Stalin’s message to American communists: with iron discipline, you’ll overcome the threats you face

When Stalin addressed the USA’s communist movement in 1929, he identified one of this movement’s core enemies as being “unprincipled factionalism.” This is of course a key foe for communists in every country; but in his speech to the Executive Committee of the Communist International on the American Question, it was something Stalin had a particular reason to focus on. As Stalin observed, factionalism was such a problem in the United States because of American exceptionalism; because within the country’s communist movement at the time, there tended to be two factions that either based their entire practice around the specific features of American capitalism, or disregarded the particular characteristics of America’s conditions.

Both errors treat the U.S. as a country where the normal rules of class conflict don’t apply, which leads U.S. communists to adopt opportunistic habits where they treat themselves as being above other communist formations. A key part of curing this error, concluded Stalin, is to recognize that the U.S. is not and will not be exempt from the crises within global capitalism; because for U.S. communists to navigate this crisis, we’ll need to eliminate factionalism from our movement:

When a revolutionary crisis develops in America, that will be the beginning of the end of world capitalism as a whole. It is essential that the American Communist Party should be capable of meeting that historical moment fully prepared and of assuming the leadership of the impending class struggle in America. Every effort and every means must be employed in preparing for that, comrades. For that end the American Communist Party must be improved and bolshevized. For that end we must work for the complete liquidation of factionalism and deviations in the Party. For that end we must work for the reestablishment of unity in the Communist Party of America. For that end we must work in order to forge real revolutionary cadres and a real revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, capable of leading the many millions of the American working class toward the revolutionary class struggles. For that end all personal factors and factional considerations must be laid aside and the revolutionary education of the working class of America must be placed above all.

What do these lessons mean for American communists in our era? Are they still relevant to our conditions? They are relevant, because in the USA we still have that problem of hubris. Of being inclined to act like the crises faced by communists in other countries–particularly the Global South–won’t apply to us.

A hundred years ago, this hubris looked like U.S. communists not expecting that a serious economic depression would come. “Many now think that the general crisis of world capitalism will not affect America,” said Stalin. “That, of course, is not true. It is entirely untrue, comrades. The crisis of world capitalism is developing with increasing rapidity and cannot but affect American capitalism. The three million now unemployed in America are the first swallows indicating the ripening of the economic crisis in America.” Since then, awareness about the potential for catastrophes has come to no longer be a problem; if anything, catastrophism has become too much of a problem, because our ruling institutions have cultivated doomism in order to paralyze radical politics. American socialist circles still have a false sense of security in another area, though: the area in which we think and talk about state repression.

The only reason why the state’s violence in the U.S. hasn’t so far reached the same extremes which it has throughout the Global South is that our ruling class here manages to keep dissent fairly under control. This success in the counterrevolutionary activities of our ruling class can make the country seem “exceptional,” and it’s one of the factors that’s stemmed from the USA’s role as the center of modern global capital; because the USA is the core imperialist power, its ruling class has been able to recruit a strong layer of collaborators from within the unions and the political left. Which is the aspect that’s made all of the state repression we’ve faced so much more effective, as solidarity can be easily undermined by those collaborators.

This is the context behind the sense of “nothing ever happens” that exists throughout the imperialist countries, and that tends to be shared by our “socialist” organizations. Because of how substantial the collaborationist element is, our ruling class has been able to maintain an equilibrium for a long time now, keeping the genuinely threatening political actors isolated and ill-equipped to defend themselves. This is the situation that we within the country’s popular struggles will continue to face, even as we gain more allies among the masses; there are objective limitations on how much of the state’s violence we can withstand, we just haven’t met those limitations yet. Something we can do, though, is combat the kind of American exceptionalist mentality that encourages us to believe our location makes us exempt from such threats.

That so many “socialists” or “dissidents” in our society haven’t taken into account these realities of the class war is what leads to the modern versions of the old movement’s factionalism. Only in a radical organizing space where many people have a false sense of security, and aren’t concerned about unifying against their class enemies, would we see as many sectarian attacks as we’ve seen against today’s American Communist Party. The new ACP was formed as a response to the actions of the capitalist collaborators in CPUSA, who didn’t want to give representation to the element which was actually upholding Marxist-Leninist traditions. They could have unified with this current, but instead they used foul play to avoid upholding democracy; and the rationale was that this current doesn’t center identity politics, so therefore it’s supposedly a right-wing deviation.

Because of these antagonisms from the compatible left, where communists who align with the Democratic Party have attacked us from a woke angle, those of us in the ACP’s camp have needed to go into this mission ready for a fight. But we must remember that just because there are many actors in the U.S. communist movement who are committed to tearing us down, doesn’t mean we should be dragged into their factionalist patterns of behavior.

The only way we’ll survive the state’s next crackdowns, and win the masses to our side, is if we come to a practice that’s ultimately non-sectarian. Not the kind of “non-sectarianism” that the established left practices, where it seeks to accommodate imperialism’s left wing; but rather a mode of operating that will let communists connect with all revolutionary mass elements. That will gain us support both from the MAGA base, and the massive current within Gen Z that’s come to support the Palestinian resistance.

These radicalized Gen Z members are “woke,” in that they share left-wing social values; but this certainly doesn’t put them in conflict with the communist movement. And it’s precisely because of the skills that we’ve gained through pursuing the “MAGA communist” strategy, where Marxists have worked to reach Trump’s supporters, that communists in our camp are capable of reaching Gen Z regardless of their cultural values. The ACP’s membership is on average probably more culturally conservative than the average Gen Z member, but this won’t stop a lot of these radicalized people in Gen Z from coming to ACP’s position; not if we put in the work to bring them towards it. To discard Gen Z would be unprincipled factionalism, in parallel to how the established left discarded the MAGA base.

Stalin warned that “factionalism, by weakening the will for unity in the Party and by undermining its iron discipline, creates within the Party a peculiar factional regime, as a result of which the whole internal life of our Party is robbed of its conspirative protection in the face of the class enemy, and the Party itself runs the danger of being transformed into a plaything of the agents of the bourgeoisie.” There are definitely agents of the bourgeoisie who seek to draw our own ranks away from the masses, and convince us to go in a purely “right” direction; I’m talking about the Nick Fuentes “groypers,” who absolutely will try to infiltrate us.

Through their fed-backed social media momentum, they seek to create a temptation for communists to tail after them, and start repeating their arguments. With iron discipline, and an unyielding focus on our mission of winning the people, we will foil this latest scheme against the revolution.

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