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. ︎

DO NOT CHEER FOR GENOCIDE!

Stand with Palestine and all international proletarians!

REJECT CPUSA’s 2025 “Amistad Award” for the imperialist trade unionists of Pratt and Whitney.

Pratt and Whitney’s “strong union contract” means that the workers building F-35 engines will have continuous wage increases. The contract protects Connecticut’s long-held role in finance capital’s worldwide imperialist death machine.

The only correct role for a weapons-manufacturer worker is to organize their fellow workers against the imperialist federal contracts of their employer. NOT to organize for better wages and benefits for all eternity.

This means working OUTSIDE AND AGAINST the captured Business Unions like International Association of Machinists Local 700.

CPUSA Comrades who speak in good faith are silenced and blacklisted from their local clubs without any hearing or struggle.

If you feel that your club is spinning its wheels, you are not alone.

Reject the revisionist rot in CPUSA. Reject their embarrassing award for the Pratt and Whitney Local.

Those comrades with anti-imperialist hearts and minds should band together to ditch the CPUSA’s corrupt central leadership. Democratic Centralism and inter-org criticism are the lifeblood of our movement. CPUSA abandoned these fundamentals decades ago.

Tendrils of revisionism, opportunism, and tailism (ROT) clench onto the convention documents, and seek to drag the party back into its days of bleakest reaction. The entrenched leadership clique, represented by Sims and Cambron, but avatared in the grinning form of John Bachtell, seeks only to window-dress the funneling of dues to People’s World and of hard-won radical energy back to the Democratic Party. Many of the 23 convention resolutions have openly reformist aims that content themselves with moldy scraps leftover from the bourgeois government’s table. A Communist Party must act like a Communist Party, not sleepwalk alongside sleepy Joe, shaking hands with ghosts when there’s a real world to seize. As the legendary Irish socialist James Connolly declared, “For our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth.”

What does it mean to want the Earth? It means the end of imperialism, the end of the genocides in Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, and everywhere across the globe. It means decolonization of settler states such as the U.S. and Canada, and full self-determination for all peoples. It means the end of foreign domination over Haiti, and an end to the American enforced isolation of Cuba and the DPRK. It demands the depatriarchalization of society, the emancipation and structural liberation of women, LGBT+ persons, and gender nonconforming persons, and the abolition of disability as an oppressive social structure. Possibly most urgent, it demands the radical reorientation of all of society to prepare for and combat the impending climate apocalypse.

It may be true that many of these points appear within the CPUSA’s convention resolutions, but they are malformed and, like produce that has been chemically treated to not sprout, they are seedless. They cannot, in their current form, revolutionize the CPUSA into the party it needs to be, or its Communists into the revolutionaries they need to be to build the world that we demand. They have remembered to be moderate, but have forgotten to demand the earth! Each resolution is guilefully crafted to speak the words of Communism, and to enact the essence of capitulation.

For instance, in its Palestine resolution, there is implicit recognition of the zionist entity contained in its phrase “just peace in Israel/Palestine” and the comment concerning “supporting the work of fraternal parties in Palestine and Israel.” This recognition negates the possibility for peace. The only thing a so-called Communist party in ”israel” could adequately work towards would be the annihilation of its own state — this U.S. imperialist outpost — but we can see from their proposed, “two states for two Peoples,” that this is not their goal. Thus, the CPUSA hamstrings its own potential so long as a fraternal relationship with the Communist Party of “Israel” (CPI) exists, and the resolution as it’s phrased leads to a dead alley. A genuine resolution would exclude all colonizers, their institutions, and even their “Communists.” For no matter how friendly the fox, it can’t negotiate the return of the henhouse. Or as the Palestinian writer Mourid Barghouti said of left-wing zionists, “A killer can strangle you with a silk scarf or can smash your head in with an axe; in both cases you are dead.” We are at a time of heightened Statesian consciousness and fury towards the imperialist zionist project and the governments that give it life. Now is not the time, nor should there ever be a time, when garroters with silk scarves can influence the demands of Communists.

