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:

1. What is fascism?
2. 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.

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.