Over these last few years, since U.S. imperialism sped up its own decline by picking a fight with Russia, communists who are committed to fighting Washington’s hegemony have been able to make serious progress. Not yet to the extent that we’ve won the bulk of the people, but this progress is substantial enough that we’re on the path towards such an achievement. And if we stay on this path, at a certain point we’ll be able to clear a certain threshold: winning the masses. The failure by the established socialist orgs to meet this threshold is what’s long kept U.S. Marxism trapped in irrelevance, impotence, and maladaptive responses towards its own stagnation.
The reason why certain elements of the U.S. left fetishize armed struggle is that they’re unable to win the people, and have come to see violence as a substitute for this. It’s a problem that’s been deliberately engineered by our intelligence centers, and all the different parts of this ideological illness reinforce the other ones. Because the main iterations of Marxism in today’s USA are idealist, thinking they can win by simply being as radical as possible, they find themselves unable to win any elements beyond leftists or liberals. Because they keep experiencing this failure, and don’t know why they’re failing, they blame the people and view them as fundamentally reactionary. Because they’re not in the mindset required for making allies out of the broad masses, they turn inward into reformist practices, or adopt an adventurist mentality where they expect to win the class war on their own.
Sometimes these two deviations exist simultaneously within an org, as shown by how the idealist PSL mentions an “armed proletariat” in its program while investing itself in getting help from liberal NGOs. The latter aspect undermines the former, because for as long as a party is tailing liberals rather than forging a distinctly communist path, they won’t get to a point where they can lead the workers. They’ll be unable to connect with most proletarians, and therefore never be in a strategic place to take serious revolutionary steps. It’s this self-defeating pattern that the American Communist Party, and the forces that share its vision, are working to break U.S. Marxism out of.
What does it mean to forge a distinctly communist path? It means not trying to substitute the work which our conditions actually call for with dogmatic, inwardly focused activities. We have a good idea of what communism’s path to success in the United States looks like; it’s apparent in the history of the early Socialist Party USA and the early Communist Party USA, which the ACP informs its practice off of. These parties were able to gain mass momentum, at least during their initial eras, because they actually prioritized the class struggle. Because they centered their practice around the question of what the working masses needed during any given moment.
It’s taken so long for the country’s communist movement to start returning to this practice because during the mid-to-late 20th century, Marxism got replaced by the New Left. By organizations that forsake the class struggle, in favor of showing themselves to be compatible with the sensibilities of petty-bourgeois radicalism. These groups merely seek to reach the student element and the professional managerial class, which leads them towards centering liberal identity politics. Building connections with the students is in itself an important goal; yet when you do this by affirming bourgeois academic theories, and while failing to make the working class into the main element you connect with, all you’ve done is retreat from the majority of the masses. As well as given the students you’ve brought in a bad source of leadership, where they’re instructed to perpetuate the ineffectual petty-bourgeois radical cycle.
The element that will be attracted to the kind of rhetoric PSL puts forth, where it continuously signals alignment with the Democratic Party on culture war issues, is not an element that’s representative of the bulk of the people. Making yourself into a culture war agent for either side of the “woke” vs anti-“woke” conflict means surrendering to capital, and subordinating yourself towards one wing of the ruling class.
The ACP understands this trap, as does the organization I’m in the CPI. And I wish the best for this new party, because it represents a recent trend within organizing that must be nurtured. A trend where an element of U.S. communists, upon looking at the decades of stagnation that New Left thinking has brought to our movement, have begun reconstructing what we once had. The catalyst for this rise of a new class struggle-oriented force, aside from the post-2008 living standards crisis, has been the intensification of imperialist wars. The drive by our monopoly capitalist dictatorship to start conflicts with Russia, China, and Iran has created a mandate for an anti-imperialist coalition, as well as made many more Americans see the connection between war and austerity. Since the established socialist orgs are unwilling to capture this moment, others have mobilized towards fulfilling the class struggle’s crucial present tasks.
This is the distinction that makes the ACP a credible vehicle for victory, as opposed to the PSL. When PSL speaks of arming the proletariat, it’s compensating for the self-defeating flaws in its practice; the hope is that if you say you have the essential components of a revolutionary party, it will make up for the lack of substance in what you’re doing. The ACP doesn’t need to talk about arms, because its separation from petty-bourgeois radicalism makes it capable of reaching the level of communist power that an armed proletariat entails. Arms, and the other practical parts of revolution, aren’t worth pursuing if you’ve already undermined your own ability to create the foundations for a revolutionary project. An armed “revolutionary” org that can’t win the masses is the makings of a counter-gang, a group that presents itself as an avenue for resistance but is truly sabotaging the struggle.
The left-wing counter-gangs may be mobilized against us sooner rather than later, because history has been moving especially fast lately and it won’t slow down. The dominant wing of our ruling class has anointed its favored puppet Kamala Harris, and hopes to use Harris as a tool for expanding repression and global conflicts. A Harris victory will mean an opportunity for agent provocateurs to be mobilized, both on the right and on the left, so that the state gets an excuse to crack down on dissent. And whether or not the deep state succeeds at rigging the election for Harris, the counterinsurgency’s best strategy is to first use the counter-gangs (particularly the “Antifa” anarchist ones) as a means for terrorizing anti-imperialists.
The role of PSL and the other pan-leftist groups will be to let these left anti-communist elements infiltrate Marxist circles, leaving communists either unequipped to defend themselves or manipulated into fighting for the counter-gangs. The role of ACP and the other serious anti-imperialist orgs will be to provide a counter towards these reactionary forces, which can only be done by following the mass-based strategies of our predecessors. When our class enemies and their proxies are united in attacking someone, you know they’re truly acting to advance the class struggle. This principle provides clarity on who to align with as our class conflict escalates.
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