize openly and safely.
NR: What negative experiences have there been between your groups and Right-wing organizers? Are you fighting over the same constituency?
MA: We are active in the same areas and fighting over the same people, but luckily, we’ve not dealt with them in any direct or violent manner recently. However, there were experiences over the past several years that had a chilling effect on the local environment: there was a Black Lives Matter protest where a truck full of Right-wingers came with loaded weapons. At a May Day celebration, somebody was assaulted by Right-wingers.
We started talking about the Congress after this had happened. We understood that we had to take safety seriously and accept the fact that we are dealing with armed people who want to kill us. And so we have to be armed and prepared to protect a crowd if we are going to have any staying power instead of being pushed underground at the first sign of contrary force.
NR: How does the Workers’ Congress orient itself toward the Second Amendment?
MA: We understand that arms are a necessary element of a person’s freedom. If you have something, it can be taken away by hook or by crook, and arms are a good way of keeping what is yours. In terms of the Constitutional protection of that right, we don’t care. We happen to have this one point of similarity with the governing document of the liberal republic, but we ultimately think that the Constitution is only a half-baked idea on its best day. The constitution of a workers’ republic would not only safeguard the idea of your freedom but also its material bases.
NR: It’s a similar idea to what I’ve heard from the Marxist Unity Group[2] –– the idea that the inertia of the American Constitution is an obstacle to socialist organizing. Do you think so? If not, what are the obstacles to socialist organizing?
MA: The Constitution is only an obstacle if you compel yourself to operate within its boundaries; we have no such compulsion; we are in competition with the Constitution. We want to demonstrate to socialists that there is no good reason to attempt an electoral takeover of the liberal republic and reform its constitution into a freedom-respecting document. We would much rather go the historically proven way of launching a revolutionary movement and building a workers’ republic, instead of the much more arduous and probably much less productive avenue of getting involved in the liberal republic. If we are going to treat history as the open-book test that it is, we should learn from people who didn’t negotiate with their enemies but crushed them.
NR: What are the bounds defined by the U.S. Constitution that you find yourself having to flout during socialist organizing? Where are the shortcomings of what Frederick Douglass called the “glorious liberty document”?
MA: The Constitution makes a great deal about respecting the idea of freedom, but it has no interest in making securities for its material bases. You have the right to life; you do not have the right to food, water, and shelter. That’s a problem. When it comes to the ability to operate politically as a socialist, those limitations come from the legal code, not much from the Constitution. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says you cannot be a communist, but there is the Communist Control Act.[3] If we’re going to focus on the real enemy here it’s the legislative mechanisms that have been used against working class people and their organizations much less than the Constitution itself.
NR: I would imagine that there are disputes within the Workers’ Congress about the history of the Left, for instance, regarding the USSR, Cuba, or China. Does this come up? How do you go about navigating such historical disputes?
MA: Sources of tension within the Congress overwhelmingly tend to be disagreements about immediate tactics. Very rarely do we have an ideological difference over the nature of the Congress and its goals that prevents a new person from remaining in the Congress. We have a sound argument for our existence that requires only gentle persuasion for almost every new person who has come around to us. There can be a hesitation to embrace Leninism or the concept of a soviet or the historical legacy of the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, or the Russian Revolution, but we have made sure that we persuade people to the necessity of this rather than beating them over the head with how right we are: people who want to be part of the Congress but are still unsure about the legacy of socialism have a venue to discuss those things that are keeping them from being full-throated communists. We are careful to guide them away from examples of liberalism into a more committedly revolutionary expression.
NR: Is the Congress explicitly and avowedly Leninist?
MA: Not explicitly and avowedly. There is a difference of opinion on whether or not we are a democratic centralist organization. We have behaved very much like one, but we have not told people that’s what we are. We have our debates, we make a vote, and when the vote is cast we stick to that decision. If that makes us Leninist . . .
NR: If it’s more about decision-making protocol and organization, is there a need to tarry with the past? What would prevent you from saying, “this is a new thing –– it doesn’t matter whether it’s Leninist or not”?
MA: I encourage people to remember that Marx and Lenin were humans. They were just people who had a worldview, and that worldview was dialectical materialism. There’s not any real point in calling ourselves “Marxists” or “Leninists” when neither of them called themselves that. Marx didn’t call himself a Marxist; he was a dialectician and a materialist. Lenin certainly wasn’t a Leninist; he was a Marxist, and he might as well have called himself a dialectician. We have benefited from the ideas of people who have names and have a legacy that we have to take responsibility for and contend with, but we are under no obligation to substitute their personal legacy for the quality of their ideas and their proven efficacy.
NR: What does the Congress’s community organizing look like?
