The empire produces its vile miasma as a result of its normal operations, and when left to simmer in the heat, this toxic waste congeals into a form of life of its own: today, this form of life is the ACP, or American Communist Party.

I recently wrote an essay on Vietnam's liberation struggle and how they built a revolutionary movement to fight, for decades, against the French, the Japanese, the French again, and the US troops.

There are interesting parallels to be made with the latest venture from the certified communism-is-petty-bourgeois patsocs, which I will go into. I notice that while the community on Lemmygrad generally knows about the ACP, this remains surface level -- if you live in the US, you unfortunately have no choice but to take these enemies seriously.

I'm going to quickly recap how Ho Chi Minh built a movement, but it's generally the same as any ML party in history, and the reason they do so is because it works.

1. A movement is built over decades, strengthened, so that it can be put into action at the correct time.
2. In Vietnam, this started as far back as the early 1900s. Ho Chi Minh travelled the world, firstly finding his own line (he didn't become a communist until he read Lenin in 1920).
3. At this time, he started establishing contact with other movements, i.e. solidarity. He was part of the PCF in France (back when it still had potential) as part of the colonial affairs committee. He travelled around the world to talk with many figures and the diaspora, building a name which translates to support when the time comes. All of this has a point, it's not just travelling for the sake of travelling.
4. All this time though, he also agitated for Vietnam even as he travelled - writing a ton of press dispatches for his journal Le Paria, and even in 1919 writing a petition to the US and French presidents to ask for self-determination in Vietnam. Of course he knew better later, but this petition made him a name in Vietnam.
5. He was also an avid reader and learner during this time, learning English and Esperanto while in London, reading during his lunch break at the Carson Hotel (where he worked 6 days a week), etc.
6. Eventually he went to the USSR and then China. He lived in China for several years, near Guangdong (Canton), so close-ish to Vietnam. There he set up a school to teach revolutionary theory to not just Vietnamese but also other Asian refugees.
7. When Japan took over Vietnam from Vichy France in 1941, the movement had been built. This is what it all led up to. All you can do is make it as ready as it'll ever be, and then when the conditions arise (in China it was the civil war started by Chang Kai Shek's coup after Sun Yat Sen's death, in the USSR it was the WW1 campaign and the decade-long mismanagement by the tsar), start. But, starting is just one phase of the process. You have to keep it going.
8. In Vietnam, they exploited the mismanagement that arose from a Japanese military occupation (where like in China they only really controlled the urban centers and rail lines) under French administration to start an armed revolution.
9. The Viet Minh set up in the north and quickly delimited their own zone of governance. They built dual power there, enacting policies (mainly revolving around food distribution, land redistribution, abolishing forced labor and doing literacy programs). This built support with the peasantry, whom they relied on for food, security and success. It also shows the people what your policies will be like after the war so your dual power just becomes state power. It makes more people want to join your movement, picking up arms and supporting you in general.
10. The war with Japan lasted until their surrender in 1945, but in the chaos of the withdrawal France quickly established a parallel government in the south. The war quickly picked back up with France bombing civilians at Hanoi, and lasted until the monumental defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
11. Notably, and this is often forgotten, I can confirm from official Vietnam websites that in 1950, the Viet Minh liberated border villages in the north so they could establish a logistics line with the newly-proclaimed PRC who provided military aid, food, and cadres to the struggle. I think it's important to note this considering the later border skirmish that took place.
12. In talks at Geneva a ceasefire was agreed upon so that elections could happen to reunite the two countries. When Ngo Dinh Diem realized he was going to lose because he was a nobody, he pulled a Korea and announced separate elections in the south. After the defeat of the French, the US invasion started and you probably know all about that one already (spoiler alert: uncle sam lost).

All of this -- this is how we organize a revolutionary movement. Learn as much as you can, teach others, build support at home and abroad before you need it. Support abroad is important with your diaspora in the case of a liberation struggle, but also to forge ties because you'll need this international support -- China provided help in 1950, and later the USSR and China were present at the Geneva Talks in favor of Vietnam (though by then the USSR was under Krushchev and we know how that went for international support. Notably if I'm not mistaken, the USSR was the one who pushed for Vietnam to be partitioned until elections while the CPV wanted to continue down to Saigon as it was called back then.)

The movement is built inside and out. You will have soldiers, but you will also have agitators, civil servants, and just workers. Not everyone in Vietnam at the time was a soldier and couldn't have been anyway. Stalin was not a soldier, and in the Bolshevik faction he was printing Pravda. But all participate in the struggle in their own way. At Dien Bien Phu, General Võ Nguyên Giáp of the People's Army of Vietnam had the genius idea to bring the artillery up the hills surrounding the base in the valley, so as to pound it from above. They built tunnels too in the hillside for the artillery. It took months of labor, and they relied on locals to help -- this was in the north, in areas they controlled -- to do this project. Thousands of workers. I'm not sure if and how they were compensated, but that's a detail for the broader point that an army does not march on its own two feet.

