Corruption and Grift in the Communist Party USA¶
An article by Persephone Raskova¶
The revisionist clique of CPUSA hoards the wealth of the Party like Smaug upon his pile of gold.¶
I dedicate this article in the memory of Comrade James Raines. I never knew James personally, but after reading his story about being driven to suicide by the abusive crooks in charge of CPUSA, I instantly felt motivated to pursue these links to the end of the world. I want to make sure that this same revisionist clique that drove a dedicated comrade like James to commit suicide is held accountable for their corruption, their disregard, and their bourgeois attitudes. All ideological quibbles aside, anyone who pushes a committed, dedicated Communist to the point of suicide should be considered a class traitor and dealt with accordingly.
—Persephone Raskova
Introduction¶
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) had its convention in early June. Many comrades with Unity-Struggle-Unity, through it’s periodical newspaper Red Clarion[1], have written numerous articles decrying the revisionist leadership. An uninformed reader may be confused as to why USU has such a strong grudge against CPUSA. Are they a bunch of Maoist wreckers, as the CPUSA National Committee alleges? Although the author personally identifies as a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, the Clarion itself is most certainly not a Maoist publication. As to the accusation of being wreckers, it is one to which we plead “Guilty as charged!” However, as will be argued, wrecking isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes, one must chop down a decrepit old tree so that beautiful new mushrooms can grow from its corpse.
While revisionism is nothing new by any means, CPUSA takes it to a whole new level. One modern example of a revisionist formation is the Marxist Unity Group[2] of DSA. However, their revisionism is nowhere near as severe as the CPUSA. Normally, comrades who hold incorrect ideas which aren’t reactionary should be struggled with and debated to a resolution. Generally, this is the correct move. However, when we debate and struggle with our comrades, we are relying on an underlying assumption that the individual or group being struggled with are coming from a place of good faith. Bandits, crooks and schemers do not come from a position of good faith. They come from a position of wanting to line their own pocket books. The national committee of CPUSA represents exactly such a group.
Bottom Line Up Front¶
Important
There is strong evidence to suggest that the revisionist clique in charge of CPUSA at the national level is engaged in systemic embezzlement of Party funds through a legal scheme involving a wide array of shell corporations and phony non-profits. All this money finds its way to Advanced Realty Corporation LLC which the revisionist clique in question are the legal shareholders of. The scammers then pays themselves in the form of dividends awarded to them through their ownership of the shares in Advanced Realty Corporation.
A similar scheme is involved with the People’s World newspaper, where it’s profits flow through to Long View Publishing Corporation – another privately owned business entity.
To be transparent, we do not have sufficient evidence to prosecute this in a court of law. The reason – besides the fact that none of us are prosecutors or law enforcement agents – is that the financial records of privately held C-Corporations are not public record. However, the converse of the thesis being advanced is verifiable and true. The entrenched revisionist clique in charge of CPUSA could absolutely disprove these claims and absolve themselves of any wrongdoing. All that would need to be done is to have financial transparency with the various Clubs and Districts of the Party. If there’s genuinely nothing to hide and this is all a conspiracy theory in the spirit of Charlie Day chasing after Pepe Silvia in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, then the matter is simple enough for the Party to clear up. All they would need to do is release the books and put the Democratic back in Democratic Centralism.
Before providing the evidence supporting this thesis, some context as to how this investigation even got started needs to be established. The reader should have this context in order to understand the magnitude of the problem, and why the Clarion has pursued this matter so vigorously.
Origins of the Investigation¶
This investigation has its roots in a 29-page PDF file titled “Corruption in CPUSA”. Reading through this document is what sparked the desire to follow the trail of money. A lot of the claims in this seemed specific, so our team began investigating the facts. To our surprise, they all seemed to check out. It’s clear that although there might have been some confusion with technical jargon, some misused vocabulary, or imprecise claims – the gist of what the polemic‘s author was stating seemed to be valid.
