Doing the Work
Labor Day bulletin on MAGA Communism
Happy U.S. Labor Day to all you Radio Free Pizza fanatics! On Monday we in the imperial core fired up our grills and enjoyed a well-deserved break for one of our comparatively few days off, and it therefore seems appropriate to reflect on the struggles and victories of the workers who fought for the rights we enjoy today: such as, for example, those workers whom the U.S. government needed to appease after federal troops killed striking workers during the Pullman Strike of 1894, but whom they also needed to prevent from organizing with the socialists on May Day. By creating Labor Day, the U.S. federal government sought to promote a less politically charged celebration of workers’ contributions.
This special Labor Day edition of our irregularly posted bulletins takes advantage of the occasion to turn not for the first, nor for the second, but for the third time to the quixotic “MAGA Communism” and its ongoing development as a contemporary political phenomenon. So, to celebrate the spirit of solidarity that continues to shape our lives and communities, let’s dig into the latest progress in the American working class’s fight for political representation and economic justice.
On that subject, this summer has seen some notable developments: specifically, the founding of the (newest) American Communist Party (ACP), to which we briefly gestured at the end of July. As the new party’s executive chairman, Haz al-Din—whom we featured in May as the originator of the “MAGA Communism” brand that produced the ACP—released the following video to commemorate the occasion, which @PeoplesPartyUS published to Instagram on the same 23 July.
Al-Din expresses his gratitude for the enthusiasm and interest shown by the American public and by those in the international communist movement who have congratulated them on the party’s successful launch. These reactions, he says, “only vindicate something my comrades and I have known for a very long time: that, in the midst of the unprecedented crisis facing this nation, this country is wanting of a real communist party—a party that recognizes the common challenges facing the American working class.”
The “Declaration of the American Communist Party” goes into greater detail on its motives in reconstituting of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) as the ACP, arguing that the CPUSA has become ineffective, corrupt, and disconnected from the needs of the American proletariat, having failed to address the pressing historical challenges facing the nation. The current leadership is accused of undermining democratic processes, suppressing dissent, and aligning too closely with liberal ideologies. Due to these failures, the declaration asserts that the CPUSA has lost its legitimacy, necessitating the formation of a new party that genuinely reflects Marxist-Leninist principles and is capable of advancing the interests of the working class in the U.S.
Given such an urgent need, Al-Din names the organizational integrity of their unifying party as its first accomplishment. Nonetheless, “we still recognize that our greatest challenges lie still yet ahead, and [we are] actually doing the real-world, on-the-ground-work to make impacts on the forgotten and abandoned communities of this country. Toward that end, our rank-and-file are even beginning to steadily make progress.”
The ACP, he tells us, acknowledges that it must prove itself to the American public through actions, not just words, and stands ready to meet that challenge regardless of opposition. The party’s Twitter account offers some evidence for that: its Colorado chapter removed hazardous materials polluting the South Platte River and Cherry Creek trail; its California chapter distributed clothing to a hundred vulnerable persons on Los Angeles’ Skid Row and cleaned up sidewalks in the Bay Area; its New York chapter removed trash from Brooklyn’s Coney Island Park; its Texas chapter cleaned up Dallas’ Brownwood Park; its Pennsylvania chapter did the same for Philadelphia’s Fisher Park and distributed squash seeds to children in Clearfield County; its Illinois chapter cleaned a mile and a half of Lake Michigan shoreline; and its Washington chapter removed waste from Ravenna and Discovery Parks in Seattle.
As it seems from News2Share’s 26 July interview with ACP supporters Jonathan Foster and Max Reed, these efforts to make a real-world impact on local communities reflect the typical interests of the average party member. Foster rejects the label of “MAGA Communism” as “a meme, a slogan, a means to an end,” but expresses an interest in building a bridge with the MAGA working class. Reed sees their party as continuing the American revolutionary tradition of the 1930s and ’40s, when the CPUSA organized strikes and sent the Lincoln Brigade to fight against fascism in Spain, and looks forward to ACP running candidates for local positions to help address issues like homelessness, drugs, crime, and the decay of the country’s urban centers.
You’ll notice, of course, that none of the ACP’s efforts so far have included advocating for childhood victims of gender dysphoria, or spend much time on any other mainstay of “woke” identity politics that speakers of the traditionalist-reactionary dialect might call “communist.” Perhaps for similar reasons, Rainer Shea argued at the start of August that anti-imperialists are making significant progress in gaining mass support in their opposition to Washington’s imperialism. Here, Shea criticizes certain U.S. leftist groups for focusing on armed struggle and radicalism instead of building mass support, which he attributes to the ideological influence of intelligence agencies and which he contrasts against the ACP and the Center for Political Innovation (CPI) in their efforts to reconnect with the working class and focus on class struggle.
