All around the country normal working-class Americans are asking themselves one question: why?
Why is it that I am struggling to make ends meet at the end of the month? Why is the price I paid for the same groceries a couple years ago doubled today, while my wage or salary has stagnated? Why is it that I was forced to go into drowning debt for getting sick, daring to get an education, wanting a home for my family? Why are the politicians on my screens so keen on waging war on half the world with our tax dollars, but so averse to investing any money on the people and the country’s decaying infrastructure? Why is my day pervaded by stress when I drop my children off at school, not knowing whether they can be the next victim of the horrendous shootings all too common in our country? Why do none of the people who govern the country seem to care about the desperate and deteriorating conditions of those like my family, neighbors, and co-workers?
Poor, indebted, and desperate, the American working class has begun to organically question the assumptions of the ruling capitalist order. While they have been generationally fed the idea that America is the greatest country on earth, where freedom, democracy, and equality reign, today the desperation they experience in their everyday lives has made critical reflection necessary, spontaneous though it might still be. Can there be any real equality between those in their class and those that benefit from their toil, indebtedness, and instability? Can there be any freedom for the men and women enchained for life to a debt they owe a major bank? Can there be freedom and equality for the millions of children going to sleep hungry every night in America, or the 600 thousand homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times more empty homes than homeless people? Can there be any democracy in a system where the people who control the major corporations, banks, and investment firms hold power over the state, using it to enforce their will, I.e., the accumulation of capital, as the bottom line and most supreme value in all social relations?
What has emerged, then, is a serious crisis of legitimacy. Faith in the ruling institutions of the capitalist class is rapidly diminishing. Only 11 percent of the American public trusts the mainstream media, the main ideological institutions of the capitalist ruling class. The politicians which enforce the interests of the owners of big capital aren’t doing much better, with just 19 percent of Americans holding that their elected representatives actually represent them. It is clear to the American people, albeit in a form that is still abstract and embryonic, that the media is simply there to manipulate them into consenting to the agenda of the ruling class — twisting facts, lying, and removing context to invert reality on ongoing world events. It is evident to them that their so-called representatives are in reality the representatives of their exploiters, oppressors, and parasitic creditors.
Out of this general and spontaneous rejection of the current state of affairs has arisen various different forms of dissent in the American working class. Some were mobilized by the Bernie Sanders movement in 2016 and 2020, seeing in it the potential for a genuine political, although not social, revolution which could guarantee the basic rights afforded in social democracies but absent in our country. In the same years, some were captivated by Donald Trump and his call to Make America Great Again (MAGA), which for many working-class folks in the country signified a striving to return to an age long gone, where their parents and grandparents could secure comfort in life and a high standard of living with a normal working-class job. Others have taken various apolitical routes, showing antipathy in the face of a political arena where they rightly observe that, as of right now, they have no ability to change anything.
While others are certainly present, these three have been the major channels for working people to express their discontent in the ruling order. Many, many flaws are evidently present in each route. But they all share a common rational kernel — the rejection of the status quo, and in the first two, the faith and willingness to work towards changing it. As it currently exists, however, one route leads to paralysis in the face of the task of constructing something new, while the other two have led to fake prophets being elevated as embodying the interests of the people, while they, in reality, have merely expressed more novel and disguised ways of upholding the same ruling order. We are in the period where it becomes evident that the hopes of 8 years ago are hollow, that a new way of framing and articulating discontent must be sought.
For us, only a communist party can live up to this task. A communist party is, after all, fundamentally the vehicle for the most advanced detachment of the working class to win the faith of the critical mass and guide their struggles to the finish line — the conquest of political power. It is a communist party which has the potential of giving these different forms of dissent some coherence, unity, and direction. Coherence arises out of the systematic understanding of the ills individuals face — ills which are not individual moral failings but systemic in character. Unity is premised on this coherence, on the understanding of our commonality of interests and our shared source of discontent. And direction arises out of the previous two — only when we can coherently understand the social order upon which our troubles are based can we see that in its own contradictions there’s a way forward. In the correct understanding of the problem, we find the premises through which the solution can be sought. When the decaying capitalist system we have before us is comprehended so too is the fact that working people — the producers of all value in society — have it within their power, as a class, to build a world anew in their own image. Once this recognition of our shared fundamental reality is achieved and the varied forms of dissent unified, then the steps forward will show themselves in the process of a struggle clear about its direction.
