Intervention Concerning the “Party Question” in the CPUSA’s Upcoming 2024 National Convention

On March 29th, the CPUSA National Committee (NC) released a discussion document for their upcoming national convention titled Build the Party, Build the Clubs. Many members of the CPUSA have rightly criticized this document, though just as many have misdiagnosed its core problems. For example, one comrade Kevah, whose critique A response to “Build the Party, Build the Clubs” was published on the CPUSA’s website, accused the NC of aspiring to build  “a Menshevik party,” based on a mistaken understanding of the term “mass party.” Since beginning this intervention, another response article bearing the same title was published (May 20th) with some of the same criticisms, and hence the same errors. In these comrades’ defense, the term “mass party” is widely misused in our movement, including by the NC. While a whole gamut of issues concerning the CPUSA’s political outlook, tactics, and form of organization are discussed in the NC’s position paper and in Kevah’s response, this intervention concerns only what might be labeled the “party question.” Questions of political outlook, program, and strategy and tactics will be relegated to a future intervention in the interest of keeping this one brief enough to hold our comrades’ attention.

The majority of the first document under investigation, Build the Clubs, is, in principle, unobjectionable. Most theoretical errors present are of a character too minor or too far out of scope to bother addressing. The actual problem, so far as I am concerned, is the ominous abyss separating what the NC claims to want for the party and the actual policies it has set into action. For all its talk of democracy in the clubs, for example, the NC has, in actual fact, maintained the CPUSA’s decrepit sect regime, lorded over, as it is, by the NC’s rotation of career bureaucrats. In the alleged interest of hashing out ideological conflicts, the NC has “provided” its rank-and-file members with the “opportunity” to submit discussions, proposals, and resolutions to the convention; yet not only are rank-and-file submissions arbitrarily limited to a thousand words (The NC’s own paper was over three-thousand), but it is ultimately up to the current NC, with no input from the convention delegates, whether to even publish the submissions. Further still, the NC denounces any public discussion or criticism on platforms out of their control — i.e. on social media — as “factionalist”! How remarkable, indeed, that this same NC, which openly declared its intent to disallow free elections at the upcoming 2024 convention (see their recent article How does the Communist Party elect its leadership?), would caution — only a few months later — that “care must also be taken to insure its internal democratic collective functioning”! The NC paternalistically counsels the clubs in the proper operation of democracy while ruling out democratic procedures for commanding the clubs themselves; the NC states that “unity does not mean unanimity or conformity,” and yet it punishes dissent in practice. Their deeds do not match their words!

It is only half-way through, under the sub-section “Becoming a mass party,” that errors of substance come into view, and here only a couple of key sentences stand out. The root of the whole scandal is found in this single passage:

The cadre model of a revolutionary working-class party tailored to fit Russia’s conditions at the turn of the century has been replaced as conditions have changed.
In its stead, at Lenin’s initiative, the international Communist movement adopted new organizational principles for countries with bourgeois democracies. This new version was called a “mass party.” “Mass” was defined as participating in mass action, taking initiative, expanding influence over time, and building a large membership. (Build the Party, Build the Clubs).

First of all, what exactly is meant by “the cadre model”? This phrase is nowhere to be found in any of Lenin’s speeches or writings, nor that of the Comintern. To be sure, Lenin did use the word “cadre” — but only sparingly, and without any clear distinction between the “cadre” of Bolshevized parties and social-democratic parties (i.e., those of the second international). The NC leaves this term completely undefined, and, even more frustratingly, never states in what way this “model” was “tailored to fit” Russia, nor what “conditions have changed” to justify its replacement. As if that weren’t vexing enough, the NC, without any restrictions on word count to blame, also neglects to cite their sources and to provide specific dates of reference. Before contacting the party to request these very details, I was sure that the passage was probably based on something; yet when I received a response from Mr. Sims, he was only able to reiterate the gist and vague phraseology of the NC’s discussion paper, and stopped responding when I pressed for specific sources! Without any grounding in history or concrete analysis of present conditions, the recognition that the party’s “role is not frozen in time but changes in accordance with the unique circumstances in each country” appears to me, at best, among the barest of banalities, and, at worst, an understated repudiation of the universally applicable lessons of the Bolshevik revolution. If we are being generous, and consider this merely a case of “innocent” negligence rather than purposeful obscurantism — and it is only at the behest of a certain comrade that I extend this generosity — then the least we can say is that such sloppy writing is unbecoming of our movement, least of all from its leaders.