While Shea suggests that recent global conflicts and the economic crisis have created an opportunity for a new, anti-imperialist coalition, he warns also that left-wing counter-gangs like Antifa and organizations like the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) may be used by the imperialist state to undermine true revolutionary movements. Nonetheless, Shea concludes that the ACP, by following mass-based strategies, is better positioned to lead a successful revolutionary movement than these other groups.
But what exactly is the ACP selling to the U.S. public? As if predicting we’d ask the question, Carlos Garrido—one of the signatories to the ACP as its secretary of education, whom we featured at the end of July for his analysis of Venezuela’s presidential elections—appeared on The Kim Iversen Show just two weeks ago to further articulate the party’s position.
Garrido first takes time to explain (at ~1:49) the difference between socialism and communism, stating that socialists often reject the tradition of 20th-century communism, while he identifies as a communist because he supports the projects of 20th-century socialist states like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Vietnam. Citing Marx, he describes socialism as a transitionary period towards a communist society, where the working class controls the state, institutions, and economy. This, Garrido argues (at ~9:18) is a logical extension of American ideals, aligning with the principles of government “of, by, and for the people.” He believes that only socialism can truly achieve these ideals by serving society’s interests rather than those of corporations and the wealthy elite, while this parasitic class controls the current system, which prioritizes capital accumulation over the well-being of the nation and its people.
Addressing (at ~16:14) the misconception that socialism means poverty, Garrido points to counterexamples in the rapid economic growth and development achieved by socialist countries like the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. He argues that the three fastest periods of development in human history have occurred under socialist or communist regimes, and refutes the notion that communism aims to abolish private property, stating that it is specifically against systems that prioritize the mere accumulation of capital. As Garrido explains (at ~27:28), lending and investment would still exist in a socialist or communist system, but with the condition that it must be used for productive purposes that benefit society—such as developing the economy, infrastructure, and industry. He condemns the current practice of finance capital “making money from money” (which Garrido links to religiously prohibited usury) as opposing the interests of the nation and working-class people.
For that reason, and perhaps unexpectedly to some, Garrido names (at ~27:41) promoting and supporting the development of small businesses as one of the ACP’s main economic policies—presumably under a state-run banking system that prioritizes productive investments in the economy, infrastructure, and industry, rather than those facilitate capital accumulation in the finance sector. “In the sort of society that we would like to create,” Garrido tells us (at ~28:09), “the average American is going to have more property, they’re going to be wealthier, they're going to have more abundance so that they can live the sorts of lives that allow them to flourish […] not slavishly working at a job for eight-to-ten hours to pay bills to people who fundamentally do nothing [emphasis mine] and make a whole lot of money from doing that nothing.”
If that’s the platform the ACP is selling, then I imagine quite a few Americans would respond, “Say no more! How soon can I take delivery?!”—even more so in the ACP advocates for the same policies discussed in our first bulletin on MAGA Communism, such as cooperative ownership models (like Huawei’s employee ownership system) as a solution to wealth inequality, which we saw in March has significant appeal for the working-class base of the MAGA movement.
Engaging with this base and with the lower levels of petit bourgeois capitalists who oppose the establishment, these patriotic socialists argue, presents a pathway to a genuine socialist movement in the U.S.—one which resonates with the American spirit, drawing on the legacy of abolitionists and suffragists—to organize a rationally planned economy that doesn’t concentrate wealth as private profits in the finance sector while it immiserates the masses. The result would mean a transformation of the U.S. political and economic system, along with a shift in its international posture as these patriotic socialists educate the domestic population on their shared struggle with foreign anti-imperialists against the American military-industrial complex.
That, of course, means fostering grassroots support and organizing communities to participate in the political process, with the aforementioned Al-Din apparently already having begun planning the ACP before its launch this summer, given the local chapters and potential for fielding candidates that he discussed in April. Indeed, this might be a fine way of achieving socialism through democratic means, and more importantly, of avoiding giving the ruling class any pretext for imposing authoritarian measures or responding with violent repression—like, for example, that which resulted in the U.S. Labor Day.
