Statement from the Editors: This is a republication of a letter by Comrade Khadija. The original can be found here. Comrade Khadija ends by expressing a wish to find a serious organization engaged in the vital work of guiding revolution, and this sentiment isn’t wrong, but we encourage her and all sharing her sentiment to reorient this desire from finding to founding the organization of organizations that will become our revolutionary Party.
It is with a heavy heart that I have to announce that I am left with no other choice than to leave the party. I don’t want to leave, however, ideologically, I feel completely disconnected; not to mention, altogether demoralized, and hurt.
In this letter, comrades, I’m going to say some strong things. As a member of the N.Y.-District Committee, the Brooklyn Club Executive Committee, former, N.Y. State Executive Committee, and former NY-YCL Co-chair, I ask that you give some, at least, miniscule space for my critiques that are, in truth, deeply caring. Even though they may sound strong, they are not bad faith (I have been in the trenches in this party, please do not insult me and accuse me of being bad faith.) Also, please note and understand, my analysis is on tendencies and not people themselves.
As someone who has given their labor to the party, emotional and physical, for 3½ years all while my daughter and I suffer the vice grips of housing precarity, I have given every morsel of myself, and now, I must walk away from what I feel, I’m so sorry comrades, is an organization, it pains me to say, is blatantly, glaringly, uncommitted to, at the bare minimum, engaging in new and reinvigorating theoretical and praxical organizing efforts; and seems to have a vested objective in keeping the party ossified and painfully static.
Briefly delving into an historical interrogation of the party, rightist tendencies have been an unbroken thrum in the party since, most say, the Browderite dissolution of the party. However, from my analysis, this thrum, though embryonic at the time, began to extend at least five years prior to Browder’s open turn to the right. We must acknowledge, also, what the brutal Mccarthyist attacks have done to the party and the lasting impression it has had on its trajectory. Nevertheless, the party’s rightist shift happened before the Mccarthyist hunt.
In essence, we’re still, in this present juncture, confined, no, mummified in, the Communist Political Association. Further, it is these rightist throughlines that Haywood himself spoke to and was subsequently ostracized for speaking against until he was formally pushed out.
I have, myself, witnessed these rightist throughlines — as many in the N.Y. district have, in fact. In the 3½ years that I have been a committed cadre member, I have always felt somewhat ideologically disparate from the party. However, I continued to try to organize with the party, hoping that if I remained a committed, good faith comrade and rooted myself in theoretical study and praxical work, the party would see the work other comrades and myself were doing and they would begin to hear us out a little bit more; and we could, therefore, at least, begin to engage in genuine line struggle. I was wrong and this was an idealist mistake.
The chairs of the Brooklyn Club really tried to encourage our efforts and uplift our work in and outside of every monthly meeting. I have to say, had it not been for my club chairs and comrades in the Brooklyn Club, I would have left sooner; and maybe my decision to leave may disappoint them and maybe some others. I’m very sorry, but I truly can’t continue to stay and give my labor to an organization that actively seems to be shunning militant Black Communists who refuse to engage in pacifist ideations.
I was hoping that at our 32nd convention things would begin to shift, incrementally, towards a more militant line with more input from the delegates there who opposed “being mere appendages” to the democratic party (Marx and Engles March 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League). Again, I was wrong.
However, even before the convention, I began to feel fractured from the party. Last August I wrote a commemorative piece on Dr. Mutulu Shakur, uplifting him as a militant and powerful revolutionary who contributed to the movement on many levels including with his world renowned acupuncture. I was told by Eric B. that this piece was not appropriate for People’s World because it celebrated Mutulu’s violent past, and that this was not appropriate for the mass readership of P.W. or helping to organize them. I later reached out to Eric and told him that my piece on Dr. Mutulu never even mentioned violence, it only uplifts his acupuncture work (because I knew if I mentioned anything about his committed militancy, it would be an issue.) He then admitted he never read my article, but that it can’t be published in P.W. Similarly, I wrote an article for the preconvention discussion entitled, Western Marxism: The Crisis of Words Over Deeds, I was also told this would not be published on similar murky justifications. My other preconvention contribution on Imperial Feminism was, albeit reluctantly, published after I told Eric I was not going to change or water down my thesis.