Implicit in the resolution on Palestine, and the resolution on an internationalist and anti-imperialist CPUSA, is a refusal to denounce colonialism, and tacit support for imperialism in its most ruthless form — the form of the zionist imperialist outpost! Through its recognition of fraternal parties in every country, regardless of the actual character of those countries or parties, the CPUSA is dragging its would-be Communists into complicity with humanity’s most depraved butchers. To “promote a policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other nations; to support movements in other countries striving for national sovereignty and self-determination; to support multilateralism and equality among all nations: and to offer a correct, Marxist-Leninist analysis of imperialism” presupposes the possibility for equality between colonizers and the colonized, oppressors and the oppressed. It is a silver-tongued disavowal of Marxism-Leninism that’s calling itself correct, and a damning liquidation of class struggle.

In its resolutions concerning “full equality for Native Peoples and Tribal Communities, LGBTQ+ equality, Women’s equality, and Latina/o equality” the emphasis on equality is apparent. But equality for any of these peoples is a structural impossibility within the U.S. system, so the real demand can only be a tepid, liberal representationalism. It is ultimately a demand for more diverse oppressors and compradors; for more Indigenous betrayers and sellers of Indigenous lands and rights, for more quisling women to erode abortion rights, and more queer drone strike operators. The party does not demand national liberation or self-determination — to do so would be to demand the destruction of the capitalist state, which the leadership of CPUSA neither want nor condone.

Similarly, many of the points have CPUSA concerned with the rights of these various groups and other members of the working class to vote, but deliberately avoid mentioning in the system of which ruling class the votes will be cast. This is not work for Communists. Communists must demonstrate to the masses the real powerlessness of voting in a bourgeois system, and make it clear that the only possibility for change lies beyond that system. This cannot be achieved if the CPUSA encourages the oppressed and working classes to vote as if it’s meaningful, which is merely encouragement to invest in one’s own oppression.

In fact, numerous other resolutions, if adopted, would vitalize the bourgeois system, rather than undermine it. These include the resolutions on Social Security, Medicare for All, Immigrant Rights, and Housing. The content of these resolutions sounds pleasant, but they are bribes for the working and oppressed classes against the full realization of their real rights. Just as the original New Deal forestalled an American Communist revolution by giving the working class a greater share of the imperial plunder, so too would any of these acts be signed in the blood of Third World children. For this reason, Communists must push back against the idea that “we just want healthcare” and so on.

The root of this putrescent language, which suffuses the convention resolutions and documents, and dangles over the party’s future like a noose, grows from the mouths and literature of the party’s ideologues and organs, such as its National Committee and People’s World. It is most pungent in their insistence, which we at the Red Clarion have previously investigated, that it’s vital for the “future of democracy” to defeat “Trump, Trumpism, and the MAGA Republicans,” or that Trump represents the only real strain of fascism in the U.S. These coils of reformism, which threaten to strangle any revolutionary potential from the CPUSA, must be sliced apart through a real struggle at the convention. The principle of “curing the sickness to save the patient” must be adopted by all resolute Communists within CPUSA. These poisoned resolutions must be defeated and healthy ones planted in their stead. True Communists must lay claim to what the revisionists, opportunists and tailists have possessed since the Webb years, claim their convention and the party-still-to-be.

Can it Be Done?

In short: no. But that shouldn’t stop anyone who considers themselves to be a true Marxist-Leninist from trying. The effort will prove the question, and if it truly is impossible to seize the convention from the ROTten faction, then attempting to do so will reveal the corruption for all to see. So, why not? What are the things preventing a seizure of power by the revolutionary faction? How have the reformists secured their power completely? By examining these questions, we can also lay out the plan most likely to succeed in toppling the ROTten leadership.

The perversion of democratic centralism that prevents clubs from forming plans for the convention and restricts all dialogue to the convention floor means that the National Committee, which has no such bar on discussing the future of the party, forms a de facto “faction” capable of organizing and marshaling its resources prior to the convention. The National Committee will not just come into the convention with an organized plan, it has organized the entire affair. The N.C. creates the slate of candidates, approves the membership at the convention, runs the convention, etc. It is not only the chiefest of “factions,” it is a faction that is running the show at every single level, where all power is concentrated. It shouldn’t surprise you to know that all appeals of discipline also go to the N.C.

As if this weren’t enough to guarantee the N.C. control of the convention floor, the very use of the slate system secures its total dominance over party affairs and the future composition of the party itself. The N.C. signs off on expulsions and disciplines, hunts down “factions,” and so forth. It also selects its own replacements on the slate. It is functionally impossible to vote for a candidate that has not been pre-approved by the N.C. Although it remains technically possible to bring up a candidate’s nomination on the convention floor, campaigning before the convention begins is explicitly prohibited by the rules against factionalism, which rules out “campaigning” at all.