When seeing this and comparing to the operations of the ACP, we might at first glance think the two operate alike. The ACP also goes to establish contact with other movements -- Hinkle and runaway deadbeat dad Chris Helali just went to Yemen to meet with (possibly) Ansarallah. They interviewed Hamas officials, they went to Russia, China, etc.

But what do these meetings do? In China, Hinkle was invited by a private news network, Guancha, which was founded by a Stanford venture capitalist. Of course it's based in Shanghai, the most liberal city in China and the only place he could make Guancha. He later made a Weibo account but was banned there, though we can only speculate as to the reason why. Seems to me this venture was more to build an audience in China. Ho Chi Minh was meeting leaders, both deposed and current. It's not a "foot in the door" thing. You can arrange these meetings, maybe not with Xi, but certainly with an ambassador or someone in the Central Committee.

He is currently in Yemen with Chris Helali, dressed in traditional Yemeni clothes (by who and why? He never says, and in the pictures is the only one in this clothes)

The man to his left by the way is Mick Wallace, also a pro-Palestine MP in Ireland. I don't want to claim that they travelled together by the way, as far as I know they were just sat next to each other in the seat order. Where was this photo taken? At the Third Palestine Conference in Sana'a -- a very good thing to hold! But listening to ACP, you'd think only Helali and Hinkle were there and nobody else. The Yemen Press Agency doesn't even mention the two of them by name: https://en.ypagency.net/351804.

What did they do while there? Seems like they're just attending. Hinkle is posting pictures of him in the attire and pretending to speak in front of a camera and that's about it. It's clout-chasing. I don't necessarily need an interview or the transcript of all that was said, but at least explain how this is beneficial to the ACP, since you're in it. Is Yemen going to support your people's war? Do you even plan for a people's war? Why are you there exactly aside of the photo op? You need to say.

But I figured maybe if Hinkle's twitter account does not mention communism at all, at least the ACP account would mention this visit and why it was taken. But they don't. Not at all.

Rather, the ACP account (@ACPMain) talks about what they're doing in the US. So let's talk about it - what is their mass movement? Where even is it? Certainly a movement is built over time (literally decades), but it doesn't seem as if they are trying to build anything. Any attempt they have made to rally MAGAs to their party (and before that to their "MAGAcommunism" or Mecha Tankie movement -- yes, that one was real, and has now been scrubbed from history) have utterly failed. And yet, they insist on continuing to court MAGAs. A mass movement is a mass movement, you don't pick and choose -- and I think many people could stand to hear that! :) But this means there are ways to go about building mass support; this has been done before, and it has left us theory we must use. In Vietnam, the Viet Minh called for all patriotic Vietnamese to join them against Japan. They didn't say, "you're not patriotic if you have blue hair or pronouns though". There is also, mind you, a difference between a mass party and a cadre party; but I digress.

In ACP theory, only blue collar workers are real workers, and they conflate those with MAGAs as if all MAGAs are not petit bourgeois but uneducated unwashed factory workers. They are clear in who they want in their party, and, by definition (and in practice we see that as well), anyone else is rejected. They don't want the "blue-haired" baristas. Therefore, they are not building a mass movement.

ACP Main is happy to repost what their chapters elect to do. From what I can tell looking from the outside in, it seems that chapters essentially run their actions how they want and do what they want on their own dime. Because telling them what to do is work, it's easier to be travelling to Yemen to get cool gift bags and make content for your podcast or whatever Hinkle is on nowadays. Haz is still on Twitch I think, where he has donations turned on. Shouldn't these go to party dues? Why are you competing with your own party?

Really seems to me as though the chapters are doing whatever they want and funneling money to the streamers committee which the streamers then use to fund their private interests.

So what do ACP cells do? They distribute flowers to women on International Women's Day (while Hinkle has said on stream once, 'women are not people') -- Int. Women's Day is a day of struggle, for the struggles women have faced and continue to face, and in which they are instrumental. I've talked about how I'm disappointed in "my" party, but at least on March 8 they're out there marching, making the men hold up the signs, and giving speeches after the march. Also in the videos posted, the 3 women are the ones giving out the flowers while the 8 men are nowhere to be seen in the frame... you can't make this shit up. Also they don't show any ACP affiliation anywhere, no flags or even a pin or anything. For all I know (and someone on Twitter hinted to this), they just claimed someone else's event as their own.

