Statement from the Editors: An earlier version of this article contained a metaphor we determined was vulgar, inappropriate to the circumstance in which it was used, and latently misogynistic. The article has been updated to remove said metaphor and clarify its intended point.
The CPUSA has been circulating numerous discussion articles for its upcoming June convention, at which the future direction of the party will be determined. These articles and their content indicate a forthcoming line struggle within the party on a number of questions. By line struggle we mean, “1. the Ideological struggle within the Communist movement for correct program, strategy and tactics for proletarian revolution, and 2. the Ideological struggle between the Communist movement and the spontaneous movements, particularly the advanced elements.” Some of the questions for CPUSA involve whether the party should finally expunge Marxism-Leninism from its programme once and for all, and how the party should engage with the broader worker’s movement. But two burning questions for CPUSA, around which several articles have been written, and which represent the crux of the struggle are:
- What is fascism?
- Is fascism already here?
These questions undergird every convention discussion article, and each author’s position on them becomes apparent throughout, or even from the title alone — take “The United States is not a Fascist Country,” for example. While this article doesn’t have a cogent answer of what fascism is, it wants to be clear that whatever it is, it’s not here. Other articles, such as “Redefining Fascism” and “It is Time to Expand our Definition of the Fascist Threat” grasp the urgency around finding a better answer to the first question, and are at least open to the idea that the United States is already a fascist country, or that the sole threat of fascism in the U.S. is not Trumpism alone.
Some of these articles were published prior to the eruption of the student protest movement, and some of them are more recent. But despite being able to bear direct witness to the brutality unleashed by the pig government against the student movement at Columbia, UCLA, Irvine and other universities, along with the general silencing of dissent against the genocide in Palestine, some CPUSA writers (and, indeed, the party’s most prominent voices and leadership) insist that Trump and the MAGA movement remain a unique threat to working class interests. This is despite the genocide being financiered by Democrats and the most violent repression of students taking place on campuses with Democrat administrators, located in cities with Democrat mayors, in states with Democrat governors, under a Democrat’s presidency.
But even these plain facts are not enough to break the hold of the triumvirate of revisionism, opportunism, and tailism — call it ROT for short — over CPUSA, and some of the articles are truly so heinous as to necessitate being dragged through the mud individually.
We’ll begin this process with Callum Wilson’s egregious and ROT-filled, “Not One Step Back — Vote Against Fascism 2024” — the very title of which is a slap in the face of the heroic sacrifices made by the USSR in World War II. The author identifies “Not One Step Back” as an anti-fascist battlecry from that time, but the phrase more specifically refers to Stalin’s famous decree of July 28 1942. This doctrine essentially prohibited the Red Army from withdrawing or retreating from battles against the Nazis, and was a major factor in reversing the Nazi onslaught. The metaphor that our little bacterium is attempting to evoke is that voting for the Democrats will turn the tide against “MAGA Fascism” just as Order 227 turned the tide of World War II in Russia. To even compare these situations is daft and nauseating. Consider: “Not One Step Back… out of line to vote,” vs. “Not One Step Back: lay your life down to kill the Nazis.” For this author, the size of a step out of the polling line is the size of a step into a Nazi grave. To him, not voting for Democrats is as horrible as avoiding confrontation with the monsters who raped and slaughtered millions of your countrymen.
The article begins by referring to a previous article by the same author, which is all but indistinguishable from this article, but focused on the 2022 election battle between Shapiro and Mastriano in Pennsylvania rather than the forthcoming federal election. In that article, Wilson failed to consider that avid zionist and pig financier Shapiro could just be a different manifestation of fascism than his Christian white nationalist opponent. In this article, fascistic qualities of the Democrats are completely ignored. MAGA fascism and Donald Trump are the only concerns. This level of analysis is woefully inadequate for someone calling themselves a Communist, but apparently makes sense to the single celled organism that wrote it.
In fact, this misconstrual of the Democrats and Republicans as diametric opponents, with nary a mention of their aligned class interests or the various factions within them, permeates the article, which, for reasons upon which we can speculate, is a painful 2,585 words in length… twice as long as the restriction placed upon other writers. And its length is not the sole cause of torment. When sentences like, “If the people’s movement fails to defeat Trump at the ballot box, the future of democracy in our republic will be in doubt” are broken down, there’s much to cringe about. Namely what people’s movement? Why specify at the ballot box? The future of democracy for which class? Why’d you say “our republic,” Callum? To which class does your republic currently belong, and why do you identify as a member of that class? Ah, well, we know why. To even ask these questions answers them.
Wilson then makes the laughably pathetic and flaccid claim that, “There will be the time to press the attack against the Democratic party, when we become leaders in the all people’s front. By getting out the vote to defeat fascism, we advance the cause of socialism.” This is a rephrase of the fool’s errand in attempting to “push Biden/the Democrats/etc. left.” A fool’s errand because the Democrats, as chosen mouthpieces of the U.S. ruling class, are some of the most vicious and irredeemable terrorist scum in the history of humanity. Can you push a hyena left? What about a shark? Will you push them left when they finally count the bodies of this genocide and find two or three hundred thousand or more Palestinian corpses? A major impetus for the Biden administration towards not counting the dead, besides the fact there’s nobody left to count them, is that it raises questions of how much worse Trump could possibly be for the people of Gaza. Will there be anyone left alive in Gaza, come election day?
