The PCUSA has been couped by labor Zionists. But amid Zionism’s collapse, their “victory” is a hollow one.

As Zionism and imperialism become increasingly cornered, and unable to continue functioning, the forces of reaction have used an insidious tactic to try to prevent revolution within the core: insert labor Zionism into American communist spaces. In this case, the Party of Communists USA. This is worth reporting on not just for the sake of warning communists about the reactionary influences that have taken over PCUSA, but because we must clarify why it’s the PCUSA that’s become a target for these types of bad actors. The reason why they’ve focused their efforts on the PCUSA, rather than on any of the ultra-leftist organizations, is because PCUSA (prior to the infiltration) represented an actual ideological threat towards the ruling class. Which means the centers of reactionary intrigue have felt the need to not just persistently target it, but also target it with psyops that are carefully tailored to a certain category of communists.

Because the PCUSA was founded upon a rejection of the petty-bourgeois radicalism that the modern CPUSA has proliferated, and that other petty-bourgeois radical orgs carry on, it attracts members who can’t be easily compelled by ultra-leftist arguments. Infiltrators have tried to destroy the party using such arguments in the past; two years ago, when a group of saboteurs seized control of the PCUSA’s website domain to publish a slanderous document, these malicious actors worked to split the party on the basis that its leadership supported “Russian imperialism.” The angle they used was to put forth the “imperialist pyramid” theory, where the new cold war is seen as an “inter-imperialist conflict,” and convince the party’s members to defect to their splinter group. 

This failed to destroy the party, because the party didn’t lose anyone valuable; it held on to everyone with the integrity to reject such destructive ultra-left nonsense. Now, the enemies of the anti-imperialist cause have taken up the inverse tactics: take over the party itself rather than form a splinter group, and use the party’s platform to push a right opportunist agenda rather than a left opportunist one.

The argument these new infiltrators have used is designed to take advantage of the desire for combating ultra-leftism and petty-bourgeois radicalism. The narrative they’ve put forth is that supporting the settler state of “Israel” is the scientific Marxist position, and that wanting to bring about this state’s end makes somebody an unserious ultra-leftist. As these infiltrators wrote in a recent statement, which they put out in reaction to the unanticipated amount of opposition they’ve faced:

The Party of Communists USA maintains its commitment to the original ideology of scientific socialism, as exemplified by the Soviet Union. The position of the PCUSA on the Israel-Palestine question is identical to that of the international Communist movement, including the historical position of the Soviet Union and all of the socialist countries throughout the world. This position is the two-state solution outlined by the Geneva Accords based off of UN Resolution 242, which calls for the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state along the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. 

To push for an immediate one-state solution within the current geopolitical context is to push for a sequence of events that would likely bring about the end of humanity. The nuclear-armed state of Israel can be expected to launch its nuclear weapons and begin World War III if its existence is threatened. It is not for petty-bourgeois ultra-left radicals on the other side of the world to dictate the struggle of the Palestinian people. Those who push for the destruction of Israel are willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands, if not millions, in the interest of their own ideological purity for a line that the Palestinian people themselves do not support. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which is in a leadership position representing the interests of the Palestinian people, has long called for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. Even Hamas has now agreed to such a solution.

This is them trying to maintain plausible deniability. To make it seem like all they’re doing is affirming the stance of the Palestinian resistance. This isn’t all that they’re doing, though, and the evidence of their deeper agenda is found in how they view the history of Zionism. We know that they don’t want to bring about Zionism’s end, because they fundamentally view the creation of “Israel” as having been a good thing.

Hamas and the other Palestinian resistance forces that support a two-state solution do so because they view it as a means to an end; that end being the dissolution of “Israel,” and the realization of a Palestinian state which encompasses all of Palestine. The way the two-state solution can make this happen is by creating the conditions for Palestine to rebuild and thrive, putting the region’s ethnic demographics in a more balanced state and thereby making Jewish supremacy over Arabs no longer possible. As when Palestinians are no longer a minority within the pre-1967 borders, the demographic dominance which Zionism has gained will be gone. 

This process has already begun due to the anti-colonial war which Hamas and its coalition partners have been waging. Throughout the last year, mass amounts of colonizers have left “Israel” in reaction to Netanyahu’s inability to get things under control. The right opportunist tendency that PCUSA’s new leadership represents does not want this process to bring about the end of “Israel,” though. It believes Jewish supremacy should be maintained, except in a seemingly friendly form where it can claim to no longer be supremacist.