During the course of this investigation, we came across an obscure WordPress website that hasn’t been updated in six years which details the suicide of Comrade James Raines. The gist of it is that Comrade Raines was a passionate Communist organizer pushed to suicide by the cruel indifference and bourgeois attitudes of the revisionist clique in charge of People’s World: Joe Simms, Susan Webb and Terry Albano among others. Because Comrade Raines wanted to genuinely give voice to the masses of Ferguson and report from a revolutionary anti-revisionist angle, Albano and Simms canned him. Comrade Raines refused to toe the liberal line, and thus was discarded. For a clique claiming to be revolutionary and Communist, these parasites attitude reflect bourgeois values. Devastated by the loss of his job and his inability to support his family, Comrade Raines tragically committed suicide.
Reading this is what turned the story from a mere curiosity into a personal and political crusade against CPUSA. Not only do these crooks seem to be grifting and fleecing their well-intentioned rank-and-file membership, but they drove a dedicated and hard-working Comrade to an early demise. And as if things couldn’t be worst, Comrade Raines blamed himself for getting canned from People’s World. Imagine if he were still alive, where our movement might be. Imagine if Comrade Raines found a real revolutionary organization, and worked to replicate himself through careful study! Unfortunately, the social murderers[3] in the revisionist CPUSA clique deprived us of that opportunity.
Before diving into the evidence, in addition to the author’s own labor the works of Comrades Adam, Soff, Celeste, and Gracchus should be rightfully recognized for their individual contributions. Other comrades deserve mention as well, but since they choose to remain anonymous, they will not be named.
The Evidence¶
The overarching thesis and the motivations for writing have been established, so it is now time to cover the evidence itself in technical details.[4] Since the allegations are of a financial and accounting nature, and since most readers of Red Clarion are not certified public accountants, care must be taken to provide a laypersons explanation of various accounting terms and technical jargon. In this spirit, a few definitions are in order.
Note
A C-Corporation is the legal and accounting term for a corporation structured in a way where:
It’s income is separate and distinct from that of its owners.[5]
It is taxed as it’s own distinct entity (as opposed to the owners being taxed).
It is a legal entity that is separate and distinct from the board of directors and shareholders.
It’s ownership is determined by who owns shares of the company.
Another phrase that’s often loosely tossed around, but is worth defining, is Non-Profit. Non-profit has a very precise and specific meaning in the world of accounting and business. It’s not exactly what you would expect, based on how the word is used within intra-left discourse. According to the Internal Revenue Service, a non-profit corporation is one that does not have any retained earnings at the end of the fiscal year.
What does all that mean? In Marxist terminology, what we refer to as profit most readily translates into Capitalist-ese as Retained Earnings. In other words, retained earnings are money that a corporate board of directors can distribute to themselves as a dividend[6]. A non-profit, then, by law cannot set aside such money for payment. That’s not to say it can’t expand, but rather that the only way for the board of directors of a non-profit to pay themselves out is as a salary. Salaries are taxed as income, which is at a higher rate than the tax rate for dividends. Therefore, it’s more advantageous for a capitalist to pay themselves as a dividend then as a salary.
But to get around this, what the clique effectively does is bill a bunch of phony expenses and costs of doing business to their for-profit shell corporations, thereby transferring the money from the non-profit into a for-profit corporate entity under their control where they can pay themselves out as dividends. Here in lies the overall mechanics of the grift – a classic accounting fraud scheme.
To paint an accurate picture of the grift, we must discuss the myriad shell corporations that comprise the CPUSA Scam.
Corporate Entities¶
People’s World¶
According to the People’s World own website, for all intents and purposes People’s World does not exist in the eyes of the law and commerce. It has no tax identification number. It’s not registered with any secretary of state or any unit of government. It owns no copyrights, it pays no employees, and it signs no checks. You can‘t sue it in court. It is a fiction, a brand, an illusion.
This might come as a shock to the reader, but rest assured it is quite true. How is it that this reputedly century-old newspaper, this time-honored staple of the Communist Party, doesn’t actually exist? It exists because it is the DBA[7] of a corporation called Long View Publishing Company. People’s World is to Long View as Olive Garden is to Darden Restaurants, or as Taco Bell and Pizza Hut are to Yum Brands LLC.
