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8/1/2025

American Marxism and the American Communist Party By: Carlos L. Garrido

5 Comments

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Below is the speech I gave about my book, Why We Need American Communism, and the American Communist Party at the Subversion Summer Camp in Bridgeport, Chicago. The camp was the subject of criticism in a recent national segment on Fox News, where the presence of the party and me in the event was highlighted. 
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America is not a hub for red diaper babies. Most people on the American left come to that position, they’re not thrown into it at birth. Coming to the left as Americans usually requires what philosophers call an “event,” an often-traumatizing rupture of our everydayness. We are navigating through our normal life and something happens that breaks the routine, that forces us to think. It is an experience that grips us, keeps us up at night, chipping at it to try to make sense of what it was.

The philosopher Alain Badiou says that it is in these events that truth hits us. What we are forced to tarry with isn’t just a chaotic and contingent predicament – it is the rupture of the symbolic order of everyday life. It shows us the impossible Real – the truth – which everydayness attempts to hide and obscure from sight. This reality always presents itself as impossible precisely because it cannot be made sense of within the coordinate system of our dominant understanding, even though it is the conditions for the possibility of it. It shatters even the basic categories through which we have come to know the world – the categories that condition our subjectivity, our desires, our fantasies, and even our aesthetic appreciation. It forces us to reckon with the fact that the world we live in is constituted through such impossibility – that it is that which presents itself as an external obstacle which – in reality – constitutes what it is an obstacle for.

Everyone has these events occur at various moments of their life. Most people try to evade their significance, to distort and force their meaning back into the very coordinate system it shattered. This is how most people cope with it. Their worldviews never actually recover; they remain as fractured as Simon Berger’s broken glass art.
Historically, leftists are the people who accept that something has happened, and who have fidelity to the process of figuring out exactly what has occurred.

This is a frightening process, considering that what is implied in it is a loss of self – of your old self, which understood itself in light of the pre-event predicament. It requires courage to pursue the significance of the event, to inquire into the truth it reveals. All of us know that such a quest will only lead to a rebirth of the self, a spiritual baptism.

For me, this occurred around the age of ten. My mother had just given birth to my sister. The birth caused tremendous difficulties – my dad was asked that question which no father would like to ever be asked: ‘if worst comes to worst, which one would you like us to save’? Thankfully, both survived.
But in the aftermath of this traumatic event, we discovered that my mother had been growing internal tumors. The doctors said she must be operated on to guarantee survival. The options seemed obvious. Get the operation and guarantee survival, or roll on with it.

I was perplexed to find out at this youthful age that the options were not as simple as I thought. Operating came with a cost, a great financial strain on the family, which would have surely led to crippling medical debts – like so many Americans today face.

While ten years old, I still found it odd that having a life-saving procedure in the wealthiest country on earth could immerse you in unpayable debt, as if one had committed some sort of heinous crime.
Little did I know that it would get much more confusing.

With such a predicament on the table, my parents did what most families would – consult their friends and family for advice. I remember listening to the conversations in our old home. Maybe twenty people were in the house. All of us Cuban.

