Today I added a new page to give further detail and internal documents sent in by former members of the cult’s tenant organizing front, the “United Neighborhood Defense Movement” (UNDM).
This post is to give some context and analysis of its contents, and describes the totalitarian leadership mechanism behind seemingly democratic structures on the surface.
-Ezra
Some UNDM history
The UNDM was launched in May 2020 by the cult’s top leadership, the “Politburo,” to bring together various of its “independent” front organizations into a single national organization, streamlining centralized leadership. On the surface, the announcement of this unification was intended to look like various “grassroots” organizations had found common ground and formed a coalition, which other housing organizations were welcome to join (read: unwittingly come under cult leadership).
The Politburo hoped UNDM could avoid exposure and condemnation by simply putting on a mask. It would be forbidden from the use of red or black in its propaganda, unlike its more obviously “revolutionary” forbearers. But it’s unclear why leadership thought this would work, as UNDM announced its affiliations with the previous organizations online, and on the ground anyone could recognize the same people showing up together, if under a new flag. UNDM was exposed immediately in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh for these very reasons.
The new branding had some success obscuring the Gonzaloist ideology, and UNDM did manage to gain the trust of some tenants despite the backlash. The UNDM website listed public “Points of Unity” while following secret Politburo-dictated political lines and directives. While the political line of UNDM emphasized “neither leadership nor the organization have all the answers. We must listen closely to the people for guidance on what is to be done,” the testimonies of rank and file members in the summation document shows these were not the organization’s politics in practice.
The reorganization of the cult’s community organizing front groups into UNDM can be linked to the cult’s increasing focus on “concentric construction,” the Gonzaloist conception of party-building in which the communist party, its armed forces for the seizure of power, and administrative organs of its new state are constructed simultaneously through military action.
Like most of the cult’s efforts, UNDM was poorly organized and its strategy and goals only vaguely understood, especially at lower levels. But the Politburo seems to have envisioned it as a vehicle for developing “base areas” or areas controlled and administered by the communist party within the previous government’s territory; the building blocks of its state power. In the Politburo’s fantasy, over time UNDM branches would organize entire neighborhoods to govern themselves with people’s committees led by the “party,” militias to keep out police and bad elements, etc.
In reality, the extent of UNDM’s organizing seems to have entailed groups of activists slowing down eviction processes and protesting for the demands (occasionally effectively) of the handful of tenants they maintained contact with. Like other front group organizing efforts, UNDM branches achieved some short term goals (like getting a tenant’s water turned back on or preventing an eviction) due to experience and skills of the couple of genuinely good organizers each branch had, and not due to “leadership” from above, whose directives were consistently out of touch with and often opposed to meaningful efforts on the ground.
By November 2021, UNDM had all but collapsed, even before the cult did. However, nothing could be deemed a “failure” if cult leadership still thought it was a good idea, so failed UNDM branches were seen as “on hiatus” or “reorganizing.” At the turn of 2022, national leadership put out a call for members to send in their “summations” of UNDM (the form at the beginning of the document shows what members were instructed to do). This document collects those that were sent in and preserved.
CR-CPUSA leadership, like other cults, required regular and in-depth reporting from members. Leadership used this fact to claim it made “democratically informed” decisions through the regular feedback of members, when it only ever made decisions based on what it wanted to do and ignored (or punished!) feedback and criticism of itself. It also used reporting as a way to control and blame members. As survivors of other cults report, being tied to your computer writing criticisms or emails is another way to eat up time you could have used to reflect on your experience and realize all was not well. And if a directive failed, leaders could then blame members for insufficient or inaccurate reporting to inform their decision. But you can see how thorough and accurate reporting was actually handled in this document itself– hear the frustration of members like Gordon describing how their feedback was thrown out, and notice the mentions of other dissenters who eventually left.
Cult leaders in rank-and-file’s clothing – how control was disguised and exerted
These documents contain a good case study in how the cult’s control was disguised and exerted compared to how it claimed to work and involve democracy, so here’s some more explanation of what was going on behind the scenes of what’s touched on in the documents on the new page.