Long View and Advanced Realty¶
What actually exists is a privately owned C-Corporation called Long View Publishing Co. By law C-Corporations which aren’t traded on the public stock exchanges (NYSE, NASDAQ, etc) are legally permitted to have closed books. Long View Publishing Corporation is the actual corporate entity and publisher behind the CPUSA periodical People’s World. As a C-Corporation, their financial records and transactions are private information known only to the shareholders of the corporation as well as the taxation authorities.
The private and confidential nature of these financial transactions cloaks Long View in a shroud of mystery. By law, it is impossible for anyone who’s not a shareholder of the corporation to know its precise revenues, or how it spends its money. It is impossible for anyone who is not a tax agent of the state or a shareholder to know where all those donations flow to. However, by investigating other public tax records we can see some interesting links.
Firstly, what does Long View Publishing Corporation list as it’s address? Let’s investigate the facts. A quick search of Long View Publishing Corporations Employee Identification Number (EIN) – an administrative identifier with the IRS that’s more or less the social security number for a corporate entity[8] reveals the following address of business for Long View as registered with the Internal Revenue Service:
235 WEST 23RD STREET 7TH FLOOR, NEW YORK, NY
This is interesting that Long View lists it’s address in New York with the state taxation authorities, when it’s flagship brand People’s World claims to be based out of Chicago. What happens when we google this address? Why, it belongs to none other than one Advanced Realty Corporation LLC. And what exactly is this address? It is none other than the address of Communist Party USA.
This isn’t so unusual, the reader might think. After all, the Party proudly parades People’s World as it’s own intellectual property. In addition to constantly begging for money, the Party says that People’s World it it’s daily periodical for workers. So it would make sense for the Party’s paper to list the Party‘s headquarters as it’s legal address with the tax authorities, right? That’s where things get a bit funky.
Warning
There is no such thing as a legal entity known as the Communist Party USA. It simply does not exist. It does not exist in any database of the Federal Elections Commission. It does not exist as an entity registered with the Internal Revenue Service. It does not exist as a corporation or non-profit legal entity registered with either the Federal government, Tribal governments, any of the fifty states, US Virgin Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, or any other territorial possessions of the United States either. In other words, CPUSA is a phantasm, an enigma. For all intents and purposes, in the eyes of the law, it would be the same as if myself and my buddies got together and called ourselves the Northeast Kansas Communist Drinking Society (Marxist-Leninist).
This may seem like a minor point, but it’s really not. Why, you ask? Well, if the party is not a legal entity, it cannot own shares of things any more than the Kansas Drinking Society (Marxist-Leninist) can. So who, or what, exactly owns Long View Publishing Company? Remember: People’s World does not exist as a legal concept. It’s a fiction of the imagination. It’s a phantasm. It is not real. What is real, is one Long View Publishing Company. And Long View Publishing Company is registered not as a non-profit entity, but rather as a for-profit C-Corporation. This means it has retained earnings, and can pay out dividends from those retained earnings to the shareholders.
Who exactly are the shareholders of Long View? To be transparent, I don‘t know that question for sure. It is truly impossible to know without looking at the financial statements – specifically the balance sheet – of Long View. And as you recall, since Long View is a privately-held C-Corp there is no discernable or legal way for a concerned citizen such as myself to gain access to those records. The only people who are legally entitled to see those records are law enforcement agents, tax authorities, and the shareholders themselves. The author, as well as the Pressworkers of the Clarion, are none of those things. So with that said, we cannot prove what we suspect.
It’d be too easy for the Party to disprove my thesis. They could release their books to the clubs and let the members debate and run the numbers themselves. If there’s no funny business going on and this is all a confusion, then that would clear the matter right up. I am not a CPUSA member, so my skin in the game here is limited. But if I were a member, I would want to know where all this money is going.
So while we might not be able to investigate the records of Long View or Advanced Realty directly, what we can do, is look at other publicly available data such as tax records, property deeds, real estate transactions, and other lawfully accessible public documents to paint a picture of what we suspect is the reality of where all that People’s World money flows. And we can start to piece together more importantly who is all that money flowing towards.
