After 1988, the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) quit running Presidential candidates, and began working to elect Democrats. They decided, sensibly in my view now, this was the best path forwards, first we need to terminate the fascist right.
CPUSA--an endlessly wrongly maligned** left-socialist political party and organizer cadre--has historically had much better success in creating labor unions (particularly in the first half of 20th century) and supporting progressive causes in general, than actually winning their own elections.
For a long time, and certainly at least 1988, CPUSA has seen the path to Socialism as requiring the unification of the Left and working people, not endlessly disabling division as happens far more on the Left than the Right. Unity for CPUSA means not just bringing more people into CPUSA, but more people into more organizations aligned with CPUSA on critical issues. CPUSA sees itself as a unifier of itself and others. Marx himself dissuaded people from joining fringe parties that had no chance of winning, instead joining (and helping lead and further expand) the party that included the majority of workers, knowing full well that no bourgeois party truly represented their interests.
A unity-above-all approach probably reached its peak during the 2000-2014 chair of Sam Webb. I recall being shocked how strenuously apologetic for the Obama adminstration People's World was in 2010. I was rather disgusted, though I certainly preferred Obama to McCain, I didn't see him as perfect, far from it. Socialists like DSA had more pointed critiques of Obama at the time. (I think
PeoplesWorld is excellent now.)
Many Communists were in fact disappointed with Webb, who stepped down at the 2014 convention and even denounced the CPUSA itself two years later. Indicative of his unity-above-all-else vision, Webb endorsed Hillary and denounced Bernie for dividing the party by challenging her in primaries.
Most of my friends see this differently. They see Bernie as capitulating to Hillary too early, before the convention. Most think he should have at least seen a floor vote and fight. Some think he should have run away from the corrupt Democratic Party (which fully deserved this) and run on 3rd party ticket.
I see Bernie as having tried very hard to do the right thing regardless of how it made himself look. He did not want to see Trump elected, so he did his best to bring the tent back together. I did too. After voting for Bernie in the primary, I voted for Hillary in the general election and persuaded all the left friends I could to do so. Whatever we thought about Hillary, it was more important to defeat Trump. I don't see either Bernie's influence or Russia as having been major determinants of the outcome of the election either. That was primarily caused by Hillary running a too-centrist campaign (all the while being strongly associated with neoliberal and neocon positions), and a very bad one too, while Trump was getting endless airtime for being crass--which played well in a strongly disgruntled hinterland Hillary wasn't paying attention to, as well as Trump's simultaneously selling out to Israel (Israel-gate is real, Russia-gate is not) for massive funds via Sheldon Adelson and others and support from fringe uber-Neocons. All this, combined with the boost the Electoral College gives to those same disgruntled areas, made Hillary lose in the determinative Electoral College vote.
I see the correct strategy as:
(1) As Leftists we must challenge corporate Democrats with people's Democrats who are good leftists in the Democratic Party Primaries when there are good opportunities for doing so.
(2) If our primary challengers lose, which may happen a lot,
we should then fall in line with the Democratic Party to help defeat the fascist Right candidates.
We haved to get used to this 1-2. If we get too hung up on not doing (2), the sad but necessary step, it will weaken people's initiative in taking on (1) as well as create more Fascism, as we see now. (1), putting out new candidates who might win, is the only path to actually move ahead.
I'm calling this sort of thinking, "Sufficient Unity." We need to be sufficient unified to prevent the ball from smashing backwards, and meanwhile allow unmitigated free expression of ideas and grievances to move the ball forwards when we can.
Now there will always be a fringe, no matter how hard we try, which won't follow through with (2).
At any given time, small number of hold outs might be good, to help keep the corporate candidates from selling out too much.
We can't know what the number is, so I recommend we must try to unify the Left as best we can, all while knowing it will never completely happen, and we must not even consider anti-social or Fascist means to stop such disunity.
(Update: I'd have to fight my own strong feelings against Biden to vote for him in the General Election, if he gets that far. I thought Hillary was the worst Democratic Presidential nominee in a long time, but Biden is another step backwards. Neither showed any change or remorse for previous actions.)
This also calls for a certain kind of fight, in general, in the Primaries. We want to have our Left challengers focus on the big vision, what we want to achieve that is different, and not on the minutae of corruption which could hinder the centrists candidates later in the general election if our challengers lose.
That's the basic principle, anyway. Seeing the difficulty of getting people to follow this 1-2 from my personal experience, I can forgive Sam Webb.
I'm not saying he's a bad guy, he's a Leftist too, and has an interesting blog. Just somewhat different tendency.