The body of the article is then swallowed up by analysis and fearmongering about the Republicans that could have been found on MSNBC. Trump would be a scary dictator, ushering in waves of unspeakable repression and horror, but he can still be defeated within the existing legal constraints of the Empire for some reason. Of course, Biden isn’t called dictatorial in the same article for exercising these same extraordinary legal powers to circumvent “our dysfunctional and gridlocked political system.” This is definitively tailist — words by a so-called Communist that mirror exactly the reactionary Democrat.
Wilson goes on to beat that famous, dead and all but decomposed horse — the paragraph of Dimitrov’s 1935 Speech to the Communist International that, according to Wilson puts forth the ”Marxist definition of fascism” as:
“the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital… It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.”
Is Wilson aware that this definition is not even the definition used in his own supposedly Marxist party’s constitution? The CPUSA’s revision of Dimitrov’s quote defines fascism as follows:
“Fascism would be the open terrorist dictatorship by the most reactionary, militarist, racist section of monopoly capital and the elimination of all avenues of popular resistance and protest.”
This is CPUSA’s answer to the first question we posed at the beginning of the article, slyly worded so that the answer to the second question can always be no. After all, no matter how many campus protests against the Palestinian genocide are viciously curbed, the protesters are technically still allowed to protest. We can’t say all avenues of popular resistance and protest have been eliminated, and it’s of course impossible for Trump to eliminate all of them either. We can see how Dimitrov’s actual formulation fits the United States, regardless of which party is in power, while the CPUSA’s bastardization of it is conveniently targeted at Republicans.
But Republicans are not Wilson’s only target. The article seems to be nefariously constructed to drive actual readers of Lenin to madness.. Wilson has the audacity to write “Ultra leftists have attempted to turn Lenin into a mascot of their immature fanaticism while ignoring the brilliant Marxist and enlightened small-d democrat he actually was.” At some point, people must admit when they haven’t done the reading, or when they have the comprehension of a bacterium. Demanding that authors like Callum cease their rancid opportunism by keeping Lenin’s name and vision out of their mouths and papers, however, might be too much to ask.
The Red Clarion has previously noted that the CPUSA only quotes directly from Lenin briefly or, in this article’s case, not at all. If they did so, they might be at risk of printing something useful for developing revolutionary consciousness and potential. Instead, we are stuck with the deep fried sentiment, “If you cannot organize voter turnouts, then forget about your revolution.” This is not something Lenin ever said, or even alluded to. Consider the following real Lenin quote, which expresses his perspective on participating in the enemy’s electoral politics: “we shall not refuse to utilise this arena, but we shall not exaggerate its modest importance; on the contrary, guided by the experience already provided by history, we shall entirely subordinate the struggle we wage in the Duma to another form of struggle, namely, strikes, up risings, etc.” Guided by the experience already provided by history. These words, already written in 1906.
Wilson concludes the article with an impotent critique of Biden. While he uses the proper “Genocide Joe” epithet, the argument made in these final paragraphs is a jumbled mess of lesser-evilism. For instance, he writes “In order to successfully defeat Trump, and protect democracy, we must mobilize, organize, and rally the great masses of the working class majority in this country, which the Democratic Party often fails to do themselves.” What does this really mean? We must mobilize, organize, and rally the working masses to the Democrats so that the Democrats can win against their will? It apparently does say that, because it’s reiterated further down: “While Biden will have no one to blame but himself for his defeat, the results would be catastrophic.” We must help this pudding-brained octogenarian win against not only his own will, but while struggling uphill against the entire Democratic political establishment to boot. And speaking of pudding brains, check out this sentence that Callum includes from Joe Sims — “defeating Biden’s support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza is the path to defeating fascism in November.” The working class movement must again, do what? Defeat Biden’s will to support the zionist entity against his own wishes so that he doesn’t lose the election? Did anyone read this before it was published? Who reads that sentence and says, “yeah, sounds good, put that in.” What about “After all, the 2020 Democratic victory in Georgia, was accredited to non-partisan grassroots community organizers, instead of the Democratic National Committee political machine.” By narrowly organizing against the Republicans, and funneling any radical sentiment back towards voting Democrat, the non-partisan grassroots community organizers completely betrayed their own interests and the interests of the people they organized.
In sum, the article in question demonstrates that its author, Callum Wilson is a spineless weasel and careerist, who should choose between joining the Democrats, purging himself of his pathetic revisionism, opportunism, and tailism (ROT), or doing some sort of secret third thing. Wilson’s article shows a woeful misunderstanding of fascism as a phenomenon somehow beholden to the legal framework of Empire, rather than that Empire’s defense against the working and oppressed classes of the world. It erroneously construes fascism and liberal democracy as two mass movements at odds with one another, where it is possible to stop one by simply voting for the other.
In order to advance the Communist movement within the imperial core, it is the duty of CPUSA members to struggle against this naivety and rot within their ranks. They must formulate a better answer to the question of what truly constitutes fascism in order to be capable of waging a revolutionary struggle suited to the actual conditions of the Empire. Certainly, the notion that pervades this and similar articles and their authors, this idea that “voting against fascism can deal it a devastating blow,” must be expunged from the party and the Communist movement.
