Please ask me questions, or maybe even @Alaskaball about the party. I will answer to the best of my ability, or will refer to the party for question I do not. We need to build the base of cadre who will help lead the proletariat. It took the Bolsheviks years to develop, and we must start doing the same if there is any hope for the oppressed peoples of the world.
Passion for our Ideology, and compassion for our comrades!
Should I join the Judean People's Front or the People's Front of Judea?
It depends on how you feel about the Moscow Trials and the attempted Hungarian counterrevolution of 1956.
Will joining immediately put me on the no fly/terrorist watch list?
Probably not right away. Depends if you are a good communist or not. :shrug-outta-hecks:
I get taken out of the line to get patted down and all my stuff gets brought over to a bomb-sniffer dog whenever I travel, so no?
We have been comrade! I’ve been trying to spread the word of the PCUSA on here for a while now. If you’re an ML, I highly recommend.
:rat-salute:
Does the party do small direct actiony stuff, like mutual aid, help with tenants union etc? And what is general composition of party, age/occupation wise?
:rat-salute:
From what I've seen across the regions and clubs it's a wide range of youth to old guard. Theres members that participated in the Iranian Revolution on the communist side, there's even people that're old enough to have work alongside veterans of the Abraham Lincoln brigade from the Spanish Civil War.
For direct action I'm aware that there are clubs engaging in food and literature distribution programs, building connections with local groups that also do the good works, network with other socialist groups ranging from PSL chapters to non-terminally online anarchist groups.
Oh yes. There are plenty of smaller orgs we are allied with. Mainly depends on your club (divided by states) and your district( essentially regions in the US). Composition I’ll say is a variety. The General Secretary is older, but has lived in the original USSR and has been a communist party member (in the original before they turned) for at least 40 years irrc.
I personally have experienced a variety of ages, identities, religions, and race in my club alone.
We have a party census wrapping up this summer, so we'll have actual data on demographics soon. Mutual aid and local organizing happen at the club level, so where you are has a big effect on what your comrades are doing on the ground.
I applied, again, to PSL, and have yet to, again, hear from them, so I was planning on joining PCUSA if I didn't hear back from them this week.
I'd like to know, though, if there's a stance on LGBTQ+ issues, I didn't see any on their site. I'm cis-het myself but would not feel comfortable in a place that didn't acknowledge the oppression of our Trans comrades and such and was not working to fight alongside them in their struggles. I support AES and the states that attempted to build communism in the 20th century, but obviously their record in that regard was not good, for the most part. Being that this is a party in the 21st century in the US I can't see this being a leader in the fight without embracing that.
I applied to PSL when I was first looking for a party and never heard a single thing at all. So I feel you comrade.
We fully support the struggle for comrades in the LGTBQ community. We even have a LGTBQ+ Commission where comrades who identify as one of those meet and discuss things like what should the party be doing to help their struggle, what should the party say regarding their line/stance, and figure ways to best organize others. They too are oppressed under capitalism, even more so in some regards. In my club we have comrades who identify as trans, and we make sure to use proper pronouns or gender neutral language.
That's very encouraging to hear, at this point I'd say it's mostly sealed and I'll apply soon. Thank you, comrade!
It’s been around for a few years now. We are still growing as a party. As right now the most important thing we can do is build cadre up. We are a continuation of the original Communist Party USA, as they turned reactionary and do not follow the guidance as a true ML party would do.
We have great educational classes on the People’s School for Marxist-Leninist Studies, have commissions crossing a variety of subjects, and commissions/districts for across the US. If you’re thinking about it, the PSMLS has a podcasts/YouTube’s for previous classes comrade.
Was infiltrated by feds, and became revisionist essentially. Like they said we should vote for Joe Biden the last election. They have failed to be a revolutionary party.
The PCUSA has only existed as a party since 2014. We have the tradition of the old CP to draw on, but there is much party building to do.
