Joe Simps for the D 
: CPUSA co-chair Sims: Fighting fascist threat a top priority Peoples world Article
Excerpts:
CHICAGO – “The battle lines are clear. We’re fighting a fascist danger at home and a genocidal war abroad. And to defeat the danger at home, we’ve got to defeat the war abroad.” CPUSA co-chair Joe Sims gave this warning on June 7, as he keynoted the 32nd National Convention of the Communist Party USA.
Sims also spoke of the “raw racism at the very heart of MAGA,” and added, “Immigrants are a special target.
“First, they tried the wall,” Sims said of Trump’s scheme to keep migrants from entering the U.S. across the Mexican border. “Then the Muslim ban, now they’re planning concentration camps. That’s right, we said it. And if they come for immigrants in the morning, they’re damn sure coming for us at noon.
But we’re not at fascism yet, of course, Sims said. And that moment of respite – for however long it lasts – means that for now, “There is room for struggle. Let us use that space to fight for a ceasefire in Gaza and for an end to the war in Ukraine. Let us use it to stop the expansion of NATO, end the blockade of Cuba, and bring the Cold War against China to a close.
He then turned to the historic question the Communist movement has always asked, “What, then, is to be done?”
you are not him 
As Sims spoke to wild peals of applause, he said, “On the one side, there’s the ruling class forces of white supremacy and MAGA pulling the country apart. On the other, there’s the working-class forces of democracy pulling the country together.”
Link to @Alaskaball@hexbear.net take on Joe Sims tailism
SSettler KKKolonial Unity 
: The Communist Party of Israel greets CPUSA's 32nd Convention
twitter
In which the CPI blames Hamas for the Gaza war, denounces the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (i guess palestinians just have to get used to dying) and washes the hands of the israeli state by claiming that its netanyahoo the problem and not the State of ISSael itself
how do you manage to be on the Right of the DSA??
He then turned to the historic question the Communist movement has always asked, “What, then, is to be done?”
Oh hell no. Do not go there to justify voting for a fucking genocidal neoliberal ghoul
Who can forget when Lenin arrived to russia from exile and told the bolsheviks to
Revisionism of the highest order. If only Lenin would come back to let them know how he'd feel
Bolsheviks in 1917: hell yeah we're voting!
Libs:
Bolsheviks: for revolution, that is, at the congress of soviets!
Libs:
How the hell are communists inviting an Israeli political party to a convention? Hell I can't even imagine the radical liberals or centre left in South Africa doing that. I don't even think most centrists would do that.
Surely this must hurt whatever legitimacy the party had.
But we’re not at fascism yet, of course, Sims said.
Why is every non tankie like this? It's never actually
I don't know why JT from Second Thought continues to associate himself with these people.
the local chapters are far far far more radical than the party leadership
If your ML party can't do democratic centralism what's the point
If your branch is far more radical than the leadership why are you in that org at all
The local chapters need to leave the org though. There is no point if this can't be fixed, get into a real and fully working org instead.
Strange, he's def left of them and calls genocide Joe a fascist... I'd assume he'll break it off after this.
how do you manage to be on the Right of the DSA??
One of DSA's co-chairs (highest elected leaders of the org) is a member of the caucus that wrote the "Do you commend Hamas?" article.
That is really cool, but let's not pretend that DSA as an org isn't often times extremely lib and that any actual communist party should never find themselves to their right. Did anything ever happen to those DSA caucus leaders who snubbed the president of Cuba and went to meet with the Gusano opposition instead?
DSA has major problems. However, in its defense, I'll quote myself from another comment in this thread:
In contrast to my perception of CPUSA, DSA hasn't devolved into false demcent (i.e. "bureaucratic centralism"). While DSA has big problems (and needs more centralism), it does actually have sufficient internal democracy necessary to engage in two line struggle, because of that it has the potential (however small) to build consensus among the US left cross-tendency.
You cite actions taken by significant elements of DSA that are bad. I agree this is concerning. However, structurally DSA has greater capacity to critique this due to its internal democracy (which still needs improvement). I'm not sure any other left formations in the US have this capacity developed to the same level.
The lack of any centralism alongside that internal democracy leads to two major structural issues:
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An obsession with democratic forms and process that impede the org's ability to respond quickly to changing situations. My local DSA, with whom I have a good working relationship as a PSL member, has to go through an approval vote process for every single action and endorsement. They have failed to carry out this vote on time on multiple occasions, thereby missing the opportunity to participate.
