The Philistine’s Question

Look at the numbers, the Philistine says! How on earth will our tiny party ever hope to catch up to these relative Goliaths of opportunism? By avoiding the sordid activist rat-race to begin with. We can, with absolute certainty, state that it is only our current which remains not only authentically communist but genuinely anti-capitalist; therefore, it is only our party which truly represents the interests and historical aims of the proletarian class in today’s society, no matter how small we may be. Where is the proletarian? It only appears and expresses itself as a class, here in our party. Outside it, it is merely individual workers scattered to the wind. Therefore, there is no competition to be found. The Marxist doctrine of social crisis guarantees the restoration of a mass proletarian movement, and it is on these historical grounds, not on the passing fashions of bourgeois politics, that our Party has systematically and patiently carried out its work of revolutionary preparation. Within the all-consuming bourgeois world, countless imposters have come and gone, each demonstrating an immature and spurious understanding of the revolutionary social science of Marxism. When the next social crisis once again compels the working class masses into struggle, these programmatic fictions will be brushed aside by the proletariat with no greater effort than that required to flick an ant from one’s skin. Behind the aesthetics and the game of appearances played by these Stalinist parties, lies not a proletarian program but a program of a radicalizing petit-bourgeois middle class.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation ran a national ticket in 2024 that outperformed every prior self-proclaimed “socialist” presidential campaign in decades. The Communist Party USA’s membership rolls are climbing for the first time in a generation. A brand-new American Communist Party is finding an audience before it has finished writing its own founding documents. Each presents itself as a more hardcore alternative to the Democratic Socialists of America, yet each alleged break turns out, on inspection, to be almost entirely rhetorical. What we have is not a movement of the proletariat but the continual downward spiral of the American middle class, disillusioned and reaching for answers to questions which the existing political establishment cannot give, yet still unwilling to give up their childish attachment to the fairytale of bourgeois democracy hoping deep down to fix and right the wrongs of the bourgeois world they desperately want to preserve so they can continue to live their comfortable individual bourgeois lives filled with all its personal interests, hobbies and shopping habits. Our Che Guevara t-shirt wearing heroes have arrived once more! So for the activist intelligentsia it is out of the fryer and into the pan.

The PSL and CPUSA co-organize with the liberal DSA sects, endorse the same Democratic candidates, and converge on the same liberal demands, progressive taxation, expanded voting rights, government budgetary reform of the military, reached by the same petitions, performative protests and canvasses, so-called "organizing". The ACP leans elsewhere: less ballot line, more podcast promotionalism, and leader-worship, plus an open nationalism its own program calls "socialist patriotism", what members and critics alike call "MAGA Communism” filled with its petit-bourgeosis nostalgia for the traditional nuclear family. It is hard to imagine a more repugnant distortion of communism than reading these groups’ so called programs which reek of the most turgid liberal nationalism and reformist drivel. It is no wonder they repel the actual proletarian like noxious bile despite all their attempts to appeal to the “masses” and to “meet them where they are at” by spewing abject ignorance and stupidity. Each group waving its own large red flag, competing with each other to catch the eye of the latest generation of organizational window shoppers and weekend warrior radicals, to herd the imagined masses into their respective tiny corrals and bleed their membership dues for their petit-bourgeois political ends: DSA’s dead end cul de sac fenced by the Democratic Party, or PSL’s and CPUSA’s and the ACP’s boosteristic "Marxism-Leninism".

Underneath the differing veneers, lies a single convergence: everything these organizations offer, the marches, the branded merchandise, the uninspired activist mantras parroted in the streets, is theater performed by imposters who have stolen the costumes of communism and Marxism while repudiating its script. None of these groups are ahead of the organic party at all, because the thing they are growing is not a real party, something they have no comprehension of.

History has run this experiment before: these are typical bourgeois party machines, built to contain and administer a layer in motion, and machines of that kind are no match, over time, for the one thing they cannot manufacture, an organic party welded to an invariant program that is defended and prepared for the true resurgence of the proletarian masses to social struggle. It does not herd the declassed middle classes toward itself to cobble together some sort of engine to prevent the social catastrophes capital promise, it is constituted by the same historical process that produces that very crisis in the first place, and will be there, unchanged, when the machines built to contain that crisis have each in turn been ground up by it. We weathered the counter-revolution. They perpetrated it.