Nah according to Google we stand for "protestant churches u.s.a" so a step better than being hogs i guess
They're all protestants, asking me to tell you the difference is like asking me to differentiate crackers from one another.
The party isn't in any of the first ten pages of search results for 'pcusa' on google. uf da. It's all presbyterians.
:acab:
The “armed force of men” who are responsible for state sanctioned terrorism/oppression in order to keep the mass of workers oppressed? No. You might be looking for the original communist party USA or maybe some Trot organizations like PSL. If you want social fascism, look towards Soc Dems.
A variety of things. I am a candidate still but we do a variety of things. We attend People’s School for Marxist-Leninist Studies to to learn theory and educate ourselves. My club (by states) has been distributing leaflets and brochures in public areas, and comrades organized in May Day in a major metropolitan areas to March and distribute literature.
As long as you agree with at least 80% of the 8 Points of Unity joining is a relatively simple, fast, and easy process. If you’re interested, I recommend listening to some PSMLS classes on podcasts or YouTube to get a grasp of what we are about and the education we do.
Hey man. I don’t know what every emoji means or what the subtext is. :free-real-estate:
nah you good I get confused too with the emojis and how everything is under 50 layers of irony sometimes
We are an explicit Marxist-Leninist party. We also do not shy away from comrade Stalin or the USSR. PSL for example is what we would consider very Trotskyist. Anti-revolutionary and do not uphold communism even in wording, as it “drives away the youth.”
From my understanding, APL is a dogmatic ultra-Left party that's more inwardly focused than outwardly focused. I'd have to ask a member of our east coast branch that was a part of it for more details but I remember them joking about how it's like 8 people circlejerking about ideological purity.
I mean our PSL chapter is pretty openly M/L. But we also try not to be sectarian because at this point in the revolution fighting about the (relatively) smaller differences in organizing strategy is counterproductive. We can figure it out once the capitalists are in minecraft
We practice Democratic centralism. While chapters or districts may be doing their own local organizing, we are disciplined and follow the Party line. There is no factionalism. We will and have allied ourselves with other mass organizations, but the Party is explicit in its ML and revolutionary in its theory. As another comrade mention in this post, our main goal right now is party building and education to make knowledgeable and disciplined cadre.
A lot of the points of contention with China now has to do with the Sino-Soviet Split. We still study China and the strides it made as a socialist nation, but are critical of certain aspects of it.
Basically, China good, but it’s complicated.
I thought it looked closer to the smug smile amazon logo myself but Nike works too
There's literally nobody else but me in my state and I'm still in it. It just means you gotta double down on trying to build the movement in your state and network with other socialist groups,
You would still be part of a district for you region, and I would imagine you would be put into a club near your state. So you would be able to organize to the best of your ability, or at the very least become a more educated ML.
You would join a club in your state's district and attend club level meetings remotely. There's party work to be done that can be taken on remotely as well. The tech bureau needs help. There's also international work and translation. Party publications need writers and editors. The People's School needs audio editors. Being physically distant is not an insurmountable challenge.
What's PCUSA's take on Mao's writings such as On Practice and On Contradiction or on points about the mass line (which, I think are present in Lenin's writings but not as explicitly as Mao's)?
We’ve studied those books actually and other works from him and different revolutionaries. Scientific Socialism is the basis for being able to see what worked in past socialist states, what did not, and how to apply them (if possible) to our struggle in the modern day. Again though, we are an explicit ML party, so we have criticisms of people like Mao, but so we do of Lenin, Stalin, etc.
I think of Mao as an ML (and figure that he did too) and it's good to see that criticisms are considered. I was just a little concerned when I was poking around the site, doing a ctrl+f for 'mao' and the only thing that kept coming up was the part in the platform about defending AES from 'maoist' (amongst others), which... yeah, I could see that being a good stance. When I'm looking at an org, I'm looking for any sort of dogmatism or anti-materialist clinging to the past (or unnecessary sectarianism, by that I mean splitting hairs between whos who, labeling every little thing) , these two being something of an non-scientific socialism, I think.
