Disclaimer: I write from the perspective of an unaffiliated activist with experience in WWP and its splinter organization CWL in southeast MI/Detroit. My views, needless to say, are my own. Without naming individuals, I have endeavored to give credit to friends and comrades for their insights where appropriate.

i. The Objective Situation Today

In his comprehensive classic Age of Extremes, historian Eric Hobsbawn described the advent of the Marxist-Leninist communist party as a revolution in social organization itself: The force of the movements for world revolution lay in the communist form of organization, Lenin’s “party of a new type,” a formidable innovation of twentieth-century social engineering, comparable to the invention of Christian monastic and other orders in the Middle Ages.”

Of course, the efficacy of the communist parties, especially in pre-revolutionary situations, owed much to the general level of workers’ organization in the unions that allowed for the expression of revolutionary leverage through general strikes and the like. For the workers and oppressed who have grown up in the so-called “end of history” (in the wake of the overthrow of socialism in Eurasia), there has been no visible worker-led opposition. In the age of neoliberalism and austerity, the destruction of collective political and social activity has precipitated a situation where Party organization almost seems unimaginable due to the fracturing of workers’ organization.

As I outlined in my previous piece How the left was misled, the problem with the current situation is not that there is no discontent with capitalism in the imperial center. On the contrary, the number of striking workers in the US has hit a historic high after a decades-long dormancy. Discontent with capitalism and its inherent injustices is undoubtedly growing and seeking an outlet. Never ones for naivete, the capitalist planners, managers, politicians, think-tankers, and economists have been able to see the writing on the wall and have taken on a thus-far successful mission to nip any revolutionary alternative in the bud by putting forward acceptable “left-wing” figures like Sanders and AOC. In its predictably farcical incarnation, the 21st century version of social democracy seeks to deliver imperialist dominance in the guise of “climate solutions” (the Green New Deal–which claims to protect the interests of oppressed people most affected by climate catastrophe at the same time it refers to the climate change as a “threat multiplier” and “threat to US national security”).

Much of the stealthy corporate rediretion of anticapitalism has been expertly laid out in this interview between podcaster Spencer Latu and communist twitter researchers RedKahina and Club-des-Cordeliers. To briefly lay out their thesis: there was once a more legitimate left-wing of the Democratic Party, a wing of the party who supported divesting from apartheid South Africa, opposed the Iraq War, supported repealing the PATRIOT Act, etc. While the two-party system of the United States has always been set up to support imperialism and prevent the growth of a true opposition movement at the electoral level, the function of liberal representative government has never been able to squash all expressions of class struggle. The careers of politicians with genuine allegiances (or at least an enforced accountability) to their working class constituencies is a testament to this.

Since 2016 and the foundation of the Justice Democrats, a PAC behind the likes of AOC, Ayanna Presley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, etc, there has been a steady erosion of accountability to working class constituents in the Democratic Party under the guise of electing likable, “progressive” young politicians. In reality, the Justice Democrats were founded by people like Saikat Chakrabarti, a Walstreet and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who started working on behalf of the 2016 Sanders campaign. RedKahina and Club-des-Cordeliers contend that the Justice Democrats PAC has been a vehicle for laundering Silicon Valley money into this group of young politicians who are not connected to the unions and other traditional working class constituencies of the Democrats. (See also the parallel development in the media realm, with the founding of the Intercept by Ebay-founder and media mogul Pierre Omidyar).

Like AOC, a case-in-point, she upended the career of Joe Crowley, one of the most senior Democrats in Congress with heavy backing from unions. Crowley, to be sure, was no socialist–but he had relationships with the remnants of organized labor that, as mentioned, are gaining steam presently. It is notable that there were rumors of his being elevated to Speaker of the House–a move preempted by AOC’s upset election. AOC has no record of activism or connection to the unions in her district, and the result of this upset has been to electorally disenfranchise the massive working class district she presides over.

Although not the main object of this analysis, it is impossible to understand the present moment without at least a nod toward the effects of the presidency of Donald Trump. It is this author’s analysis that the effect of the Donald Trump presidency has been, somewhat paradoxically, to put wind in the sails of a kind of patriotic liberalism, reaffirming confidence in the forms and functions of US governance. Since Trump’s election, the calling words have been “not my president,” “not my country,” “this isn’t the America I know”–and the protagonists in the valiant anti-Trump struggle has been Robert Mueller, the FBI, Nancy Pelosi, the CIA, and NATO. With the theatrics of Trump’s supposed move to withdraw US forces from Syria, which of course never materialized (and, without going too afar of this piece, which was never the primary thrust of US policy in Syria), the Democrats raised a furor over this disastrous misstep that supposedly threatened US national security. In the realm of the media, liberals have re-affirmed the trustworthiness of the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media against the foil of Trump’s “fake news.” In short, there has already been a substantial rightward swing in mainstream politics that has been achieved in the “resistance” against Trump–as if the ruling class aren’t all co-conspirators behind closed doors. More left-wing critics who foam at the mouth about a break in ruling class strategy would do well repeat to themselves Julius Nyerere’s helpful aphorism: “The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

For the purposes of this analysis, all that is necessary to mention is that the mainstream left has been firmly co-opted to direct anti-capitalist politics toward acceptable outlets. Sheepdogging, as it’s known, is one of the most crucial tools the ruling class has in its toolbox today, and the response of the communist left ought to be ruthless criticism and exposure.

ii. Moving from here

What has it been, in practice? As laid out in How the left was misled, it has rather been uncritical fawning of prominent social democrats like AOC and Ilhan Omar. What is to explain this tendency, this uncritical acceptance of focus-grouped media avatars?

