The 32nd National Convention of the CPUSA will be held this weekend, from June 7 until the 9th. All members of the party who call themselves Marxist-Leninists must grasp that the future of the party is at stake, and set it on a path towards genuine revolutionary action.
Tendrils of revisionism, opportunism, and tailism (ROT) clench onto the convention documents, and seek to drag the party back into its days of bleakest reaction. The entrenched leadership clique, represented by Sims and Cambron, but avatared in the grinning form of John Bachtell, seeks only to window-dress the funneling of dues to People’s World and of hard-won radical energy back to the Democratic Party. Many of the 23 convention resolutions have openly reformist aims that content themselves with moldy scraps leftover from the bourgeois government’s table. A Communist Party must act like a Communist Party, not sleepwalk alongside sleepy Joe, shaking hands with ghosts when there’s a real world to seize. As the legendary Irish socialist James Connolly declared, “For our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth.”
Claim the convention!
SAMPLE RESOLUTIONS
WHEREAS the perversion of democratic centralism that prevents full discussion of proposed resolutions and limits new resolutions to those that have been pre-approved by leadership places revisionism and opportunism fully in command of the party apparatus,
LET IT BE RESOLVED that the convention rules be amended to: i) permit each speaker to hold the floor for 10 minutes, ii) adopt in full Robert’s Rules of Order to govern procedure, and iii) be explicitly permitted to offer new resolutions on the convention floor.
WHEREAS the revisionist drift of the party for the past fifty years has caused it to fall away from the masses, tail the Democratic Party, and lose its character as a proletarian institution, LET IT BE RESOLVED that this convention hereby enacts a self-denying resolution which shall disbar any present members of the National Committee or anyone who has served on the National Committee in the past decade from appearing on any slate before this convention or being elected or appointed to the National Committee or its subcommittees for at least four years and LET IT FURTHER BE RESOLVED that any candidate for the National Committee shall be required to take an oath of commitment to the proletarian revolution before the convention prior to being placed on the slate.
Since they are aware this is likely to fail, what's the long-term plan? I get the reasoning behind leaving parties like CPUSA, but I couldn't find any suggestions on alternative orgs.
All I can gather from these complaints, so far, is that we should be wary of any org willing to label itself with 'USA' or 'America,' unless actively agitating against incorrect party lines.
You should read their unity prospectus to fully hear their reasoning, but to me it seems they mostly approve of the direction of FRSO. However they also state that any org is better than none and encourage ML unity, that’s their whole struggle
https://unity-struggle-unity.org/unity-prospectus/
It's an interesting piece, and yesh while their position is basically that FRSO is a cut above the rest they do have some criticisms (correct IMO) of how they operate.
With that said the program they lay out meant to address the issues they see as primary in the Communist movement, nnamely theoretical backwardsness and amateurism, strikes me as odd in that this has all basically happened before with the attempts at empire-wide party building during the New Communist Movement in the 80s. There is so much that has gone with even an attempt at summation that it all feels a bit preemptive: why did it fail to cohere in the 80s? Why is it different now?