The American left is fractured, shattered into hundreds of competing ideologies and tendencies, disparate and vying for prominence. While this can undoubtedly be attributed in part to the sustained counter-revolutionary campaign spearheaded by the Bourgeoisie, it does us no good to conceal our division. We see Marxists, Leninists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and an entire slew of other tendencies fighting over what is left of the divided Left, and that isn’t even including the Democratic Left, such as the Democratic Socialists, which still live in the margins of Liberal ideology. We are broken, battered, and all but destroyed, but it does us little good to wallow in self-pity. It would do us much better to remember what Bordiga said in Considerations on the Party’s Organic Activity When the General Situation is Historically Unfavourable, in that we as Communists must continue to persevere and work to establish the historic party in permanent preparation for the revolution to come, as the untrained and uninitiated proletariat will side with the Communists who speak to their issues as members of the working class; on the day of revolution, that truth will bring victory. 

That is not to say that the Communist must wait passively, however. The work of the Communist in any historical moment is both persistent and ephemeral. Our work must be persistent in its efforts through any and all means of organization, regardless of the situation in the wider world; at the same time, our labors as Communists will be an ephemeral part of history, which changes week to week and year to year. Communists must always act with a sense of imminence, treating the revolution as days away and acting with that degree of force and energy, for if we do not, who will?

This brings us back to the American Left, or what is remaining of it. When the average American thinks of “the Left”, they overwhelmingly tend to assume the Democratic Party is its core, standing as a bastion of “progressivism”, a catch-all term used to denote the liberal center-left; they may even see the dead-center liberalism of Democrat leadership as being the leaders of “the Left”. While these electoral progressives and liberals may be seen as left-of-center to an extent, it is by no means the Communist Left, as it is still very much based within centrist liberal politics and refuses with great clarity to shift from that position. We see the “left-wing” Democrats, the Sanders and the Ocasio-Cortezes of that party, take up the mantle of the Left with little push back from the Communist Left, whose voice is hardly audible against the well-funded juggernauts of electoral parties. If the Communist Left operated as a powerful bloc within American politics, perhaps our critique of such single-minded electoralism might work to our favor, but we are not a powerful bloc. We are weak compared to the bourgeois parties that dominate the American political landscape.

It comes to no surprise to the Communist that those who stand as supposed thought leaders and proselytizers to the public are charlatans and modernizers. The loudest seemingly socialist voices on these mainstream video platforms, the Hasan Pikers and co. are but phantasms of the Communist Left, with very little to contribute besides entertainment to a Left, but not Communist, base; they do little to promote actual Communist thought, satisfied with a very minimalist programme. They peddle the ideas of socialism, but fall into the same traps that have plagued the pseudo-Communists of old. They are beholden to reforming the current paradigm, as opposed to actualizing a movement to abolish it; they are the Lassalles and co.. Even worse, these commentators are mere shells of what was once present, lacking for all their audience the reach into not-already-online segments of the American proletariat. We no longer have Communist voices reaching the masses, instead they now reach a small community, with very little to show for actual organization effort beyond their own base. We are atrophied, and what is taking our place is weak and porous to bourgeois influence.

It does no use to be insular in times like this. As Bordiga said, it is a mistake of the Communist Left that far too many are focused on theory and far too few are focused on action. While the Pikers of the world are focused on action to an extent, it lacks any backing in Communist theory, and are leading many astray with false praxis. On the reverse side, many parties and organizations are perhaps too keen on theory, with no action or organization to their name, which leaves them principled but small to the point of irrelevance. Perhaps the Pikers of the world may act as a pipeline to more principled groups, but this has shown little results; often that pipeline has simply been directed to other content creators rather than anything not on a screen. The groups that grow in this political environment are the so-called “progressive” organizations such as the Democratic Socialist Alliance, as opposed to any real communist party. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is smaller still, and yet they are still mired in bourgeois electoral theory, as opposed to actual Marxist thought. This is worse when one examines the Communist Left in its entirety. The fractional International Communist Parties all fight over the moniker, while possessing very little difference in action, that is to say non-action, aside for a few, who are, again, extremely atrophied due to constant splits. Leftists in the United States are offered a truly useless set of choices between successful recruiters lacking theory and successful theorists lacking recruitment.

Organic Centralism is a belief that fractionalism is a sign of decay within the party, and that the decay must be rectified to reinforce the Marxist movement and reunite the fractions as one effective whole. This should be the goal of all Communists, the reuniting of the entire Communist Left under a single tendency, one based in the invariant line of theory laid forth by Marx and Engels in the 19th century, and added to by countless theorists who maintained Marxist Orthodoxy. We do not need to modernize and adapt our theory (for time has only proven that theory correct against the failures of the bourgeoisie), only our actions must account for the historical moment. We must attempt to reconcile theory with one another as Marxists, spread that orthodoxy to the proletariat as a whole, and abandon the revisionist tendencies that have sprung forth throughout the years, as it has only made us weaker. If the conditions for revolution were to make themselves present now, then there would only be hundreds of small cells, all ready to tear out each other’s throats, as opposed to a singular critical mass with roots throughout the proletariat, ready to enact Socialism, and in time, Communism.

Marx and Engels would be ashamed of the revisions seen in today’s Communist Left, as they represent exactly what they were arguing against. The invariant line should be revered and studied, not revised ad nauseum at the will of romantic revolutionaries, reactionaries, and opportunists. We see Nationalists who truly consider themselves Communists now, what has our movement come to? It is as though the entirety of Marx and Engel’s work has been forsaken by the so-called Communists, solely so they may adopt the vague aesthetics of present anti-Capitalism. There is little else to say about the reactionaries and revisionists than this: They are wrong about Marxism and its tenets. We see Marxist Leninists, proponents of Socialism in One State, extol the virtues of Stalin, when he was but a perpetrator of Bourgeois Capitalism, one headed by the state as opposed to headed by private industry. 

We, again, must attempt to reconcile fractionalism within our disparate parties, and come in line with what Marx and Engels first laid forth in The Communist Manifesto, and further elaborated in Capital and Anti-Dühring. Socialism is a science, not something that bends to the wills of the zeitgeist of the modern era. Our parties should be engaging in Dialectical reasoning, as opposed to deriding each other. Perhaps, then, we would be able to fall back in line with Marxist Orthodoxy, and move forward as a singular bloc, able to contest the liberal behemoth that is Democracy. But that is easy to say, as many believe themselves to be Marxists, but are only Marxist in ideological name. We must be rigorous in our examination of theory, just as we must be rigorous in our advancement of the true Marxist line to the proletariat. Then, and only then, will a revolution be possible.