This was when the real event occurred. When consulted for their advice, these friends and family said something I simply could not understand. It was outside of the cognitive map my young mind had.
The friends and family told my mother that she should go to Cuba, that the operation there would be free.
How could it be, I thought, that the same people who I’ve only ever heard malign Cuba, socialism, the Cuban government, while simultaneously accepting the most fervently American exceptionalist ideas and narratives, how could they sit there with a straight face and tell this hard working woman to leave the wealthiest country on earth – a country she’s a citizen in – to get an operation in a dirt poor island, an island they’ve only ever described as authoritarian and catastrophic?
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You can see, my friends, why such a predicament was world-shattering for me. All the assumptions I held about Cuba, the U.S., and the values aligned with both were now up in the air. I didn’t become the communist I am today right then and there, but the seed of doubt of the narratives I held as true and of the values I considered superior, was planted.
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It was in 2015 when I began to find answers for this enigma. The campaign of Bernie Sanders was central for me. Here was this adorable old man explaining lucidly the role of profits in our healthcare system, and how different it was in other advanced countries. I came to understand that the experience I had at ten years old was rooted in the fact that we have a system that puts profit over people, and that Cuba, irrespective of its limitations, had one that puts people over profits. On this basis I was able to remap myself in the world. To develop new categories through which to engage in everyday life. And, most importantly, to develop a new sense of purpose – tied to a new system of values – that could give my life meaning.
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While the failure of the Sanders ‘political revolution’ brought to an end my alignment with the social democratic politics that politicized me, it left me with a bug to fight for social justice that I could not shake. This might sound silly, but I knew very early on that my life’s purpose was tied to sacrificing whatever necessary to fight for change.
I am sure that just like I have my story, all of you have many stories of what brought you here, of what traumatic break in your everydayness caused you to consider yourself as part of the left – as part of those committed to moving history forward, those whose agency is tied to ensuring that the arc of history, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to say, continues to bend toward justice.
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It is in this light, on the basis of this recognition of the fundamental unity we all have, as people who came to realize – at different points, in different ways, and for different reasons – that something fundamentally has to change in America, that I would like to propose some ideas from my recent book Why We Need American Marxism – where the title for this talk was taken from.
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I felt the need to write the book shortly after a trip to Mexico, where I gave a conference on my previous book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism. In this book I argued that the U.S. left had to overcome its incessant obsession with only supporting or working with those entities which they considered pure, that is, which they felt lived up to the ideal they had in their head. With this framework, I critically interrogated three forms I thought were most harmful for the American left.
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Both of these books can be purchased in midwesternmarx.com/books
First was the outright condemnation of what’s often called actually existing socialism. I felt that such a rejection was premised on these real states not living up to the ideal of what they thought socialism would be like in their heads. This was a completely faulty approach, since it starts with an abstract ideal and not reality itself. Instead, I argued that we must remember the difficult conditions socialism is forced to develop in – conditions of siege, as Michael Parenti would say. No socialist project has ever been allowed to develop peacefully, without hybrid war waged on it by US imperialism and its proxies. Whatever imperfections and contradictions these states might have, they must be understood in this context.

They must also be understood, not as reified entities, existing the same across time, but dialectically, that is, in a constant process of contradiction-ridden development. As Samir Amin used to say, we could not blame a state like China for not looking like the socialism of the year 3000 – when the Jonas Brothers tell us we’ll be living under water (that was a millennial joke).

In any case, this was a position I considered to be rooted in an American exceptionalism, since it says that the whole global south has failed at socialism, but we, the virtuous Americans, are the ones that will succeed.
The second form of the purity fetish I explored in the book was rooted in the attitude many leftists took to the working-class part of MAGA.

While hardly ever saying it explicitly, many accepted the Clinton categorization of them as a basket of deplorables. I was one of them before I moved to Iowa, and then Southern Illinois, for ten years to work on my bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. But in the MAGA heartland I very soon realized that the conception I had of them was a caricature – that some of these people have a righteous anger toward the system – the deep state, as they call it – and a general mistrust of all established institutions. It is on that basis that dissidence starts, and such a pool of workers were primed for organizing toward socialism. The task was, in my view, one of delinking them from Trump, and showing them that America could only ever be great if it is socialist - that the stuff they like in Trump (the rhetoric of being anti-war, pro-reindustrialization, anti-deep state, etc.) will never be realized under Trump nor the two-party duopoly.
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The left’s condemnation of them, I felt, was rooted in a caricature of who they are crafted by the hegemonic liberal media. But nonetheless, even if they were as problematic as the media said they were, the task of communists and socialists had always been to organize people – not on the basis of their ideas – but on the basis of their objective class positions. Condemning a large chunk of the working class because they don’t share the more liberal and cosmopolitan social values that many leftists have was – in my view – archetypical of the purity fetish. They were not deemed pure enough and hence considered not organizable. This was not a mentality, I felt, that was in line with the history of how dissidents from the capitalist system organized. And to be clear, when I say MAGA here I am speaking of our working-class neighbors and coworkers, not the deep state monsters at the head of the movement, who have fooled our brothers and sisters into thinking they’re actual political outsiders.
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Georgi Dimitrov
The last form of the purity fetish I felt was harming the American left was rooted in what Georgi Dimitrov, the great Hungarian anti-fascist leader of the Communist International called national nihilism – the attitude of condemning your country wholeheartedly because of its past evils and imperfections. Dimitrov argued that socialism was a content that needed to be given a national form. This was a position which was standard for the 20th century communist movement. It was rooted in the recognition that socialists around the world needed to position themselves as those who will actualize the most progressive elements of the national traditions their country’s people identify with. He urged Americans to not give up figures like Washington and Lincoln to the right – to utilize them for the purposes of the left, showing our countrymen and women that the values of the 1776 revolution, that the conception of government of, by, and for the people, cannot be fully actualized under the capitalist dictatorships in which we exist – that only socialism could make real the democratic dreams of the American experiment.

