Problems of Economism in the CPUSA and the American Marxist Movement

by J. Ryder

April 7, 2024

The impasse that American communism now faces is undeniable: we lack strong politics and are subsequently absent from the national discourse regarding the future of this country. Here there lies a crucial misunderstanding amongst the organized left in respect to its collective prerogative. There exists an ostensibly unanimous desire to build a movement out of the fringe peripheral motion of American politics rather than launching from the basis of the most potent and relevant aspects of its internal content. This misconception has, without exception, spanned every aspect of organizing work and subsequently condemns each one to failure. The basis of this malpractice is economism, or the understanding that posits that it is not mass-political struggle but rather agitation on the level of the economic, spontaneous, and unconscious aspects of sociopolitical life that blazes the path to a revolutionary situation. This thought process tends to validate our communists in their abstraction of the conditions which govern our political landscape in favor of detached pseudo-realities suited toward fulfilling idealistically conceived narratives. This pretentious and backward approach has led to various determinant obstacles arising including: considerable dissonance between the mass element and the communists’, inability to garner substantial support for a unified communist agenda, as well as lack of any real governing influence or power. Building a mass base through an orientation toward hegemony must become the central tenet which unites our work and gives it purpose. This fundamental understanding regarding the required tasks of our communists deems the ongoing attempts at revolutionary organization as predominantly apolitical and locates economism as the primary juncture which must be crossed at this stage to advance.

Although originally refuted by Vladimir Lenin in ‘What is to be Done?’ (1902), many self-proclaimed Marxists (and even Marxist-Leninists) maintain an economistic approach without realizing they are doing so. This subconscious element of economism has led to a complex system of obstacles that is sometimes difficult to parse. As J. Moufawad-Paul soberly puts it, “the subjective instance of economism has become normative, particularly in the imperialist metropoles, and often functions as the proverbial ‘ghost in the machine’ of anti-capitalist organizing. Since it can be theorized but is not usually a theoretical position, it is difficult to pin down. We are thus stuck with the task of locating its symptoms, drawing them out, and attempting to slowly and messily establish a diagnosis…because of the nature of its object of critique, as should already be clear, this analysis is invested in the dubious task of producing a taxonomy of a problematic that produces subjects who aren’t aware of how they have been subjectivized. What we are attempting to expose, analyze, and critique will lead us to think “economism” against the fact that those determined by this consciousness do not believe they need to be diagnosed. ‘Politics in Command: A Taxonomy of Economism’ (2022).” The fact that this problematic worldview exists as a proverbial ghost possessing its vessels covertly does not give reason to justify its continued authority on the contemporary Marxist movement, however. Rather, this only gives reason for intensified persecution of the issue at hand. Regardless of its disparate and subconscious character, economism remains the pestilent crux of revolutionary organizing over 120 years after its original debunking. This caricature of Marxism must be sought out, diagnosed, and resolved through a struggle for the primacy of politics, through which all revolutionary thought and action must be channeled. 

This albatross of economism has taken on an especially pernicious character in its misestimation of the union struggle. Throughout the history of American Marxism, the valorization of unions has been a mainstay; the popular conception being that unions are the foremost site of existing class struggle and should therefore be prioritized in communist organizing spaces. This notion of unionization as class struggle is undoubtedly accurate, however, this truism has hitherto only actualized as a vapid fetish, hindering the full scope of work necessary to engage meaningfully with the unions as well as national political life in general. As communists, we understand that it’s only through the development of an active base of consciousness that socialism can be actualized, yet we contradict ourselves by simply reinforcing the already existent and economic nature of the mass element’s consciousness. We don’t take growing trade union consciousness as indicative of an opportunity to advance that trade union element in a political direction, but rather as a chance to de-escalate our own activity from that of a political character to a trade union character. We pride ourselves on this submersion, as if it is indicative of a principled humility, when in reality it sacrifices the opportunity to engage promising union struggles in any way that could be meaningful for either party. It’s this communist self-liquidation into union struggle that has produced the problematic relationship between the communists and the unions, rather than any wrongdoing on behalf of the union movement or unionism as an organic orientation in general. The engagement of unions on a more political front can of course be potent in the generation of a political movement and bloc (as shown by the historically effective relations of the Democratic Party with the unions), but the engagement with those unions through the logic of economism can only hope to reproduce the rationale that already informs their practice. The left has understood the present growth of the union struggle as correspondent to the growth of socialism, when in reality this correspondence can only be actualized through the synthesis of the union movement and the communists in a coalition of an explicitly political character, without which the union struggle is doomed to fall under the wing of the existing coalitions often of a Democratic Party persuasion, a case we have seen occur time and time again. What has taken place in the stead of such a coalition by the communists is an apolitical self liquidation of devastating proportions. 