Workers Education Societies¶
What is it that the Communist Party USA actually does? What is it’s programme? Well, as laid out in their official 2020 programme, one of their main tasks is to educate workers and raise their consciousness. In order to accomplish this task on paper, the Party has set up Workers Education Societies in Los Angeles, Chicago, and St Louis. Each of these is involved in a nefarious embezzlement scheme. In the case of St Louis, the rent expenses all flow to Dan Giljum. Rossana Cambron embezzles the money from the LA WES, and the Chicago WES rental expenses all go to Long View. In these ways, the Worker Education Societies all are shell corporations that enable fraud and embezzlement.[9]
The Corrupt Clique¶
Based on our investigations, we’ve deduced the following individuals who we suspect are members of this corrupt revisionist clique. They either are involved formally in abusive labor practices, directly profiteering from the Long View racket, or both.
Dan Giljum¶
Dan Giljum is a retired AFL-CIO staffer and leader in the Missouri CPUSA district. Staying true to his roots as a corrupt union bureaucrat, Giljum is listed as the legal owner of the building listed as the address of St Louis Workers Education Society. Taking a look at the 2019 Federal tax returns for the STL Worker Education Society, we can see an approximately $24,000 expense for “Occupancy, rent, utilities and maintenance“. Since Giljum is the owner of the property, it’s reasonable to assume that Giljum is therefore collecting this money from the rent for his personal enrichment.
Where is the money from the Worker Education Society coming from? The same tax return states its revenues of $51,555 are derived from “Gifts, Grants and Membership Fees.“ In other words — the dues money from CPUSA members in the St Louis Club are directly enriching a corrupt union bureaucrat.
Rossana Cambron¶
Rossanna is a central figure in this entire scheme. She is the co-chair of CPUSA, a People’s World writer, and has her name signed on a number of tax returns of organizations within the orbit of CPUSA. She is also listed on the International Publishers board of directors which is a who‘s-who of the CPUSA’s worst grifters. When I spoke to former members of CPUSA, they described her personality as being “abrasive” and “greedy”. Others I’ve spoken with have mentioned that she wears flashy jewelry, and lives in a home with an estimated value of $892,800 as of the time of writing this article.
According to the tax returns for the Los Angeles Workers Education Society, Rossana is listed as the Treasurer, paying herself a salary for presumably book keeping. Normally, this is nothing unusual. After all, I as well as the Red Clarion firmly believe in the concept of a professional revolutionary who dedicates their full-time career to advancing revolution. And as it is with all workers in capitalism, we need money to survive. So it makes sense that Rossana, as a high-ranking Party member, would draw a salary for her services.
But when we investigate the facts a bit closer, it calls into question her professional services. We can see that the total revenues from this tax return are \(49,568. Under the expenses, we can also see that \)38,821 were paid out as salaries and benefits to the employees of the non-profit. In our case, this non-profit employs precisely one person: Rossana.
Important
If we do some basic math, we see that Rossana’s salary and benefits from the Worker Education Society amount to 78% of the total expenses of the Society. Her salary is also 2.5 times the value of the services provided as per the tax return.
Although the return in question is from 2009, I cannot find a more recent copy on file with the Internal Revenue Service. But, given what we’ve already discussed, I think it’s reasonable to assume that this general pattern has held up in the 15 years since.
Joelle Fishman¶
Joelle Fishman is a Connecticut based CPUSA ‘organizer’. To her credit, the investigation into the various CPUSA holdings in Connecticut revealed no blatantly obvious funny business going on. However, Joelle is listed on the Connecticut People’s World Committee, Inc articles of incorporation as the founding member. And, as demonstrated previously, People’s World is nothing more than a fictitious shell label for Long View Publishing Company LLC, a privately-owned for-profit C Corporation to which the rent revenues of various CPUSA properties flows. Therefore, it is reasonable to argue the claim that Joelle Fishman is one of the members of the corrupt clique that profits from the dues of the rank-and-file.
