A CPUSA member recently responded to a letter from SCORE about the CPUSA’s political line on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in their pre-convention document. This response ignored SCORE’s valid critique, and instead showed why communists are not organizing around COVID: there is a contradiction between how left parties, particularly the CPUSA, educate their members and members’ vulnerability to bourgeois propaganda. This contradiction is clear when communists see through lies about issues like Palestine or mass incarceration but fail to see through propaganda on COVID (or vice versa). People in the imperial core are fed propaganda since birth, leading to linear, reductionist, and individualist thinking. Deepening knowledge and engaging in practice in the following key areas would help in overcoming this internalized propaganda.

Conceptualizing the dynamic flow of the structural and superstructural processes that keep capitalism running², is key to addressing conjunctural issues like COVID. Communists in the imperial core often see through one set of lies, one Invented Reality³, about issues like labor exploitation, the War on Terror, or the eugenic, ableist component of fascism, but they cannot apply that understanding to another set of lies. A group may even know that mass organization is the biggest tool against bourgeois forces, but without understanding how these systemic processes are interconnected their full capacity to effect change will remain unrealized.

Blaming one party and focusing on elections ignores the deeper root causes of crises, especially the ongoing health crisis. Treating politics like a sport⁴ and not addressing root causes often leads comrades to miss the interconnection of systemic issues. Both the dominant parties in the USA have an identical policy trajectory in the arena of public health. Both fight against workplace protections⁵, and use health authorities for corporate interests⁶. They implement great air filtration systems privately, but hypocritically reject them publicly⁷. This dismantling of public health was understood in prior socialist struggles, as SCORE mentioned in its previous letter quoting and referencing Marx on the Factory Acts⁸ and Marta Russell on eugenics⁹. 

Educating comrades about the state’s pivotal role in maintaining capitalism is crucial to effective goals, strategies, and tactics¹⁰. Praising the Democrats, a conservative party which serves the exploiting class, for increasing public health funding ignores myriad ways those funds were misused, such as undermining the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, and now the Free Palestine movement, by shifting them to police funding via sleight of hand¹¹. Downplaying COVID's danger, comparing it to the flu, or talking about the ongoing, mass-disabling pandemic as if it is over undermines public health¹². Similarly, not seeing the state’s role in indigenous struggles, climate catastrophe, neo-colonial wealth extraction, the size and shape of the reserve army of labor, and many other issues actively undermines efforts to effect real change.

Politicization of trusted bodies has undermined their credibility and effectiveness. In many areas, and especially with COVID, it is difficult to accept that respected scientific authorities, and especially public health authorities, have been used as political tools to maximize exploitation¹³. Accepting this puts a heavy responsibility on our shoulders, to ourselves, our children, and our community. This can be painful—but solidarity is a salve: through mutual education, principled struggle, reflective practice, and empathy we can help each other to bear this burden.

Applying the science of revolutionary change and interconnection, especially analyzing appearance versus essence and form versus content, is a powerful tool¹⁴. SCORE’s previous critique was about internalized propaganda, not a wording mistake. We understand health is not healthcare access, healthcare access is not the same as COVID risk mitigation, and access to the highest quality healthcare or even free healthcare does not determine whether or not someone gets sick.

Misunderstanding the limits of reformism and electoralism reflects a deeper issue in understanding how the communist theory of change is applied. Change is not accidental: it happens when a group prioritizes and actively organizes for it, intentionally and collectively. An organization cannot change what it has not decided to fight for. Reforming healthcare access will not result in a change in the mitigation of COVID.

Holding a deeply incorrect political line without sufficient investigation and without having engaged in principled struggle is easy. What is difficult is to commit not merely to a temporary or superficial change, but to a fundamental change in how a party’s shared values turn into material results and concrete actions. The state has completely failed on public health from a proletarian perspective and is not addressing this issue because it goes against the interests of the ruling class. For the reasons outlined in SCORE’s previous letter, and to protect the health of our comrades, we must take this issue to heart. Activist group members must recognize they are part of a community and have a duty to protect it, and that duty includes rigorous investigation and principled internal struggle.