This union fetishization has led the CPUSA and the various other American Marxist organizations to place a misinformed emphasis on union organizing, dispersing their cadre into unionization efforts themselves in the hopes of becoming notable in their ranks. The intended outcome here is to build brand credibility for the party organization through the ‘good deeds’ of the cadre, in turn raising the level of these unions from reformist units to revolutionary ones. However, these cadre who liquidate among the unions don’t end up changing their purpose at all; rather, the unions’ reformist character converts the ‘communist militant’ into little more than an organizational functionary for its own goals, carrying out the same tasks the union was performing just fine on its own. Pamphleting, SALTing, phone-banking; these are tasks that unions are appreciative of in voluntary contribution, and individual party members should feel free to do so if compelled; yet it should not be seen as the primary task of the party’s organizational apparatus to do so. These daily activistic tasks are seen not as supplementary contributions but rather the the raison d’etre of political organizing in general. Marxist organizations entering unions does not politicize the latter, it only depoliticizes the former. This conception of communists raising the unions to a revolutionary consciousness has hitherto only been actualized as the lowering of their own, potentially revolutionary consciousness to the level of trade union consciousness and calling it Marxism. The point here, of course, is not to oppose unions but rather to understand on what grounds the most effective alliance with the union organizations can be made. To engage the unions effectively, it must be done through a political program that meaningfully incorporates the social goals of those unions and empowers them in national politics. This can be done only by the communist party itself, a task that has thus far been completely neglected.

This isn’t to say that unions are reactionary—on the contrary, they are an undeniable vessel of struggle. However, their social function essentially limits them to activity that does no more than attempt to mediate the antagonistic relationship between labor and capital. While, again, these tasks are valuable, they only develop into revolutionary tasks when totalized by a genuinely political force. This phenomenon is demonstrated succinctly by the Democratic Party and President Biden himself in their reconciliation of the  unions into the dominant agenda. The capitalist class knows that by absorbing and incorporating the economic demands of the unions they can gain the consent of many potentially rebellious elements of the mass struggle, and will gladly make that trade every time the need for it arises. The ruling class understands economic demands as the easiest to accommodate, as they quell the necessity for more permanent and structural political change. This is a fact frequently forgotten by our communists, who feel that the economic demands being made will somehow evolve spontaneously toward politicization, not realizing that politicization must involve an intentional approach on the part of political militants and cannot be some tangential sidekick to what is seen as a ‘grander’ or more widely encompassing economic struggle. Lenin writes: “economic concessions (or pseudo-concessions) are, of course, the cheapest and most advantageous from the government’s point of view, because by these means it hopes to win the confidence of the working masses. For this very reason, we Social-Democrats must not under any circumstances or in any way whatever create grounds for the belief (or the misunderstanding) that we attach greater value to economic reforms, or that we regard them as being particularly important, etc.” What is to be done? (1902). 

These misconceptions among Marxists regarding the necessary orientation toward the unions were omnipresent during the years I spent organizing in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and one anecdote in particular springs to mind. We held an event honoring exemplary leaders from the labor movement with Christian Smalls, president of the new Amazon Labor Union (ALU), being recognized for his great contributions to the rising tide of the union struggle over recent years. In his acceptance speech, Smalls started by thanking everyone for the lavish praise that had been heaped upon him for his work in the field, along with some standard slogans and motivating words that accompany similar labor events, but what he then turned to took me by surprise: “yeah we have historical victories that happened this year,” Smalls said, “but 2024 is around the corner, and let me tell you this…if we lose this [Democratic Party] Administration, guess what? Everything that we've done from Amazon to Starbucks, you can forget about it. So yes I've done some great things and I inspired a lot of people, the ALU has inspired a lot of people, but it's not enough…we all have to hold each other accountable and we have to hold these politicians accountable…I'm just one union president I can't do everything. It's not up to me. it's up to all of us, so remind yourselves why are you in this?” Smalls recognized that although union militants must necessarily continue their struggle, none of it would prove useful without a broader political struggle. That if we don’t fight for the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act, mobilize the progressive electorate against the fascist GOP in 2024, and gather a mass base within the parameters of independently organized Marxist politics, these spontaneous union victories on their own will be aptly met with their own unraveling. 