In an interview with Connecticut CPUSA member Will Bartinik he described Joelle as follows:
I can’t say a ton that would be helpful. She is a 2nd or 3rd generation member, gifted her position by blood. She runs the whole district on her own. She’s very culty, I remember one time she talked about how “special” the CPUSA was and it almost brought her to tears.
—Will Bartinik, Connecticut CPUSA member
Not only is Joelle profiting, but apparently descends from a long blood line of revisionists! Who ever thought that revisionism could be genetically transmissible? The description of her as ‘cult like’ also lends credence to including her on the list, as financial exploitation is a Hallmark trait of a cult.
Joe Sims¶
Joe Sims is the other co chair of National CPUSA. He’s listed as a Senior Editor with People’s World, and I have confirmed with a Comrade who wishes to remain anonymous that he is a central member of the corrupt revisionist clique profiting from the Long View scam. His profile on International Publishers also state’s he is an avid lover of biking, so I’m sure that Sims can afford the nicest Tour de France quality bicycles. This would explain why he’s always begging and grifting for People’s World donations.
John Bachtell¶
John Bachtell is listed as the CEO of Long View Publishing Company. He is also the former Co-Chair of National CPUSA from 2014 to 2019.
Others¶
Other noteworthy individuals worth mentioning are Roberta Wood, CJ Atkins, Tony Pecinovsky, and Gary Bono.
The CPUSA “Programme”¶
A party is what it does, and ideally what it does is more or less the same thing as it lays out in its program. But sometimes there‘s a big disconnect because what an organization claims that it does, and what they actually do. In the case of CPUSA the difference between what they actually do and what they claim they’re doing is quite astounding.
What the Party says they‘re doing¶
To get an idea of what the CPUSA think it’s doing, in its own words, we need only to look at the official Party Programme on their website. I’ve selected a few of the most bombastic and ridiculous claims from their programme, the reason for which shall be readily apparently in the following section:
A developed anti-monopoly program will build on the many struggles and issues already begun and won in the fight against the extreme right. As part of that coalition, the Communist Party will propose radical democratic demands aimed at curbing the political, economic, and ideological power of the monopolies.
I guess to the CPUSA, genocide is not an extreme-right policy because they seem to have no problem endorsing Genocide Joe, the butcher of Gaza! Also telling that their programme wants to “propose” demands, rather than force them from the hands of the bourgeoisie. That is because they clearly view themselves as the lap-dogs of the ruling class and their politicians!
Our country’s revolutionary history is filled with massive struggles to protect and expand democracy. The people have won democratic gains such as the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution, successful legal battles ensuring that all people have inalienable rights, elimination of property requirements for voting, outlawing of poll taxes, enrollment of former slaves as voters, voting rights for women and Native peoples, lowering of the voting age, the Voting Rights Act, and the restoration of voting rights to felons who have served their time.
It fills my heart with joy to know that the CPUSA looks to the American Revolution and the Bill of Rights for inspiration, both of which were lead by and theorized by a notorious owner of slaves and rapist of human beings named Thomas Jefferson. This is doubly insulting as they cite “enrollment of former slaves” as a virtue of the Constitution written by slavers!
A Socialist Bill of Rights, enshrined in amendments to the U.S. Constitution, will guarantee all the freedoms we have won over centuries of struggle. It will include freedom from unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, discrimination, and oppression. It will include extended rights fundamental to socialism: the rights to justice, liberty, and equality; free quality health care and education; living-wage jobs and decent housing; and a healthy environment.
This right here is the pièce de résistance. The broad societal vision of what CPUSA wants to do is..... amend the Constitution of the United States? CPUSA even lets their fellow revisionists in Marxist Unity Group outdo them in radicalism – at least MUG openly calls for Burning the Constitution!
Since it is a 61 page document, we could go on and on with multiple examples, but I believe I’ve highlighted enough of this nonsense to make the point clear.