UNDM’s original “Points of Unity” stated: “Gentrification is an expression of class warfare against our communities.” But in 2021, Jared changed his position on gentrification. So he ordered the UNDM leaders to Austin to hear him lecture on his new synthesis of this question. Among the leaders were both people who had been dedicated members of the clandestine organization for some time, and people not yet inducted into the clandestine organization but in the process of being indoctrinated– meaning, they had begun to be let in on secret information and groomed towards joining. This is a good example of the false democracy in the organization. Here’s how it worked in the cult’s newspaper, Tribune of the People, and it appears to have worked similarly in UNDM:
Front organizations are launched under the leadership of people placed in position by the cult’s top leadership. These leaders groom certain supporters who demonstrate desirable traits like loyalty and fanatic adherence to the ideology. After a year or so, elections are held, declaring “We’re now stable enough to democratically elect leaders, isn’t that great!” It looks like the group is proving its commitment to democratic processes. But the only possible choices to vote for are those who have already been leading and those who have been groomed for leadership. Everyone else has been instilled with a sense of their inexperience and inability. Current leadership puts forward its slate of “recommendations” and everyone the cult wants elected is elected. Nobody gets into a leadership position without having been groomed to the point that they will accept and carry out the orders of the cult’s top leadership.
After this, certain measures may occasionally be put forward for “line struggle,” or debate and vote by membership to determine which political line the organization will follow. However, members are coercively persuaded and manipulated into supporting the line leadership wants. For example, leadership will make time to hang out alone with those who don’t agree, build a rapport, and have long talks with them about the issue until they “come around.” This dynamic is especially effective when the dissenting member is an inexperienced young person, particularly a young woman, and the leader is an older or more experienced person, especially an older man. Those that continue to resist are either outnumbered in vote by the majority who’ve been persuaded by the above methods, or if they really pose a problem, will be criticized or expelled by leadership on some trumped up charge.
Further control is maintained by top leadership through controlling the information necessary to make an accurate evaluation and informed decision. Members and the general public may have behaved very differently if they knew how the organization was being puppeted from behind the scenes or that the end goal of the organization was not “community defense” but recruiting more followers into clandestine cells where they would be bound to orders under threat of death. An example of how information is obscured and manipulated to persuade, is Facundo/Luis Rivas’ contribution to the summation discussion. He presents his positions as if he’s just another member sharing in the democratic discussion. What most of the others don’t know, is he’s actually part of top leadership of a cult pulling the strings behind UNDM. His “contribution” to the summation is a deceitful injection of not even his own positions, but parroting Jared’s positions. (In the cult’s ideology, “democratic centralism” demands that clandestine party members like Luis push the party line, i.e. Jared’s line, in whatever work they are doing, over their own opinions.
His summation aimed to impress and take charge by starting with a history of UNDM and giving analysis of political errors.
This was a common tactic of the cult leaders to assert authority and control the narrative: if you study history and have more book knowledge about Marxism than other members, you can present an impressive analysis of “what happened” that others will look foolish trying to argue with. Nevermind that you twisted the facts to suit your personal conclusions, and that you depend on and cultivate the ignorance of lower members. Back then, we would read something like Luis’ account here and feel put in our place, embarrassed by the shallowness and amateurishness of our own accounts, and we’d feel compelled to agree with what the leader said. Standing outside the cult now, we can see these leaders were actually shamelessly lying through their teeth and manipulating members, hoarding and using knowledge to exploit like capital, while our own analyses we were made to feel so bad about were in fact pretty damn accurate criticisms of the cult. Part of the work of this website is to give former members all the information they were intentionally deprived of so that they wouldn’t feel confident pointing out what was wrong.
For example, in Luis’ revisionist “history” of UNDM, he describes how the anarchist organization Ovarian Psycos (OVAS) attacked UNDM in LA as if this persecution appeared out of nowhere. In fact, “UNDM” in LA as it stated on its own website used to go by the name “Defend Boyle Heights,” which was the organization that got into fights with the OVAS, at one point pepper spraying people at their community event. What’s more, Luis had previously dated the leader of the OVAS, adding another disturbing factor in his wielding the cult’s front organization to physically attack her organization. It should be noted, many people have told me the OVAS also have some abusive and destructive practices in their group, so this is not to say the attacks were one sided. I can’t confirm which group started physically attacking the other first, but my goal here is to focus on the CR-CPUSA regardless of how other groups behaved.
Among continual calls to “submit to leadership,” Luis also lies about how UNDM developed its politics and why people left. He describes political lines as “winning out” rather than being forced, and doesn’t explain the actual mechanism for changing politics which was being called to Austin to receive Jared’s new position. He mischaracterizes dissenting people who left the organization when they recognized the farce as “individualist” or breezes over their reasons for leaving.
Luis’ summation is arrogant and out of touch, calling for tighter control of top leadership and better obedience from members among a sea of rank and file criticisms all calling out the opposite: the awful, commandist leadership and cult practices. But at the time, in the context of the cult, devoted members read polemics like this from Luis, Chris, Jared, and other high ranking leaders and fell into line, both chastened at our inferiority and hopeful that these leaders would bring us to revolution in the end since they seemed to know what they were talking about.
Ex- Red Guards and CR-CPUSA Hub 
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