Notably, the ACP could overcome some of the limits we discussed in July that come part-and-parcel with the “MAGA Communism” branding. The idea of uniting Trump supporters, who are largely capitalists, with communists, appears inherently contradictory, appealing only to a small, contrarian audience rather than effectively reaching out to conservatives or fostering a broad working-class movement. The niche brand’s potential to alienate seems evident in its critics’ observations that MAGA Communists have mobilized primarily around cultural issues rather than genuine Marxist concerns, which limits its effectiveness in addressing the broader challenges faced by the working class. Accordingly, the ACP may well represent an effort toward building a mass movement centered on workers’ rights and common economic struggles, free from the burden of associating with a contentious political movement like MAGA: in addition, that is, to one as contentious as “communism.”
But other concerns we discussed don’t come out in the wash so easily. In particular, the former MAGA Communism’s susceptibility to co-opting—with Dr. Richard Wolff noting the obvious example of the Nazi Party’s use of the term “socialism” to shepherd a disaffected working class into a fascist ideology—or to external sabotage, with U.S. intelligence agencies using the brand as a vector through which to introduce divisions into domestic socialist movements.
The aforementioned Shea described analogous concerns at the end of August about the upcoming Rage Against the War Machine (RAWM) rally scheduled for 28 September 2024, emphasizing its role in the current anti-imperialist movement. Shea explains that since the original RAWM event, the coalition has gained influence, while its primary threat has shifted from the established left to far-right groups like the “groyper” Nazis. Notably, he accuses such groups of having previously attempted to infiltrate the original RAWM rally—and, though I can’t point here to a particular source, I do recall hearing at that time about some stranger leaving brochures at a contemporaneous CPI event for a “traditionalist worker party,” or something along those lines.
These groups, Shea argues, seek to co-opt anti-establishment sentiments with fascist and anti-Semitic narratives, and he therefore warns that the ruling class benefits from these far-right elements propagandizing their disillusioned audiences, which would otherwise support genuine anti-imperialist efforts.
Meanwhile, Radio Free Pizza devotees will recall how Western intelligence agencies instrumentalize far-right and neo-Nazi groups to justify their security state, as we covered last October. Those interested in that possibility may compare that to Jesse Wingert’s analysis from the end of August suggesting “the Financial Bourgeoisie” might install Kamala Harris against the voters’ will, in which Wingert argues that the “groypers” and the rest of the reactionary right pose a limited threat on their own: though the ruling class could use them strategically to divert attention from or cause disruption to anti-imperialist efforts, Wingert finds these neo-Nazis unlikely to replace pan-leftist counter-gangs as the ruling class’s main proxy force.
In any case, given the counterrevolutionary function of the far-right, Shea calls for a united front among true anti-imperialist forces, including communists and other groups opposed to monopoly capitalism, to counter both the sectarian left and the far-right. For him, the upcoming rally represents a critical moment in the struggle against imperialism—especially in the face of increasing state repression following Harris’ nomination—and the domestic anti-imperialist coalition would do well to prevent those groypers from co-opting the movement and redirecting its popular support into antisemitism:
The wing of the bourgeoisie that’s behind Harris is increasingly in conflict with capital’s lower levels, which seek an end to big capital’s degrowth schemes and are looking for allies in this fight. The dissident right psyop seeks to convince these rogue capitalist elements that [the Jewish Question], with its lie about how monopoly capital comes from a global Jewish conspiracy, is what they must invest themselves in to defeat the monopolists. Within this narrative, Marxism is another part of the conspiracy, with the driving force behind monopoly power being “Judeo-Bolshevism” […] Marxists must expose the lies of those who scapegoat the Jews, while illustrating how Marxism is what can build an alternative system to monopoly capital.
Given the apparently growing popular sentiment of anti-Zionism in the U.S. after eleven months of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, it seems doubly important that all anti-imperialists—and particularly any erstwhile MAGA Communists—ought to take a firm stand against the presentation of monopoly capital as representing Judaism. (If they need something to draw on here, I understand both Marx and Lenin had something to say about this “Jewish Question.”) Therefore, we ask with interest: can the ACP avoid falling prey to that ideological trap presented through the dissident right, and can it instead manage to develop popular support through working-class solidarity and thereby establish a revolutionary political platform?