This perspective felt so foreign to how most of the American left conceived of the U.S. Many of the leftists I saw would write America with three K’s, burn the flag, or describe socialism as the process of destroying America itself.
I considered this to be not only factually incorrect – since for me America had a rich history of struggle not reducible to genocide, slavery, and imperialism, but also politically futile – how are you going to organize the American people on the basis of telling them you want to abolish all of the traditions they have been socialized in? To destroy all of the symbols and values they have grown up with?
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To my surprise, this last form of the purity fetish was the one that perplexed the audience in Mexico the most. I remember some Cuban comrades coming up to me and asking how could leftists reject American revolutionary heroes from 1776 onwards when people from across the global south, from Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Lenin, and Fidel and Che themselves, were tremendously inspired by the revolution against Britain, and then the revolution against the planter class in the U.S. south? They told me – and this was something I was already aware of – that even in his defense after the assault on the Moncada barracks, his famous ‘History will absolve me’ speech, that Fidel was citing the right to revolution in the American declaration of independence.
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Fidel Castro at the Lincoln Memorial
And thus, after such engagements, I decided to write a book which teased out a bit further the third form of the purity fetish, and which charted a course for overcoming it.

Marx and Engels had already written in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that although not in substance, but in form, the working-class struggle against capitalists is national. This quote has been completely misread by the national nihilist left. They treat form and content in the traditional philosophical medium, where the goal is to pierce through the form (a distortion of sorts) to arrive at what is truly important – the content. But this whole understanding of form and content is critiqued by both Hegel and Marxism. For these traditions of dialectical thought, form is not simply a distortion of the content, it is the particular manner through which the content manifests itself. The goal is not to pierce through the form to get to the content, but to understand – as Marx says of the commodity – the secret of the form itself – that is, why did the content need this form?

So, when Marx and Engels talk about the struggle being national in form – this doesn’t mean, as most leftists today interpret it, that it is only superficially national, or that it is in reality not national and something else – something deeper. Instead, for Marx and Engels, as well as for the traditional communist movement of the 20th century, socialism needed to take on a national form primarily because it was the social context – that of modern nation states – in which the class struggle was situated. This becomes even more the case when imperialism develops, and wars of national liberation – aiming to achieve sovereignty – are shown as one of the central forms of the class struggle in the age of imperialism.

To understand that every socialist country has had to give the content of socialism a particular national form (as a concrete universal), and then to say that we cannot do this because America is uniquely evil – is to participate in the utmost form of American exceptionalism – it is like saying that ‘everyone can root their socialism in their national context but we, the uniquely evil Americans, will not – we will have the pure content of socialism devoid of a national form.’

But to remember this important lesson about socialism taking a national form is not enough. After all, the book is titled Why We Need American Marxism – not why we need American socialism. I pose the following question at the beginning of the text – if socialism must take on a national form, then, does Marxist analysis need to also take on a national form, that is, do we need something like ‘American Marxism,’ which understands the specific and particular form and history of the class struggle in our country through the Marxist framework? The answer I provide in this book is yes!

Basing myself on the research I’ve done into Chinese, Latin American, and other socialist experiments, what I found was that conjoined with a unique path and development of socialism, was also a unique framework of Marxism that could account for those particular differences in histories and traditions, all which shape and are also shaped by the class struggle.

In Cuba, Marxism was integrated as the most advanced stage of their leading revolutionary thinkers – Martí especially.

In Bolivia, Marxism is combined with the unique conditions of indigenous communities, and with the historical insights which have arisen from such communal realities.

In China they have developed, from very early on, a Sinified Marxism which includes not only the explicitly Marxist thinkers in China’s history, but also progressive thinkers from its pre-Marxist past, and also – and here is the most controversial one – the most progressive aspects of thinkers which have been central to its civilizational reality, like Confucius.