All the same, we may hazard a guess as to what the NC means. It is plausible that, by “turn of the century,” the NC has in mind the 1898-1905 period of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), during which it was forced to operate underground. It was during this very period that Lenin famously wrote What Is to Be Done (WITBD, in 1902), among other lesser-known works of a similar subject, advocating to keep the party an illegal fortress for the sake of its own survival. If that is what the NC means by “cadre model,” then they are basically correct: Lenin does indeed argue in WITBD for a secret, conspiratorial organization, specifically to survive the conditions of utter political tyranny under Czarist autocracy, and so that one day they could emerge from the underground and engage in really mass struggle. If, indeed, this is what the NC has in mind, then I only have to wonder what purpose it has in bringing this up, since it really goes without saying that a party enjoying general political liberties, that is capable of operating above-ground, and that is capable of utilizing legal forms of struggle, would be foolish to do otherwise. With the possible exception of some Maoists, there are few if any Communists advocating a preemptive retreat to the underground. So not only is the purpose of this section unclear, but it also pits the so-called “cadre model” and “mass party model” against one another in such a manner that one could easily interpret this section as a renunciation of vanguardism, as comrade Kevah did (in light of the Party’s actions and agenda, not to mention its history, I do think that Kevah’s suspicions of liquidationism are, in fact, well founded, just not on account of what the NC has said in this section of their paper — a subject for a future intervention).

And this is really the crux of the issue: Statements such as, “the international Communist movement adopted new organizational principles for countries with bourgeois democracies,” and, “This new version was called a ‘mass party,’” are patently false. There was never any new model of party organization (whether applying to bourgeois-democracies or not, whether being called a mass party or not, whether adopted “at Lenin’s initiative” or not, etc). I took great pains in combing through the Comintern resolutions searching for anything that could have even wrongly given that impression, and found no such thing – time, I fear, that I’ll never get back. But more importantly, that is not to say that there was never any such idea as a “mass party,” nor that the term belonged to the Mensheviks (as is all too frequently believed by our Marxist-Leninist comrades today). And it is here that, despite striving for brevity, I am required to dredge up some “lost” history (“lost,” that is, from the conscious memory of most contemporary Leninists — myself included until I was kindly corrected, at great pains to my poor ego, by a certain comrade).

The idea of a mass party wasn’t created by either the second or third internationals; as a matter of fact, it had already been long established as part of the social-democratic tradition by the first international. Few advocated for this very ideal more fiercely than Marx himself, who strove “to replace the Socialist or semi-Socialist sects by a real organization of the working class for struggle,” believing that, “The development of the system of Socialist sects and that of the real workers’ movement always stand in inverse ratio to each other” (his letter to Friedrich Bolte, 1871). Marx and Engels frequently expressed disdain for what they viewed as sectarianism, as the tendency of some socialists to separate their organizations from the real movement of the workers and to form specialized organizations, united by special doctrines, competing against one another for influence. This anti-sectarian principle is perhaps most famously expressed in the Communist Manifesto (maybe you’ve heard of it?). Hence the mass party ideal (fitting, more or less, the definition provided by the NC) was, in reality, the well-established goal of every social-democrat, regardless of tendency, regardless of tactical disagreements. That is to say, the development of a mass party had, all along (i.e., since “the turn of the century”), been the aim of Lenin and his fellow “Iskra-ists,” and it was “merely” a disagreement among the various factions of the RSDLP on how to achieve it, on who to recognize as a party member and which organizations to consider party organizations. These particular disagreements, and not disagreements over the ultimate aim of the movement, were what precipitated the Bolshevik–Menshevik “split” at the RSDLP’s second congress in 1903 (see Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, 1904, ch. I: “Paragraph One of the Rules”). No one foresaw that only a few years later, in 1905, that a bourgeois-democratic revolution would sweep across Russia, forcing from the autocracy significant — if incomplete — political reforms, allowing the RSDLP to emerge from the underground into a newly conquered state of semi-legality. From that point, Lenin observed that the RSDLP was then becoming “a mass party all at once, changing abruptly to an open organization” (Party Organisation and Party Literature, 1905, Collected Works, vol. 10). I reiterate: the RSDLP itself was, in fact, both a vanguard party and, from 1905 on, a mass party, having developed by 1917 an expansive membership among the politically advanced workers of 200,000–300,000 (see the “Short Course”, 1939, ch. 7). By the time they split from the second international in 1916, let alone by the time they founded the third international in 1919, the Bolshevik party itself had become a mass party in full bloom, not a “cadre model” party only just transitioning to a “new version called a mass party” (whatever that string of words might mean).