The significance of this ideological trap for the ACP in particular has another dimension, as the treatment Indie offered two weeks ago about the U.S.’s Green Party may help illuminate. Here, the reporter at Indie Media Today and host with the Indie News Network expressed his skepticism about the effectiveness of voting, particularly in the 2024 presidential election. While he acknowledges the positive energy around Jill Stein’s campaign as the Green Party candidate, she stands little chance of winning due to the overwhelming power of the corporate media and political system. Highlighting the challenges Stein faces—including media neglect, ballot access issues, and the difficulties of running outside the two-party system—Indie concludes that no candidate, including Stein, can overcome the control that the “Corporate Military Intelligence Apparatus” exercises over the establishment media narrative: even if Stein were to gain traction, she would be smeared and marginalized. Furthermore, and notably for our purposes here, Indie questions even the value of those gains as small change in comparison to that which establishment political lobbies deploy: “5% [of the popular vote] only gets $20m of federal funding - how much did AIPAC alone pledge to spend to defeat 8 House Democrats? Even $20M is a drop in the bucket.”
I’m not entirely sure just how much the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) spent on that, but it sounds like it put up $14.5 million to successfully support Jamaal Bowman’s primary challenger in New York this year, and $8.4 million to unseat Cori Bush in Missouri: so it’s already more spending more than the potential federal funding just on those two. That’s out of more than $100 million already spent on the 2024 elections by the end of August. For such significant spending on political campaigns to originate from a lobbying group formerly known as the American Zionist Council underscores the importance of Shea’s prescription to the anti-imperialist coalition to refute associations between Judaism and monopoly capitalism—especially given the bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year (and its senatorial analog referred to committee) to equate criticism of Zionism’s product, the State of Israel, with antisemitism.
Because the system itself is the main problem, not the candidates, Indie aligns with “None of the Above,” expressing a lack of faith in the electoral system and a belief that real change won't come through voting. Though he amusingly advises the Green Party to abandon their efforts to court disaffected Democrats, whose support will likely dissipate following the 2024 election, and instead to “focus on workers and organizing the rank and file against management & corporate-friendly political creatures like Teamsters’ & UAW leadership”—the targets, more or less, of the erstwhile MAGA Communists—Indie nonetheless doubts that voting for Stein or any third-party candidate will make a significant difference, and encourages readers instead to consider what comes after Election Day.
As we wrap up this special Labor Day edition, it's clear that the ACP is attempting to carve out a new path in the U.S. political landscape. By focusing on local community work and addressing the tangible concerns of the working class, the party has begun positioning itself as a serious interlocutor in American political discourse: a force, that is, which can refocus debates away from cultural issues and toward political representation and economic justice. This stands in stark contrast to more established left-wing movements, which have been criticized for neglecting class struggle.
The ACP’s emphasis on practical, grassroots organizing and its apparently unconscious efforts to distance itself from the more contentious aspects of MAGA Communism branding may allow it to build broader support among disaffected workers and small business owners. But it faces significant challenges it faces are significant, including the risk of being co-opted by far-right elements—or of being falsely accused of such, given how often the party speaks out against Zionists.
In fact, threats incurred for the sake of that position have already appeared, with ACP Politburo member Prof. Danny Shaw—who already lost his job at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice earlier this year (most likely) due to his pro-Palestinian activism—having been detained in late August by agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at a Chicago airport, during which Shaw was forced to provide agents with passwords to his personal devices.
Notably, the ACP’s statement on Shaw’s detainment draws analogy between the anti-communist persecution of the McCarthy Era and today’s persecution of anti-Zionist activists. In our view, the validity of that comparison underscores the importance for the ACP and like-minded groups to prevent the corporate media and U.S. political establishment from framing anti-Zionism as antisemitism. While the ACP’s use of blockchain technology to transparently register and verify its chapters, and to cryptographically authenticate its official communications, may help it for a time to fend off any false accusations (through doctored screenshots or the like), we nonetheless expect to see further such attempts from the state and media to marginalize the ACP or harass its members.
Of course, all that’s before mentioning the challenges the ACP would face if one of its candidates ever won an election: the overwhelming influence of corporate and imperialist interests in the U.S. political machinery. Indeed, perhaps Indie has a point, and that, even if an ACP candidate appeared on the ballot, it would be wiser for any true revolutionary to vote “None of the Above.”
As the ACP continues to develop, its success will surely depend on its ability to navigate these challenges while staying true to its core mission of advocating for the working class. Whether it can do so without falling into the ideological traps that have hampered other movements remains to be seen. But if it can maintain its focus on class solidarity and economic justice, then in a few years’ time the ACP might just provide a viable choice for Americans seeking real change in a system that seems increasingly stacked against them.
None of the Above!! ♥️♥️ thank you bro
Any time! It's an interesting Catch 22: the system needs to change, but participating in it might only give it more endurance in remaining the same.