MA: The biggest source of our community organizing and involvement with the public has been through a spontaneous group of organizers who came up around the genocide in Gaza. It was a group of people who started calling themselves Southern New Hampshire for Palestine — a handful of dedicated organizers from across the state who have been able to put on some impressive demonstrations. We got involved in that early; we made ourselves useful, became familiar. We wanted to be in a position to exercise political influence with new people. We did not, however, want to storm our way into that position. It’s more valuable that we are accepted into a group and asked for our advice than assuming people want it and giving it to them anyway. By way of peripheral participation, we have been able to win respect for the Congress and are able to have other people, who were at first devoted to just taking part in the struggle for a free Palestine, be introduced to a wider arena of struggles; we are starting to open them up to the idea that capitalism is a whole network of oppressions that all have to be dealt with in concert.
NR: Why has the gravitational center been the Palestine protests? Many might say that if you want to organize the working class, it would be a horrible first step to start by having people choose sides in the conflict and then splitting them down the middle.
MA: We have to play the hand that we are dealt. We had two options: we could try to find out what movement we could generate, or we could take one where there are many people already in motion. The fact of the matter is that there was already a spontaneously growing movement for a free Palestine that relieved us of the need to figure out what we could do to set people in motion. If that came with the task of drawing some battlelines between pro-free-Palestine and pro-genocide people, that was a necessary battleline to draw. At the end of the day, revolutionary activity boils down to making friends on the one hand and enemies on the other. Having the right friends doesn’t mean much if you don’t have the right enemies.
Q&A
I hear an antinomy between liberal and revolutionary, and between liberal republic (like the United States) and workers’ republic (like China or Cuba). Since the term Leninism came up, Lenin had a saying: socialists need to be “as radical as reality itself.”[4] What’s not revolutionary about liberalism or the liberal republic?
MA: The liberal republic was revolutionary when its opponent was monarchy. By comparison, the world that it built on the ash heap of monarchy was comparatively more forward-thinking and progressive. It provided an environment of political rights that made working-class organizing easier; Marx and Engels are explicit on this point, especially in the period of the 1848 Revolutions. We’re not, however, in the 1840s where the capitalists are still struggling for dominance over the old monarchies. They are the new monarchy, the dominant power, and they ensure that whatever revolutionary potential they have is not taken into the hands of workers. For instance, the freedoms of speech and assembly have only been selectively applied when they are used by workers.
Liberalism has put itself into the position where it is the dominant ideology, and it is a reactionary ideology. It is not an ideology that looks to graduate beyond capitalism; it is one that stares the contradictions of capitalism in the face and says “yeah, I built that.” Liberalism is characterized by the idea of a constitutional republic, individualism, and property rights. It is not the constitutional republic that is the source of reaction in liberalism; it is the emphasis on individualism, free markets, and property rights that make it increasingly reactionary over time as the free market goes from a section of society to its decisive section. Now that the free market is the decisive section of society and the capitalists are in a position of social power, they can apply those freedoms selectively in order to maintain that power. The way that liberalism will always seek to preserve the rights of the individual rather than the rights of the collective, will always preserve the free market over the free worker, means that it will be an obstacle to revolution. The only reason that we’re not fully embracing that is that we would rather have all of the friends instead of the right friends and the right enemies.
Because you mentioned Lenin, I thought of a phrase that is common in a lot of his writings about tailism,[5] that just because this is where the spontaneous protests are, you don’t want to simply tail it and adapt to the situation. I bring this up because one of the promises of community-based organizing was to be stable against the fluxes of capitalist politics. We’ve had Israel–Palestine the past year; two years ago, it was Ukraine–Russia; and a few years before there was the March of Return in Gaza; and, depending on your age, you might also remember Operation Cast Lead or the protest of the Turkish flotilla raid. How might you intervene in a way that isn’t tailist?
MA: We would be more vulnerable to the accusation of tailism if we had noticed something was happening, become involved with it, and then made no effort to translate this activity into a wider scale of political activity. We were eager to encourage people into a wider set of struggles without doing the opposite of tailism, command-ism, where we are insisting that people are doing the wrong thing and should instead do what we’re doing. We’ve been there and ready to discuss with people how to expand what they have going on into a wider and more long-term form of struggle. The results speak for themselves: there’s a handful of people from this organization that now have an understanding that Gaza is connected to many other things.
This conversation has been at the level of tactics, but the topic of tailism poses the question of the end goal. You can say “I’m participating in this demo because people are going to come and then they’re going to get organized into something else,” but why are they getting organized into something else? What’s the point of that? That’s part of what Lenin was talking about when he criticized tailism. It’s not that you’re not going to have the upper hand in terms of recruitment; it’s also that you might sacrifice the end goal, and you might liquidate the goal of socialism and the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat into your practical activity. What does socialism have to do with the Gaza protests?