All these groups owe their basic orientation to the same unresolved question: what to make of the Soviet Union, in its time, and China today. Stalinism and its Maoist descendants treat one or both as viable "socialism"; Trotskyism has held the former USSR, and China today, to be a degenerated workers’ State worth defending.

They’ve all abandoned the real communist program, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the abolition of wage labor, mercantile exchange, and the profit-driven firm as the actual content of communism. No, they worship the State owned enterprise and the proliferation of reformist pandering. State capitalism as socialism, as a guarantee on a future job for the middle classes and their radicalizing parties.

The Dying Middle Class’s Activism & Stalinism: Pragmatism and Empiricism

The Revolution will not be made from more petition signature collecting, mutual-aid drives, neighborhood cleanups, phone banks, promotional videos, feel-good protest sign-holding, self important seminars, “educational programs”, and flag-waving. Nor from any dosage of terrible “community building” or other “survival programs” aimed at falsely ameliorating the ills of the bourgeois world while wasted deep in its social swamp. No level of personal self sacrifice and heroics can overcome hardcoded material conditions that keep the masses inert. They want social connection; they want to end alienation without destroying what alienates them, capital. Utopianism in a nutshell.

Activism and Stalinism represent two complementary expressions of the same bourgeois deviation: the substitution of empiricism and pragmatism for dialectical materialism and the invariant communist program. Both conceive the party not as the organic historical expression of the proletariat’s determined course of development toward communism, but as an apparatus to be consciously constructed, expanded, and managed through activism, recruitment, tactical innovation, and organizational technique. This conception reflects the outlook of the middle class, whose social position is defined by instability, competition, and the constant need to defend its status through individual initiative, social networking, and continual innovation in method. For them, communism is State-run enterprise, higher-order democracy, and the miserable "full employment" of society.

As the middle classes are increasingly proletarianized, its insecurity and alienation find expression in an endless search for practical interventions that promise to ameliorate social dislocation without abolishing its material basis. Pragmatism and empiricism are therefore not merely philosophical errors, but the characteristic outlook of strata whose existence depends upon adaptation to changing conditions and which judge truth according to what appears to work in the present. Dialectical materialism, by contrast, is the theoretical expression of the proletariat as a historical class, it is its worldview and reality. It evaluates politics not according to immediate utility or organizational success, but according to the objective development of the capitalist mode of production and the historical movement of class struggle. The communist program is therefore not a tactical instrument to be revised according to circumstances, but the historical continuity of the proletariat’s struggle arising from the material contradictions of capitalism itself.

For the opportunists, the question thus ceases to be whether the party expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, but instead becomes whether the party apparatus can be expanded, strengthened, and rendered more effective within bourgeois society itself in defense of present conditions as a means to “prove” the functional practical value of the party machine, to win more adherents and dependents. In this framework, activism appears less as the political expression of the proletariat deceived than as the moral and psychological compensation of declining middle strata clinging to their social existence, while Stalinism elevates the same pragmatism into a doctrine of party-building, statecraft, and national development, thereby subordinating communist principles to immediate success and reformist demands. As Bernstein declared, "The movement is everything; the final goal is nothing". Against this, we insist that the revolutionary party cannot be fabricated through voluntarist activism or organizational engineering; it emerges organically from the historical movement of the class itself, whose trajectory is determined by the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production rather than by the empirical calculations of self-appointed genius militants who perpetually evaluate the "situation" and seek to "seize the moment" through heroics at the opportune moment.

