The blurb for this workshop was:

Join us for a teach-in on how to build out winning campaigns to change policy and laws through grassroots power. At this educational event, we will discuss how to go from activism and advocacy to organizing and running campaigns to win lasting change.

In clear terms, this blurb outlined CPUSA’s tactic. It was a baby’s first workshop for those who wanted to exercise their bourgeois-democratic rights of voting, make petitions, and have meetings with elected officials. It promised to teach the most basic skills of doing so, all within a liberal framework of the free competition of ideas. In that sense the ideological content matched the label on the box.

But why would the ostensible Communist Party be engaging in this type of activity of liberal miseducation? And why host it at a white church (a tellingly white church) instead of at one of the numerous Black churches in segregated Peoria?

Because essentially the CPUSA has no interest in uniting the revolutionary masses of the US Empire. CPUSA has all the interest in the world, however, in reproducing its membership of radical-liberals, and securing the greater white networks of support that make that reproduction of the activist-organizer caste possible. In no stage of this process does the leadership have an interest in actually making revolution. Whether this idea of hosting a liberal workshop was stochastically generated by Peoria CPUSA’s own reformist-minded members, or if a directive came down from a higher body, it makes no difference in so far as the results are the same: a counter-revolutionary tactic for a counter-revolutionary strategy wielded by a revisionist and settler-chauvinist organization whose sole purpose is to reproduce the conditions of its own existence.

Political Miseducation

The workshop revealed a lot about the class character of the attendees and of the presenter. With the exception of the author, all attendees were white, with a few visibly queer people, split between the younger cohort (young adults) and the older (around or past retirement age). During introductions, the main concern of the attendees was the fear of the general crisis of American imperialism and the resulting blowback on the domestic front. The desire for some people was a return to “normality” and for others an ascent to a better society. Primarily, the attendees were motivated by subjective factors (moral outrage, political opposition) rather than objective necessity.¹

H. began by highlighting Black Lives Matter and the reform to eliminate money bond as a success of the kind that he intended to convince attendees was primary for political change.² This is of course in line with CPUSA’s social-democratic political outlook — revolution is impossible (or ill-advised), so socialism must be won piecemeal by political struggle encapsulated within the liberal law-and-order rules. Mass mobilization is a tool for these ends.

Our presenter further defined organization as a disciplined craft, as an exercise of collective power. Whose collective power? The power of the “99%” against the “1%”? The Poor vs. The Rich? The power of the white liberal against the white conservative? Why this emphasis on discipline, which is obviously needed for any type of sustained human activity, but no emphasis on scientific class analysis? One of the handouts (a reproduction of a copyrighted worksheet sold by a liberal career-NGO professional) helpfully defined a variety of “roles” one might play within a liberal campaign, proposing that each liberal organizer assort themselves based on one’s own personal talents and passions. Of course, there is no room to discuss the actual efficacy of a “diversity of tactics,” but instead different responsibilities are presented like roleplaying classes that each individual selects like players at a game table. This embodies the voluntaristic, amateur nature of CPUSA and of liberal organizations in general: organizing is something that people do as a hobby because they feel morally compelled to, not because otherwise they will not survive their conditions. When there is no imperative for survival, when the margins for mistakes are large enough, there is no selective pressure to correct mistakes at all.

Our presenter stated that the goal of organizing is to win real material benefits for “the people” (defined in abstract, totally absent of class and other internal contradictions). But what is a victory? A bill reluctantly passed in the Illinois State House of Representatives? Tiny reliefs in funding packages? Again, one only has to look at CPUSA’s line to understand why they push this dead-end incrementalism, which in reality means temporary concessions against a systemic onslaught of deprivation and predation by the bourgeois class, doled out primarily to the white-settler population. Of course, for the settler labor aristocracy and settler petit-bourgeois, it makes sense to struggle within the settler-colonialist system. But for the precariat and the colonized, much less so.

Our presenter claimed that the large, systemic problems of society must be sliced into smaller, winnable issues; that by dealing with smaller issues, one can defeat large problems because society-wide problems are “too big” to conquer outright. He took the example that an attendee volunteered of systemic ableism, cut it down into a problem of inaccessibility for a historic building, then proposed that the organizing solution would be a campaign for funding to renovate the building or zoning law changes to require accessibility. This is the misshapen dialectic of the general and the particular, the abstract and concrete in action utilized for liberal metaphysical practice.