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Self-sabotaging factionalism. DSA is formed of many formal internal factions with often diametrically opposed political objectives. These factions can and do openly oppose and defy the democratic decisions of the organization. They create hostility and tension between comrades and prevent the organization from holding or carrying out a political line. And by allowing such open opposition, the democratic decisions have no enforceable weight, and thus the democracy exists only in form, not in practice.
My local DSA is full of good comrades doing good work, but the organization hinders that rather than empowers it.
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My impression is that their party leadership is a little lib but DSA has actual young people pushing it to be more radical. I know people my age in YDSA but today at a rally when I saw a CPUSA guy and started making fun of him none of my friends knew what CPUSA even was. And they were literally all socialists involved in other orgs.
“On the one side, there’s the ruling class forces of white supremacy and MAGA pulling the country apart. On the other, there’s the working-class forces of democracy pulling the country together.”
I have some bad news for you about which side Joe Biden is on, my guy.
Also the very next part too:
“First, they tried the wall,” Sims said of Trump’s scheme to keep migrants from entering the U.S. across the Mexican border.
And who provided funding to continue building the wall?
“Then the Muslim ban, now they’re planning concentration camps. That’s right, we said it.
They literally have concentration camps on the border right now. And who was it that expanded the camps after Trump?
And if they come for immigrants in the morning, they’re damn sure coming for us at noon.
So the solution is to vote for the Biden, who continued building the wall and who expanded the concentration camps after Trump, in order to stop Trump, who plans to continue building the wall and expanding the concentration camps?
The math ain't mathin'
Yeah, I don't get it. There's a very reasonable argument to be made that picking Biden over Trump won't make that much of a difference in real terms. This honestly seems like one of the best times in recent history to directly address the legitimacy of the system, rather than pretend that it matters which demented old man gets to be president.
That's definitely the clearest and most effective strategy for advancing class consciousness.
If we drop our expectations lower though and we just consider that this person is the leader of the largest communist party in the US and, as such, his role is to engage in political analysis then the next step from that is to consider his political analysis of the situation - that Biden is significantly different to Trump, that Biden is both capable of stopping Trump and willing to do so, and that Biden is not doing what Trump did which he believes makes Trump bad/an existential threat etc.
I can't even put words to exactly how that leaves me - I'm not speechless or aghast or disappointed. If I was in a room with him, there would be nothing that I'd want to say to him or to hear from him because I genuinely believe that there's more value in shitposting on some little corner of the internet than there is in engaging with someone who is either so politically disconnected that he genuinely believes these things that he has said or who is very consciously attempting to deceive the masses by using convenient fiction in order to achieve a deeper political goal in the most cynical way possible. I nothing him, y'know?
Imo what that boils down to is either he thinks that people like me are completely stupid or he is genuinely this stupid. Either way 🤷
What’s really unforgivable is the total lack of any long-term strategy, which is the only thing that any third-party in American politics should be concerned about, let alone an ostensibly revolutionary party. They aren’t going to secure any actual political power through elections in the near-term, so the entire exercise should be about how to raise class consciousness and convince people that the very obviously dysfunctional system is in fact dysfunctional.
To endorse that system in any way just muddies the waters. It’s not the job of the CPUSA or any other socialist party to help the Democrats get elected, and doing so is not going to help advance socialism in any meaningful way. I could understand if there were actual politics happening, that they were leveraging their support to get policy concessions from the Democrats, but that isn’t happening and will likely never happen, so this is nothing but an own-goal.
Like you say, either he’s incompetent, or he has an incredible amount of contempt for people who he should want in his coalition.
Right?
Let's be really cynical or pragmatic, whatever you want to call it - say you're the head of the CPUSA. You feel that your primary task is to maintain your membership numbers and you don't want to cause a split or you want to appeal to the milquetoast left-ish "socialist" crowd or some shit. Fine. Game is game.
So what do you do? You announce that you aren't endorsing anyone. Or you tell people to vote with their conscience (because you know that everyone who still believes in bourgeois democracy is gonna vote Biden anyway).
Then you refocus on what matters. Done and done.
This is how I felt in the Bernie era when there were a lot of slapfights over whether or not to vote for him. I was just like - fuck it, it's not worth splitting a movement over. If you're gonna vote for him then you're going to do it regardless of what other people in your organisation say. And if you're not going to vote, what, is someone going to drag you to the polls so you can cast an invalid vote or something?
If you don't endorse Biden you aren't hitching your wagon to whatever the fuck atrocities his regime is going to be complicit in for the next four years. But if you do endorse Biden, what strategic goals does this achieve which non-endorsement would not?