Historically, this outlook became dominant because the postwar expansion of capitalism created the broadest and most materially secure middle strata in modern history. The destruction of productive capacity during the Second World War inaugurated an exceptional period of accumulation that enormously expanded managerial, professional, academic, technical, and administrative layers. These strata required political forms corresponding to their social interests: reformism rather than revolution, democratic administration rather than class dictatorship, activism rather than programmatic continuity. The Democratic New Deal in America, Social Democracy in Europe and its developmental Stalinist counterpart in the East. It all worked to stabilize capitalism and its middle classes, for later liquidation under the law of capital accumulation, all that it required was a few world wars to secure its temporary existence. The same sort of suicidal, live for today mentality is still spewed everywhere by the middle classes amid their rampant denial of the massive preparation across society for the next great imperialist war. In the past their growing numerical and ideological weight drew substantial sections of the proletariat into organizations and movements whose politics reflected not the independent historical interests of labor but the mediating role of the expanding petit-bourgeosis and the labor aristocracy under imperialism. The mass parties of social democracy, the bureaucratic apparatuses of Stalinism, and later the proliferation of activist organizations all corresponded to this historically specific phase of capitalist development just as they are unfolding today on a similar razor’s edge.

Today the material foundation of these politics is steadily disappearing. Monopoly capitalism progressively eliminates the relative autonomy of the middle strata through concentration and centralization of capital, reducing them toward the general condition of wage labor while simultaneously stripping them of the privileges that once distinguished them. Their political radicalization is therefore the expression of an incoherent class strata struggling for its own survival rather than the emergence of proletarian politics. Their activism seeks not the abolition of capitalist social relations but the mitigation of their own insecurity, alienation, and downward mobility.

As this process of leveling continues, these intermediary strata lose not only their economic independence but also their political independence. Their organizations increasingly find themselves absorbed into, subordinated by, or destroyed within the dominant parties of capital. In the United States this tendency appears in the continual gravitational pull exerted by the Democratic Party over every activist and reformist current. Some continue to struggle within it, hoping to democratize or transform it, while others advocate a “dirty break,” imagining that organizational separation alone can preserve the same activist politics under a different institutional form. Yet both remain products of the same declining class who will either bind themselves to the Party of the bourgeois or to the only true party of the proletarian, the International Communist Party.

Determinism, Our Small Party and the Brain of the Class

The relationship between party and class is not one of representation but of organic function within a single historical body: the class supplies the material force and terrain of struggle, while the party, as its most conscious and continuous organ, supplies the direction that force could not generate on its own. This is the relation our tradition names the reversal of praxis, whereby the collective, doctrinally continuous action of the party outweighs the sum of its individual militants because consciousness runs from the organized whole back down into the parts rather than upward from isolated wills. The party is therefore organic rather than voluntarist or merely organizational: its conception rests upon the same material understanding of consciousness that underlies our understanding of the human organism.

The brain, or encephalon, is the material organ through which the organism receives stimuli, retains and processes experience, and develops the perceptions and knowledge necessary for its continued existence. What we call the psyche, or “mind,” is not a separate substance or autonomous faculty, but the highest function of the plastic encephalon: the utilization of acquired knowledge and experience in relation to the organism’s needs. Consciousness is therefore not an independent source of action standing outside material reality, but a determined product of the organism and its conditions of existence. As we explained in For a Dialectical-Materialist Theory of the Psyche, the psyche “exclusively designates the highest function of the plastic encephalon,” its noetic activity, or the use of acquired knowledge in satisfying needs and preserving the organism. The encephalon also processes knowledge of which the individual is not consciously aware; it “knows much more than we are aware of knowing.”

This conception belongs to a broader materialist understanding of causality. Democritus grounded early atomism in a world governed not by chance but by necessity; Spinoza argued that nothing in nature is contingent; and Laplace later gave classical determinism its most famous formulation, imagining an intelligence capable of calculating the future from complete knowledge of the forces and positions constituting the present. Though limited by the science of their periods, these thinkers shared the rejection of arbitrary will as an explanation of nature.

Dialectical materialism develops this insight beyond mechanical determinism. Matter is not an inert substratum awaiting an external force; motion is the mode of existence of matter itself. Consciousness is consequently a development of material nature: the brain is a product of natural history, the psyche a function of the brain, and consciousness continually formed through the organism’s interaction with its environment. Society is no exception. Capitalism is not an eternal or natural order requiring an external act of will to abolish it, but a historically determinate mode of production generated by definite conditions and contradictions. Its supersession therefore arises from its own development rather than from an arbitrary decision imposed upon it from outside.

