In its Members’ Own Words: The CPUSA Abandons Marxism-Leninism

On March 29th, the National Committee of CPUSA released an article entitled Build the Party, Build the Clubs, a so-called “discussion” document for the forthcoming convention. However, as the party tacitly confirmed in its article How Does the Communist Party Elect Its Leadership, no genuinely democratic discussion will be possible at the convention. The very mechanisms that CPUSA leadership lauds as “probably the most democratic process possible” are actually tools of centralized control, which stifle emerging revolutionary voices within the party and protect the interests of an entrenched clique of desiccated opportunists, such as John Bachtell and the current co-chairs of the party, Joe Sims and Rossana Cambron. The slate system, as the Clarion has highlighted in The Cult Building Tendency, is a sleight which enables the outgoing National Committee to re-elect itself and bolster the compliant toadies within its ranks. It all but guarantees the expulsion or ostracization of clubs and party members who aren’t in on the grift. The dues must flow to the coffers of People’s World, Workers Education Society, and all the other shell corporations chaired by the aforementioned husks. After all, those who control the dues control the party.
And what is that party? One would expect a party that is Communist in name to espouse at least some Communist principles about the form the party should take. According to Build the Party, Build the Clubs, the “cadre model of a revolutionary working-class party tailored to fit Russia’s conditions at the turn of the century has been replaced as conditions have changed” and, “in its stead, at Lenin’s initiative, the international Communist movement adopted new organizational principles for countries with bourgeois democracies. This new version was called a ‘mass party.’” Their justification here rests on the phrase “conditions have changed” and on evoking Lenin’s name to subvert his revolutionary formulations. They do not and cannot specify what has changed, nor can they quote Lenin directly, at risk of proving themselves to be liars and distorters. 

After all, in his 1904 text One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Lenin thoroughly and specifically denounces the notion of a mass party — one open to anyone in the class without exception — when he states: “I thereby express clearly and precisely my wish, my demand, that the Party, as the vanguard of the class, should be as organised as possible, that the Party should admit to its ranks only such elements as allow of at least a minimum of organisation” and goes on to say, “The Party, as the vanguard of the working class, must not be confused, after all, with the entire class.” Lenin’s arguments in this text were directed at Martov, leader of the capitulationist Mensheviks, and Nadezhdin, a social democrat of his time, who were advocating for just the type of social organization the CPUSA’s National Committee describes now, 120 years later. (So much for “changed conditions.”)

It’s frankly unbelievable that after the Bolshevik victory in the 1917 October Revolution  Lenin would make an unprompted about-face and advise international Communists to repudiate this key tenet of Bolshevism in favor of the then-defeated Menshevism, or worse, Kautsky’s social democracy. If the authors are even a little familiar with Lenin, they are no doubt aware of his meticulous denunciation of Kautsky.

One anticipates that the CPUSA speechwriters will attempt to point to places where Lenin spoke of the mass party after 1905, while failing to include the critical context that he did not mean “a party composed of the masses,” but rather “a highly organized cadre-party to whom the masses will flock during the time of revolution.” Be prepared!

What the CPUSA wordsmiths are doing with their article is the same rhetorical trick used by Flat Earthers to befuddle people who understand that the Earth is round, yet lack the technical savvy to say why that’s true. They are claiming something that a layperson can sense is untrue, but that requires more than a layperson’s knowledge to prove is untrue. For instance, when the article says, “at Lenin’s initiative, the international Communist movement adopted new organizational principles for countries with bourgeois democracies” they have again avoided explaining precisely what he said, and at which congress or in which text he said it, so that if they are confronted, as we are confronting them here, they can point to another text in which he said something they can construe as supporting their claims. Nevermind that if you do as Lenin actually implored at the Third Congress and “read the whole passage” you’ll find the “first step was to create a real Communist Party so as to know whom we were talking to and whom we could fully trust,” rather than create “mass parties [that would] also work at training cadres,” which is nonsense, or worse, Menshevism. At the Fourth Congress, the first task for the Communist International was again, not the formation of mass organizations or proletarian united front, but “to establish the nucleus of a Communist Party ” capable of implementing those tactics!

As far as tactics are concerned, CPUSA’s National Committee has rightfully identified that “an essential part of re-emphasizing Marxist-Leninist basics” is a press that serves as a mass agitator and propagandist, and as a mass organizer. Unfortunately, they suggest People’s World is that press. As Lenin described in Where to Begin? and elaborated upon in What is to be Done?:

In our opinion, the starting-point of our activities, the first step towards creating the desired organisation, or, let us say, the main thread which, if followed, would enable us steadily to develop, deepen, and extend that organisation, should be the founding of an All-Russian political newspaper… Without such a newspaper we cannot possibly fulfill our task — that of concentrating all the elements of political discontent and protest, of vitalising thereby the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.