What else do we see? Haz is out there organizing striking truck drivers! Cool! Except, well, you only see him for a few seconds at the beginning, and only him in the frame -- for all I know he recorded this outside his patio and then went back inside. In the rest of the video, ACP members are portrayed distributing leaflets to the drivers. That's great. But you don't see Haz anywhere. They also didn't post the leaflet, which is a missed opportunity. Because while I could certainly admit my first point (about haz not being anywhere in the video) could be bad faith, organizationally speaking, it's a huge missed opportunity not to post the leaflet online; and more importantly, it doesn't allow for its criticism or critical reading. I can't make a point about what's in the leaflet because this leaflet has not been made public. Why would you not do that? You made a cool tiktok edit-style video, you know how social media works, so why did you just conveniently forgot to post the actual leaflet? Secondly, seeing that I have no idea about why the truckers are striking, I also can't talk about that - this seems like important information for a communist party to cover. Not just why you're there but why they're striking and how that ties into the broader political context. Because if they're striking to deport immigrants, that's a very different thing than if they're striking for higher wages.

They posted an article from Ted Reese for their newspaper but don't provide a link to the article but to subscribe to the journal. I've honestly never seen this, except maybe from Trots. Usually communist papers republish their articles online because the point is to do agitprop, and it's counter-productive to paywall that. You run the paper at a loss and that's to be expected (I'm sorry, are we doing commodity production now?). And sorry but the thumbnail provided made me laugh. "Socialism has a long-term tendency to decentralize wealth and power" what the fuck does that even mean lmao.

Looking at the link provided to subscribe to the paper, most of the articles are written by the grifters in chief, with some written by outsiders, or at least I don't think they're in the ACP. Again, that's not really how you run a communist paper. It's a great idea to put out a submissions call to your members to write these articles, because it allows in more perspectives and also things you don't necessarily know to talk about that they can fill in. I will give the grifters this, at least they write for it lol. If they didn't write anything, it's true, I could easily make the point that they are using their members' labor to sell subscriptions. At the same time, I feel like I've definitely seen some of these titles around before they were in the journal, like "Civilize the Mind and Make Savage the Body" by Edward Smith (he stole the wording from Mao but I'm pretty sure he talked about it before)

If you want to subscribe to this incredible paper, they first ask for your email address lol. Never seen that before but okay. I log in, and the digital subscription is $15 fucking dollars a month. Print is 25. For context, my party's newspaper comes out to 7 a month, in an expensive place, and you get both print and digital. You can also contact them for preferential rates depending on your situation. It also comes out once a month in a magazine form.

Finally, they claim they are working "in tandem with" Randolph United, a tenants union, in Randolph, Massachussetts. The video they show was produced by Randolph United and never once mentions or shows anything related to ACP.

In tandem means that they are working parallel to them but never once together. It means Randolph is out there doing their thing, and ACP is leeching off of that to say "no we're here too!". In a reply to their own tweet, ACP posted a press release by Randolph that also never once mentions ACP. Can you imagine if people like Lenin, Mao or Ho Chi Minh had done that? We would rightfully have criticized their action, and even maybe not have ever considered them examples of the communist movement, because how can you be a communist when you consider leeching off another movement's achievements to be good praxis? Like, what does it say about you as a whole?

Seems to me like ACP only exists to fund the individual ventures of the unelected, we-picked-ourselves central committee -- who just happen to all be streamers that have been orbiting around each other for years now. It's the TikTok Hype House, where some TikTok producers and friends live together to produce content together. Võ Nguyên Giáp was picked for his skills at organizing an army (he was not a military officer before the war) and revolutionary education. What skills do people like Edward Smith of MWM possess, beyond having TikTok followers?

This is how you know you are operating in a cult. And this is how we know the ACP is nothing but a self-serving, twisted (and theory-twisting) investment venture. The only thing it can bring about is more pestilence.

It's dire, and I don't have a ready-made solution beyond "just make your own party comrade ez". It's not that ez.

Most western parties are completely ossified, existing only to justify their existence (a paradox) and capture well-meaning, engaged comrades into perpetual ineffectual tailism.

As some EU/US parties are now celebrating their 75th or even 100th anniversary, we are reminded that they have achieved absolutely nothing in those 100 years, so what's there to celebrate? When someone pointed that out to me, it suddenly got the gears turning in my head and all made sense.

EU (broadly european, not European Union) parties have basically all turned to eurocommunism after 1991. They became heavily dependent on soviet funding in the 20th century and when the funds dried up, they had nothing left to show for it. When you look at the history of these parties, you can see the eurocommunism though already back in the 20th century. CPUSA particularly is just one mistake after another throughout the 20th century, the chauvinism in hindsight is plainly there and nothing has improved in that party. I'm singling out CPUSA because I know its history very well, but this is a story that repeats across tons of parties.

This is a mistake China is thankfully not committing. They correctly consider it's not their responsibility to take over the revolution for other countries.

