It takes courage to look truth in the face. Statesians arent’s used to it. We’ve been trained to ignore the truth and favor comfortable mystifications. All through our primary education, the state-approved curriculum tells us to ignore the evidence of our eyes and give faith to the bourgeois political parties, the bourgeois news, and the bourgeois experts while they lie and obfuscate the material realities of things. Although we Communists think of ourselves as beyond this simple bourgeois metaphysics, although we pride ourselves in looking at the underlying material causes, we are still the products of our environment. We can be duped. We at the Clarion understand if those ritualistic words, “Communist Party,” act for some as a kind of hypnotic seal of authority, lending faith to a rotten institution. Something about them commands an instant respect and obedience, like a bishop’s homage to Rome. Those words come with a horror of breaching propriety, as if it were high heresy to challenge the authority of The Party. It’s as if the organization itself bears the seal of a sacred imprimatur. “Even when it’s wrong,” the party functionaries say, “it must be right.” The liberal fixation on process over product, with form over content, grips us tightly in our very bowels. As Engels lamented, “these people imagine they can change a thing by changing its name…”
But we are (or must be) strict materialists. We do not take the world as we wish it to be, nor as we are told it is. We analyze the real conditions and act accordingly. A Communist Party that has liquidated Marxism-Leninism, that has objectively abandoned the class struggle, that is in real terms nothing more than a caucus of Democrats or, even worse, simply a carbuncle on the ass of the Democratic Party, is not a Communist party. It is not an agent of revolution. It is objectively a pillar of reaction. So what are we to do?
Firstly, you must come to understand and then accept the objective situation of your party. Over the past fifty years, the trajectory of the CPUSA has been circular, treading water and rehearsing the same pitiful play. By engaging in a holding pattern of tailing the Democrats to complete liquidation, followed by “reclamation,” only to tail the Democrats again, the CPUSA has deployed the exact same tactic on its own members that the Democratic Party has on the people of the U.S. Every party convention, like every U.S. election, is the most critical. Every cycle is the one in which the revolutionary-progressive forces stand on the verge of victory or absolute defeat. This cycle keeps otherwise revolutionary comrades constantly bailing out the CPUSA boat, focused on the CPUSA’s internal struggle (which never amounts to real change) rather than advancing the subjective conditions of the revolution. The objective conditions of revolution have been present for generations. We must reject the treadmill of the CPUSA conventions, the show of liquidation, the false outrage of “fighting fascism” and stop wasting time.
Keep in mind that the longer you remain in the CPUSA, the longer you give material aid to our class-enemies. You must steel yourself to disrupt long-established relationships, to lose old friends, and to break out of comfortable habits. You must be prepared to let go of the “progress” you’ve perceived the party making. This is perhaps the most difficult psychological hurdle to clear, but you must reject the sunk-cost fallacy that is telling you to keep pushing the CPUSA. Sisyphus was imprisoned by the gods in the ceaseless cycle of pushing the boulder up the mountain; in the CPUSA, the members are cursed by the revisionist leadership with constantly striving to purify the party. Unlike Sisyphus, you can leave. The boulder will never reach the top and you will never purge the party. The system in which you operate doesn’t allow it, it’s designed to keep you working on the boulder instead of on revolution. Set aside the boulder and the mountain both — they are illusions designed to occupy your time. The revolution has nothing to do with them!
Once you have managed to jettison the canard of party loyalty (parties earn loyalty through revolutionary action, they don’t deserve loyalty because they call themselves by a Marxist name), then you can really get down to work.
You must assess whether you know anyone who might also, either already or with a little help, see through the gauzy veil woven by the party’s bourgeois ideologists. You should begin to discuss the real qualities of the organization. Don’t take my word for it: examine the actual, verifiable record of the party’s behavior. Discount your personal feelings and attachments. Almost accomplishing a revolutionary purge of the leadership, almost adopting a correct line, etc., counts for nothing. The very same party ideologists could tell you with a straight face, and not even be lying, that the party has been almost revolutionary for 100 years. The resistance of leadership, however, grows exponentially as that “almost” nears the possible. Don’t give credit to feelings of near-victory; instead, examine the tools the party rearguard keeps in reserve to defeat you. Have they used them all? (They have not). In the final instance, would they simply expel you? (They would!)
Begin to record contact information. Although the party tries to prevent local groups from communicating (another worrisome practice designed to splinter dissent and isolate revolutionaries), use the channels you have available to reach out. Make contacts with other revolutionists. Cherish them, and keep them secret. Communicate often and plan together.
Prepare entire clubs to depart the party with you. Do not cede the organizational power you’ve built up to central leadership. Deny them the organizations you’ve built. Begin withholding dues and reports from the central party. Use every procedural trick you have. If anyone complains, remind them it’s not only what Lenin would have done, it’s what Lenin did. When you have secured as much as you can, enact a formal split. Vote as a club to break with the central party. They can’t stop you! Only then will you be free to pursue development and actual revolutionary strategy. And once you have made that terrifying leap, reach out. We’ll see you in 2025.