People’s World, however, is a far cry from Iskra, and the people who make positive comparisons between them are either uninformed or proprietors of People’s World. For instance, People’s World routinely publishes content unbefitting of a Marxist press, presenting  no coherent program besides pleading with its readers to “Vote Democrat” and “Donate to People’s World.” Party members had previously been able to defend People’s World by saying it wasn’t the party’s newspaper, despite being operated by and having the majority of its articles written by CPUSA members and being the primary recipient of CPUSA’s fundraising efforts. But Build the Party, Build the Clubs has stripped even that excuse from the newspaper’s staunchest sycophants, with a full section called “Building the party around our press.” Thus, People’s World’s defenders must now make awkward contortions to justify the paper’s liberalism, revisionism, and liquidationist attitude towards Marxism-Leninism. For example, they allude to unnamed laws which prevent the party from exercising “full editorial control” over the paper, again despite the party and paper being operated by all the same people, and the fact that only the newspaper (not the party!) is a legal entity, begging the question of which controls the other. Even if it is the party in control, the lack of “full editorial control” means they’re holding a gun, but occasionally allowing someone else to aim it and pull the trigger. 

The result of this is that the National Committee expects People’s World to “build broad all-people’s unity,” by which they cunningly mean to liquidate Marxism-Leninism, while saying, in the very same document no-less, that Marxism-Leninism is the one, grounding ideology of the party! That this needs to be explicated is a symptom of the failure and suppression of real Marxists and of miseducation in the Communist movement: Marxism-Leninism is NOT the ideology of “all-people’s unity.” It is the materialist science with which the proletarian and oppressed classes overthrow their oppressors, and, in turn, repress the exploiting classes through the dictatorship of the proletariat. We understand “dictatorship” is a scary word for CPUSA — doubly so since one of their current chairs once wrote that it was time to ditch the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” — but Lenin never minced words about this subject. In The Dictatorship of The Proletariat he posits, “Suppression of the resistance of the exploiters as the task and content of the epoch” and that this “is entirely forgotten by the opportunists and socialists.” Although Lenin was referring to Kautsky, he easily could have been referring to Joe Sims. In a recent People’s World article, “The World Is a Better Place Because Lenin Lived, Sims writes, “the answer to it all is democracy, democracy, and more democracy. But not just any democracy — class democracy, advanced democracy giving all power to the workers and the people.” Again, this sounds pleasant, but it has forgotten or avoided what Lenin articulated above. To quote another Marxist-Leninist that the CPUSA finds too scary, Stalin wrote the following in Foundations of Leninism:

The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be “complete” democracy, democracy for all, for the rich as well as for the poor; the dictatorship of the proletariat “must be a state that is democratic in a new way (for the proletarians and the non-propertied in general) and dictatorial in a new way (against the bourgeoisie)” (see Vol. XXI, p. 393). The talk of Kautsky and Co. about universal equality, about “pure” democracy, about “perfect” democracy, and the like, is a bourgeois disguise of the indubitable fact that equality between exploited and exploiters is impossible.

The “all-peoples unity” advocated for by CPUSA is exactly the same— a bourgeois disguise of the fact that true proletarian democracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is “the democracy of the exploited majority, based on the restriction of the rights of the exploiting minority and directed against this minority.” It does not, and must not, include “all people.”

With articles such as Build the Party, Build the Clubs, and the winceworthy Not One Step Back, which the Red Clarion will soon polemicize against, the National Committee is signaling its intention to fully expunge Marxism-Leninism from the CPUSA at its convention and become yet another “progressive” organization. It has already done this once before, when it attempted to strike the words “Marxism-Leninism” from the party constitution.

The power of the people’s organization, of the proletarian vanguard party, is such that even the mere mention of the words still drips with energy. Like a magnet, it attracts the advanced members of the working class. Thus, although they have long-since destroyed any remnant of Marxism-Leninism at work within their party, they have found they cannot effectively divert class-consciousness without paying lip service to Marxism-Leninism. But it is just that: lip service.

Such organizations exist only to siphon dues and shove revolutionary energy and revolutionaries back toward the Democratic Party. Whether the CPUSA, or some fragments of it, can escape this dead alley is undetermined. The slow liquidation of the party has been an ongoing struggle since the party’s earliest days. But if the CPUSA actually develops “party activists” who are “well versed in theory and practice as well as the history of Marxist-Leninist politics,” as they claim to want to in Build the Party, Build the Clubs, such activists could well become the counterrevolutionary leadership’s grave diggers. The true Marxist-Leninist strain, long asleep and seldom dominant within CPUSA, must awaken.

What this strain does once it is awake remains to be seen. Perhaps the party can be purged of its revisionist and careerist leadership. More likely, however, is that these true Marxist-Leninists must extricate themselves from the dead hulk that surrounds them and join with the rest of the Marxist-Leninists in North America, toward the foundation of a Communist Party that bridges the mystifying state lines of the U.S. and Canada — a Communist Party of North America.