Lamentably, the historical communist party in our nation has shown itself incapable of living up to the task of the organization which bears that name. It has sought class collaboration in the era where class struggle is an imminent reality. It has sided, under the cynical auspices of ‘fighting fascism,’ with the Democratic Party whilst such organization has sent hundreds of billions in U.S. taxpayer money to neo-Nazis in Ukraine for a proxy war against Russia. It has supported this party through its murderous funding and equipping of the Zionist entity’s genocide in Palestine. It is a “communist” party which objectively has supported fascism and class collaboration under the justification of fighting that which they precisely support. Fascism, for them, is simply the social conservatives who disagree with the more liberal social values recently accepted by the forces of hegemony. For them the fascist threat emanates from our conservative co-workers and not the capitalist state that uses both parties to fund war and genocide. But what can be more fascist than supporting, financing, and equipping a genocide carried out by a white supremacist apartheid state?
The “communist” party USA spits on the legacy of Stalin, Dimitrov, and the great anti-fascist fighters of the world communist movement when it cites them tongue in cheek to support the fascistic American state. It forgets that, as Michael Parenti wrote “the fascist threat comes not from the Christian right or the militias or this or that grouplet of skinheads but from the national security state itself, the police state within the state.” 1 These are the forces which enforce the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” central to the Marxist understanding of fascism, elaborated in the brilliant work of Georgi Dimitrov. 2 The “communist” party USA operates, therefore, with an idealist and anti-Marxist understanding of fascism when it ignores the role of fascism as a form of capitalist governance in periods of crisis. It reduces fascism to a problem of ideas in the mind, and it’s unable to see how, as a form of capitalist governance in crisis, it’s been present here in both parties all along. The basic understanding of the spurious dialectic of Democrats and Republicans, of the unending and performative back-and-forth used to mask the continuity of the imperialist state and serve its continual reproduction, is completely lost on these “communists.” They side with one side of the capitalists, imperialists, and fascists. In doing so they don’t actually fight against the ‘fascist threat’ they so often invoke but reinforce it. They feed into the spectacle of American politicking; they become complicit in its operations.
But errors in party lines are amendable when the operational method of a communist party is upheld. Democratic centralism, when actually present, gives the party the potential to rectify — to improve its understanding of the situation and its failings. It allows the slippages into social chauvinism, opportunism, and ultraleftism (so evident in the cpUSA) to be reeled in and corrected. But here too, the “Communist” Party USA has completely violated its obligations. Ample evidence has shown that at the 32nd National Convention party democracy was thwarted, and democratic centralism tossed out the window. 3 And when those courageous cadres sought to rectify this usurping of the party — this coup of the American working class’s historic organization by a small clique of lifelong bureaucrats — through constitutional means stood up to share a petition requesting the democratic consultation thwarted at the convention, all real communists were purged, often expelling whole clubs themselves. The evidence has been documented and made public. As was made evident, the ruling clique of the cpUSA, then, has completely destroyed party democracy in order to defend its support for class collaboration with a party that supports Nazis and carries out genocidal wars on native peoples.
But no amount of fettering the class struggle would achieve their desired stoppage of the movement of history. An organization of the working class, grounded not in middle class professionals and bureaucrats but in the working class itself, guided by Marxism-Leninism and not the purity fetish, was bound to arise. On July 7th of 2024 this organization was born. It’s birth, as Executive Chairman Haz Al-Din noted, was itself a triumph in deed, not merely in word. 4 It brought together a broad group of different communist forces, stemming from those which were unconstitutionally purged by the cpUSA, to carry forth the struggle together, to reconstitute the American Communist Party our people so desperately need. It is bounded not by abstract and pure doctrines, but by the living science of Marxism-Leninism, which sees truth in the deed, in practical results and organizational achievements. Our standard of success will not be the construction of theory built off of the purest abstract ideas. Our standard of success will be our capacity to fulfill the role history has assigned to the American Communist Party, namely, to provide the coherence, unity, and direction that can get our people out of the perpetual crises which have pervaded our decaying capitalist mode of life, and establish in its place a society of, by, and for working people — Socialism.
Originally published on MidwesternMarx.com
Footnotes
- Michael Parenti, America Besieged (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998), 119.
- Georgi Dimitrov, Against Fascism and War (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 2.
- Our Institute has a whole playlist discussing the 32nd National Convention and interviewing around a dozen purged members. You can watch the six videos in that playlist here.
- First address to the public from Executive Chairman Haz Al-Din.
