On July 21, 2024, several “communist” internet personalities gathered in Chicago to form the “American Communist Party.” Among the founding members are Eddie “Liger” Smith, Carlos Garrido, Noah Khrachvik, and Kyle Pettis (former member of Maoist Collective – Red Guards and American Party of Labor) of Midwestern Marx; Adam “Haz Al-Din” Tahir, Henry Ahmad, and Grayson Preutz of the Infrared Collective; Jackson Hinkle (prominent MAGA communist) of The Dive With Jackson Hinkle; Christopher Helali of the Party of Communists USA; and Rev Laskaris of RTSG. Together, these ten individuals constitute the ACP Plenary Committee.
The founding declaration also includes signatures from twenty-nine clubs of the Communist Party USA, as well as three clubs of the PCUSA. However, many have since denied affiliation with the ACP on social media. The ACP justified including these signatures based on a petition they signed against Resolution 5 of the 32nd CPUSA National Convention, which formalized the CPUSA’s long-standing alignment with the Democratic Party.
Within days, ACP leaders appeared on RT and The Jimmy Dore Show to promote their new formation, quickly amassing tens of thousands of followers on X (formerly Twitter). Their sudden rise in popularity is the culmination of the “CPUSA 2036” initiative, launched by “Haz” in 2021, where Infrared supporters were encouraged to infiltrate the CPUSA, detach it from the Democratic Party, and “restore its former glory.” To be sure, the ACP’s declaration highlights significant issues within the CPUSA—namely, the failure to address the struggles of the working class in the United States, the lack of democratic centralism, the dissolution of its publishing arm and ideological journal, the transfer of party archives to New York University, their alignment with the Democratic Party. However, the validity of these observations does not negate the fact that the ACP constitutes yet another complete deviation from Marxism-Leninism.
This new “party” is a thoroughly petty-bourgeois formation, led by streamers (small businessmen), political grifters, and ex-functionaries of the state and embodying some of the most disturbing and harmful tendencies obstructing the reconstitution of the communist party in the US—careerism, individualism, overreliance on online forms of recruitment and organization, pandering to the most backward sections of society, promoting and condoning reactionary and alienating positions (e.g., “patriotic socialism” and “MAGA communism”), and supporting outright anti-communist leaders like Nicholas Maduro and Vladimir Putin. These tendencies should all come as no surprise, as the ACP’s leaders in the “Plenary Committee” all have a petty-bourgeois background as social media “influencers” and “content creators.” Moreover, Hinkle and the Infrared Collective are both specifically known for their embrace of fascist and “Third/Fourth Position” ideologues such as Aleksandr Dugin, James Porrazzo (American Front, New Resistance), and Raphael Machado (New Resistance Brazil).
The ACP joins the likes of the deeply anti-communist and opportunist World Anti-Imperialist Platform as another fundamentally reformist group championing the theory of multipolarity. Rather than fighting for revolution, its true aim is thus to subjugate the workers and people of this country to sections of the bourgeoisie in the US that are supposedly interested in the revival of national production and the bourgeoisie of other countries. To that end, these swindlers co-opt the rhetoric of Donald Trump, of “bringing jobs back to America,” and the ideological guise of the Eurasian imperialist bloc for the “defense of traditional values.” Their mask of “patriotic socialism” is designed to appeal to the Republican Party base in the US as a supposed bulwark of the working class, harking back to the days of Browder and the Popular Front and drawing on modern and historical US symbols and traditions with slogans like “Communism is 20th (21st) Century Americanism.” The Midwestern Marx Institute, now dovetailing with the voices of MAGA communism, has played a significant role in developing this ideological-political framework by utilizing the works of Georgi Dimitrov [1, 2, 3], attempting to give “socialist content a national form”—”Socialism with American characteristics.” This approach repeats past errors while systematically obscuring the motives of the bourgeoisie and distorting reality, presenting conservatism and the reactionary turn of capital as progress. However, it has also proven effective in influencing the youth, who often lack historical knowledge and class experience.