Lastly, however, and most critically, the millions of dollars of resources controlled by the leadership of CPUSA isn’t owned by the party. The New York City headquarters building, recently assessed at the value of $9 million and rented out by the party (making the party itself a landlord!), isn’t owned by the party, but rather by Advanced Realty (which also isn’t owned by the party). People’s World isn’t owned by the party, but by Longview Publishing (which isn’t owned by the party). In fact, the party, as an entity, has no legal recognition in any state and is not federally registered as anything. Each state “party” is an “unincorporated club.” This means that the party is, under bourgeois law, incapable of owning any property or money. So who owns all of these things?

Individual party leaders. John Bachtell runs Longview Publishing. Advance Realty is run by Libero Della Piana, who is also the managing director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an NGO. The party launders its money through a number of NGOs, of which the Drug Policy Alliance is only one. Others include the Alliance for a Just Society, People’s Action, Race Forward, the Center for Third World Organizing. While this may seem to be a clever scheme to keep party assets from the hands of the federal authorities, in fact it is merely a way to allow federal authorities to more appropriately manage “party” assets. By maintaining them primarily in NGOs, which receive grant money, the assets are required to report directly to their federal backers and managers exactly what every penny is spent on. Even further, party leaders employ their own significant others and children in those NGOs, from which they draw a salary. John Bachtell lives from the donations of party members to People’s World, even though the party does not own, control, or manage its own newspaper.

Even if the revolutionists were capable of making use of the rules of the convention to purge the National Committee, restructure the party, and purge all of the rot from the constitution, rectify its lines, and prevent a split, to bring the party’s money under party control would require the good will of the entire rotten leadership. The best the convention could do would be to pass a resolution demanding the current leadership turn over the assets, which the convention would have absolutely no way of enforcing. The party has no bourgeois legal “right” to that money.

Worse, these putrid leaders have shown their willingness to throw away the party constitution whenever it suits them. Should an organized opposition appear at the convention, there is no doubt that party leadership, just as C.P. Canada did two years ago, will rise up in a counter-revolutionary wave and have that revolutionary opposition completely expelled from the convention, or somehow prevented from bringing their resolutions to a vote.

So What Do We Do?

Organize now. Find your allies now. Prepare a plan for the convention floor. Build up a series of resolutions and prepare to make use of every procedural trick available to you. Pass a self-denying resolution barring all current leadership from serving on the next National Committee and pass a resolution demanding an open commitment to revolution from any future N.C. member.

During the breaks and when you have free time off the convention floor, agitate among your fellow delegates. Explain the true history of the party, and the need to purge it of its rot. Go in for the fight.

Comrades, it is up to you. You cannot afford to be tepid. You cannot afford to lower your head and accept crumbs from the corrupt leadership. It is now all or nothing.

We are with you. Generations of Communists have tread this path before you, laying down life and limb. Do you intend to crumple at the first challenge, or fight for a better world?

Claim the convention!

SAMPLE RESOLUTIONS

WHEREAS the perversion of democratic centralism that prevents full discussion of proposed resolutions and limits new resolutions to those that have been pre-approved by leadership places revisionism and opportunism fully in command of the party apparatus, LET IT BE RESOLVED that the convention rules be amended to: i) permit each speaker to hold the floor for 10 minutes, ii) adopt in full Robert’s Rules of Order to govern procedure, and iii) be explicitly permitted to offer new resolutions on the convention floor.
WHEREAS the revisionist drift of the party for the past fifty years has caused it to fall away from the masses, tail the Democratic Party, and lose its character as a proletarian institution, LET IT BE RESOLVED that this convention hereby enacts a self-denying resolution which shall disbar any present members of the National Committee or anyone who has served on the National Committee in the past decade from appearing on any slate before this convention or being elected or appointed to the National Committee or its subcommittees for at least four years and LET IT FURTHER BE RESOLVED that any candidate for the National Committee shall be required to take an oath of commitment to the proletarian revolution before the convention prior to being placed on the slate.

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.

