As a CPUSA member, I appreciated the article “Socialism with American Characteristics.” The CPUSA program is worthy of critique. It is frustrating and unwieldy. It’s too long, it doesn’t know who its audience is, and it doesn’t communicate the key points of the party line properly. It is a document from 2005 which has barely been updated since, and it shows.
The two major problematic ideas — the “Fight against the Extreme Right” and “Bill of Rights Socialism” — really represent one problem. What they are is a bowdlerization (in the most literal sense of the word) of the demand for a Democratic Republic. Fealty to the US Constitution in the program is a reaction to state repression which has historically defined our party as a “threat to the constitution”, jailing our leaders along such lines. “Defeating the extreme right” is extremely poorly defined. We’ve seen the consequences of the Extreme Right in power, and we believe that it is necessary to keep them out of power to preserve the scraps of democracy that allow a party like ours to exist in the first place, but what is the path to do so? The implied path is repeated Democratic Party electoral victories in presidential and congressional elections over the course of decades. Ironically, the main thing preventing this from happening is the Slaveholders’ Constitution! In the same breath the program recognizes the leading role of the proletariat while submitting itself to the leadership of the liberal bourgeoisie and middle strata. The party recognizes the need for working class independence and a proletarian revolution; it recognizes that only the proletariat can expand/establish democracy; it also recognizes that there is a lack of democracy which prevents it from openly agitating for the proletarian revolution. Yet the program doesn’t come to the conclusion that the constitutional political system itself should be the subject of it’s ire! Frustrating!
On all fronts, however, the party has seen substantial improvement since the election of Joe Sims and Rosanna Cambron as co-chairs at the 2019 party convention. We are making due with the program we have for now, as logistical issues have stalled our next convention until 2024 and writing and adopting a new program might take even longer. Previous leadership, particularly during the Sam Webb period, took right-wing positions and nearly destroyed the party altogether. These attitudes still exist in parts of the party, but they do not represent the majority of leadership nor membership anymore. A new perspective has arisen in our discourse recently which replaces “Bill of Rights Socialism” with a reference to the revolutionary democratic promise of Reconstruction, a la DuBois; I feel that this is where the party is headed. The “rebellion” in CPUSA already happened, really, and the task of those of us in the party is to consolidate it. I’ll recommend two articles from the CPUSA website which I think are quite good and reflect the reality of our current orientation well — “The Struggle for Full Legalization of our Party” by Jamal Rich, and “The Party We Must Become” by Joe Sims. I encourage all those interested in engaging with the CPUSA program to also reach out to the party itself!
Solidarity!
-Noah Sigel