This sentiment espoused by Smalls to a crowd of communists and organizers can only be properly understood as a figurative call to arms:. ‘Why do you so-called political organizers honor us and pretend to assist us while not failing to serve  your real role?’. This seemingly inconspicuous anecdote has gained even more potency since the relationship between the CPUSA and Christian Smalls has collapsed, with the latter stating in a public twitter spat with a prominent party leader that  “you attach yourself to everything and every movement for clout but don’t do shit.” This sort of confused and apolitical pretentiousness from organized communists is not out of character but rather indicative of the infantile state the movement is in. The truth is that the unions are doing their job—they are fighting for their membership. It is the so-called Marxists who are not doing their job. Instead of promoting the politics through which the spontaneous economic struggle can be preserved, advanced, and expanded, the ‘party militants’ find themselves content to be bystanders and, merely fanatics of the economic struggle rather than the answer to its prayers.

The necessity of this more encompassing politicism becomes increasingly apparent when these victories at the level of the workplace are becoming significantly more difficult to achieve, protect, and expand in its absence; yet it is that same vital politicism that gets neglected by our communists. When Chris Smalls went to the white house and met with President Biden, he was labeled a traitor to the union movement by the communists, as if he wasn’t just trying to consolidate the goals of his members through political means that those same communists refuse to take on. It is this very self-indulgent game of sectarian purity on behalf of our communists that pushes Smalls and alike forcibly into the hands of the Democratic Party. Here lies a wish to have one’s cake and eat it too! To abstain from the motion that governs the political and electoral landscape in a supposed attempt to delegitimize liberalism only to decry those who attempt to politicize their movement through the liberals (who remain the only left-of-center coalition that cares to embrace such a politicization), is among the most hypocritical and inane requests, yet it is one that we seem to be intent on making again and again in the context of our union friends. It’s clear that the only reconciliation for this medley of errors is a self-reflection of a critically political manner; one that will hopefully lead to the creation of a Marxist politics capable of incorporating rather than negating the very natural desire on behalf of the union struggle to expand their influence and protect their gains on an institutional level. Here it is apparent that there exists two unionisms: one organic and spontaneous, arising out of economic necessity on behalf of the working class; and a contradictory economistic unionism, employed by communists in place of a much more necessary politicization of the former.

One of the driving, yet often concealed theories behind the economists’ unionism is that, through the lowering of capitalist profit brought about by union struggle, an economic crisis will ensue that will correspond to the preponderance of socialist forces. To them, the value of a potential general strike, for example, doesn't lie within its political potency but rather in its ability to create an anarchic economic situation; and that out of the ensuing disarray, a revolutionary force will arise. ‘The worse, the better’, the accelerationist adage goes, implying that there is a direct correlation between the harshening of capitalist crisis and the proliferation of socialist consciousness ready to bring about socialism. This logic, however, fails to account for the necessity of Marxist political intervention to bring about socialism. What this rationale fails to incorporate is the fact that without a political party willing and able to initiate and facilitate such an intervention, crises remain stillborn, unaffected by the communists. Although this accelerationist understanding is taken up by many ‘party militants’, if followed to its logical end it renders superfluous the party form.

 The Invisible Committee, an adventurist group who sabotaged railway and electrical lines in attempts to incite capitalist crisis in France, are a perfect example of what following this apolitical logic ultimately amounts to: destroy infrastructure and foment crisis in hopes that socialism will naturally come along with it. The truth is that even if these groups were successful in severely hampering capitalism’s economic capacity and creating an anarchic political environment, the result would not be the rise of a revolutionary subject. To the contrary, the resultant environment would likely have every reason to be absolutely reactionary, nihilistic, and counterrevolutionary without the presence of the communist party carrying out the political struggle necessary to actualize socialism from the ashes of crisis. In a global climate in which fascist organizations, parties, and paramilitary groups have been far and away more successful than the left in rising to prominence and seizing political power out of arid socioeconomic conditions, the idea that the masses of struggling workers in crisis would organically come to socialism is utter idealism. It is clear to see that economic hardship alone serves only to create a decentralized and rebellious mass element, but by no means a revolutionary one. The Communist party must create the revolutionary subject—, there is no revolutionary subject found readymade in the underbelly of crisis as these economists would have you believe. These victims of capitalism may be more open to revolutionary ideology, but will not miraculously stumble upon it by themselves; it must be brought to them by the revolutionaries themselves. “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement;” perhaps there should be a more thorough examination of these words that so many repeat as a mindless dogma.