In Venezuela, the same is true with the figure of Bolivar and others. The rational kernels of these world-historic individuals are captured and integrated into the framework of the National form their Marxism takes.
In the U.S., therefore, how would this look? While I don’t seek to get into the nitty gritty here, I think it is clear that American Marxism needs to integrate into its understanding of the specificity of class struggles in the U.S. not just the Marxists of the past, but also all of the traditions that have stood on the side of progress in American history, starting perhaps even before 1776 and going up to our current day.

We can start, for instance, with the many first nations tribes (e.g., Iroquois) which were existing under conditions of what is called primary communism. The American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (very influential for Marx and Engels) would describe their form of life as “communism in living.” Their influence would go well beyond just first nations. As the historian Mitchell K. Jones has argued, “by the 18th century, their primary communist system inspired settlers from Europe who came to the New World seeking refuge from religious persecution.”

Or we can perhaps turn to thinkers like Roger Williams, the mid-17th century theologian who rejected African slavery and the genocide of the indigenous on the basis of his Christianity, which he felt compelled us to accept all as equal and dignified under god’s eyes.

It also forces us to tarry with 1776 as a progressive event in world history, a revolution against the British empire – the first anti colonial revolution in the hemisphere, as Herbert Aptheker put it. This revolution was described by none other than Lenin in the following form, as, I quote:

“One of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest… That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery.”
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The Declaration of Independence was such a radical document for its time that teachers all across Europe could be barred from their post for teaching it. This was a country borne out of a call of people to have not only a right – but the duty – to overthrow oppressive conditions. It is not lost on history the great paradox of the country which was founded on the right to revolution turning into the empire that prevented and squashed others trying to exert such a right for themselves.
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But, nonetheless, the spirit of the democratic creed of 1776 provides fertile ground for development into a socialist sentiment. Jefferson himself distinguished between the democratic and aristocratic man. The democratic man is for the people; he is the man of the revolution. The aristocratic man is the man who prioritizes profit, wealth, and privilege – such a man, Jefferson argued, could be fatal to the implementation of the ideals of the revolution if they came to power. Historical hindsight has shown he was correct.

Many of these figures, perhaps excluding Paine, are not free of contradictions. The opposite is true – they could say the most liberating words, push forth the most emancipatory ideals, while in practice being oppressors themselves – as, of course, was the case with Jefferson, Washington, and others. But the ideals they develop – or better yet, how the form they developed it in reached people, cannot be lost sight of.
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Very few people know this, but an attempt to develop scientific socialism (basically what we would later call Marxism) was already underway in the mid-1820s in America! Two decades before any prominent writings from Marx and Engels! In figures like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, the utopian experiments in communism that arose all across the U.S. were studied and critiqued. All of these thinkers held that a socialist society – which they conceived of as the society that expanded the democratic creed of 1776 to the sphere of economics and social life – could only arise by going through capitalism, not by trying to step out of it – as the utopian communities hoped. Through their scientific studies of the political economy of capitalism, these thinkers held that on the basis of the very contradictions of the system itself, a new communist society was possible.

While, of course, none of them outline this with the clarity and refinement of Marx decades after – how absurd is it that Americans were developing scientific socialism before Marx and none of us know who they are? There are perhaps 2-3 people, besides myself, whom I know have written about these individuals. Isn’t this a sad state of affairs?

How absurd is it that today we hear socialism being spoken of as uniquely anti-American (both by the right and by the national nihilist on the left), when we have such an advanced – but yet ignored and forgotten- homegrown tradition of socialism?

Even the two main philosophical currents that arise out of America – transcendentalism and pragmatism, have been leftist in orientation, and thoroughly critical of capitalism.