Two strategic interpretations arise from this tactic, neither which are revolutionary models: either the system is “too big,” invincible, and therefore one must carve out spaces of exception via reforms, or by fighting for reforms one can finally defeat enough enemies to get to the Final Boss and then win against the “too big” problem of society. The first reaches the radical zenith of running off into the woods to start a settler-commune in disastrous retreat; the second proposes that Big Ableism (and all of its fellow distinct -isms) lives in a specific office in the White House and must be defeated there. In any case, this model of slicing oppression like a sausage fails to understand that Big Ableism does not exist as a concrete phenomenon, but rather ableism saturates social dynamics in general, as part of the class struggle as a whole. This too repeats for other “axes of oppression” which are always already part of the class struggle.

H.’s primary metaphor utilized for this workshop, to get from an undesirable present state to a desirable future state, is the bridge. To build a bridge requires knowing a source, destination, the conditions of traversal, the resources at hand, and whatever else. In this metaphor, progress is cumulative and linear (though not necessarily sequential; one can build parallel bridges). Each bridge must be constructed via a campaign to unite the “base” through interpersonal relationships, common agreement on sausage-slice issues, and strategic agreement. Of course, the idea of coalition-building and drawing in a number of organizations (of what class character? Again, unanswered) becomes primary here, with the potential base sorted into fixed tiers of “unconnected,” “supportive,” “activist,” and “core” categories (vanguardism with the serial numbers filed off). The same old canard of “diversity of tactics” is repeated. Experimentation is important, yes, but if political struggle is to have a scientific component to it, useless tactics must be discarded and successful ones must be replicated. One cannot permit themselves or others to repeat harmful tactics if they want to win.

Next, our presenter instructed us that communication for a campaign must be done like any other electoral campaign, with pitches and volunteers and donations, etc. What is interesting is that throughout the presentation, the enemy is unspoken, and only given concrete form as targets of isolated issues, never to the level of implicating the whole system of liberal democracy and its underlying imperialism and settler-colonialism unto itself. This can be partially chalked up to the requirement of a “non-partisan” workshop, but the silence on the general class struggle in society is deafening. Again, for a so-called Communist Party workshop!

The final apparatus that our presenter wished to impart on the class was the concept of a campaign lifecycle (a variant of this model) and self-critique. Not “self-critique” in those words obviously, and certainly not to critique individuals for the purposes of ideological development or to escape the entire paradigm of liberal organizing itself, but rather as a checklist to improve upon liberal organizing and to propagate electoralism into the infinite future. The phases of the campaign lifecycle may well be effective in guiding our liberal reformists in spinning their wheels into the mud as each successful campaign is rolled back by their fascist brethren. As for Communists, we desire real advancement.

Before the Q&A section, our presenter advised us on further reading: March by John Lewis (who is the archetypical representative of nonviolence); No Shortcuts by Jane Mallery (who proposes the united front of social progressives and settler-unions); Let This Radicalize You (towards left-populism and left-eclecticism) by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba; and Roots to Power by Lee Staples (who spouts even more left-populism and left-eclecticism)… Nevermind any scientific socialist texts!

During the Q&A itself, our presenter fielded a question about environmentalism and possible stakeholders adequately. Then one of the attendees asked how unions, if they were forbidden to strike by law, could have any actual leverage on politics. This was dismissed as an “out of scope” issue. Yours truly asked about examples of past successful campaigns and current ongoing ones by CPUSA, but was told that this was a “non-partisan” workshop and to speak with the presenter after class.

All in all, what a strangely liberal class for the Communist Party to put on! That is, if you take the Communist Party at their word, which we shall not, and examine only the workshop and not the situation in which it was placed, which we shall do now.

Class and Nationality in Peoria

Originating from the onset of European colonization, the settler-colonial political economy of the US Empire generates and maintains a specific settler consciousness for the white population: a sense of liberal humanitarianism and universalism, of free speech and debate of ideas, and of the civilizational battle for democracy against undemocratic (“barbaric”) forces, be they Native American, the descendants of enslaved Africans, Palestinian, or Russian. In the practical sense, this means that white people and their thoughts are quite literally valued more than the colonized peoples and their thoughts, in both the economic sense and political-economic sense. Settlerism, whose social basis (those who are racialized as “white”) has increased over time and which also admits individual nonwhites on a case-by-case basis, creates the bourgeoisfied proletariat (labor aristocracy) and petit-bourgeois,³ whose mobilization is much more politically impactful and legitimated by the extant bourgeois-democratic order than the mobilization of the colonized proletariat and the precarious white proletariat.

