Ho Chi Minh wrote that "revolutionary morality consists, in whatever circumstances, in resolutely struggling against all enemies, maintaining one's vigilance, standing ready to fight, and refusing to submit, to bow one's head. Only by doing so can we defeat the enemy, and fulfill our revolutionary tasks."
This is the essence of the mission of a party: to act consistently in combating the enemies of liberation, and to serve the people with the same amount of diligence. When a party fails to do these things, it loses power, as happened to the Soviet Union's ruling party after it abandoned the state as an instrument for class struggle. The root of this fatal mistake was that it repudiated the theory which had been laid down by Stalin and Lenin, and embraced what Xi Jinping has called a "historical nihilism" of refusing to let lessons from the past inform one's actions. So is the case for the Communist Party USA, the organization that's often treated as the default option by newly radicalized communists looking for something to join.
Rebranding Kautskyism for the era of the new cold war
This is not intended as an attack on anyone in the CPUSA who's a principled Marxist-Leninist, who supports Russia in the present anti-fascist conflict, who doesn't vote for Democratic presidential candidates, who seeks to engage in the armed militancy required for building a serious cadre, who"most importantly"is willing to honestly look at their party's flaws rather than uncritically defend it. If anything, this is a gesture of sympathy towards these types of CPUSA members. Because they've been persuaded into joining an organization that's not compatible with their goals.
A party need not be democratic centralist to advance the communist movement, as evidenced by my own organization the Peace and Freedom Party. What makes the CPUSA's lack of democratic centralism have it function as a liability to the communist movement, rather than as an asset for the movement like the PFP, is that the CPUSA adopts the superficial aesthetics of a Bolshevik org while acting inconsistently with how a Bolshevik org would conduct itself. Unlike the PFP, the CPUSA quotes Marx and Lenin, which comes with the implication that it seeks to be a Leninist org. But while laying claim to this role, it distorts the meaning and nature of a Leninist org.
A Leninist org doesn't lose control over its official publication People's World, leading to this publication promoting CIA atrocity propaganda about China, calling to vote for Biden, and repeating the neocon narrative that Russia is the biggest threat to world peace. (The latter article was written by former CPUSA chairman John Bachtell, showing how deep this liberalism has historically run within the party.) A Leninist org doesn't have a current chairman, Joe Sims, who uses anti-communist atrocity narratives to justify omitting Stalin and Mao's contributions to theory from the party's analyses. Even more importantly, a Leninist org doesn't have a current chairman who directly repudiates Lenin's theory; Sims retreads Kautsky by arguing that there's a contradiction between the class struggle, and what Sims calls the "all-class democratic struggle."
His full quote is "The history of Communist Party shows an ongoing tension in balancing class and all-class democratic struggles." Those who agree with this statement may say Sims is merely repudiating class reductionism, but this isn't what he's doing. He's obfuscating the reality that the struggle for democracy, and the struggle for proletarian power, are one and the same. The overlap between these two categories has nothing lacking, as Kautskyists like Sims would have you believe. Their overlap is 100%, because bourgeois "democracy" is necessarily compromised and proletarian democracy is the genuinely democratic alternative to it. This error within the CPUSA's thinking must be stressed because it's the point of origin for every other detrimental thing it does, including its publication's pro-imperialist narratives on geopolitics.
I point to People's World's statements as evidence against the CPUSA's credibility not because every CPUSA members shares its stances"as I said, plenty of actual Marxists have been drawn to the org"but because the fact that this is an issue in the first place reveals the fundamental structural flaws in the party. Ironclad discipline, in which these kinds of feuds are avoided, is instrumental for a Leninist party. And because the CPUSA's leadership takes the Kautskyist stance, it doesn't prioritize that kind of discipline. The PFP doesn't have a publication that's promoting liberal propaganda, despite the PFP also not being democratic centralist. This is because the PFP chooses not to be democratic centralist due to its role as a mass org, whereas CPUSA chooses not to be due to its explicit rejection of Leninist analysis. The PFP doesn't pretend to be something that can become the vanguard, whereas the CPUSA does. With this inconsistency between what CPUSA says it is and what it actually is, no wonder it's spawned a liberal platform that's centered around deradicalizing communists.