 Though innately hopeless in achieving their objectives, The Invisible Committee and similar organizations alike have at least earned the kind of respect given to those who intentionally carry out a certain theory to its logical end; such cannot be said for the current crop of supposed ‘Marxist militants’ who use the facade of a political party to reproduce this same economistic logic now with a shinier, more official veneer. To those groups whose primary activity is dominated by the coordination and expansion of union activity, tenant organizing, and peripheral activism, the party- form is a fossilized caricature. These daily activities can be just as easily carried out by a loose band of sympathizers, let alone the already existent union membership and staff. These ‘party form’ economists seek only to tail and reproduce the economic struggle while dragging along the party form for whatever morsels of institutional benefits that it may provide. What these economists must realize is that the trade unions are doing the unionizing, the tenant organizations are struggling with the tenants, the Salvation Army feeds the homeless, etc. It is not the job of communists to simply play support to these struggles, nor is it the job of communists to create turmoil through which there is no political edge, which as we know alone can only promise chaos and not socialism. 

The task at hand is not to simply carry on and assist the narrow economic struggle but rather to embody socialism as a political force, constituted and articulated through the mainstream sphere of national discourse and debate, the medium through which all change must pass to be actualized. Through this embodiment, those already existent mass struggles can finally find revolutionary potential through their organizing, efforts which have hitherto only been consistently funneled into the growth and expansion of The Democratic Party due to lack of a real left political alternative. The Democrats, as irredeemably liberal and anticommunist as they are, have seized upon the progressive electorate for the exact reason that they do to the contrary of what the communists do. The Democrats don’t do inner-union organizing nor mutual aid for the homeless, what they do instead is provide a program that accommodates the needs of the masses in any given cultural and economic moment and then express it nationally, therefore mobilizing their base politically on a scale of tens of millions.  This too should be seen as the real task of the CPUSA and movement toward a Marxist political party in general: the creation of a primarily programmatic and theoretically oriented political agenda that can operationalize these economic and activistic struggles within communist politics. It’s only through those politics that economic reality can be meaningfully altered or even understood. The mutual aid table, the union strike, the eviction defense; within the context of a political party these activities that once could only hope to reproduce capitalism on more livable terms can, at last, prosper in the creation of revolutionary forces.

This understanding makes it intensely frustrating when CPUSA members are told (myself formerly included) that their agenda amounts to nothing more than keeping their heads down and ‘doing the work’. That they are merely required to fulfill the quota of necessary reinforcements to these existing economic struggles and that following this fulfillment the working class will naturally flock to Marxism like the latest seasonal migration of birds to the south. By advocating for the primacy of political struggle over economistic activism in the CPUSA, I found myself frequently derided for not sufficiently ‘doing my part’. Engaging American politics from an analytical and critical angle is apparently insufficient for a day’s work to the high and mighty militants of practicalism. Instead, if I and all the other party members just worked overtime to foster unionization efforts, do mutual aid, and submerge ourselves in similar ‘practical’ tasks (tasks that I attempted myself first-hand again and again to no avail), our goals would be met and the eve of revolution would be upon us. 

This understanding tends to mask itself in a veil of righteousness and empathy where in reality it reeks of self indulgence and offhandedly insults the political intelligence of its intended audience. To think that politics is as simple and transactional as giving out groceries or assisting in a union effort in exchange for subscription to a socialist worldview is nothing short of delusion, yet is a dominant form of thought among these organizers. They give out food along with their various dull slogans and pamphlets like a drug coated in candy to deceive the consumer of the true nature of its contents. That, like a child or a dog, the working class will be drawn toward their messaging due to the positive reinforcement of free supplies or a higher wage. What these economists don’t understand is that people are much smarter than they think, and will readily take the immediate assistance they offer just to turn around, throw away the tacky pamphlets they’ve been given, and instead subscribe to the Democratic Party program, who at this stage unfortunately remain their only significant means of progressive politico-cultural expression in this country. 

This false correspondence of activism-as-politics manifested by economism can only be understood as a chronic impediment to political organizing. Although they remain in denial in respect to their subscription to this worldview whenever the critique arises, the economists will subsequently use the party form to carry out no more than these same futile tasks, refusing to utilize political independence for its true purpose. The revolutionary party form is indulged and paid homage to, yet a meaningful political line is not pursued through it, and the vacuum that remains is instead filled by a pervasive economism. Instead of generating a political vision, this pseudo-pragmatism takes the forefront of party activity. This self-imposed inhibition can only be broken when the theoretical undertaking of creating a meaningful and relevant political line is understood as the true meaning of the hitherto encumbering slogan of ‘doing the work’, and is thus given primacy in juxtaposition to more tangential, activistic tasks.