This has the exact same energy as RSVPing to a wedding reception that you weren't even invited to.
I really don't think they're the largest communist party in the US in any way that counts. If you go to political actions across the country they simply are not present.
is. Even FRSO and a couple of Trot parties have more real presence than them.
Liberal shit statement anyway, "country together"? A solid 1/3 if not half the country are straight up fascists or at very best anti-communists that simply can't be dealt with except forceful re-education, you need to get away from and destroy your enemies not get "closer" with them.
You guys can just shoot me afterwards, so long as I can ride along to blow shit up before that.
If there's no mechanism to rid the party of this moron then I don't see why there are any comrades still organising through it. If the existing leadership won't get rid of him then the whole bunch are reactionary. How many decades of dedication is it going to take for any group of real and dedicated communists to root them out? It's a lost cause.
People gotta sit down and ask themselves exactly how long it will realistically take to achieve and whether that's a timeline worth doing or whether it's better to be organising through alternatives.
CPUSA was literally half (or more than half on the high end) feds in the 60s. You can't fix that.
sadly there is no democratic mechanism to get rid of him
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.
Also Joe sims and his friends are the owners of the all the assets of the CPUSA
Lastly, however, and most critically, the millions of dollars of resources controlled by the leadership of CPUSA isn’t owned by the party. In fact, the party, as an entity, has no legal recognition in any state and is not federally registered as anything. Each state “party” is an “unincorporated club.” This means that the party is, under bourgeois law, incapable of owning any property or money. So who owns all of these things?
Individual party leaders. John Bachtell runs Longview Publishing. Advance Realty is run by Libero Della Piana, who is also the managing director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an NGO. The party launders its money through a number of NGOs, of which the Drug Policy Alliance is only one. By maintaining them primarily in NGOs, which receive grant money, the assets are required to report directly to their federal backers and managers exactly what every penny is spent on. Even further, party leaders employ their own significant others and children in those NGOs, from which they draw a salary. John Bachtell lives from the donations of party members to People’s World, even though the party does not own, control, or manage its own newspaper.
Extremely well written link.
This seems like a lot of effort when the people that aren't revisionists could simply migrate to another ML party that isn't clearly fucked up procedurally in so many ways. What's the point in spending one to three decades fighting this out and waiting for these people to die when people could simply move.
All this agitation and trying to fight things out procedurally and for what? What's the outcome going to be? The outcome will be that these people stay in place until they're dead and they get to appoint whoever follows them so those people are almost certainly going to be exactly like they are.
Fighting in CPUSA appears to be a dead end to me. The mechanisms are what matter here. Really lay out to yourselves how many decades this will take vs how immediate moving to another party would be. It's really fucking obvious what the correct path is.
All this agitation and trying to fight things out procedurally and for what? What's the outcome going to be? The outcome will be that these people stay in place until they're dead and they get to appoint whoever follows them so those people are almost certainly going to be exactly like they are.
It seems like they're going to just appoint their failchildren at this point since the finances are entirely controlled by a few families.
Yeah which is exactly why there is no point in fighting it. The problem can't be resolved without a mechanism and one simply does not exist. It's an organisational dead end.
He then turned to the historic question the Communist movement has always asked, “What, then, is to be done?”
Jfc, Lenin would run roughshod on these clowns.
100-ish years of the feds doing their best to prevent such a party from existing.
That's something every communist movement in every country ever has had to deal with.
Not every communist movement is in the country that is the imperial core hegemon.
exactly.. and they control all the levers here so it must be vastly easier to keep under wraps here
I would say both the
and the FRSO are doing decent but yea in size the DSA marxist caucuses do seem to have the most reach and influenceI'm not opposed to a bit of electoralism but I think electoralism on the national level is a doomed project for the left, local and state level politics are what we need to focus on
We have no interest or illusions that the presidential campaign is going to lead to electoral success. That's not what it's for. It's a platform to spread communist messages and build the party. We do very little other electoral campaigning.
The electoral campaign isn't expensive because we don't have any money in the first place. Its two people occasionally traveling around the country and otherwise entirely local work done by members and volunteers.
We fundamentally are not an electoral party. The vast majority of our work is non-electrical and the campaign's purpose is to amplify that, not the other way around.
I have also heard from others that they tend to go to protests, speak on socialism, market their candidates, and then leave.
Literally yesterday a PSL organized protest brought out 100k people to DC and physically surrounded the white house. We do not show up and co-opt - we are the ones that organize in the first place.