The Harvard scholar F. O. Matthiessen, describes the founder of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “as an ancestor of American Communism.” It is also well known that other transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau frequently wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, the same leftist paper Marx and Engels were publishing articles at the time. The leftist historian Staughton Lynd, in his Origins of American Radicalism book, takes a few pages to cite Marx and Thoreau, and forces the reader to guess who is who. The critiques of capitalist alienation in each are virtually impossible to tell apart when put together in such a manner.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Henry David Thoreau
American pragmatism, on the other hand, has always stood on the side of socialism, a homegrown American variety of it. Charles Sanders Peirce developed a logic that was intimately social, critical of capitalist individualism (which he called the gospel of greed), and promotive of agapism (a communal Christian love), upon which he felt society and the quest for truth should be based.
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The other two major pragmatists were also on the left. William James identified with socialist anarchism and John Dewey considered himself a democratic socialist – one more radical than most who call themselves that today considering he actively participated in movements to create a third party outside of what he saw as the two capitalist parties – a third party that united the working class, socialist, and radical liberal sectors of the American political horizon. In this way, John Dewey, who is literally called Americas philosopher of democracy, is far, far to the left of someone like Bernie Sanders, which is considered the utmost left point in the acceptable American political spectrum today.
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Charles Sanders Peirce
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John Dewey
Few people’s thought has shaped contemporary America more than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the head of the civil rights political revolution of the 1960s. Dr. King, as is well known now, was a socialist! For him the question of racism, war, and poverty were intertwined, and rooted in the capitalist system itself.
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I can go on and on showing how some of the most prominent and influential thinkers in America’s past have been socialists or general critics of capitalism.
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Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.
In general, I would like to make the bold claim that all Americans are already socialists, they just do not know it yet.
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You can’t tell me that someone believes in government of, by, and for the people, and that they don’t believe in socialism. At its most basic level – this is precisely what socialism is. It is, as Fred Hampton used to say, the people. If you are afraid of socialism, you are afraid of yourself.
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Fred Hampton
In this way, much of the lingering anti-communism our compatriots have is nothing more than an unrecognized form of self-estrangement. They have been convinced to hate that which they already agree with, just because they do not know that they agree with it yet!

There was a dream Trotsky wrote about in his memoirs where Lenin visited him, well after Lenin had already died, and in the dream the conversation gets to a point where Trotsky almost blurts out ‘and that was shortly after you had died.’ He omitted it out of fear that Lenin was alive in his dream only because he didn’t know he was already dead. Likewise, most Americans are anti-communist only because they don’t know that they’re already communists.

To propose the development of an American Marxism, then, is to uphold the historical recapturing of the progressive elements of our past – it is to give voice to the unique form the class struggle has taken in our country’s history, and how that struggle has been thought of by the most progressive minds of their time. It is to give historical legs to those of us fighting for a new world today. Our fight is for the future, but it is also for the past. It is a struggle which prevents previous struggles from having died in vain.

The most important thinker to have given expression – in Marxist terms – to the unique form of the class struggle in the U.S. was WEB Dubois – which is why I call him the father of American Marxism. He was the first to see that, for most of U.S. history, the struggle against the color line – against the racism which Marx called the secret through which the capitalist class sustains its power – that this struggle was not just a race struggle, it was the form the class struggle took. And no event in this struggle is more significant than the civil war, which he saw as the second American revolution, an event he equated in significance to the Russian and Chinese revolution. Here, he argued, 4 million enslaved proletarians – he also calls them the black proletariat – freed themselves from the chains of chattel slavery through a general strike that won the war. By fleeing from the south to the north, the black proletariat effectively waged a ‘strike’ against the southern economy, which produced a dual blow when they joined the north as workers, spies, and soldiers who knew the terrain better than anyone else.
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Dr. W. E. B. Dubois
Out of this struggle arose the period of reconstruction, which Dubois categorizes as a dictatorship of the working class. Here the freedman’s bureau would govern in defeated southern states, backed by the military might of the north. This was an experiment, then, in modern socialism which is neither talked about in such terms, nor celebrated anywhere near as much as the Paris commune, which occurred years after, and which lasted a tenth of the time as reconstruction. It was a socialism not inspired from abroad, but immanently arising from within the soil of the country’s foundation. As Dubois said, there are no truer believers in the spirit of 1776 than the black proletariat that freed itself in the civil war, and which led a dictatorship of the working class for a decade in the U.S. south before the counterrevolution of property in 1876. With such a Duboisian, American Marxist understanding in mind, isn’t it silly to talk about how essentially “anti-socialist” America is?