The issue with the Mutulu piece happened a year ago, but I still stayed. I didn’t want to just leave. I wanted to stay and struggle for the correct line alongside my comrades. And, there were some strides made in terms of hosting some events and talks with people, but nothing structurally significant.
The convention left me confused and disappointed. All of the people who’ve been in leadership on the National Committee for the last 20 or so years, or more, were, again, nominated and voted in, with the exception of a few new additions all of whom are in alignment with Resolution 5. Facsimiles of the same sterile ideas. Not one voice of opposition was nominated. Many comrades raised their concerns and nominated other comrades in the opposition to be in the N.C. I also nominated myself from the floor… of course I was told I didn’t get enough votes. Voices of opposition and those in favor should have been counted aloud… they weren’t. A comrade stood up and called for a secret ballot, he was told he was out of order. The resolution was deferred to the incoming N.C., who, of course, passed it, but to provide a patina of democracy, asked people to submit “language suggestions.”
The party’s pivot to fighting against fascism (though this is critical) has severely truncated its socialist imaginary. This uncritical lack of examination of all the moving components of fascism and its chameleonic character; the way it morphs and transmogrifies itself in mode, but never in kind within the structures of capital, has not seriously been taken into account. Instead we are forced to accept haggard and warn ideas about the right danger; which is very real, we can’t deny this fact, but this undialectical approach disavows the strong liberal anchor that fastens the menacing drum of the far-right. Our party’s analysis, therefore, does not thoroughly account for dense and rooted liberal collaboration with fascism.
To heave against any ultra-left confusion, I’m not saying that Trump and the brigadier lynch terrorists are not an imminent danger to liberal democracy (which we ourselves have to interrogate; and which also was birthed from the mutilated blood of African and Indigenous people), I’m saying to place heavy emphasis on the chauvinist sadism of one party when both have a proven history of shared complicity; telling people to vote against MAGA-right forces while not placing brute class struggle as the spearhead and revolution as the ultimate aim, is duplicitous as best, willfully collaborationist at worst.
Again, so I’m not branded an ultra (although I know I am by some in the party), I am, to be explicitly clear, not denouncing the electoral struggle — the Trumpian white terroristic march is not to be minimized as there is a difference between a fascist movement and a fascist state — I’m merely stating that to marshal that over and against militant class struggle amputates any kind of socialist imagination in the collective consciousness and locks the masses of frustrated people into the imperial capitalist two-party dictatorship. Moreover, if all we’re ever instructed to do is vote against fascism using the broken vehicle of the Democratic Party, the possibility of a Socialist world is violently hijacked from us. And, instead of liberation being at the fore, it is peripheried and bartered in the name of what’s “practical.” Furthermore, practicality is employed to cut down revolutionary understanding and movement.
As a militant Black woman Communist, I feel completely alienated from my party. However, it seems to be a clear pattern in the party to shun Black Communists who hedge against Kautskyite pacifist utopias. Again, let me be clear, peace is our ultimate aim and we should pursue it wherever possible, but in order to attain that peace, a just peace not seeped in delusions about the outright brutality of the capitalist class, we must engage in class struggle with brute force. The most idealist and dangerous thing we can do is to think the ruling class and its repressive state apparatuses are going to let us just have a peaceful road to socialism when history has shown they will wholesale annihilate anything that even attempts to threaten their global nexus of blood and profit. Allende learned the hard way.
This is what happens when you trade placing the concerns of the most oppressed and allowing Black and brown people — who bear the brunt of capitalist degradation — to be at the helm of the movement, for a gutted and nebulous anti-racism campaign that doesn’t offer a root to stem analysis of the capitalist problem.
There will be many more Black people who will pass through this organization and feel this daggering sense of alienation. Many more will be left feeling hollow and demoralized. A troubling pattern I experienced was the way Black comrades with more palatable, integrationist views integrationist not in the sense of an international cohesion around our shared aims of liberation, but integrationist in the sense of bartering liberation from capitalist asphyxiation for a rainbow coalition fantasy land that pushes revolutionary class struggle to blurred and forgotten margins — were instrumentalized over and against more militant comrades who do not hold pacifist, integrationist views. Militant comrades were scolded and infantilized for our views and told “Black people fought for the right to vote” in order to kill discussion around the party mostly centering the electoral struggle. Black people, may I add, fought for the right to be free, not to be the gutted appendages for a cadaverous Democratic Party.
