The democrats come from the class and system that created sharecropping, that created this immiseration. The Dems don't get credit for building a communist movement, when they do something decent it is FDR attempting to save capitalism while laying the groundwork for those attempts to be undone later. CPUSA managed to do all it did without raping and pillaging the global south, it did it while building a mass movement which yes they DID regardless of what you want to think happened. Zero promise of building any sort of mass movement? I just gave you examples. Being on the ground floor of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, etc IS building mass movements. You want to give the dems credit for things they got dragged to do half-assed kicking and screaming and later killed, but CPUSA doesn't get credit for a mass movement ie its own members? I get that you want to work backwards to justify your point and call it materialism, but come on. CPUSA also gets credit then for that shit, you don't get to have it both ways.

Also you are utterly misunderstanding what I mean by goal, I don't mean the fucking end goal for humanity, I mean what we would want to get out of a third party. What would be a success for a third party is entirely different between us. Working on the fringe of the democrats hasn't been proven to work any more than CPUSA's method. You just disregard materialism when it doesn't suit you. Working the left edge of the dems got the Populist party killed, how is that better for mass movement building? If we can evidentially get those wins without sacrificing our ideals via CPUSA, then why would we bow before the dems to get kicked in the face again and again? We can and have pushed for shit like social security without working the edge of the democrats, but rather by agitating. CPUSA was involved in the push for social security BTW

CPUSA managed to use its third party status and organizing to actually force the democrats on shit, not by playing with the edges of the party. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-8/lrs-cpusa.htm

In describing how the party extended its influence during the period that followed, Klehr cynically claims they were just riding Roosevelt’s coattails, and they were effective because their political line had changed, on Moscow’s orders, to make them virtually indistinguishable from liberal Democrats. In truth, it was the mass base the communists had already built up, and the effective independent work they had already done, that made an alliance with Roosevelt possible. In one of the few really useful chapters of his book, Klehr gives a sense of how effective this alliance had become by 1938. In California, Washington, New York and Minnesota, the CPUSA was deeply involved in the electoral campaigns of various left-wing Democrats, and in getting out the vote for Roosevelt. They built up strong progressive political organizations whose usefulness was not lost on the president. Though the communists never openly acknowledged their role in these electoral campaigns, Roosevelt found it increasingly important to woo CPUSA support.

Klehr has less to say about the CPUSA’s role in the historic drive to unionize workers in basic industry under the banner of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), but what the party achieved here was even more impressive. When General Motors workers launched their dramatic sit-down strike in late 1936, party cadre provided tactical leadership, and a communist, United Auto Workers Vice President Wyndham Mortimer, represented the strikers at the bargaining table. Communists edited the CIO’s newspaper and served as its top legal counsel. Party organizers brought thousands of workers into fledgling CIO unions like the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, the United Rubber Workers and the Packinghouse Workers.

And yet this was actually too close, while they had massive wins like social security, they did so by using their strong third party support to pressure and boost FDR which put them in a position that lost them some of that outside opposition strength which proved disastrous.

In Harlem and elsewhere, the communists’ work was undermined by a more serious failing. They never did find a way to bridge the kind of mass revolutionary agitation they had done in the early 1930s with the broad united front work they did in the latter part of the decade, and again in the World War II years covered in Isserman’s book. The more their organizational influence grew, the more they tended to liquidate their independent role as communists, and the weaker their ties to the masses became. No sooner had they begun realizing the full potential of their tactical alliances with Roosevelt and CIO chief John L. Lewis than they began uncritically tailing them.

This contradiction became apparent during World War II, as Isserman shows. Throughout the war, the communists retained their positions in the CIO national office, and they gained unprecedented influence in the federal government. They used these positions to engineer a high-level deal which was supposed to insure uninterrupted war production without sacrificing the living standards of workers in the war industries, or threatening the organizational strength of the CIO.

The deal broke down because, despite all the talk of “equality of sacrifice” in the battle to defeat fascism, the capitalists took advantage of wartime conditions to intensify the exploitation of their workers and send their own profits soaring. When workers fought back, the CPUSA, unwilling to jeopardize its influence in high places, failed to back them up. Many workers who had won the right to union protection a few years before because of the party’s militant dedication now concluded that the communists could not be trusted to defend their rights.

So working the edges ended up destroying the power and force they had in the '30s all to help the dems, and what became of this influence in the democrats?

Naison is closer to the mark when he suggests, towards the end of his book, that the party’s growing unwillingness to jeopardize its political alliances with the leadership of the CIO and the Democratic Party led it to temper its aggressive defense of the interests of the people of Harlem. Naison does not really analyze this politically, but he does put his finger on a sore spot. The communists began as political outcasts who pinned their hopes for revolution on the notion that the masses would turn to them out of desperation when capitalism had so destroyed their lives that they would have no alternative but revolution. By 1938, the party’s effective and often heroic work to build the organizational and political strength of the working class had brought it close to a prominent position in U.S. life.

If the CPUSA was seduced by this newfound respectability, it wasn’t simply because “power corrupts.” It was because the party had failed to analyze how its day-today work contributed to its long-range goal of working class revolution. Having lost its bearings, it was unable to develop its impressive gains into lasting victories. But it left a rich history from which the present generation of communists can learn a great deal. A half century later, a central task of the revolutionary movement in this country remains the building of a genuine communist party to lead the working class struggle.

Social security is being cut, welfare is non-existent, and we don't have a strong agitator force of a third party that the oppressed KNOW have their backs against the democrats. So no we don't have the same goals for parties, I don't want to cozy up to the dems or get a better position in bourgeoise democracy. Holding less power, and no institutional power but having the freedom to do what Rosa said is infinitely more effective than edging Schumer

Indeed, a bourgeois party, that is, a party which says yes to the existing order as a whole, but which will say no to the day-to-day consequences of this order, is a hybrid, an artificial creation, which is neither fish nor flash nor fowl. We who oppose the entire present order see things quite differently. In our no, in our intransigent attitude, lies our whole strength. It is this attitude that earns us the fear and respect of the enemy and the trust and support of the people.

I do not intend to say yes to the existing order as a whole. Our no, our intransigent attitude lies our whole strength, in the 1930s as well as today if we have the guts to actually earn the fear of the enemy. You saw materially in the previous excerpts that staying truly third party got more loyal and wider support for CPUSA than becoming linked with FDR and the democrats. They began viewing their power as being with the CIO and war industries board and it got them cast out once the dems no longer needed them. They didn't build dual power, they latched onto the power of the very thing we must destroy. Suddenly they are powerless and don't have that third party ability to protect social security or welfare programs. Suddenly we are at the behest of at best, people who have to first and foremost be in the good graces of the democrats. So yeah there in actual writing is why I reject simplistic blanket statements about "zero promise of building any sort of mass movement" a statement which frankly is blatantly anti-materialist