If you read the newest article by CPUSA officer C.J. Atkins (managing editor of the party organ People’s World, and Executive Director of the pro-Canadian government NGO, ProudPolitics), How does the Communist Party elect its leadership, it’s clear that they still aren’t ready to admit new voices. We will address the hypocrisy that is the CPUSA constitution and the anti-democratic structure it enshrines to protect its opportunistic and careerist leadership below, but first we must deal with something that is purposefully hidden from new recruits in the CPUSA: the party’s own history.

For this reason, we urge the widest possible circulation of this pamphlet among the new recruits of the CPUSA, so they can make their choices clearly, and have their voices heard despite the pressure from the “national” organization. Only through real struggle — not the tame, leashed thing present at CPUSA conventions of the past century — can the party be vigorously purged of its opportunists and careerists and fit to participate in the revolutionary milieu of North American Communism.

A History of Opportunism

It’s not easy to learn the history of the CPUSA; comprehensive studies haven’t been compiled, and the publicly available information online is all tinged with bias one way or the other. Fatally for the CPUSA, the party’s own accounts of its history that are publicly available (for instance, Five misconceptions about the CP’s stance on Black liberation, written by a CPUSA employee who is paid through one of its shell corporations) are outright lies. We know this because other party members and even earlier party historians disagree. The Five misconceptions can be easily debunked by looking at the party records!

We can divide the history of the CPUSA into several major periods based on the predominant forces at work. The party’s roots can be traced back to the Pre-Party Period (roughly 1876-1919). The founding of the party (1919-1923) was followed almost immediately by fierce factional fighting between different types of political opportunists. We can call this entire period the Lovestone War (1919-1928). The party’s Third Period (1928-1935) coincides with the so-called Third Period of the Comintern. These three periods can collectively be termed the “early party” in which the membership was grappling with imperialist opportunism. The Early Party was followed by the disastrous Browder Period (1935-1958), during which open class-collaborationism ruled the day. The intervening Hall Period (1958-2000) was followed by the most recent period of open liquidation (2000-2019) and the Sims/Cambron Co-Chair Period (2019-present).

The Early Party

The party was initially created out of several social democratic organizations that had long subordinated internationalist concerns to mere economism — the narrow concerns of direct economic gains. A coalition of “leftists” brought together non-reformist elements of the Socialist Party of America. This group was known as the Left Wing Section, a formal faction within the party. This faction was not only praised by Lenin, but was even used by the Communist International (Comintern) to help form the Communist Party of the USA. So much for the ban on factions!

The early party was actually unable to cohere; immediately following the election of the Left Wing Section to most of the executive positions in the SPA in 1919, the moderates in the SPA expelled them. The non-English speaking “language sections” of the SPA broke off and founded the Communist Party of America. The SPA called an emergency convention in August of 1919 and the remaining left delegates formed the Communist Labor Party. These were both ordered by the Comintern to join into the single Communist Party of the United States of America and the CPUSA as we know it was born.

But it was not born without strife. The following ten years would be typified by a power struggle between two cliques represented more or less by two forces of opportunism within the party: the Ruthenberg-led former CPA and the Lovestonites. There’s a reason you’ve never heard of Lovestone: he was responsible for the thesis of “American exceptionalism.” This is the line that the CPUSA, openly or not, still materially follows. They can’t afford to educate you about Lovestone because you might see through their program.

His clique put forth the so-called analysis that capitalism was stronger in the U.S. than anywhere else on earth or in history, and that it could not be overcome by revolutionary might until it began to decay. He presented this thesis to the Comintern and helped lead the early CPUSA toward a position of capitulationism. He proposed that the party should just attempt to “hang on” until the revolution was possible, retrenching and defending itself from the capitalists but taking no moves to advance toward overthrowing the capitalist class. This basic thesis has informed top leadership in the CPUSA since.

The Comintern blasted Lovestone, as did Comrade Stalin himself. They ordered the CPUSA to cease factional fighting between Ruthenberg and Lovestone and chastised Lovestone as being a defeatist. This was not the end of Lovestone. By the 1960s, Lovestone would be an active CIA contact inside the AFL-CIO, funneling money from the counter-revolutionary forces of the Central Intelligence Agency into the labor movement.