When you pretend like worker struggle can under any circumstances represent something detrimental to the "democratic" struggle, you're naturally led towards rejecting the concept of proletariat dictatorship, i.e., workers' democracy. This is because once you've embraced Kautsky's analysis on what "democracy" means, you treat the necessarily truncated version of "democracy" the capitalists have created as something under which socialism can be achieved. You become satisfied with a practice that exclusively serves electoral efforts within the confines of bourgeois "democracy," rather than one that works towards overthrowing the capitalist state. Communists use bourgeois electoralism as one among an array of tools for strengthening the movement, for educating and mobilizing the masses with that revolutionary end objective always in mind. Not as an end in and of itself.
Communists are aware that socialism can never be achieved while playing by the rules the bourgeois state sets down for us, and that therefore those who advance Kautsky's strategy are not truly working towards socialism. They're working towards opportunism. As Lenin wrote, "Our politics must be working class politics. The workers' party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its own goal and its own policy."
When you've embraced Kautskyism, you inevitably do exactly what Lenin warned against doing. You don't view overthrowing the state as a priority, other than maybe in some non-committal abstract way. So you don't implement the democratic centralist disciplinary model that's necessary for making a party qualified to lead a workers state. You don't even treat a workers state as being necessary to bring about, as your ultimate priority is to perpetuate an endless cycle of opportunistic electoral campaigns. This naturally leads towards tailing a bourgeois party like the Democrats, because under the Kautskyist framework of "who said anything about overthrowing the state," voting for Biden to superficially appear more "progressive" is seen as an acceptable option. If all that matters is appealing to the broadest possible base of "progressives," and Lenin's practice of lifting the people up to the level of an ideologically trained cadre member isn't needed, voting blue is optimal.
In our context of an imperialist propaganda war against existing and historical socialist states, as well as against Washington's geopolitical rivals in general, this opportunistic mindset can be rationalized by believing imperialism's atrocity narratives. History's examples of workers democracies have supposedly been too "authoritarian," so it's not necessary to quote Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il, or other theoreticians who have a bad reputation among the liberals you seek to appeal to. You should merely quote Marx, Engels, and Lenin, even though your party rejects the analyses of these thinkers by taking the Kautskyist stance.
When such an analysis on Russia and China is made from within the imperial center, it necessarily takes on a chauvinist characteristic; the anti-imperialist struggles these countries have been engaging in throughout the last century are disregarded, in favor of vilifying narratives about "Stalinism" and the "totalitarian" Communist Party of China.
Sims doesn't use these more hyperbolic labels to describe the USSR and the PRC, but his embrace of the banal liberal distaste towards them enables the most explicit anti-communist propaganda. And it mirrors the view that Bachtell has towards Washington's rivals, in which as soon as a country challenges U.S. interests, it's categorized as a menace. Anti-Leninism directly informs the new cold war's guiding ideology, in that it's necessary for the cold warriors to demonize Leninism to support their arguments about "imperialist" Russia and China. A Leninist analysis shows the U.S. and its wealthiest allies to be the only imperialist powers in modern times, so Leninism must be discredited. The way in which petty bourgeois radicals do this is by putting forth the original anti-Leninist ideology Kautskyism, and hoping people accept Kautskyism's reformist distortions of Marxism rather than developing towards a revolutionary stance.
That stance requires principled anti-imperialism, which is equally unacceptable to the bourgeois radical. So it becomes necessary to preemptively dissuade people from anti-imperialism by repeating the State Department's narratives about the "free world" being under attack from "autocrats."
Promoting Khrushchev's historical nihilism
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