In sum, the establishment of the Comintern, in 1919, was not the dawn of a new “mass party model.” Far from it: the mass party ideal was, by then, already long-established in the Marxist tradition. If anything, the “new” Communist Party was the apotheosis of that model. So the confused statement about adopting a “mass party model” is mistaken for two reasons. On the one hand, the mass party was not a distinct model at all, but rather a stage of party-building. On the other hand, the fact that modern-day Communists remain split up into sects clearly attests that, while the aspiration to become a mass party is objectively correct, it is juvenile to believe that the CPUSA, or any other such sect, is ready and prepared to become one, given that their continued division is the exact antithesis of that aspiration. Without completing the first step of party-building, without, in other words, uniting the vanguard, dreams of forming a mass party are but an idle fancy.

Turning my attention towards Kevah’s reply to the NC, there are a handful of troubling mistakes. To begin, the introduction of the article states that: “the National Committee … expresses a frank misunderstanding of Marxism-Leninism and dialectics.” Actually, neither the NC’s article nor Kevah’s has anything to do with dialectics. At all. This is merely the exact kind of (not-so-)revolutionary phrase-mongering typical of inexperienced comrades who believe that such phrases can be cast like a spell to make any point they wish without any concrete argument. I’m much less inclined to thoroughly rake this comrade over the coals for it — that is to say, compared to that certain comrade of mine — I only bring it up since it is such a common sign of sophistry in our movement (a similar kind of baren sophistry as appealing to “material conditions” and “particularities” to make any kind of philistine argument one wishes without ever once specifying what and which!).

In the main, I warmly welcome any signs of comradely struggle in much the same way a parched traveler lost in the desert would welcome even a muddy puddle of water to quench their thirst. Nothing is needed more urgently in our movement than for the rank-and-file of the sects to wage an open political struggle against their own bureaucratic leadership, to not only criticize but to ruthlessly criticize them, and in broad day-light no less. If communism has any kind of a future here in America, then the revolutionary line must be brought to the fore in clear contrast to the opportunist line now prevailing. It is my imperative, therefore, to support such struggle by any means – and here those means can only be pushing comrade Kevah and others to develop their criticisms through further criticisms of my own (it’s dialectical, you see).

I digress. As I have already stated, Kevah, like many other comrades, mistakenly attribute the term mass party to the Mensheviks and their conception of party membership. This error clearly manifests in Kevah’s description of a vanguard party as “an organized, disciplined, and professional revolutionary vanguard party with the strictest of admission” (emphasis added). Firstly, at no point did Lenin advocate for a party solely comprised of professional revolutionaries (cadre, if you prefer?). Secondly, why the superlative here? We certainly want as many to join the party as we are capable of organizing, do we not? For comparison, here’s the oh-so-strict requirements for new members to be admitted to the Bolshevik party in 1919: 

A member of the party is anyone who accepts the party program, works in one of its organizations, subjects himself to the decrees of the party and pays his membership dues… New members are admitted as candidates on the recommendation of two members of the party. (Party Membership Rules, 1919).