Peoria, due to historic redlining and ongoing national oppression, still remains one of the most segregated cities in the Midwest. The Joint Commission on Racial Justice and Equity of Peoria County maintains its own set of arcGIS map data and comprehensive tables for the purposes of assessing national oppression, as well as comprehensive statistics assessing the prospects of different racial groups in Peoria County. Informal apartheid is reflected in the income gap between white and Black households (and other statistics related to pollution, employment, etc.), and in the political organizations that populate the area. Further complicating this picture is the high population of bourgeoisified proletariat and petit-bourgeois in the city of Peoria, such that in 2024 a combined 33.7%of the workforce earned more than $100,000 per year and 66.0% earned more than $90,000 per year⁴ with an average home ownership rate of 57.5%; these are all statistics inflected by national oppression, at the county-level the average white household earns $63,100 annually compared to $30,400 for Black households.⁵

Owing to this demographic composition, Peoria is politically quiet with a handful of left-liberal organizations compared to a college town such as Bloomington-Normal or Urbana-Champaign. CPUSA, the Democrat Party’s 50501, the Green Party, as well as local single-issue formations and the recent addition of the crypto-Trotskyite Workers Strike Back organization occupy organizing spaces. All these exist with heavy overlap, sorted more into personality-based cliques and aesthetically sectarian friend groups than representing any substantial political disagreement. So are the activist NGOs in Peoria present: including but not limited to Peoria Proud, ACLU, League of Women Voters, and, of course, the Unitarian Universalists (UUes).

These organizations are mostly white organizations, in so far as they are dominated by white people, hold settler consciousness, and a faith in Law and Order. Black organizations such as NAACP, Southside Community United for Change, and the Black churches are also imbued with settler consciousness in so far as the political economy of the NGO as an organizational form plus the concessions of the settler state towards token political representation naturally produces such consciousness, and in so far as religion acts counter to revolutionary consciousness. Yet at the same time, this exists in tension with the national oppression experienced by Black Peoria and is reflected in their practice. SCUC in particular, a conglomeration of neighborhood associations (a liberal version of neighborhood councils) in the deprived Southside area, acts like an informal networking space between those particular organized nationally-oppressed reformists and Black (and other nonwhite) politicians. What distinguishes white from Black organizations is which community they recruit from and mobilize; Black organizations generally have less margin for error and less surplus labor to use up and as such are primarily focused on poverty (and the effects of poverty such as over-policing and incarceration) and intra-community issues, while white organizations have much more room for mistakes to be made and play in the field of “high” politics. Hence the segregation in Peoria remains despite everyone’s liberal best wishes that this ought not be the case.

To examine one white organization of interest: the UUes are a sociopolitical node for a specific kind of white progressive that has left even ostensibly progressive wings of Christianity but has not yet broken with religion entirely. Instead of Christian charity (paternalism), the UUes market themselves as a sort of Social Justice Church, which in practice means charity (paternalism) and reform campaigns. This mostly manifests in the form of encouraging their members to organize in settler-dominated reformist organizations, which perfectly lines up with the content of the workshop. In any case, like with other white churches, when attending their services one does not expect to see a lot of melanin. This makeup was reflected in the actual attendance of the workshop as mentioned before.

Compared to other small churches, which tend to be caught in a kind of money-sink death spiral due to a lack of attendees and therefore tithes, the UUes appear to be doing well. They run regular events for fundraising, they keep up charitable programs, they have a decent proportion of children to adults in the congregation. They are ideological left-liberals dedicated to land acknowledgements and statements of inclusivity and pulling isolated quotes from a variety of faiths in the pursuit of a homogenized liberal-universal spirituality. Committed to participating in protest theatre and nonviolent resistance, in agreement with the hegemonic imperialist logic of civilized democracies and uncivilized autocracies, in the end, they serve as release valves for white guilt and to redirect anti-hegemonic questioning into a reinforcement of the very same liberal political economy that has brought the world to this general crisis of imperialism. None of this is out of the ordinary for settler consciousness.

