Democratic Socialism has grown rapidly as an ideology over the last decade, yet Communist-labeled politics in the United States fall out of the current framing of the Overton Window. But there are still factions, sects, and exclusionary in-groups that can move the needle in influencing public debate. The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was founded 107 years ago but never recovered from the McCarthyist era. After peaking at over 75,000 members in 1947, it collapsed under Cold War repression, Smith Act prosecutions, and mass defections following Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin. It remains an ideologically Communist party, but a marginal one at under 20,000 members.

In 2024, a faction of CPUSA members led by streamer Haz Al-Din split from the party and formed the American Communist Party (ACP), with Al-Din serving as its chairman. The split was ideological: the ACP cited the CPUSA’s progressive and left-wing coalitions, participation in bourgeois electoral politics, and its embrace of what they called western hegemonic values as grounds for departure. The party has since been described across the left as National Bolshevik, MAGA Communist, Kautskyite, and Larouchite.

The ACP presents itself as a new, ideologically pure group, the sole heir to the Leninist tradition in the United States, uncompromising in its rejection of bourgeois politics. But looking at what the ACP actually says and who it tries to reach reveals a party whose politics and messaging are nationalist, chauvinist, and reactionary.

Haz Al-Din's streaming platform Infrared functions as a de facto press office for the ACP, and his statements make the organization’s views explicit. In one livestream, he actively endorses Senate candidate Diane Sare, a reactionary Christian nationalist figure, on the grounds that she is "rescuing the decaying U.S. economy" and "promoting peace and cooperation with Russia and China." ACP members have also been photographed publicly endorsing Trump-aligned figures, including former director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Co-founder Jackson Hinkle has stated that women should not have the right to vote without a man's permission.

The party's programme calls for the "Promotion of American Civilization" while omitting any serious engagement with the colonial question. The iconography matches the rhetoric: the ACP uses imagery of George Washington alongside Marxist symbols, a collision that would be absurd if it were not so deliberate. Yet simultaneously, Al-Din claims that communism and Islam are the same thing and that rights in a communist society would flow from religious scripture. A party that sells itself in American founding mythology while preaching theocratic socialism is not applying any coherent political tradition. This is what has been coined "MAGA Communism": the political and ideological unification with the Trumpist movement, which the ACP characterizes as a working-class movement that could help defeat what Al-Din calls the "globalist beast."

To claim the Leninist tradition while holding these positions is contradictory and historically illiterate. The ACP follows the pattern of National Bolshevism, a tendency that breaks from Bolshevist internationalism in favor of nationalism. Communism is inherently internationalist: workers’ movements cannot be confined to one nation, even more so in the age of globalized flows of capital and labor.

Marxism draws a sharp distinction between the nationalism of an oppressed nation which is progressive, anti-imperialist, defensive in character; and the nationalism of an oppressor nation, reactionary and chauvinist. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban nationalism makes sense from a communist struggle because it is defensive, directed against external imperial domination. Think of Thomas Sankara’s Burkina Faso, which cut ties with colonial oppressors, nationalized all land and mineral wealth, and built an idea of anti-colonial nationalism that materially benefited its citizens. You cannot replicate Sankara from within the imperial core.

American nationalism has been used for centuries to unite workers behind the flag and against international solidarity. In red clothing, it defends the American bourgeois state, which is the very problem socialism exists to overcome. Lenin was clear on this as early as 1913:

Workers who place political unity with ‘their own’ bourgeoisie above complete unity with the proletariat of all nations are acting against their own interests, against the interests of socialism and against the interests of democracy.

Lenin, Theses on the National Question (June 1913)

And in 1914, writing directly against nationalist currents within the workers movement:

The class-conscious workers fight hard against every kind of nationalism, both the crude, violent, Black-Hundred nationalism, and that most refined nationalism which preaches the equality of nations together with the splitting up of the workers’ cause, the workers’ organisations and the working-class movement according to nationality.

Lenin, Corrupting the Workers with Refined Nationalism (May 10, 1914). Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 20

Ultra-nationalism alone should be enough to disqualify the ACP from any Leninist claim, but their approach to bourgeois political participation is almost equally contradictory. Lenin's theory of revolutionary strategy, elaborated across his later writings, insists that a communist party must engage with the masses where they are, including through bourgeois institutions, to build toward revolution.

In Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin dismantles the “Left Communist” tendency emerging across Europe at the time, exposing its ideological hypocrisy. In the chapter specifically addressing participation in bourgeois parliaments, he is unambiguous:

Criticism — the most keen, ruthless and uncompromising criticism — should be directed, not against parliamentarianism or parliamentary activities, but against those leaders who are unable — and still more against those who are unwilling — to utilise parliamentary elections and the parliamentary rostrum in a revolutionary and communist manner.

The argument is that refusing parliamentary engagement reflects a failure to understand the difference between what is obsolete for the vanguard and what is obsolete for the masses:

Parliamentarism, of course, is ‘politically obsolete’ for the Communists in Germany; but — and that is the whole point — we must not regard what is obsolete for us as being obsolete for the class, as being obsolete for the masses. Here again we find that the ‘Lefts’ do not know how to reason, do not know how to act as the party of the class, as the party of the masses.

Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), Ch. VII

In the same text, in the appendix on the split among German communists, Lenin directly attacks Laufenberg and Wolffheim, the original National Bolsheviks, calling their views “preposterous absurdities” and “stupidity and not revolutionary.” The ACP adheres on both counts: rejecting the parliamentary strategy Lenin demanded and embracing the nationalist tendency he condemned, all while claiming the revolutionary as their theoretical foundation along with Marx.

The ACP split from the CPUSA over what it called liberal compromises, yet ended up with an ideology that is more fringe and less coherent than what it left behind. A rejection of left-wing coalitions in favor of far-right ones was intended to expand a base, but instead dramatically narrowed it. Support for far-right bourgeois figures is masked as outreach to the working class, but it is capitulation to the class interests those figures serve. Lenin's argument for engaging bourgeois institutions was premised on using them as a platform to radicalize the masses and turn them against the status quo. The ACP uses the same logic to justify endorsing the status quo's most reactionary defenders. The mechanism may look similar, but the direction is inverted.

The consequences are material. The ACP’s messaging makes common cause with the reactionary currents that socialist organizing needs to overcome to enact any structural change. A party that wraps itself in Leninist authority while committing the errors Lenin vehemently condemned is at best opportunistic and at worst a long list of reactionary currents.

The ACP is a movement that cannot be considered communist in any meaningful sense. The closest they get is patriotic socialists, in the same vein as National Bolsheviks, reactionaries pretending to be communists to steal the name of a tradition they have effectively abandoned.

Santiago Ferrer is a Master’s student in Political Communication at the University of Amsterdam, focusing on socialist movements.