At our convention, well meaning white comrades were called racist by a white lady for challenging the Black comrade who believed it was important to adhere to and uplift the fight against fascism line and for Black people in this country to continue to use the Democratic Party, no matter how severely compromised, as a vector for change because, ” Black people built this country and fought for the right to vote.” The white comrades were chastised and called racist and were called upon to fight against their white supremacist behavior.
It is deeply insidious and manipulative to weaponize a person’s perceived Blackness and the fact that Black people were locked out of the right to vote in order to keep them psychically butchered and cleaving for life inside the Democratic Party; a party that has preyed on the socioeconomic strangulation of the Black community — a strangulation they themselves keep manufacturing so they can play good cop, bad cop with the lynch terrorists in the Republican party and obscure their role — for decades. What twisted manipulation it is to call white comrades racists for rightly countering the rhetoric of the Black comrade who employed the heavy adversity Black people face in this country sociopolitically in order to keep them from wielding their growing class awareness to struggle against the Democratic Party, and the two-party despotism as a whole, which seeks to maim their developing class consciousness and keep them enslaved to the Democratic Party, which is parasitically sustaining itself off the blood and labor of Black folk.
These events, as well as the more general streams of zionism that ebb through the party, made me really uncomfortable, and I did not know how to navigate these things with some of the Black and BIPOC comrades in the party who I felt sometimes took on the role of overseer to the more militant, non-pacifist comrades. Furthermore, you can’t uphold the legacy of Claudia Jones solely in words when you have a militant Black Trinidadian woman comrade who is left alienated and confused in the party. You must engage in revolutionary deeds, not barren words.
On another point, I’m not exactly sure what happened with the Austin Club, but from reading their statement and assessing conditions in the party, the dissolving of their club, in my opinion, was unfounded. It was purported that comrades in the Austin Club were inspired by and trying to incorporate in their practical work some revolutionary Black nationalist elements of organizing. Some members, from my interactions with them, have expressed disrespect and demeaning attitudes towards the Black Panther Party that they try to drape in the worn garb of “critique.” Interestingly, though, the same people who say they’re merely critiquing the Black Panther Party don’t seem to give the same grace and energy for critiques of our party. This is an outright misrepresentation and vulgarization of critique.
Reactionary wrong ideas have not only been allowed to develop in the party, they have been cultivated, and in some cases, encouraged to a certain extent. Making fun of the Austin Club because they draw on the revolutionary Black nationalism (in stark contrast to bourgeois nationalism) of the Black Panther Party is evidence of the deep throughlines of Anti-Blackness that courses through the party like a virulent disease that has been allowed to metastasize.
While there are segments of the Western left that do overly rhapsodize only the armed tactics of the Black Panther Party — and we should acutely examine this — there is a pattern by some within the party, and the broader Western left in general, to cloak their disdain for militant Black Communists in “critique.” Black leftists who denounce the armed struggle often use “Black militant” as a paternalizing slur; and palatable leftists are used to scoldingly cut down non-pacifist Black Marxists.
The revolutionary nationalism of Harry Haywood, Thomas Sankara, Chris Hani, Steve Biko, Selma Francois, Maurice Bishop, Kwame Nkrumah, Lee Nelson Perry, Robert F Williams, Sengor Lamine, Queen Mother Moore, Cyril Briggs, Nat Turner, Denmark Vessey, Walter Rodney, Yusuf Salman Yusuf, Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin, Mehdi Ben Barka, Sékou Touré, Kwame Ture, Elain Brown, Huey, etc. all serve to strengthen and deepen the analysis of the world socialist movement. If comrades were given the proper theoretical guidance by the party, they’d know these very basic and obvious things are a part of the dialectical course of history.
