The ideas presented in this article arose directly out of an online Thread on the appropriate policy of the popular front in the Communist parties. The thread had drawn in present or former members of the Communist Party USA, The Communist Party of Canada, and the Canadian New Democratic Party.
I had respectfully questioned those among my interlocutors who supported the current political line of the American party's leadership and its policy of deep integration of their party into the centre of the "Obama movement". Here follows the greater part of what I said at the forum on "A Ragged Process at People's World" [http://www.peoplesworld.org/a-ragged-process/]
"It seems curious that one year into the most grave economic crisis since 1928 when socialist and Marxist ideas are being raised around the world in the bourgeois Press, that this is the moment a Communist leadership would sink into the woodwork because of fear of red-baiting?
What other motivations, strategy and tactics might the cpusa leadership be applying? For one, Sam Webb has written that communists must move away from 20th Century "imported" models of Socialism. This would rationally seem to suggest that either the leadership is leaving the Leninist project on the QT -- or is adhering to a tactics and strategy that intelligent people with long histories on the Left of the spectrum simply are too slow to understand.
Another thesis that is more logical to me is that the leadership believes that in order to completely identify with the "center" demands of the multi-class Obama "coalition",it is necessary to diminish and submerge references to the Communist tradition. An example of this that I thought confirmed this thesis was seen in Democratic party candidate and cpusa member Rick Nagin's Cleveland ward race, when during the electoral race he told the Cleveland Press it was time to change the name of the CPUSA to something less offensive to Americans, such as, perhaps "the New Socialist Party."
AN INTERNATIONAL WORLDVIEW IS INTRINSIC TO THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT
Each national party is certainly responsible for its own political development and it is correct that all CP's were hindered -even stalled in their adaptation to particular national conditions by dependence on the CPSU's line. I would never argue that any national party accept dictation from any external source.(But at the same time there were notable occasions when the international movement made corrections and contributions by reminding particular parties of broader perspectives perspectives and co-responsibilities to the international movement. These interventions such as Jacques Duclos' 1945 article criticizing the policies of American party Chairman Earl R. Browder ).
So there is another equally integral axis within the Marxist-Leninist tradition we have received as a trust: i.e. the communist movement is by its very character and ideology both composed of independent self-governing parties and an international. We have a global hymn "The Internationale" as our anthem. National revolutionary cultural texts, stories, and songs have been built up in every national communist party around the internationalist core mission and proclamation of our movement. There are symbols which are the common inheritance of the international movement, symbols that each speak to the comprehensive global nature of our long-term goal of a world comprised of inter-linked socialist, worker-power states. And in all intact Marxism the highest stage of revolutionary victory is looked to as goal and horizon, the final achievement of the stateless, classless society of communism.
The Communist movement as a global summons and analysis intrinsically comprehends a delicate tension from its foundation in The Communist Manifesto (& etc). We pose in our founding documents and present status a global unity-in-legitimate-diversity that is by its nature always a contested space that entails debate. This has always been true. The international character and ethos of Marxism in the Communist movement is not dependent on the presence or absence of an organizational bureaucracy such as the Comintern of the pre WW 2 years.
We are not just independently doing creative Marxist analysis in our national parties - although we are certainly responsible to perform that task. Because of the call contained in Marx's summons, "Workers of the world unite!"
we are also the current stewards of an always contended and at times rather disorderly international organism. We build on Marx and Engels and Lenin. etc but also on democrats such as Louis Riel and Papineau in Canada and Lincoln and Jack Reed in the USA. Still, our movement's core message is that in a real sense the workers as yet have no abiding state in this period of capitalist "pre-history". I would argue that there is no real creative embodiment of Marxism without a recognition of the conciliar global reach of world communism.
Is it difficult to hold both aspects of the Movement in balance? It is an inherently difficult task that we have committed our lives to. But members of the international organism must patiently and positively undergo the anxieties of holding this tension in balance. The alternative is continuing a superficial and formal international politesse with each other while unspoken "concerns" fester away in the well-known old passive-aggressive sectarian political culture of shunning, cabals, and misunderstandings.
We have not learned how to live with our inheritance as communists and those who "make waves" in such a pathological political culture do so at a cost. I am well aware of that, but know that we must learn to cast off this habit of uncharitable passivity or be rightly consigned to the sidelines in addressing the world's great sorrows and pain.
A related (brief) correlate: I don't think either side in this ongoing discourse is wholly "correct" or totally in error . Without suggesting in any way a capitulation to bourgeois postmodernism or its attendant radical relativism, Marxism-Leninism is a method and path before it is a series of unchanging encyclopedic definitions. Praxis as a method is a constant creation and unfolding process of learning from action and relecting on action.
Today's Communist movement is obviously inadequately communist in the sense of exemplifying the greater tradition's intrinsic dynamic. Too often in both the reformist and traditional groupings inside our family of Communist parties we are content to wearily carry on the worst obsessions with compliance, passive aggressiveness and rule by dictate. We have all in our several ideological formations lacked a disposition of basic openness to comrades who differ with us on penultimate questions. All Communists of different tendencies have habitually retreated into our little 'fortresses' - both those on the 'left' or 'right' side of any given debate. We have recently discovered that the ideological liberals are most illiberal when in leadership.And much of this pathology derives from confusion about the proper distribution of effective power in our movement.
Communists must address an a priori question on the nature and rights of democracy within the framework of the Leninist polity of democratic centralism if we are to break from a party culture of compliance and control which continues to erect and perpetuate barriers to real democratic participation. This is a vital question for both "Reformists" and Leninists in our increasingly polarized international, for we have read of or experienced the degeneration of party democracy in the formerly CPSU aligned parties,and now we have witnessed the remarkable resilience of this pathology in the leaderships which have pushed a model of "new socialism".
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