Revisionist Reproduction

So why would an ostensibly Communist organization host a reformist (liberal at worse, social democratic at best) workshop on organizing at the UUes, implicitly targeting that congregation for attendees? What value does Peoria CPUSA get out of trying to recruit these particular people into the habit of creating and leading reformist campaigns, and of eventually recruiting morally-outraged left-liberal bourgeoisfied proletariat and petit-bourgeois into their ranks?

Very simply put, Peoria CPUSA, whose founding members were originally the Peoria DSA chapter (DSA being another left-settler electoralist organization), is made of the same stuff as the UUes are, has an understanding with them and with the other liberal progressive organizations, and represents the CPUSA as a whole. Worse than any honest liberal formation which at least does not lie to your face about what it is, CPUSA proclaims itself to be Communist while eviscerating Communism of its revolutionary content. They strip all which distinguished Communism from the ideology of the social-imperialists of the Second Internationale — the class-collaborationists who welcomed the advance of fascism in their own countries against Communists, who sought to maintain the grip of their imperialist countries on their colonies within and without, whose mass base was the parasitic labor aristocracy they defended zealously. Worse than any honest social-democratic party which would at least proclaim itself proudly to follow this hoary tradition, the CPUSA offers the illusion of changing course through hypothetical line struggle, which would be productive in any well-formed Communist organization.

But the hypothetical remains unfulfilled. In reality, CPUSA is an anti-democratic organization which ruthlessly purges any genuinely revolutionary tendencies, such as in the case of the 2024 National Convention and the liquidation of the Austin chapter thereafter in order to maintain a reformist theory and practice. In their theory, the revolution must be carried out within the framework of bourgeois democracy, and the current crisis of imperialism must be soothed by the united front of labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois settlers to win more pieces of the imperial super-profit loot, and to win accommodations and assimilation for the nationally-oppressed and gender-oppressed into imperialism.⁶ In their practice, it means forever delaying and sabotaging revolution in favor of reforms, suppressing genuinely revolutionary impulses from their own membership, and in general shamelessly fulfilling a counter-revolutionary purpose on behalf of the bourgeois.

Through this investigation, we understand what Peoria CPUSA is doing as a reflection of their national organization and as a reflection of their environment. Their goal is to reproduce their own membership drawn from the “middle class,” to gain enough influence to successfully claim piecemeal reforms locally, and to morally justify to themselves that they are building revolution in the meantime. Once we know these facts, we understand that the central conception of building “collective power” is not meant to be taken in the abstract. It means, concretely, building the collective power of the labor-aristocratic and petit-bourgeois settler left, of re-legitimizing bourgeois democracy by winning small concessions as to stave off the desire for the whole pot of revolution in all of its total destruction of old social relations and forms and therefore the total destruction of US imperialism and settler-colonialism. We understand why CPUSA as a whole supports the Democrats: because they are ideological allies and dedicated partners who benefit from the arrangement — not because the left-bourgeois can be understood in any way to be the “lesser evil.”

1. For the queer white people, this factor is more wiggly in so far as the current bourgeois regime embarks on an exterminationist campaign against them; but, of course, whiteness gives one more room in the first place. ︎
2. Every year since the passing of the SAFE-T Act, held up as the golden standard of reform-oriented organizing by this club of CPUSA, there has been a concerted effort to gut and reverse the reform. ︎
3. Admittedly, the categories are blurry as labor aristocrats are often specialized laborers with the capital to become petit-bourgeois; by the same token petit-bourgeois often obtain labor aristocratic jobs when the going gets tough; this is a fact captured in the liberal “middle class” term. ︎
4. These figures was reached by grouping together all workers in an industry earning over $90k and $100k respectively, based off of their median yearly wages, dividing that by the total number of people in the workforce, then multiplied by 100 to get the percentages. ︎
5. Hispanic Peorians experience their own dire statistics; the lumping of national groups together however makes this data less useful overall in discussions of national oppression. Hispanic Peoria does have its own set of grassroots organizations, churches, and charities which serve the community. A discussion of the prospects of Hispanic, especially immigrant-based, organizations is out of scope of this article. But generally the same contradiction between the legal reformist framework and the realities of class and national oppression are present as in Black organizations. ︎
6. Gender oppression referring to both women’s oppression and the oppression of queer and trans people. ︎