A comrade of mine has labeled the attitude of the groups on the revolutionary left since the fall of the Soviet Union a “siege mentality.” With the onset of the global counter-revolution in 1991, as Stalin mournfully predicted, “a period of the blackest reaction” set in, culminating in the grand crimes of the destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and so many other countries that have complicated US imperial dominance.

Domestically, this took the form of a precipitous decline in the socialist movement, except for the admittedly brave anti-imperialism of WWP against the destruction of Yugoslavia. In terms of the workers movement within the US, however, what came with the collapse of Eurasian socialism was a lost generation. The old guard members of the communist movement, many of whom emerged in the crucible of anti-war and Black liberation activism of the late 1960s, came to defend an increasingly small circle of activists that only began to pick up about two decades later with the 2016 presidential election.

Perhaps this reflects most closely my own personal experience, but the psychological effect of decades of pursuing activism with some, but few, and certainly no permanent, upticks in mass participation created a situation ripe for manipulation. The election of Donald Trump was intentionally engineered as a way of creating fear and directing opposition along approved channels (one kind of strategy of tension).

The young people who poured into WWP-PSL in the wake of the election were not on the whole politically developed and the old guard, who had seen no comparable influx of young activists into the revolutionary movement in decades, were starstruck and unable to critically shape the consciousness of this energetic mass of youth. It is impossible to lay out the goings-on in the micro-sphere of the US communist movement, but WWP/PSL/CWL have hemorrhaged members who criticize the lack of structures for genuine accountability for misconduct by members; who critique the pro-troop propaganda of the likes of Mike Prysner (an admitted war criminal who tortured people in Iraq, who has to this day refused to name his officers who gave the orders) within the PSL leadership; and, in the CWL, who criticized the ascendancy of the social democrats and dared to raise any critical conversation about directing tactics away from street rallies to anything else.

The same dynamic has been reproduced in the media sphere with the elevation of the social democrats. People who call themselves communists have turned to uncritically praising and defending the young social democrats who in their voting records unquestionably support the aims of US imperialism. At the moment when it’s never been more important for communists to criticize the electoral process in the United States, when it’s never been more important to show that there is no alternative possible within the system, the so-called communist organizations have ceded their ideological territory to the self-styled left-wing of the imperialist Democratic party.

An important caveat: it is by no means the situation that the “old guard” is alone responsible for the situation, when the “new guard” is certainly rife with opportunists, infiltrators, and self-promoters who took advantage of this siege mentality situation to elevate themselves within national party leadership. If they have no actually achieved rank within the party leadership, then they exert a tremendous de facto leadership influence through social media.

iii. Conclusion

It should seem to go without saying that one cannot begin to do anything without an honest assessment of where one is at. For any communist party genuinely to take root within the masses and progressive forces of this country, it cannot continue down the path of tailing the Democratic party, running interference for the controlled opposition, and . For the self-styled communist parties in the imperial center, an honest new beginning might include:

Honestly assessing the state of the political and social forces today; Developing tactics for reaching the masses that aren’t self-promoting rallies and insular national conferences; Critical journalism that exposes the strategies of the ruling class in controlling the opposition within the United States, including: sheepdogging and the limits of electoralism; the financial and media networks that promote celebrity leftists; Researching methods of psychological and social control, especially with Operation Gladio, the strategy of tension, and psychological warfare; Providing critical young researchers and activists with the opportunity to take on leadership within national organizations, to shape the future of the communist movement strategically and ideologically;

Until these things and others occur, there is no chance that a revolutionary communist movement can take root in the United States. We have to be honest about the essential function of celebrity-DSA electoralism before we can overcome it, as Steve Salaita laid out so well in this piece on the limits of left electoralism (although the figure in question has been exposed to support imperialism as well):

Amid the bickering on the US left about the utility of voting, a compromise usually emerges: voting is merely a form of damage control that one performs every few years before returning to the serious stuff. But the rhetoric of voting supersedes the physical act. In turn, elections have become a nonstop preoccupation. The off-season no longer exists.

When candidates become politicians, they have a tendency to abandon important elements of their platform, thereby undermining their original appeal (almost always it happens with foreign policy, but healthcare is another common site of backtracking). I don’t want the stink of betrayal on my conscience. (And I’m uninterested in “educating” people whose supposed ignorance is deeply incentivized by the ruling class.)

[…]

It’s a noteworthy approach. When it comes to imperialism, star politicians of the left who are otherwise firebrands morph into world-class dissemblers, sloshing around in vagueness, timidity, and doublespeak. Progressive and democratic socialist candidates have mainstreamed discussion of grotesque wealth and corporate greed, but only superficially challenge a political economy reliant on Indigenous dispossession, coups d’état, covert meddling, and mandatory peonage to Western capital. Left electoralism has a poor record in the area of US foreign policy.

At the end of the day, it may be more important to initiate a new party outside of the Marcyite orbit of WWP/PSL and their successor organizations that can adequately assume the historic task of organizing workers and oppressed people in the United States. As far as I can tell, it will be impossible to have the ideological space to develop the critiques that I have attempted to outline above within the constraints of the current communist party configuration of the United States.