At a time when less than 20 percent of Americans think their representatives actually represent them, and when less than a dozen percent of Americans trust the mainstream media – that is, the dominant ideological apparatus of the ruling capitalist class, we find ourselves in the midst of a comprehensive crisis of legitimacy. Neoliberalism has hit American workers hard, forcing most people to live paycheck to paycheck, to be drowned in unpayable debts, and live in utter desperation. We are the first generation of Americans to not be guaranteed a better living standard than our parents. For most of us fighting today is not even an option, it is a necessity.
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As a Marxist, I think that half of the fun of trying to understand the world is ruined if we don’t try to change it. Developing an advanced American Marxism, in my view, is essential. We need to know how the class struggle has brought us here, and how we can utilize the progressive elements embedded in our people’s common sense to move them to socialism. But this requires a lot more than writing a book or theoretically trying to make sense of something.

It requires getting your hands dirty with actual work. It requires building an organized collective of disciplined individuals who can put the struggle, the principle we all operate under, above petty self-interest. It requires turning people from the shallow and hedonistic individualism our society promotes to tried-and-true communists. You don’t do this through debates. You don’t do this through nice words and sophistic discourse. You win people through actions, through consistent deeds.

Americans will only come to recognize socialism as a real alternative when they see the communists are the most upstanding people in their workplace and community. We need to try our best to be the men and women of the future society we are striving for. To lead by example in work. To win the trust and sympathy of our people by serving them. After all, once again, socialism is nothing if not putting working people, the masses, as the highest principle.
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This is what my party, the American Communist Party, fights for. All around the country the cadre of the ACP are doing works of community service to integrate themselves into pre-existing American communities, to show them what communists are actually like, and debunk the myths our people have been spoon fed since birth about communism.
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Founding of the American Communist Party.
All around the country our cadre are organizing workers, helping workers unionize, and joining in on picket lines with them. In New Jersey we have spearheaded the effort of organizing the drayage truckers – these are thousands of essential workers, workers who can shut down a whole regional economy, being organized into the Teamsters by the American Communist Party. This is work we are doing in virtually every state, helping unorganized workers combine and win a voice for themselves. Work of this kind is going on in many other industries around the country, where our party’s cadre is helping to lead unionization efforts.
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“The American Communist Party, together with the Teamsters, joined in solidarity with Waste Disposal workers in their strike against Republic Services in Boston.”
After every natural disaster, when the local and federal government fail communities, our party has been there – with what little resources we have – to help our people. The work we have done in central Texas after the floods has impacted the lives of many Americans who were left behind by a government that is always ready to spend money for war, but never for American communities.

It is high time that we put whatever secondary or tertiary differences aside for a second and focus on the fact that our people keep getting squeezed to their last pennies by a class that continues to grow richer and richer… a class whose puppets are sending us to war around the world to die or lose limbs fighting against people whom he have more in common with than the parasites who sent us there. To paraphrase MLK, every bomb thrown on Gaza lands in Chicago. The empire feeds off the republic, as Parenti used to say.
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You can either sit on the sidelines and let things get worse, all because you won’t join a fighting organization over mean tweets one or another member posted before the party’s founding, or you can join us, judge us through our work, and be a part of fighting for the construction of a new, socialist America.
I hope you choose the latter. Thank you.

Author
Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE.

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5 Comments
Siden04
8/5/2025 01:58:20 am

'...Cuba, irrespective of its limitations, had one that puts people over profits....'.

‘These people [of Cuba] you see today tell you that even if they should disappear from the face of the earth because an atomic war is unleashed in their names … they would feel completely happy and fulfilled…. ’ (part of Dr. do no harm Che’s address to the First Latin American Youth Congress in July 1959, three years before the Cuban missile crisis).

‘What I wanted to stress is that the working class is not putting forth its full effort’ (televised speech, 1961). ‘By working on the proletariat’s sense of responsibility, we hope to greatly improve the quality as well as the presentation of industrial products’ (article in Cuba Socialista, 1962). ‘The perfect revolutionary, the member of the ruling party, must work every hour and every minute of his life, during these years of very hard struggle that lie ahead of us’ (speech to textile workers, 1963). In fact, for each of Guevara’s references to the future communist society, he made at least a dozen pleas urging the Cuban workers to increase production.

This is what Fidel said when urging Mexican businesspeople to invest in Cuba, in 1988:“We are capitalists, but state capitalists. We are not private capitalists'' (Daum, Walter , 1990,. The Life and Death of Stalinism).