Webb expresses a post-Marxist sentiment that there's more to it than just worker class that I think is wrongheaded. Capital may not have invented the divisions among us, Capital is a historically recent invention, but Capital owns and operates these divisions now, and Capital is ultimately to the root of the modern rise of White Supremacism and the like, which thrives on the availability of lumpenProletariat (even though not all White Supremacists are underclass themselves, some are its generals). NYTimes refers to the likes of the El Paso Shooter as well as other terrorists as "lone wolf losers," perfect example of what Marx called lumpenproletariat. People with real lives including friends, good jobs, and all the old union benefits (healthcare and paid vacations) and social community don't go shooting down shopping malls, only those whose life is somehow stuck in an emotional desert of alienation from what they could be positively contributing to and receiving from society ("from each according to their ability" is just as important as "to each according to their needs"). Capital doesn't want to pay those union benefits or even see a deep workplace community, both of which threaten short term profits. Our whole lives have been rebuilt with as much default atomization as possible, starting from the fact that people generally travel alone in cars, instead of in mass on trains, because it's both more profitable and less threatening to Capital. Imagining some sort of "other" (uniquely ethnic?) basis to violence from white people is just as racist as White Supremacism itself. So I wouldn't call his analysis Marxist but post-Marxist, and I haven't found it fully explained either, so perhaps I can't yet fully judge it.
Still, I love Webb's denunciation of the term "Coastal Elites." That's just as much an ethnic slur as "Jewish Bankers." I denounce DeBlasio for different reasons than Webb, however. I denounce Bill DeBlasio becuase in real life he is a "Liberal" Zionist mayor who strongly denounces BDS. DeBlasio's "leftism" fools no one, especially leftists.
Meanwhile, I fear excess application of diversity-enhancement measures, such as quotas, to achieve the diversity in the party that Webb argues for. It is possible to focus on diversity to the point where mission is destroyed. There is a balance, I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I suspect that at the highest level in an organization, competence and enthusiasm are the most important. So, we ought pick the best possible executive, regardless of diversity mechanisms. Then some level of diversity support may be appropriate to an executive board, but I wouldn't let a diversity mechanism force one counter-revolutionary onto a Leftist board.
So, in selecting President, we would choose* Bernie Sanders and not Hillary Clinton, even though Clinton is a women and women have been historically under-represented. Hillary is a very wealthy woman with neoliberal and neocon tendencies, and Bernie is about the least wealthy person in the Senate who is a lifelong and committed socialist. (*Assuming our choice were determinative.)
Among the general population, the generally marginalized groups such as women, blacks, and latinxs are generally lefter in most ways compared to the general population. However, within leftist organizations, an inversion may occur, in which individuals from such historically marginalized groups who make it in the door are less left than their male counterparts, possibly because of external difficulties or distractions involved in making it into the organization. Being serious about diversity alone will result in counter-revolutionary drift.
I know it's all too easy for me to say this, as a white male from middle class background. But I know people from generally marginalized groups who feel exactly the same way, if not stronger. They may say, if that woman/black/latino isn't the most leftist one on the executive board, then they don't actually represent me, they represent a false identity that some people are being fooled into believing represents me, so even for the sake of diversity the diversity system is worse than no diversity system at all.
I also know a left leaning political scientist who feels the same way about the McGovern reforms of 1972, which began to apply diversity quotas within democratic party operations. He feels they were the beginning of the collapse of the pro-worker Democratic Party, and the rise of the neoliberal one, as relatively wealthy "minorities," the ones wealthy enough to get in the door, came to run the operation. Further, often people from minority backgrounds but having right wing views are "groomed" by wealthy people and organizations to create these "representatives," and the quotas give them clear sailing to leadership, even if their actual views are reactionary.
I think the important place to apply diversity enhancement systems is at the entrance to an organization. Get more women, blacks, latinos, etc., into the organization in the first place. Then, let them compete on socialist charisma for the leadership positions. In line with this thinking I believe that diversity initatives, even quotas, are quite desirable where there are limited education slots, such as in university admission.* But it would be better yet if such entrance slots were not limited.
*Quotas as such may actually be illegal in the case of University admissions, due to laws and court decisions. However top ranked universities do take considerable efforts to promote diversity anyway. If quotas are illegal for selecting people for education, should we rely on them for selecting leftist leaders???
Another factor is, whites are often marginalized too. We should not be filtering them out just to ensure diversity. We should take care to make a place, the best possible place for each person, even white men.
This now removed article describes how the female and minority promotion works in organizations such as DSA (and, while not as comprehensively, within the Democratic Party). While the article was removed because the author used a fake name and DSA could not validate they had actually attended, their description of DSA pretty much* matches my own experiences two weeks ago. As one example, all fifty people in the room had to give their names and pronouns. But because some people (including me, I admit I arrived late and didn't know better, my bad) weren't following the instructions, not everyone gave their pronouns. SO, we had to go through the entire room and do it all over again. In not a single case was the styling of a person inconsistent with their pronouns. People who styled themselves as female used female pronouns and vice versa.