In this statement, which was given to me by one of the former PCUSA members who have integrity, the infiltrators summarize the view of “Israel” that they want to make predominant within the communist movement:

Though they’re hesitant to say it so frankly in public, they view the Nakba as having been a liberation war. This is why numerous PCUSA branches and members have defected: these infiltrators are pushing the idea that “Israel” has the right to exist, which gives a malicious context to their calling for a two-state solution. They don’t support two states for the reason Hamas does, that being because it’s a practical step towards ending Zionism. They support it because they want Zionism to survive. Which puts them at odds with all of the anti-imperialist countries that they claim to support; they’ve already forsaken solidarity with Hamas and PFLP, despite their opportunistically using these and other Palestinian groups as justification for their position. And because China has helped negotiate an agreement between Hamas, Fatah, and PFLP, for them to go against Hamas makes them in effect anti-China and pro-imperialist. 

It’s a repeat of what the anti-Russian Marxist-Leninist orgs have been doing: working to divide the global anti-imperialist forces by only selectively supporting these forces. Except whereas these other orgs have done this by disavowing Russia, the PCUSA infiltrators have done it by disavowing the Palestinian resistance. That both these camps of opportunists claim to support China is what makes them so damaging; if they got their way, there would be a catastrophic split between the different global entities that are resisting U.S. hegemony.

Their justification for all of this is that the Soviet Union and the old American Communist Party viewed Palestine’s partition as a positive development. But as the principled former PCUSA members have pointed out in the party’s People’s School for Marxist-Leninist Studies meetings, this narrative leaves out crucial context. These anti-Zionist comrades explained how the USSR did this because its strategy at the time was to support every anti-British force; how the Soviet and U.S. communist leaders later recognized that Zionism isn’t a positive force; how the labor Zionists created a state that inevitably shed its initial “socialist” veneer, and became dominated by the openly Nazistic Likud Party; how supporting the two-state solution as a means to an end shouldn’t mean apologizing for labor Zionism. And perhaps most importantly, they clarified that Zionism means “Israel.” That the two can’t be separated, as the infiltrators want to do, and you therefore can’t support the continuation of “Israel” without being a Zionist.

These malicious actors were able to take over due to structural deficiencies within PCUSA that already existed, and that need to be recognized in order to avoid future events like this one. Even though the PCUSA was set up with the goal of combating the CPUSA’s reformism and liberalism, which made it take on correct positions like supporting Russia, the organization was built in a way that made it unable to win the people and open to reactionary takeovers. 

The PCUSA is bureaucratic and dysfunctional. This makes its leadership obtuse and unresponsive to feedback, like the responses that the anti-Zionist comrades gave. This made the infiltrators easily able to subvert democratic centralism, imposing their will from the top-down without getting any vote from the members. It’s also made the leadership complacent, satisfied with doing a limited amount of in-real-life work; even though it was able to build up a union presence, this was in spite of the party’s character, which is overwhelmingly an online one. It’s lacked focus on in-person recruitment and organizing for the same reason that it was so vulnerable to being couped. This connection between the two problems is implied within the resignation letter of one former member, who’s said that:

The party shows almost no enthusiasm or respect to joining mass protests in defense of Palestine. The members of the party that have consistently gone to these events and built coalitions with them did so of their own initiation, not the party's. The party routinely hesitated to participate in any of these actions. This is one of the forefront issues of the time, much like the Spanish Civil War and Vietnam War were at their respective times, and it is an issue that demands urgency and a re-analysis of the Palestinian question from a Marxist-Leninist lens that actually captures the whole history of Palestine and not just '48, '67, Oslo and now from the perspective of white American and European communists…

Upholding these positions and distancing the party from the mass movement is putting the party and our mass organizations on a suicidal course where we will lose our international and domestic allies, our place in alliances and coalitions, our trustability, our credibility and our members. All of our great work over the years is being risked because a few pro-Israeli members would like to die on the hill of the two-state solution. This is a position that basically aligns with both major bourgeois parties, the revisionist CPUSA, the KKE, the fascist Ukrainian government and NATO. How can we be so hypocritical in supporting reunification of Korea or China with Taiwan but continue to support the partition, occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine? How can we be so forceful against UkroNazism and so tame against Zionism?

The reactionaries who’ve done this believe they’ve won, but they’ve lost. Because 1) they aren’t able to even slightly slow down Zionism’s unraveling, and 2) their actions have compelled all of the principled people within PCUSA to confront the structural flaws within their former org. These good people, and friends of theirs like myself, are now able to take the struggle to its next stage without being hindered by a party that doesn’t work properly. The infiltrators are desperately trying to reverse history, while we’re embracing history’s progression. That’s why we’ll win.

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