At the same time, the African Blood Brotherhood was being integrated into the CPUSA and revolutionary action was proceeding in Alabama and the Black Belt. Harry Haywood is the most famous of the revolutionary theorists to come out of the U.S. during this period, and for good reason. Haywood was a proponent and defender of the Black Belt Thesis, the analysis that the Black population of the U.S. Empire was a nation-in-chains in the South, and this serves as a nexus of oppression everywhere until land reform is undertaken. He was a staunch opponent of revisionism and opportunism in the upper ranks of the CPUSA.

Those who opposed Haywood and the Comintern’s position on the Black nation classified racial prejudice as a “moral concern” that needed no special attention. Haywood, the Comintern, and many Black comrades in the U.S. defined Black liberation with regard to specific economic structures. The struggle within the CPUSA against Black liberation came to a head not during the early party period, but in the 1940s, under the villain Earl Browder, as the party tacked toward peaceful coexistence with the U.S. capitalist class, and then finally during the liquidationist period at the end of the 1950s as the party was permanently conquered by petit-bourgeois interests.

Earl Browder: Arch Class-Collaborationist

The never-unified CPUSA’s internal struggles continued to grow more dangerous throughout the middle and late 1930s. It had not been on any firm class footing, despite its membership achieving certain powerful successes in the U.S. class struggle. Earl Browder was appointed by the Comintern to suppress this factionalism and was selected to serve as the party’s head alongside William Z. Foster, the CPUSA’s candidate for president who ran on a Black Belt liberation ticket. Foster suffered from health problems, and Browder took command of the party apparatus.

In the early 1930s, the CPUSA considered president Roosevelt to be a fascist, and opposed joint work with the Democrats. Browder took the lead in convincing the Comintern that a new detente with capitalists in the U.S. was not only possible, but necessary to fight European fascism. He was the champion of the “People’s Front” — a corruption of Georgi Dimitrov’s United Front strategy — and by 1936, Communists were in key positions of the Roosevelt administration. Foster, now sidelined, fought against Browder’s collaborationism with Roosevelt, but Browder controlled the key party positions.

This is how the embarrassment of “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” came to pass. “Patriotic” Communism, as seen today, is a revival of Browder’s efforts at class-collaboration.

It doesn’t stop there.

Browder produced a piece of “theory” known as Teheran, Our Path in War and Peace which was published in 1944. Among other garbage, including a contention that imperialist exploitation of the world by the U.S. was weakening, Browder wrote that “There can be no effective national unity in America… that does not include big capitalists.”

“The Communists,” he wrote, “foresee that the practical political aims they hold will for a long time be in agreement on all essential points with the aims of a much larger body of non-Communists, and that therefore our political actions will be merged in such larger movements. The existence of a separate political party of Communists, therefore, no longer serves a practical purpose but can be, on the contrary, an obstacle to the larger unity.”

The party encouraged no-strike pledges during the war, ostensibly to protect Soviet Communism, but in actuality destroying the revolution at the time when the organization of the working class in the U.S. Empire was at its height, and a time when U.S. imperialism was weakened by fighting foreign enemies.

In 1944, Browder dissolved the party.

This move was nearly successful; throughout 1943 and ‘44, he suppressed all dissent to the buildup of the plan to dissolve the CPUSA as being in violation of party discipline. This toxic and ludicrous understanding of democratic centralism, preclusion of all dissent, persists within the CPUSA and many other “sister” parties to this day. It was only through the intervention of the French C.P. and the circulation of newspapers and letters from France blasting Browder and demanding his removal that the party was reconstituted in 1945.

Although the party was actually dissolved and Browder managed to issue party-wide orders to that effect, it was shortly thereafter put back together under the leadership of William Foster.

It was during this time of Browder’s leadership that the attacks on Haywood and the Black members of the party holding to the line of national self-determination grew stronger and stronger. Browder fought to suppress national self-determination as antagonistic to the new vision of the world he predicted in which the U.S. capitalist class would eventually peacefully hand over power to the working class.

The Traitor’s Convention: 1957

In response to FBI investigations and the prosecution of eleven highly-placed members of the CPUSA, the party took the position that it was not advocating for the overthrow of the capitalist state — a crime under bourgeois law — but for Browder’s “peaceful transition.” The eleven defendants were found guilty and each sentenced to five years in prison. This led to the prosecution of some 100 more party members throughout the early 1950s.

The party, having been led down the rabbit-hole of opportunism by Browder, who took advantage of the already-existing petit-bourgeois tendency for collaboration and conciliation with Roosevelt and the so-called “progressive” capitalists, was caught unprepared for this onslaught.