(*I don't much distinguish between working class and non-capitalist "middle class" as the author does. IMO, that's taking Class too far, and in a divisive way. Many of the attendees looked like college students. I would not be criticizing their "middle class privilege." I see them as working class too. The only ones NOT working class are those who get most of their income from capital, or who represent Capital as executive managers.)
In the key decision of the day, a white male voice was the first to oppose the clear (though unspoken) preference of the DSA organizers against raising a primary challenge to an establishment Democratic Representative. That voice was only heard 40 minutes into the discussion (which was supposed to be limited to 45 minutes):
"We should primary challenge EVERY corporate Democrat! Hold their feet to the fire until they agree to our platform!"
A sentiment I was very much in agreement with (however, because applause and the like is not allowed, I had no way of expressing my agreement until the vote). Heretofore, the progressive stack of arguments against the primary challenge were limited to "we should only endorse
established candidates, otherwise it would look bad for the DSA. Now that an independent white male had spoken with a somewhat resonating argument, a new argument appeared in the stack. We should not primary challenge the Democratic representative because he is a [Minority] candidate in a [Minority-Majority] district and the member-challenger is White. This argument was, not surprisingly, first made by two people of the [same Minority], and then echoed by organizers and established members. The ultimate vote was lopsidedly against the endorsement, however, it was not only white or male members voted for the white challenger, a black lady in front of me voted for the endorsement too.
The decision not to endorse a challenger may have been the correct one, and for the all the reasons given. The challenger himself appeared to have no anger about it. Any similar organization might well have come down the same way (and, in general, and pretty good reasons IMO, DSA generally supports Democrats rather than consistently opposing them like the Green Party).
I can live with these procedures, and this outcome, I concluded later. I have not cancelled my DSA membership, and I intend to go to DSA meetings (and Our Revolution and CPUSA) as I am able. I honestly don't know how DSA differs from other organizations that promote socialism nowadays, including CPUSA--and nobody asks for the CP endorsement anyway. I haven't been to a CPUSA meeting in several years (though I am trying to organize a Club now). For 2019, CPUSA has voted two co-chairs, a Black man and a Latino woman. That looks similar to DSA, which has had a Female Minority chair for some time now.
100 years ago, mainstream Socialists (SPA) were more "middle class" and the Communists more "working class" and included more minority members. Since then, both groups have almost always been led by white guys. A Progressive Stack may help reverse the historical white-maleness of mainstream American socialism.
But I found the DSA meeting hard to swallow at first, and I could easily imagine even friends of mine who are not white or male not being very keen on it, primarily because my friends are more into the challenging and protesting thing, not the going along with establishment parties thing. A Female Minority friend of mine was more critical of the arguable anti-white-male bias than me. "What are white guys supposed to do? Mass shootings?"
That is not my feeling at all.
I am perfectly willing to wait my turn in a progressive stack, or be discriminated against with regards to organizational roles on the basis of my historically advantaged race. With less power comes less responsibility.
I can only hope people may come to forget what the people who caused almost all our problems looked like.
(** CPUSA does have a long and complicated history, partly a result of having survived for so long. It began as the left wing of the Socialist Party of America, which itself had begun as the centrist wing of the Socialist Labor Party. For a long time, CPUSA was part of the Comintern, and while CPUSA was mostly a party of well meaning organizers, it also included a few spies. The Comintern was disbanded in 1943. From 1959-1987 CPUSA received a payment from the Soviet Union to keep it from saying certain things about the Soviet Union. It complied until 1987, then when Gorbachev ended the soviet jobs guarantee as part of Perestroika, CPUSA refused any more bribes and became very critical of the Soviet Union. Prior to that point, CPUSA is often portrayed as being an "apologist" for the Soviet Union. However, just as much, it was correcting the story and context portrayed by imperialistic Western Media, which is a good thing. CPUSA opposed the Korean War, which socialist organizations of the time tended to support.
CPUSA membership has been as high as 66,000, and it's candidate for President has received as much as 0.26% of the vote which is pretty good for a 3rd party, and the Socialist and Communist endorsed Henry Wallace got 2.38%.
While the CPUSA claims to be "Marxist-Leninist" it's actual plan to gain control of the government is through the ordinary electoral victories of socialists (and this has been for the longest time...nothing could be found as long ago as 1951 to indicate that any of the CPUSA leaders had ever advocated violent overthrow of US government, contrary to the ultimately un-Constitutional criminal claims against them. Only with complete (super supermajority) electoral victories will socialists be able to remake commanding heights industries as worker controlled.