'The island is currently facing its worst economic crisis since the 1959 revolution. Long and daily power cuts, scarce internet connection, food and medicine shortages, and high prices are the realities of present-day Cuba. Some staple items like beans are nowhere to be found; rice production has declined and much is now imported. Sugar, too, has become an import in Cuba, which, until recently, was the leading sugar exporter in the world. People cannot make ends meet with their meager incomes — a doctor’s monthly salary is approximately $50. Even by conservative World Bank estimates, 72 percent of all Cubans live below the poverty line. Beggars seem to be everywhere, with the African community descendants from slavery being the most economically victimized' (Consortium News, July 11, 2025).

'With average monthly wages in Cuba stuck at $16.50, the Caribbean island is one of the poorest countries in Latin America.
However, amid all the economic turmoil, there is one person who appears unfazed and continues to flash a lavish lifestyle - communist higher up Fidel Castro's influencer grandson, Sandro. The 33-year-old has over 121,000 followers on Instagram, where he flaunts luxury at every turn. He sips Cristal beer aboard yachts, speeds through Havana in Mercedes‑Benz cars, and hosts parties at EFE Bar, his exclusive venue where entry fees reach 1,000 CUP and minimum table bills climb to 15,000 CUP.
That is hundreds of times what most Cubans earn in a month' (Daily Mail, 21 July 2025).

Capitalist hallmarks, such as class society, commodity production, profit motive, exploitation of wage labour, markets, etc., are found worldwide, including Cuba.

The American Marxist Eugene Debs said in 1913 ‘What the poor need is that the rich shall get off their backs’ (The Oppressed Need Justice, Not Charity).

Reply
Charles McKelvey link
8/5/2025 09:29:33 am

Comrade Carlos’ article provides an insightful critique of the idealist, anti-working class, and anti-national character of the so-called Left. And the article’s concept of socialism in national forms is important, calling for the construction of socialism with American characteristics, rooted in the American Revolution and progressive movements in American history.

In reflecting on the strategy of the American Communist Party with respect to the workers of the MAGA movement, we should keep in mind that Trump is a historically significant political figure who possibly is forging a transformation of the two-party duopoly into a genuine two-party system, with partisans of the people in one party, and lackeys of the corporate elite in the other.

I address this issue in a review of Carlos’ article in my Substack column on August 5, “Socialism in national forms: Can communists be Republicans, or vice versa?”

https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/p/socialism-in-national-forms

Reply
Jon
8/21/2025 09:41:52 am

lol "national form" and "[economic system] with [nation] characteristics" non-economically.

When China uses the [economic system] with [nation] characteristics rhetoric, they're using economically to justify economic revisionism (not expropriating money-capitalists and property owners). Which is complete nonsense since communism is an economic system that's uniform across all nations.

When y'all use it, you mainly use non-economically because you're afraid to use the word nationalism. Y'all believe there's an American nation, but you refuse to call yourselves American nationalists. You want the benefits of nationalism, but you're afraid to be seen with it.

Additionally, the ACP's program is no different than than the PatSoc Front's program, yet y'all wouldn't refer to them as communists/comrades. They have the same economic views of nationalizing the big industries while not expropriating the money-capitalists or property owners.

https://patsocfront.substack.com/p/the-program-of-the-patriotic-socialist

Both the ACP and PatSoc programs are imperialist though, since the U.S. is an imperialist/high income country. Unequal exchange economic imperialism would continue since neither program has any goals of stopping unequal exchange trade that's in favor of the high income country (the U.S.). You'd have to unequal exchange trade in favor of the imperialized/low income countries in order to be against economic imperialism. Which would mean all countries being at the same income level.

The PatSoc Front at least has the decency not to falsely call themselves communist, unlike y'all who appropriate the name. The masses of people will see through this charade eventually though.

Reply
Jon
8/21/2025 12:19:24 pm

Typo correction, left out the word "it" in these sentences:

they're using *it economically to justify economic revisionism

you mainly use *it non-economically

Reply
emily c
10/17/2025 01:59:12 pm

i see a lot of analysis i've had in my head for years in this. the present day american left's antipathy for the working class has made it pretty much totally useless, and created a boogeyman out of like, just normal people.

im an electrician that travels all over the country. working class americans aren't what west LA dsa members make them out to be. really sucks that most of our "left" orgs are filled with classroom ideologies that have no application to reality.

i always joke the cult of oppression olympics will fight eachother and maybe after that's done the workers can build socialism here

Reply



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