Khrushchev’s “secret speech” also rocked the party. John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker, called for dissolving the CP as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and became the center for a new liquidationist faction, intent on removing the revolutionary content of Marxism and making it palatable to the progressive capitalists. Liquidationists sprang out of the CPUSA woodwork. They demanded a “re-examination” of Marxism-Leninism and condemned the theory of the bourgeois state as an instrument of class rule.

The most fateful convention of the CPUSA, that of 1957, was fast approaching. A draft resolution was circulated in September of 1956 to be debated at the convention. The draft argued for what Haywood recorded as a “peaceful, parliamentary, constitutional transition to socialism.” It would be

…the development of an anti-monopoly coalition through “labor and popular” forces gaining “decisive influence in key Democratic Party state organizations and even liberal Republican movements.” Thus would develop the “American Road to Socialism.” The Communist Party would remain on the sidelines to “support and endorse” such progressive campaigns. On the Afro-American question, the right of self-determination was completely omitted and the Party urged wholehearted acceptance of the NAACP slogan of “Free by ‘63.” Working class leadership and proletarian revolution were entirely excluded from this document. The National Board voted in favor of the resolution, Foster and Davis voting a qualified “yes.”

Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik

Left opposition to this turn grew throughout the end of 1956 and the beginning of 1957. However, they were lacking central guidance; the left opposition was excluded from the National Board. They had no regular access to any of the party machinery to air their views, and leadership deliberately suppressed Marxist-Leninist education to maintain the status quo. All dissent was systematically suppressed, and inner-party democracy was quashed.

Three factions of rightists came to the Sixteenth Convention on February 9, 1957. The Gates faction was openly anti-Soviet and supported the liquidation of the party in its entirety. The center-right  faction was led by Eugene Dennis and called for the ideological liquidation of the party’s vanguard position. The left-center was represented by Foster, and were staunchly opposed to any further leftward movement — embracing open calls for revolution, for instance, in the face of FBI repression.

The Sixteenth Convention, in an attempt to quell the disunity that had plagued the party from the beginning, moved to suppress the split. The three right trends, which had captured the National Board, called for a “unity of all trends” during the convention. The left opposition attacked this false unity, and upset many of the “unity slates” — you see the beginning of the hideous slate system here — that were planned to oust left candidates.

As part of this “unity of all trends,” the three right cliques forced through the passage of the treacherous September Resolution, which spelled the death knell of the party as any kind of revolutionary force. Immediately following the convention, the three “unified” trends began to harass the left opposition within the party, driving membership out through bureaucratic gamesmanship. When Haywood attempted to challenge the slogan calling for the party to follow the petit-bourgeois lead of the NAACP, he was attacked by the leadership. The question of self-determination for the Black Belt and the oppressed Black nation was abandoned. The CPUSA had openly determined to follow the petit-bourgeois-dominated NAACP and the petit-bourgeois/bourgeois alliance that formed the central core of the Democratic Party of the 1930s-60s.

The Party Leaves the Struggle — So the Struggle Leaves the Party

The content of the CPUSA program has been, since the Sixteenth Congress, roughly the same for the last 70 years. In some periods it is more openly liquidationist (as we will see below, with the coming of Sam Webb), and in some less (as this current period), but the actual on-the-ground effect of every party program since 1957 has been, on one end of the spectrum, to tail the petit-bourgeois “progressives” or, on the other, to call for the complete abolishment of the party.

The Black Power movement and the New Communist Movement began in the mid-60s  as the CPUSA failed in its historical role to lead the working classes. In 1966, the Black Panther Party was formed. Organizations like the essentially anarchist Students for a New Democratic Society and its militant offshoot, the Weather Underground, sprang up. These were organic expressions of working class militant socialism that arose independently because the main outlet for the working class had been stopped up by the revisionist, opportunist, and government-infiltrated CPUSA. Two FBI operations, SOLO and TOPLEV, garnered many CPUSA informants; as early as 1948, the CIA had identified a goal to implement agents at the top levels of the CPUSA, and unredacted reports from the FBI as late as 1984 indicate a large number of government spies within the CPUSA ranks. Operation CHAOS, a CIA domestic spying program begun by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, undoubtedly planted even more spies within the CPUSA ranks.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle thus, having been driven out of the party by its accommodation of U.S. capitalism, manifested in other organizations. Projects were undertaken to re-found the CPUSA or to purge it of its opportunistic elements. None of these produced lasting results. Because the CPUSA had consumed the oxygen for working class organizing on an all-Empire level, because it stood back and did nothing while the Black Power movement was slaughtered in the streets by police both in uniform and in suits, there was no way to challenge it, and all meaningful revolutionary activity drained away. By the late 1980s, party membership had dwindled from a once-proud 300,000 to 25,000.