What the Party is actually doing¶
I spoke with Comrade Will Bartinik of CPUSA Hartford West End club who bravely and generously agreed to speak with me on record about the CPUSAs programmatic activities. In his own words:
My club (Hartford West End) was limited to the PW route, local ceasefire resolution (failed), and trying to make connections with the Working Families Party. One idea was to invite the local WFP organizers to a cookout! I’m still in the club technically; will probably be kicked out soon for criticizing leadership and sharing Red Clarion articles. Onward with USU
—Will Bartinik
when I asked this Comrade for clarification of what he meant by his club being ‘limited’, he replied:
The first layer of resistance is older members who have proudly been in the club for decades. In my case, this was a guy who had been in for 40 years. Just beyond him was the leader of the Hartford CP clubs, a third generation CPUSA member. Brian Steinberg. Beyond her is Joelle Fishman, who runs all the CT clubs as her fief. She accepts all the new members. It actually took 3 months for her to contact me when I first tried joining.
Here are some examples of “limits.” 1. Clubs have no way to talk with one another. All communication includes leadership as mediator. Even within the city of Hartford, CP clubs do not talk with each other. This makes it very difficult to build anything because everyone is isolated by limited manpower. For example, I wanted to aggressively expand the paper route but was told we didn’t have enough “capacity” to do so and needed more members in our own club first.
They’re also totally isolated from the more serious organizing groups in the state. For example, they don’t work with the CT Palestine Solidarity Coalition. I think the reason is that the group doesn’t recognize Israel. Therefore, too radical and “not pragmatic” for the lofty CPUSA.
In conclusion, they have fully abandoned the struggle in favor of trade unionism. They have fully embraced the white chauvinist mantra of American Exceptionalism that posits we need to wait until Capitalism naturally decays. Of course, the reason they say this is because an actual struggle would require too much sacrifice. They don’t want to give up their comfortable lives!
Apparently all Club activities must go through three layers of approval to ensure that every clubs line is sufficiently tailist and revisionist. The last of these three layers is Joelle Fishman, who we’ve demonstrated is a member of the revisionist clique. This testimony is consistent with the testimonies of other Party rank and file gathered by USU.
A glance at the CPUSA *What We’re Doing* website lines up with the Comrades testimony. It seems that since October 7th the overwhelming majority of Party work has been campaigning for Democrats and pushing for toothless local ceasefire resolutions. True to their legacy as revisionists, CPUSA is all too happy to ride the coat tails of the masses.
CPUSA leadership should be ashamed of itself. It is completely undeserving of the honor of calling itself a Communist Party. A Party is supposed to be leading the masses ideologically and pushing their best ideas forward, not riding in the wake of popular sentiment. Even among the Democrats who they tail, there a few rogue congresswomen such as Rashida Tlaib who have at least spoken at engagements alongside Resistance organizations such as the PFLP. This puts CPUSA to the right of ”The Squad” within the Democratic Party, and firmly to the right of the Democratic Socialists of America. Pathetic!
But when we factor in that CPUSA is designed as the revisionists cash cow, the ‘Party’ line makes far more sense. If one is trying to milk the organization’s rank-and-file for dues money to fund your comfortable lifestyle of revolutionary role-playing, then one would be wise to not rock the boat too much. After all, if a rag-tag band of communists with zero training, led by a woman in rural Kansas with half of a graduate degree in accounting, can uncover the grift with imperfect information then so too can a trained federal agent or IRS auditor with access to far more complete information.
Again, to be clear there is no definitive proof that CPUSA National Committee is actively collaborating with Federal authorities. So this is speculation. But is it that far-fetched of a hypothesis? It makes logical sense: the Feds know about the grift, but simply choose to turn a blind eye because the victims being fleeced are Communists. In exchange, the National Committee of CPUSA cracks down on any revolutionary dissent, and ensures that the party never goes further than the “left” wing of “progressive” Democrats. Stranger things have happened before...
How Does This Affect The Communist Movement?¶
This is an entirely fair question to ask. Why should anyone care about what some die-hard party fanatics will dismiss as “sectarianism” or “wrecking”? How does this affect broader Communist organizing within the heart of the Empire?