The reference to Socialism with Chinese characteristics is no coincidence. In a recent interview with Jimmy Dore discussing the founding of the ACP, Hinkle confirmed that “…the way that a communist country operates, at least when it comes to the economic aspect, is much similar to how we are witnessing China operate today.” Such a characterization contradicts the Marxist understanding of the fundamental character of capitalism (private appropriation of social production) versus that of socialism (social production for society’s needs). Hinkle further states that “Russia…is basically rebuilding this multipolar world…even though Putin does not call himself a communist, [Putin] basically is taking up the mantle and waving the flag [communist flag] at this point”. Both statements demonstrate the ACP’s rejection of scientific communism, of the unyielding fight for the emancipation of the working class from the bourgeoisie of every country, in favor of aligning the people with the imperialist BRICS alliance.
In the same interview, Hinkle never once mentions the necessity of the socialist revolution, instead regurgitating the old, tired plan of using the state to nationalize industries. “Socialism” is thus to be built within the framework of capitalist society, as enshrined in a bourgeois constitution that guarantees private property and a bill of rights whose freedoms extend only as far as one’s capital.
The banner of multipolarity does not belong to the communists. The slogan for the “multipolar world” is a continuation of imperialism through a new division of markets, labor forces, and raw materials. Exchanging one imperialist center for another is no exchange at all. Multipolarity is the slogan of social democracy, “progressivism”, and ultimately reaction masquerading as revolution. It is the banner of which imperialist alliance will lead the global capitalist system and by extension the inter-imperialist war.
Aligning with the state forces of Russia and China is a betrayal of proletarian internationalism. It means choosing the side of one or the other imperialist poles in the ever-intensifying competition for dominance within the imperialist system. Today, that competition takes the form of the US-NATO-EU alliance versus the China-Russia alliance. In this sense, the ACP is no different from the social-democratic parties of the Second International that chose to side with “their” bourgeoisie. The consequences of this alignment will also be the same: the disorientation of the working class and the obstruction of the path to socialist revolution, leaving the people unprepared for the looming threat of a renewed world war.
We should further be wary of any organization claiming itself as the Communist Party, especially one helmed by online personalities and with no connection to the working masses. Such a grandiose claim, born out of blatant megalomania and overestimated support, can only lead to further confusion within an already fractured revolutionary movement. The title of the Communist Party is not something that one can pin on oneself. For Marxist-Leninists, the communist party is the fighting cadre organization of the working class, led by a revolutionary program based on the principle of democratic centralism. The ACP offers no such program, and the apparent lack of an election to their “Plenary Committee” calls into question their claim to uphold democratic centralism.
Since the Counterrevolution in the USSR, an ideological-political crisis has ravaged the international communist movement. With no leading center to unite the revolutionary forces of the world, opportunist and revisionist ideology has come to dominate the movement, particularly in the US. All of this has led to the rise of many organizations claiming themselves as the true champion of the working class in the fight for socialism-communism, among them the CPUSA and the PCUSA. Neither organization can sidestep their joint responsibility for the development of the ACP, for both have themselves become bastions of the same eclectic and opportunistic tendencies that present China and Russia as “anti-imperialist.”
The CPUSA, of course, denies its responsibility for the creation of the ACP, claiming it was “birthed outside of its ranks.” They mention nothing of the years spent cultivating the theories of multipolarity, market socialism, and other opportunistic trends within their ranks or their relinquishing of the Leninist theory of the party in favor of the organizational standards of a social democratic mass party. But the truth is that the CPUSA has been a bankrupt vehicle of opportunism and appendage of the bourgeois political system for decades, having long tied itself to the Democratic Party in the name of “defeating fascism.” It is only natural that this eclecticism and opportunism would give rise to the abomination that is the “American Communist Party.”
Thus, between the CPUSA, PCUSA, and ACP—to say nothing of the myriad other formations scattered across the country—none offer a revolutionary option for the workers and popular forces in the US. However, there yet remains one alternative to the bourgeois state: the Communist Workers’ Platform, an organization dedicated to fighting in the streets, in our neighborhoods, in the schools, and, crucially, in the workplaces for the reconstitution of the Communist Party in the US. We do not simply dream of a better world. We work to construct it, to build up and organize the forces of the working class in preparation for its historic mission, the overthrow of the capitalist system.
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