The Ghost of Sam Webb

The next stage in the CPUSA’s development was the appearance of the treacherous Sam Webb in 2000. Webb became chairman, and kept the party on the same tack as its 1980-incarnation: playing a supporting role to the Democratic Party against the “ultra-right” threat of the GOP.

Webb repeated the Sixteenth Congress throughout his entire tenure. He directly contradicted the tasks set out by the socialists of the 20th century and embraced Bernsteinian revisionism as the order of the day. “While political supremacy of the working class and its allies is imperative, once acquired its task isn’t to smash the state into so many pieces, but rather to transform the class content of state structures,” he wrote in 2009. “[C]ommunists of our generation,” he sang, in the siren song we have seen above, designed to convince the petit-bourgeois, vacillating elements, “would do well to follow the example of our Depression-era comrades.”

He denounced Marxism-Leninism itself, calling it “rigid and formulaic” and said it was time to move “beyond Communist Parties.” At the 2014 convention, the party narrowly avoided removing Marxism-Leninism itself from the constitution and party documents.

Webb was ousted at this convention by John Bachtell — current editor-in-chief of the party organ, People’s World. Bachtell, who worked for the Obama campaigns, had worked extensively as chair on the so-called inside/outside project coordinating “Communists” within the Democratic Party. He was slightly to the left of Webb in that he didn’t call for open liquidation of the CPUSA as an organizational structure, but did hew, in his time as chair, to a tailist strategy to “defeat Trumpism” (as he put it). Class consciousness had begun to rise with the threat of the far-right fascist advancement of the Tea Party and then-metastasizing MAGA elements in the GOP. Webb, who advocated dissolving the party just as Browder had done, had to go. The party couldn’t countenance open liquidation — perhaps because it once again began to serve its purpose as a magnet for young Communists who don’t know any better. This allows the party to draw in potential revolutionaries and neutralize them by subjecting them to Byzantine, opaque, and undemocratic party structures. The rules require them not to get too feisty, and soon they find themselves forced to keep their revolutionary activity at a very low grade. At every opportunity, that energy is redirected into campaigning for the political class of the Democratic Party — to campaigning for our enemy. Sam Webb had to be sacrificed to save Webbism. Growing class consciousness threatened to push the working class into a revolutionary position. John Bachtell helped to negate it. The party had been winnowed down to some 2,500 members in the wake of Webb’s disastrous time as chair. After Webb was ousted, it grew again to roughly 5,000.

In 2019, Bachtell lost the chairship to long-time CPUSA members and Webbites Rossana Cambron and Joe Sims. This followed the even higher pitch of class consciousness during the Trump years; membership in the CPUSA appears to be as high as 8,000 people. The co-chairs immediately began to call for more revolutionary organizing to channel the surge of class consciousness — while maintaining the exact same 1957 line in action.

CPUSA’s Democracy — but For Which Class?

There exists at the top of the CPUSA a group of well-paid labor bureaucrats that make their living off of corporations owned by party members. Party properties and organs — in fact, all CPUSA assets — are owned by shell corporations like the International Publishing Corporation and Long View Publishing. This includes a network of charities and other corporations that pay out salaries, such as Military Voices Speak Out (the charity headed by Arturo Cambron, Rossana’s husband and a District Organizer for the party in California). Individuals are vetted to serve in these positions, then moved up through the CPUSA and the “mass” organizations that are controlled by high-ranking CPUSA members (like Long View, etc.)

To understand how this leadership retains control of the money and resources of the party as a whole, we can step through the sly doublespeak of C.J. Atkins’ article about elections within the CPUSA.