Firstly, the CPUSA’s tragic trajectory must be upheld as the textbook example of the dangers of revisionism. From the very beginning of the party, when it purged Harry Haywood in an act of white settler chauvinism, it’s fate was sealed and doomed to irrelevance. It fumbled the bag on many occasions: first, with Haywood’s correct theorization on the Black nation as an oppressed internal colony of the United States, and secondly in the 1960s and 1970s when it refused to align itself and subordinate itself to the leadership of the Black Panther Party. Every time it failed, it was due to its settler-chauvinist revisionism. Given it’s revisionist historical trajectory, it would be a net contribution to world history to wreck such a chauvinist, empire-loving party into a thousand pieces, so that something genuinely revolutionary and liberatory could be built from its ashes.
Secondly, the Party controls millions of dollars worth of assets in the form of various real estate holdings across the United States. These buildings could, if the party took a revolutionary anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist line, be used for genuinely revolutionary activity that poses a threat to the social order. But they’re not. Instead, they’re being used as part of an embezzlement scam to fleece well-meaning rank-and-file comrades into funding lavish and comfortable lifestyles of the revisionist clique.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Party is like a bog of quicksand that drags down hopeful and energetic rank-and-file comrades into a vipers pit of revisionism and liberalism. Many earnest revolutionaries join the Communist Party USA because, well, it calls itself the Communist Party. It’s completely understandable why an eager but inexperienced Communist might be deceived in this fashion. It’s one of the reasons why their revisionism is so dangerous.
Once they’re stuck in this quagmire, the alluring miasma of liberalism slowly begins to take hold of them. They breathe it in, surrounded by it. Bogged down in the quicksand of liberal ideology, they‘re unable to escape and have no choice but let liberalisms seductive vapors fill their lungs. What’s worst is that unlike the DSA where there is no centralized authority and there is no party discipline, the CPUSA has perfected the art of centralization and organizational discipline. This is why clubs are forbidden from speaking to one another without the presence of higher headquarters monitoring the conversation.
And as the Clarion article More than Mercenaries details, the group dynamics draw people further and further down the rabbit hole of revisionism and tailism, until they either quit out of frustration, or become the bad guys themselves.
Conclusion¶
As a bald Russian man once asked, ”What Is To Be Done?” The national convention has come and gone; the revisionist clique has entrenched themselves and effectively ensured their eternal domination of CPUSA. Let us be clear here:
Warning
The Communist Party USA is a burning boat. It is a lost cause. It can not be salvaged. It is not worth salvaging. Even if it hypothetically could be saved, and the revisionist clique becomes ousted by some sort of divine miracle of Marxism this would not be enough. This is because due to the legal structure of a C-Corporation, by law the revisionist clique would continue to own Long View Publishing Company, every single property used by the Party, as well as Advanced Realty Corporation.
In effect, no matter what happens to CPUSA, the partys ruling clique controls all of its wealth. Nothing short of an actual proletarian revolution will change. The rank and file had their one shot to oust this clique and potentially salvage the party at convention, and they let it go to waste. Therefore, the only option left is to split from CPUSA and break off.
Where should these comrades go, should they decide to do that? I cannot say for sure. Although CPUSA is by far the most egregious of these national organizations, every single group at a national level has its own problems. DSA is unsalvageably controlled by an opportunistic right wing, and what pathetic excuse there is for a left wing in the DSA wants to fight the right with kiddy gloves while the DSA right sharpens their blades for the knight of the long knives. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is a cultish sect riddled with credible accusations of sexual abuse and also takes a dogmatic Marcyite line that’s incompatible with legitimate anti-revisionism. National Maoist organizations such as Maoist Communist Union deny the primary status of settler colonialism, and thus suffer from the same kind of chauvinism as detailed above. Or they take on an extreme cult-like form, as the various chapters of the Red Guards and the Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party USA.
While unfortunately all the national level organizations are more or less unviable, that leaves us with one realistic choice – to start out own principled, anti-revisionist, chauvinism-free Marxist-Leninist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist formations from scratch with the intention of eventually uniting into an Empire-wide formation.