In response to accusations of economism, and the push for politicization of the party, dogmatists will often give you a smug look and a pointed finger toward the party program. To them it seems that the mere presence of a program and the party organizational apparatus itself is proof enough of superiority over the logic of economism. The induction of the party form is not, however, the solution to economism in and of itself; even those organizations which pride themselves on their ‘political work’ are usually doing so by concentrating entirely on the country’s peripheral conflicts that they conveniently cherry pick and contrive importance out of, rather than the questions and conversations which dominate the national discourse time and time again, and therefore in doing so still embody an apolitical and economistic logic. This phenomenon is not displayed any more clearly than in the program of the CPUSA. The party’s ‘political agenda’ insists on pre-occupying itself with the aforementioned economic struggle, yet in doing so attempts to ‘lend the economic struggle a political character’, as Lenin would derogatorily characterize. Such a disparaging description is adept in understanding the focus of the party around concepts such as the ‘anti-monopoly coalition’ and building ‘worker solidarity’, the latter being only meaningfully understood as abstract posturing, as its only resultant form has been nothing more than vapid sympathizing and virtue signaling without any orientation to their political implications. As for the ‘anti-monopoly coalition’, an astute and political-sounding campaign has in practice only resulted in economistic conspiracism. 

An instance that bears relevance to such a shortcoming was the CPUSA campaign to expose the “corporate backers of fascism” in which members were sent to protest outside of corporate offices financially supportive of right wing institutions and politicians.  Instead of fighting on the front lines of politico-cultural struggle and discourse that have become so predominant, our membership was tasked with revealing the concealed yet allegedly grand ruling class economic conspiracy behind it all to the masses. Instead of battling fascism as a cultural stalwart in its many various expressions that daily preside over American political debate, we were meant to tell people to look at the ‘real reason’ behind these phenomena. The issue to the party wasn’t Trump, the GOP, or the rising cultural tendency toward orthodoxy and fascism, but rather a cabal of big money conspirators pulling the strings behind the scenes. We never protested the institutions, figures, or ideas representing the extreme right on a major scale, but rather sought it as our duty to abstract the problem to their corporate donors. We were told that the battle actually took place on the level of boycotting The Home Depot and Coors beers, that by carrying out these simple and easy economic tasks we could avoid tainting our communism with the messy and unwieldy democratic political struggle of the masses. These demonstrations and campaigns of course never got much notice outside of the few culty adherents within party circles, gathering the likes of dozens in Hudson Yards on a good day. 

Inherently, this almost contrarian and conspiratorial approach could never resonate with the popular mass-struggle toward democracy and socialism. Instead of acknowledging the premise of the ongoing conflict and the lines of demarcation it has drawn to build off of, communists have only sought to distract and take away from its energy and direction. They are constantly attempting to take people out of politics and throw them into the ‘nuanced economics’ of it all, as if the struggle hasn’t already advanced past such a necessity (if there ever was one). In a world of classed antagonisms that have taken on complex and advanced cultural expressions unique to the American experience, our communists have sought only to dumb down and attempt to formulaically resolve contradictions through narrow conceptions of terms like ‘class war’ and ‘working class’. What is required is a renewed understanding of what it means to be a communist in the United States in 2024; one which accepts new and changing political dynamics and trends as necessitating a correspondingly transformative approach, one which prioritizes politics and their ends over idealistic virtue signaling and self-fulfilling bureaucratic pseudo-parties.

If communists want to gain political agency we must consistently be willing to reckon with the issues of the day instead of attempting to counterpose them with issues and analyses derived abstractly from theory. This means engaging with elections in a tactical and political way, understanding the rise of fascism as the main contemporary threat to democracy and therefore socialism, and understanding the culture war as the great debate of our era; subsequently articulating a coherent political line that connects these issues with the broader vision of communism. When the Communist Party becomes a tool of the people, one that it can use as an orienting beacon toward a new world, only then will Marxism have the chance to gain hegemony in the United States; no longer the play-thing of sectarian activists, revolution will become the zeitgeist for the progressive masses of American people; the northern star for yearning souls.