To begin with, Atkins starts with a canard. “In the Communist Party,” he cautions, “our unity and our collectivity are our most powerful weapons. Our democratic process is all about finding ways to include the voices, thoughts, and experiences of everyone in the party as we decide our policies — and doing so in a fashion that is collective, which safeguards our unity.” This sounds like a touching bit of organizational dogma, but what does Atkins mean when he says this? He admits right away that elections “might even strike [new members] as downright undemocratic when they first see it, totally top-down.”

What is he talking about? The slate system and the National Committee.

Let’s forget that the U.S. Empire isn’t a “nation” but rather a prisonhouse of nations. Set that to one side. What is the National Committee? It is the executive body of the CPUSA, and makes all decisions on all levels. It is the final arbiter of all disputes, and the body to which one would appeal if you disagree with another body. The National Committee is the Politburo and the Executive Committee and the Supreme Soviet rolled into one.

So how are members of this ultra-powerful party-brain elected? Once every four years (or longer, if the National Committee decides to postpone) a convention is held. Once the convention date is set, the existing National Committee creates a subcommittee called the Committee on Leadership. This subcommittee develops what Atkins calls “proposals” for who should staff the National Board and the National Committee, and who should serve as officers of the various subcommittees. How does it do this? Through no formal process. It “casts a broad net across the entire country.” How democratic! Can you submit your name for consideration? Not formally.

“Consultation is the name of the game,” Atkins says. “It’s all about ensuring that the leadership of our party is equipped with the diversity and experience that’s needed.” Ah, but the Committee on Leadership is also “tasked with guaranteeing the party’s continuity, and that means getting the right mix of seasoned party veterans and newly-emerging or young comrades who are growing into leaders.”

Break that down.

The leadership of the party, who have the absolute authority to expel or dismiss members, to select officers, to pick who get the lucrative sinecures of appointment to the party corporations and the payroll of party charities, breaks off a piece of itself (we don’t know, from Atkins’ article, how big the Committee on Leadership is — it might be composed of all the same members as the National Committee) to pick a few people “growing into leaders” (based on the criteria that they share the same political outlook as the current leadership) and “seasoned veterans” (by which they mean, charitably, the same small pool of people on rotation, or uncharitably, just themselves).

Is the floor open for nominations at the convention? Sure, but the vote is presented as a slate. Members are not allowed to campaign — Atkins presents campaigning as some filthy bourgeois tactic, rather than the knowing coalition of groups sharing struggles — so any attempt to campaign prior to the convention is just labeled factionalism and the campaigners are expelled.

But the process doesn’t end there. The National Committee then appoints a Presiding Committee — a credentialing committee and executive committee for the conference. The Presiding Committee makes final rulings on procedural questions, and then presents the slate of candidates selected by the Leadership Committee to the convention. No one that is not approved by the Presiding Committee can appear on the slate. Voting is not yes or no. It is not up or down. Voting proceeds by “choosing a minimum percentage of names from the final list of nominees” — the slate.

Truly, we can take Atkins’ words about process at their face value: the National Committee elects itself.

Debate about political lines and issues is prohibited until the convention begins. Such debate is (wrongfully) called a breach of democratic centralism in the long four-year plus stretches between conventions. Don’t like a party policy? Don’t like a party line? Even bringing up that fact inside a party meeting is grounds for discipline. How can you determine if you agree with people on the slate? How can you tell what you think about any individual candidate? You are left to the whims of the Leadership Committee and the Presiding Committee, both of which are wholly creatures of the National Committee.

Whom does this “democracy” serve?

It serves the clique of interested functionaries who live off of the wages of the rank-and-file party members. It serves John Bachtell, who is paid by Long View and International Publishers. Every few months, the party brass sends out a party-wide warning that People’s World needs more, more, more donations, or else they won’t meet their goal! What is their goal?

Subsidizing the very opportunist serpents that are paralyzing the party with coil after coil and loop after loop of bald-faced lies.

Proletarian Democracy Requires Struggle

It is not possible to achieve a meaningful contribution to the revolution without struggle. Bitter struggle! That means the combat of opposed viewpoints, the dialectic of conflict. Why is the CPUSA averse to conflict? Because its leadership cannot afford to be on the losing end. All struggle must be controlled and subsumed, lest the party be re-captured by the revolutionary element and its resources directed to the destruction of the capitalist state and the very lifestyles of the petit-bourgeois functionaries that now command it.

Do not let them defang the struggle.

Confront the beast in its lair.

Ever onwards, toward revolution!