CPUSA also denounces fascism and repression, it aims for "Bill of Rights" socialism, which would not take away personal freedoms or personal property except in cases of extreme excess. The goal is to gain control of the Means of Production and direct it to human means and needs, and also to make people even more free otherwise, even in ways we cannot imagine, because for so long we have been thumb of the masters. But the one freedom which should rightfully be banned, is to speculate in ways that control society to the ever increasing wealth for speculators. Even capitalist economist and speculator John Maynard Keynes said that when a casino runs society, we cannot expect a good outcome. Society must not be run by casinos, but through democratic means, and with the full opportunies for people to edcuate themselves completely.
IMO the Leninist qualifier is unnecessary. Lenin was a brilliant man and created a treasure trove of papers regarding socialism-in-practice which may still have merit and ought be studied critically by socialists against events of the time (so we don't make the same mistakes next time). But Marx had essentially the same overall plan as Lenin initially did, "socialism" is not stateless it is directed by the state, though in Marx's vision workplace democracy was also critical. Lenin, unfortunately, chose to dump the real workplace democracy when it proved unmanageable: the actual Soviets were disbanded fairly soon after the "Soviet Union" was created. He was criticized vociferously at the time by the Left Communists, such as Rosa Luxemburg, and then Lenin wrote a paper responding to them. Lenin had tried to remove Stalin, but after Lenin's death Stalin pretended Lenin was still his best buddy, and he rolled out whatever Lenin paper he could find to justify anything he wanted to do on any given day, keeping 20,000 papers completely secret. Lenin the man didn't want the term "Leninism" to be used at all, because he feared such bastardization, and his wife railed against it.
The 1917 Revolution was more political than violent, although the Bolsheviks violated good faith with impunity. Lenin simply had the good fortune to be able to step in when the Tsar had abdicated, the next in line declined, and so a weak and ineffectual provision government was ripe for the picking; with some trickery and politics tthe Bolsheviks appeared as a true majority at a particular moment,. Then, the violent part began with fending off the counter-revolution, including from other countries.
Such good luck, if you want to call it that, cannot be planned exactly. In fact, many including communists might imagine some moment as Lenin's arising, though serious analysts say the USA is not vulnerable to such situations. For one thing, the "voluntary" military tends to be conservative, and the constitution itself virtually locks in conservatism. So it's pretty unlikely for the entire constitutional government to resign, and the military to decide to back the Communists.
There could be something else, however.
And the communist plan does also reguire true mass demonstrations as well.
In all honestly, all of these things are hard to imagine happening at all. A "violent overthrow" would of course be impossible.
But no matter how you arrange it, the vast majority of people have to be working together, unified. Otherwise, nothing is going to stick. That is going to take a long term effort, most likely, and meanwhile Communists and others can study books and history, and discuss, and think about how to make the world what it could be, for everyone. Which is really, it has seemed to me as I have seen Connunists, a lot of what being a Communist in the USA is actually about.
So it's it's a cadre to organize, unite, read, discuss, and think.
Lenin was very critical of the Mensheviks, who did seem to focus on those last 3 things. Well Lenin's was an opportune moment, with no time to waste. Here an now, such an opportune moment is unimaginable. This is pretty much what mainstream leaders of the CPUSA concluded very early. So the organization was not committed to "violent overthrow" or anything like it. That was more in people's imagination than anything else. It was committed to achieving unity of the working class for achieving socialism.
Unlike the Communist movements in other countries that have actually seized power, the CPUSA is untainted by acquiring power and the compromises of real government, and, gasp (it should not be a priority where the ends justifies the means)) maintaining power.
In both Lenin's view and Marx's, only when we have achieved full socialism through controlling the state can we get to stateless classless communism. DeLeon of the SLP was far more radical than Lenin and proposed anarcho-syndicalism, a variant of stateless communism, from day one. But not only did DeLeon not have the opportunities Lenin had to take over a country at an opportune moment and test his ideas, DeLeon's radicalism drove people out of the SLP itself. In the end, anarcho-syndicalism is so hard to conceive even on paper, it's probably impossible in practice. Though, I think the Participatory Economics people have done the best explorations of how anarcho-syndicalism might work. If it did work well, it could be the best of all.
The end "goal" of almost all leftists, including socialists, communists, anarchists, is a stateless classless society where "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs." That phrase was much earlier used by the Apostle Paul. Whether you call this end communism or anarchism, it is defined the same way.
Unfortunately, Lenin never regarded social and personal liberalism as very important, and in that he was wrong, and in contradiction with the Bill of Rights Socialism of CPUSA.)