SCORE demanded clear action, and not on healthcare or word choice. SCORE was not asking for a temporary convention policy or superficial in-person meeting guidelines, but rather a fundamental change in the CPUSA’s political line. Effective organization around this line would materially result in concrete actions like mandating masking, free distribution of disposable respirators, improved ventilation, and subsidized air filtration systems and agitation toward goals such as masks in healthcare and treatments for Long Covid/PASC.

In the CPUSA and across the broader left movement, we must resolve the contradiction between theory-practice and the propaganda which separates us from one another, not only in the fight against COVID, but in preparation for all of our future battles, together.

SCORE is an international organization focused on socialist organizing, agitation, and education and centering the world-historic COVID-19 pandemic. All members are also members in other parties and organizations. https://socialist-core.org/

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1. V. I. Lenin, Better Fewer, But Better, 1923.

2. Mita Sekisuke, The Method of Capital 1974; Andrew Kliman, Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, 2007; Ben Becker, Imperialism In The 21st Century: Updating Lenin’s Theory A Century Later, 2015, p. 92-3.

3. Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality (Youtube).

4. Scott Cooper, “Bourgeois Democracy”: What Do Marxists Mean by That Term?, Left Voice 2021.

5. Bruce Rolfsen, OSHA Virus Rule Intended to Cover All Workers Draft Shows, Bloomberg Law 2021; Tim Dickinson, ‘Abhorent’: Disability Advocates Slam CDC Director for Comments on ‘Encouraging’ Covid Deaths, Rolling Stone 2022; Omicron as severe as other COVID variants -large U.S. study, Reuters 2022.

6. Jordan Liles, Did Delta's CEO Influence the CDC on 5-Day COVID Isolation?, Snopes 2021; New CDC COVID isolation guidance meets corporate needs, flight attendants union president says, CBS News 2021; Bruce Y. Lee, CDC Director Walensky’s Covid-19 Rebound Raises Questions About 5 Day Isolation, Forbes 2022; Walker Bragman, How Dark Money Shaped The School Safety Debate, The Lever 2022.

7. Biden Brings His Own Ventilation to @mcps High School, Parents’ Coalition of Montgomery County 2022; Lambert Strether, How Ashish Jha and Rochelle Walensky of Newton, MA Protect Their Children from Covid (But not Yours), naked capitalism 2022; Bruce Y. Lee, World Economic Forum: Here Are All The Covid-19 Precautions At Davos 2023, Forbes 2023; State of the Union 2024 (transcript, hosted by USA Today) (relevant part is Biden announcing that “[t]he pandemic no longer controls our lives.”).

8. Karl Marx, Capital, 1887, Ch. 15, Sec. 9, “The Factory Acts.”

9. Marta Russell, Capitalism and Disability, Verso 2019.

10. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970 (trans. Ben Brewster).

11. Anastasia Valeeva, Rifles, Tasers and Jails: How Cities and States Spent Billions of COVID-19 Relief, The Marshall Project 2022; Shannon Pettypiece, Biden urges cities to spend Covid relief money on police, crime prevention, NBC News 2022.

12. Too Many Deaths, Too Many Left Behind: A People’s External Review of the CDC, People’s CDC 2023; Will Stone, CDC's new COVID metrics can leave individuals struggling to understand their risk, NPR 2022; Alex Skopic, COVID-19 is Still a Threat. So is Biden’s CDC., Current Affairs 2024; Sarah Zhang, The ‘End’ of COVID Is Still Far Worse Than We Imagined, The Atlantic 2022.

13. Walker Bragman, How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID, Lever News 2021; Scientific Integrity: HHS Agencies Need to Develop Procedures and Train Staff on Reporting and Addressing Political Interference, U.S. Government Accountability Office 2022.

14. Oscar Atkinson, Dialectics: Method to our Madness, 2015; Evald Ilyenkov, Soviet Psychology 1977, Pt. 2, Sec. 10, “Contradiction as a Category of Dialectical Logic"; Study Marxist Philosophy: Penetrate the Appearance to Grasp the Essence, Communist Workers Party 1980; What is Content and Form in Dialectics?, Lenin Institute 2022.