If the very framework from which we work is disjointed and muddled, everything which is built upon that will, henceforth, reflect that disjointedness. There doesn’t seem to be any real cohesion in the party in terms of practical work. Most of us, speaking for the N.Y. district, do work outside the party in other organizations; which is fine, but there doesn’t seem to be a weft connecting that external work with the party. Everything feels so disparate.
Criticism/self-criticism, which is the very life-force of the Communist movement, is not practiced in our party. True and rigorous critique is altogether discarded in the name of accoladeism and self-aggrandizing empty statements that do nothing but atrophy the growing class awareness in comrades. Without the veins and arteries of criticism/self-criticism, we come to celebrate and uphold reformist ideas; demeaning and attacking anyone who dares challenge the liberal vague of delusion. To uphold destructive ideas using sporadic interjections of Marxists phraseology is to knife away at the global Communist movement.
On the point of ultra-leftism; one can not deny that this tendency of frenzied petit bourgeois vicissitudes between Bakuninst terrorism and anti-revolutionary mania is a danger to building the global Communist movement. The party, contrastingly, does not have a serious ultra-left problem, it has a thoroughgoing right-deviationist problem. With all the scattered ideologies in the party ranging from elements of Trotskyism to the dominant social democratic trend, one can see how rightist ideas were allowed to seat themselves in the party and ossify it.
Also, the term ultra-left itself is not a slur. It is not something you uncritically hurl at someone as an insult. It is an unblunted analysis of a tendency within Marxism. Allow me to draw your attention to one of the footnotes in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. In the text, Lenin goes into an explanation of the issue facing the Italian Communist Party with Bordiga and Turati. He goes on to affirm that Bordiga is correct in pointing out the destructive opportunism of Turati in him recognizing the dictatorship of the proletariat in words, but not in deeds, remaining seeped in parliamentarism. Lenin goes on to further castigate Turati stating, “Such a mistaken, inconsistent, or spineless attitude towards the opportunist parliamentarians gives rise to ‘Left-wing’ communism, on the one hand, and to a certain extent justifies its existence, on the other.” Rightist tendencies, in essence, births ultra-left confusions and imparts legitimacy to it.
In closing, when our party shuts down valid disagreement; when it seeks to quell voices of legitimate frustrations around the party line, it manufactures dissenting factions. We can not stay mute while the party traffics in economies of right deviationism. Confliction points will rise the more one seeks to suppress disagreement; that is the natural dialectic of political life. Party leadership must take responsibility for all the recent factions and splintering they’ve helped to create. Factions are also a natural outgrowth of being in a party. It is not necessarily bad, depending on varying context, of course, for factions to form: dissenting opinions inform and birth new synthesis. Party leadership also must grasp the stark difference between harmful factionalism and actual line struggle. The point of a party is to struggle for correct ideas that aid in hedging forth revolutionary movements, and when you cut off line-struggle, you asphyxiate the lifeline of Marxism-Leninism.
I can only hope that you can give a bit of space for my analysis and feelings. I can never hate the party. When my father died this past spring, the party was there; and they made sure comrades who, like myself, couldn’t afford to go to Chicago for the convention made it there. I have learned so much, and in my heart, I can never hold antipathy for the party, despite my well intentioned critiques maybe being misinterpreted. There are also many good comrades in the party, but I have to be honest, I often wonder what this even means when comrades, though they have good intentions, do not do enough to stand against the rightist ossification of the party.
I am not saying these things as some sort of learned person; I hold no fancy degrees, no degrees period, even. I’m saying this as someone — disenfranchised and gutted — who worked in a beauty supply in Brownsville Brooklyn for 16 years; I’m saying this as someone who was a young mother in high-school, as someone who is continually fighting housing dispossession, who came to the party for guidance, but many times felt shunned and lost.
I will, with everything I have in me, continue to organize around tenants rights, Black liberation, anti-imperialism, Palestinian liberation, Black womanhood, cultural work, unifying Korea, etc. as I did when I first joined the party 3½ years ago. As a steeled Marxist-Leninist, I believe in the party as the primary vector to help guide revolutionary change, and I’m hoping to very soon find one committed to this most vital effort.
In liberation,
Khadija.
