We Warned You.

Last weekend, CPUSA held its long anticipated 32nd Convention in Chicago. We say, “long-anticipated” because the party leadership purposefully delayed it last year in order to bring the influx of new revolutionaries under the control of the old guard. The convention exceeded expectations and was also a bitter disappointment — in the words of one attendee, the “dialectics on display were so dizzying.”

In the lead-up to the convention, the Red Clarion published a number of pieces about the CPUSA’s history, lack of democratic processes, and the tripartite problem of its Revisionism, Opportunism, and Tailism, or ROT. This culminated with the article “Claim The Convention,” in which we made it clear that any members who consider themselves Marxist-Leninists needed to seize the convention floor, expel the entrenched leaders, and put forth resolutions representative of CPUSA’s rank-and-file. We insisted that members fight tooth and nail against the party apparatus that was put in place to sheepdog and neutralize them. Of course, we suspected this would be impossible. The bureaucratic inertia of CPUSA has accreted over decades. To chip away at any individual aspect, such as the slate system or the national committee’s vetting of convention resolutions, would be like shooting a charging rhino with .223 — you might inflict a superficial wound, but the beast would still trample you underfoot. To actually slay this gigantic monster, a much higher, illegal caliber would have been necessary.

However, our agitation served a secondary purpose. It exposed the CPUSA and its leadership, before all but the most deranged, hardline party cultists, for the undemocratic careerists and DNC running dogs that they are. In support of our articles, our agents conducted postering and flyering actions at the convention. The most hardline CPUSA members revealed their cultish mentality with their drastic responses to this agitation: destroying (or, in many cases, attempting to destroy) our flyers, and scrawling misogynist insults on them (fitting for the Chauvinist Party USA). These extreme responses are typical of cult-like indoctrination. Some CPUSA members took stacks of 10 posters and ripped them apart. Our proposed resolutions were modest, but the dread they instilled in CPUSA hardliners was palpable. These cultists reacted with fear, revulsion, and logical contortion to justify the perverse “democratic centralism” of their dead organization. This type of panic is an indication of weakness and enervation in an oppressor; it is the fear that they will be exposed to be powerless before the masses; it is the fear that they are being seen as they truly are, and brought to a reckoning.

The utter perturbation of CPUSA’s staunchest advocates proved that, had the infirm and scattered opposition within CPUSA been able to unify, it would have been possible to vanquish the revisionist colossus. In other words, the revolutionary membership was much stronger than it itself believed. Had they organized with intent to derail the corrupt resolutions from the outset, rather than engaging in a Fabian delay to see what would happen, or had they chosen to disrupt the zionist speaker, instead of discreetly walking out, they would have thoroughly exposed the entrenched leaders and party as the enemies of the working class and oppressed peoples that they are. 

Fortunately, although the opposition was unable to act, CPUSA did the movement a favor and chose to out themselves. With their disavowal of settler colonialism as the principal contradiction in North America, which the Red Clarion thoroughly examines in “Against CPUSA’s Colonizer ‘Communism’,” the CPUSA have cast off any pretense to claim the title “Communist.” Through class reductionism, they revealed their fascistic intention to suppress the class struggle. In describing their rejection of settler colonialism as the “primary” contradiction, rather than by utilizing the correct term, “principal,” they proved themselves to be either illiterate or wilful distorters of Marxist theory. In cutting short debate on the proposed resolution to endorse Biden (in all but name) and leaving it to be determined by the incoming national committee, they showed that their own constitution and democratic processes are anathema to them. Through the sleight of democratic process that is the CPUSA slate system, they ensured the ROT at the core of the party remained in power without even the hope of a responsive challenge. Even the supposed floor nominations that occurred were a charade of democracy, an optical illusion for the benefit of the party’s detractors and doubters. The floor nominations appear to have been fixed in advance to nominate primarily sycophantic careerists at the expense of representatives from southern states. Of course the northern, corrupt, chauvinist bureaucracy has once again cut out the Black national heartland!

All of this seems disheartening, we know. Ultimately, however, we must recognize it for what it is: a gift. An enemy cannot be properly fought until it is known. The convention burned away any illusions that the CPUSA is in any way on the side of working and oppressed peoples. The hardliners have given us the gift of self-identifying as a real enemy to struggle against. By arguing against the continued existence of settler colonialism in the North American context, they have also drawn the battle lines along which this struggle will take place. They have denied the anti-colonial struggle and national liberation as preconditions for a just society, and denied that they constitute a vital phase of the social revolution. There is no longer any need to struggle alongside CPUSA as any sort of fellow traveler. They are labor zionists, colonizer “communists,” and may now be derided as the enemy.