This has direct consequences for revolutionary politics. If individual consciousness is materially determined, then revolutionary politics cannot be understood as the sum of independent individuals freely arriving at a common understanding. Bourgeois society furnishes individuals with the knowledge and practical automatisms necessary for reproducing existing relations. The worker experiences exploitation and the contradictions of capitalism, but immediate experience does not automatically provide the historical knowledge required to understand and overcome them.

The party therefore preserves knowledge that existing conditions do not yet require the individual proletarian to possess. Its indispensable task is to maintain invariant doctrine and the accumulated historical experience of the communist movement, providing the political leadership through which scattered struggles can be unified into a single historical direction. It does not wait for spontaneous consciousness to generate doctrine; it preserves the historical knowledge required for future stages of struggle before that knowledge becomes immediately functional for the mass of the class.

This is also why the party may be small without being historically insignificant. Its numerical strength rises and falls with objective contradictions: at one moment it may consist of a handful of disciplined militants; at another it may become a decisive political force in revolutionary crisis. Its size is not the measure of its function. It neither isolates itself from the proletariat nor dissolves itself into it, but meets workers in the concrete struggles imposed by bourgeois society while bringing to those struggles the continuity of Marxist doctrine.

The party itself remains subject to historical determination. It cannot will revolutionary circumstances into existence or substitute organizational enthusiasm for the development of capitalism’s contradictions. What distinguishes it is therefore not freedom from determination but the possession and continuity of communist doctrine within determination. Its strength and possibilities fluctuate with bourgeois society, while its task is to preserve and develop the accumulated knowledge of the movement through theoretical work, historical study, and intervention in the struggles of the class.

The importance of this continuity becomes clearest in periods of crisis. Individual consciousness is necessarily limited by the knowledge and experience available under existing conditions. When those conditions change, inherited forms of knowledge may no longer provide adequate responses. Crisis therefore has a cognitive dimension: what once appeared natural or permanent can become visibly inadequate. Yet crisis does not automatically produce revolutionary consciousness. It creates the necessity for new knowledge without guaranteeing that the resulting response will be correct; reformism, nationalism, religious reaction, desperation, and revolutionary politics can all emerge from the same social rupture.

The party’s function is to ensure that the necessary knowledge does not have to be invented at the moment of crisis. Like individual memory, which preserves knowledge whose immediate utility may have disappeared, the party carries historical experience across periods in which its practical relevance is not yet apparent. When changed conditions make that knowledge necessary, it can be reactivated rather than rediscovered.

This gives the party a historical continuity that no individual consciousness can possess. Its militants remain finite biological organisms, but the doctrine they collectively maintain can survive the disappearance of particular individuals and generations. The party is therefore the reservoir of the attitudes and positions that the communist social person of the future will adopt: not an ideal consciousness existing above the class, but the material continuity of knowledge accumulated through the class struggle.

From this follows the specific meaning of the reversal of praxis. Consciousness does not simply rise from isolated individuals and become collective through agreement. The accumulated experience and doctrine of the historical movement are organized in the party and, through its continuous action, return to the individual militants who compose it. The individual does not first construct communist theory from immediate experience and then contribute it to the party; rather, the party provides the theoretical and practical framework through which immediate experience becomes intelligible.

Its collective action can consequently be conscious and coordinated toward a historical goal in a way no isolated militant or eclectic mass organization can reproduce. The party’s consciousness is not the arithmetic sum of its members’ consciousnesses, but the historical continuity connecting their activity to the accumulated experience of the movement. Its power can therefore be vastly greater than its numerical strength, because its strength lies not simply in the number of militants but in the doctrine and historical experience organized through them.

The materialist theory of the psyche thus provides the basis for the materialist theory of the party. Just as individual consciousness is a determined function of a material organism situated within definite conditions, revolutionary consciousness must be understood as a historical process embodied in a material organ capable of preserving knowledge beyond the limits of individual consciousness. The party is that organ: not an ideal consciousness hovering above material reality, nor a voluntary association of individuals, but the organic continuity through which the class preserves invariant doctrine, transmits historical experience, and develops the political direction necessary to transform the contradictions of capitalism into a conscious historical movement.