MA: If the only thing we cared about were responding to what people are demanding in a given moment, we would be populists; but we are socialists and we are trying to consciously steer people from one form of society to another. We are making sure to keep track of populist tendencies that only reflect immediate concerns without losing sight of the eventual goal of getting these people interested in building a workers’ republic. What does Gaza have to do with all of that? It was the movement that was available to us, so it was much better to involve ourselves in an existing movement than take shots in the dark at building one that could have the same level of response –– but probably wouldn’t. That leaves us the task of figuring out how Gaza is connected to other struggles. We can tell people how the Israeli army is funded and supplied by the U.S., how that impacts our domestic fiscal policy, and how there are millions of people who are affected by a hurricane who are left out to dry because all their money went to Israel. We can navigate a maze of struggles to draw a conscious line between something happening far off that does not directly impact people and local things that do directly impact them. Then it comes to the matter that capitalism is the name of those problems and socialism is the solution. But what is socialism? Everyone has their own answer to this question. In the most simplified terms, socialism is a workers’ republic; it is just the society of equal rights. The end goal would be statelessness, moneylessness, classlessness –– communism.
This discussion of the formation of the Workers’ Congress reminded me of how people used to talk about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), circa 2017, as an organization in which many other Leftist organizations entered, tried to work within, or in some cases, like the International Socialist Organization, completely dissolved into. The Workers’ Congress is an organization that sounds similar but was started in 2022, after the entire experience of the DSA. What was the historical moment in 2022 such that the Workers’ Congress seemed necessary?
MA: What happened that got me to seek out my comrades more adamantly about this conversation was George Floyd. Bernie was cool because he cleansed socialism in American politics. The George Floyd protests were cool because I’d never seen us burn down a police department before. When I saw that and the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle — the amount of revolutionary energy that poured out — I got to thinking, “imagine if the energy behind this was paired with a general strike; imagine if racial equality and workers’ rights merged. What if multiple struggles were able to be folded into one avenue of struggle?” That was it: seeing all this energy pour out but with so little direction.
What makes us different from DSA? They didn’t even have it in themselves to take thousands and thousands of organizers and just make it a party. We have tens and we are willing to take a bite out of the challenge of building a state. Who cares what DSA is doing? They happen to be a part of the Congress. Good for them. But it’s not because we’re doing what they’re doing. Rather, they’re doing what we’re doing.
I’m interested in the question of organizing under the socialist banner and what people who are attracted to socialism think that means. The question is also occasioned by the large number of young people who have been attracted in recent years to the history of the Left and rejected the Leftist sectarian landscape that they found on the ground, inherited from the New Left. How do you conduct an education around the historical legacy and failures of socialism in this context? One of the most basic problems with the old sectarian landscape is that it could no longer credibly educate young people. How do you address the question of education and ideology?
MA: One of the problems that the Left has been dealt is that the legacy of the New Left is dominated by Left anti-communism, which is an ahistorical perspective. It’s much more than educating people about the history of communism; it’s about getting people to embrace the controversy of that legacy. Yes, there is violence and death and war in the history of communism, and if you are a socialist or a communist who wants to persuade people to your perspective, you have to take responsibility for that, which doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting it and calling it a bad thing, but being able to explain it in its historical context.
We talk a lot about the need to educate Leftists on the history of socialism so that we can properly carry out the goals of a modern movement, but I’m continually dealing with Leftists who think that most people wanted to leave the Soviet Union, who actually think that China is a capitalist country, who think socialism is failing, which is ridiculous because it’s currently working for more than a billion people. We have to educate people about the Left, but not the way the New Left did. The New Left were some of the most insidious traitors to the working class of the last 100 years, and they deserve to be shot. If we are serious about instituting the goals of the socialist movement, we are going to have to contend with its real history, not the one that we have made up to persuade us that our Left anti-communism is somehow acceptable. |P
Transcribed by Andrew Tan
[1] Video of the interview is available at <https://youtu.be/cdWeKfHfkCo>.
[2] A group within the Democratic Socialists of America.
[3] The Communist Control Act was passed in 1954 “to outlaw the Communist Party, to prohibit members of Communist organizations from serving in certain representative capacities, and for other purposes.”
[4] The quote is recounted in a 1943 article in Foreign Affairs by the Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu. Lenin says, “I don’t know how radical you are, or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.”
[5] See, for example, V. I. Lenin, “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social-Democrats” in What is to be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (1902), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm>.