How did I not see that had happened, that's a lot of people to get in one place for that kind of organized protest effort! I'm looking for information, and of course mainstream media is vague and lib-coded, but it got their attention, so that's a win.
Yeah they would much rather not report but we are able to pull big enough numbers for these nationwide calls that they can't entirely ignore it.
Does PSL often work with other orgs like DSA and/or FRSO, or do they tend to stick to themselves?
We have a few nationwide relationships that are very strong. Most prominent is with Palestinian Youth Movement, who we coordinate with at the national and local levels all over the country. Individual branches develop relationships based on their particular conditions. My branch has a good relationship with local DSA and cooperates with them on some Palestine work. There's no local FRSO that I'm aware of so I can't say about that. As a rule we try to avoid beefing with other orgs.
What's the plan for after the election? I know you clarified that they do other things, and the campaign amplifies those things, but what happens when they no longer have that amplification? How do they plan to keep up the momentum? I hope this (or any of this) doesn't come off as rude, I'm genuinely curious and I don't know a lot about how PSL operates.
So far our work on Palestine has been far more significant for the growth of our profile and party than the campaign. We work on every struggle that affects the working class and the consistency and strength of our political position, organizing capacity, and internal training program (candidacy) are the reason for our success. We'll continue to do that work. For example, my branch right now is:
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continuing to organize for Palestine as part of a local coalition that includes PYM, DSA, USPCN, and some entirely local groups; we are targeting our county for divestment and organizing with healthcare workers for solidarity actions
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doing a series of Pride events focused on reclaiming the radical anti-imperialist history of pride - marches, educational panels, etc
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organizing black-brown solidarity between working class black folks and Palestinians
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running renovations for a local African American Museum in poor condition that is too radical to receive foundation support
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operating our physical location, the Liberation Center, as a community space and citywide activist hub
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doing clerical support for an AIM run Native American museum
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running three separate Juneteenth marches with different focuses, including one that's queer focused
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planning for some [redacted] labor organizing
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utilizing links between the local Puerto Rican community (of which many members are a part) and the island to build a socialist independence movement
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and a few local members are in Cuba on solidarity work as we speak
That's just presently ongoing work - we have done tons of other stuff the last few months, including student encampment support (our members were the first to get arrested) and carrying out a successful ballot access petitioning campaign in coordination with other branches in our state.
Physical Location? That's pretty cool, I was actually going to mention the possibility for a community/third space but I don't think other orgs do that either so it's not like a standard had been set.
It is an objective of every PSL branch to get a Liberation Center set up. It's the main thing dues go towards for our branch, but it massively amplifies our organizing capacity. Plus the cheapest spots are usually in the kinds of neighborhoods where we want to do the most work.
Also glad to see they are hosting pride events as well, intersectionality is good to see.
Not just good to see but fundamental to our approach. It is impossible to have a serious liberation movement that doesn't aggressively stand up against all forms of oppression and chauvinism.
I'm practically sold. Hope the SF PSL is as lit as your branch.
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I was reading about this protest, and I'll be honest it wasn't obvious to me (maybe I just missed it) that the PSL was involved. Which, to me, strikes me as a messaging issue (again I have so little time, so maybe I just missed it). But even ignoring that I definitely get better vibes from PSL vs CPSUSA.
We were deeply involved on every level of planning, staffing, and communication. We don't blast it out because (despite the accusations) that is the opposite of how we operate. But it was my local branch that organized our city's bus caravan and PSL folks doing all the support work - street leadership, A/V, security, and a big chunk of the speakers.
That's really awesome to hear! Is there a prevailing thought behind working behind the scenes as opposed to advertising the org with the event?
For these huge national events it's under the ANSWER coalition, of which we are the largest but not only member. They are the name on the tin for that stuff because we are working in concert with other ANSWER members. And we are explicit about PSL involvement, it's just not the lead org. Local stuff we always put our name on.
Got it, that all seems logical to me! Thanks for the info.
Also, anecdotally, PSL members seem to spend a lot of irl time discussing their electoralist projects. I think electoralism is a valid vehicle but don't think it's strategic to dedicate that much attention to it.
In contrast to my perception of CPUSA, DSA hasn't devolved into false demcent (i.e. "bureaucratic centralism"). While DSA has big problems (and needs more centralism), it does actually have sufficient internal democracy necessary to engage in two line struggle, because of that it has the potential (however small) to build consensus among the US left cross-tendency.