Does this comrade believe that the CPUSA, acting in its completely legal and cowardly fashion as the unofficial cheerleaders of the DNC (a topic for another time), needs stricter membership rules than the Bolshevik party did? And if so, why? The membership rules that this comrade later quotes (without citing its origin no less) comes from Better Fewer, But Better, written in 1923, i.e. after the revolution; more importantly, however, those were the rules for admission into the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection – that is to say, not admission to the party in general! It’s unclear why this comrade finds these rules at all pertinent then? Comrade Kevah further states that “The party cannot be open to everyone,” which is certainly true, but offers nothing more concrete than the NC in the way of specifying who should or shouldn’t be permitted to join! Again, I understand that rank-and-file submissions could not exceed a thousand words – which is in small part why I am compelled to intervene — nevertheless, it’s not clear to me that the CPUSA’s problem is admitting too many people into the party, and therefore I am puzzled by this comrades opposition (perhaps this comrade has information I am not privy to that would suggest otherwise?). If a vanguard party is to become a truly mass party (which we are all now, no doubt, on the same page about) then it is impossible for the party to consist entirely of professional revolutionaries. Lenin stated this quite clearly in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back:

When I say that the Party should be the sum (and not the mere arithmetical sum, but a complex) of organizations, does that mean that I “confuse” the concepts party and organization? Of course not. I thereby express clearly and precisely my wish, my demand, that the Party, as the vanguard of the class, should be as organized as possible, that the Party should admit to its ranks only such elements as allow of at least a minimum of organization. My opponent, on the contrary, lumps together in the Party organized and unorganized elements, those who lend themselves to direction and those who do not, the advanced and the incorrigibly backward—for the corrigibly backward can join an organization.

And,

The active elements of the Social-Democratic working-class party will include not only organizations of revolutionaries [my italics], but a whole number of workers’ organizations recognized as Party organizations.

On this point – that the party should include organizations of workers who are not themselves professional revolutionaries – Lenin and his opponents at the congress were in agreement. Getting to the core of the issue, to reduce Lenin’s “minimum of organization” to “professional revolutionaries” is really to pervert Lenin’s view of the party in service of maintaining our existing system of sects in the U.S. In this very system of socialist sects, “party orgs” have been substituted for what are termed “mass orgs.” Which is to say, front groups which are formally independent of the party and comprised, despite the name, in most cases, of very few people, usually liberals, who are specifically kept in the dark about their association to the party — who are under the “influence” of the party only insofar as they do not actually know whose leadership they are following. Of course the “core” of the party, its nucleus, will be comprised of professional revolutionaries and other explicitly Marxist cadre, but so far as a party remains only a core — let alone a section of a core — without successive layers pulled from the masses, it remains only another sect out of touch with the masses.

Moving on, comrade Kevah continues by rightly pointing out that the NC is completely and utterly vague with their description of “the cadre model.” Yet, this comrade also accepts this dubious term at face value. I have to wonder, then, if this term is a creation of the CPUSA, and taught to all its members, or if everyone simply sees the word cadre and takes it for granted that it has some meaning they should be familiar with, and therefore take pains not to embarass themselves by questioning it? What a pickle. It suffices to say that the alleged conflict between a “cadre model” and “mass party model,” whether likened into a conflict between Bolshevism and Menshevism or not, is purely fictional.

Subsequently, and to my dismay, Kevah’s reply has a most bewildering distortion of history of its own: “What the authors go on to suggest is a type of party tailored to even older ‘conditions.’ That is, of Menshevism, or even worse, Kautskyite social democracy.” What conditions could this comrade possibly be referring to? To which conditions was Menshevism “tailored”? Quite plainly, the problem with Menshevism was that it failed to tailor its policies to the concrete conditions under which the RSDLP operated, i.e. under Czarist despotism, conditions which certainly preceded their efforts to organize a political party. Similarly, the equally odd attribution of Kautskyism to “even older conditions.” Not only were Lenin and Kautsky contemporaries, but Kautsky was not even the architect of the reformist (right-wing) trend in social-democracy — he was, infamously, a much later renegade. That honor belongs to Bernstein, whereas Kautsky himself didn’t even formally break from revolutionary Marxism until the first world war (1914, for those keeping score). Hence it is not only unclear what is meant by “Kautskyite” social-democracy (as opposed to the “regular” sort?) but it’s equally unclear what “older conditions” could possibly imply. Certainly ironic in light of Kevah’s completely correct criticism that the NC was similarly vague with their own references to particular “conditions”! But more to the point so far as “older conditions” are concerned, the conditions to which the vanguard party model itself was tailored were, in fact, older than the time in which Lenin (and Kautsky, and the Mensheviks) lived. This much I implied in an earlier section, but now I will reiterate in full what Marx and Engels said about the party in their lifetime:

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties… They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement… The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others… The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. (Manifesto of the Communist Party, section 2, 1848).

Here they expressed, firstly, that the Communist Party is a singular mass party rather than a series of sects. Secondly, the representatives of the proletariat in the party are its own most advanced members. And thirdly, the Communists aim for the immediate, revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Clearly what Lenin advocated in the form of vanguardism, therefore, was largely a return to the original Communist principles, which had been lost over the years. Which is to say, the vanguard “model” was not tailored (i.e., uniquely so) to the new and particular conditions of Russia “at the turn of the century,” but really to the universal conditions of capitalist society, at the very least since the mid 19th century. Even democratic centralism, the “invention” of which is usually attributed to Lenin,  was actually first given its present formulation by Kautsky, as early as 1903, and was subsequently, by 1906, adopted by the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions alike. So, in sum, Kevah’s statement here is A Whole Mess.

Next, Kevah takes issue with the definition provided by the NC for “mass party.” In fact, this definition is basically unobjectionable, if not a bit vague and to a considerable degree ironic. It is really only the mysterious discrepancy between the NC’s definition and description of the mass party that demands criticism.

Nonetheless, Kevah does discern several things correctly, which I will reiterate even though none relate directly to the “party question.” Firstly, the necessity of a central (national) party school to educate members in Marxism-Leninism and to develop cadres. From what I understand as an outsider to the party, education, including curriculum, is currently left up to the Clubs, without any central guidance, aid, or oversight; if this is correct, Kevah is most certainly right about the need for a real party school (though I shudder to think what curriculum the CPUSA’s present leadership would create). Second, Kevah aptly criticizes People’s World for failing to be a good “agitator paper.” This criticism could have only been better if they had also mentioned that despite the NC calling to “Build the Party around our press,” the NC never once acknowledges that the paper is an organ independent of the Party’s central committee. Given that the NC’s only concrete proposals on this matter involve having the clubs commit to discussing and distributing the paper, it seems like the NC really wants to use the party to develop the paper, and not vice versa! Finally, Kevah is right to say, if I may take some small liberties in rephrasing their argument, that the primary task of our movement in the current stage of struggle is objectively the unification of the vanguard – and not the construction of “a united front” or of “fighting maga.” I reiterate: it will be impossible for us to build a mass party so long as the Communist vanguard remains split into competing sects! How will the NC’s recommendations, although correct in the abstract, help to resolve this situation? Obviously they will not!

In summary, we may simply state the following key conclusions on “the party question”:

• The term mass party is not synonymous with the Menshevik “party of a whole class,” and neither is it a distinct “model” from that which the Bolsheviks pursued. The Bolshevik party itself was both a vanguard party and (eventually) a mass party.
• The “mass party” concept predates the Mensheviks and really refers to a fully united vanguard party (as opposed to a system of sects) which is now in the stage of actively preparing for the final confrontation with the bourgeoisie by actively leading the proletariat in mass struggle.
• There’s no such thing as “the cadre model” and the NC’s ambiguity in this matter doesn’t inspire confidence, to say the least.
• The aspiration to become a mass party is objectively correct; yet, as one of many sects, the CPUSA’s insistence on its own self-sufficiency actually precludes any such possibility.

In a forthcoming paper, we shall examine the political outlook, program, and strategy and tactics of the CPUSA’s present leadership and of the opportunist wing who support it.