The situation we are in today, in the west, is that we have ossified parties who only exist to collect dues and justify their existence. What I mean by ossified is they have become ineffectual, going through the formal motions to elect more ineffectual leaders one after the other. They're fossils, basically. Rigid, unable to move even if they wanted to. They just kinda exist there to point at. One thing that demonstrates this nature is that most western parties exist as mass parties when they should be having cadre parties. They are far too marginal (again, most of them), to be thinking about making a mass party at this stage.

When I point this out people generally tend to agree, but are quick to point at the youth wings as being much more radical. Yes, they are. But it doesn't matter. They'll get captured into the machine anyway. Either the party will beat the revolutionary spirit out of you and you'll fold to their formalism, or you'll leave it. We're not the first youth generation to be radical, you know. I'm sure students in the 60s were also hopeful they could correct the krushchevist trajectory or whatever of their respective parties - they didn't. We're not the first kids to try and redress the party line.

When joining a party, or looking at your party, ask yourself: what are they actually doing? I was having a discussion about the CPCanada the other day, started on their decolonial line (it's absolutely terrible, they think Quebec is a nation and have some sort of weird reverence for what is, without question, just colonialism but French instead of English). Eventually the defense turned to "but they have members in parliament!" Yeah, and so do liberal parties. "But we go to protests", yes, and so do liberal parties. They even organize some of these protests. "But if we went too far we would get censored!" Good?? Use it?? How are you a communist and afraid of getting censored, not even jailed, unless as a party you only existed to collect dues and money to feed the central committee with.

The person I was talking to, though my point is not to name and shame, was likely a baby communist and perhaps reading these lines above you might also think their arguments were poor while finding different arguments in favor of the CPCanada. But I believe that these arguments were fed to them by the party, because they tried to join it and so likely got the spiel about how cool the party is. At least that's what I choose to believe.

Or they love to say "we get fraternal greetings from AES countries!" Yes, fucking everyone does. Holy shit. I hear that one so much, it's not a fucking endorsement and stop trying to make it sound like it is. This is a legacy of the comintern, every fucking party that existed in the first half of the 20th century gets these greetings. You're not special. CPUSA is a huge proponent of that one as if it somehow erases all their other failures (their cute podcast where they're all smiles reading from a script lmao). You're not the fucking Communist Party of China, don't pretend like you two are on the same level. And this goes for any western party.

All of the above applies to "my" party by the way. I put it between quotes because I was part of its youth wing and still retain some contact, but eventually just kinda fell out naturally. I think the turning point for me was realizing the people I looked up to in there were basically eurocommunists who knew nothing out of their very specific bubble. Lots of callbacks to Rosa Luxembourg (and specifically Rosa for some reason, though I have to say they also liked Lenin), but very little in action aside from electoralism and more electoralism.

You need to actually lead some struggles. A point of pride for them was that we knew how to organize better than the other socialist youth wings. Yes, that's great. And it's true. But what do we do with that? If you just attach your name to a campaign along with the other socialist parties people are just gonna see the other parties because they're "safer".

Basically if nothing separates you from socdems you're doing something wrong

And I can't believe I have to explain that to some communists. People will go to the 🌹 party if you give them a choice between socdem-but-we-like-lenin and socdem-but-we-like-flowers. you need to offer something different, and electoralism is not it. But it's safe. And then you capture young engaged communists, use their labor for your electoral campaigns so you don't have to pay money for it, and the cycle continues. It looks good on paper and 100 years later you pat yourself on the back for having failed at doing any revolution. A party doesn't get my involvement on virtue of calling itself a communist party. It needs to earn me. It needs to earn you.

you know what I participated in in my years with "my" party? Went to marches not organized by the party. Put electoral pamphlets in envelopes or something, idr. Designed their 201X program on the computer. That's about it. Everything I hear them talking about is where to put the fucking electoral posters with the fucking greens and social fascists so that we can get two fucking candidates elected into a useless parliament. couldn't organize themselves out of a paper bag. you may laugh, but this is common across most european "communist" parties. And that's just what you see on the surface. Beneath that they have ENDLESS debates about whether China is socialist or what to say about the war in Ukraine. Apparently that one almost caused a split. That should never happen, jesus. A split happens because of organizational differences, not because one side thinks Russia is imperialist and the other thinks it's Ukraine that's imperialist. You have to think about what led to such a situation in the first place.

I offered to run a seminar/course/talk/just-ten-fucking-minutes-please-that's-all-I-ask-for about modern China and the CPC, because this party doesn't do any education, they take you as you are and then you're kinda just left to your own devices. They told me I should go to the whatever meetings first for whatever reason. They have no interest in educating each other. This is what goes on beneath the surface, the kind of stuff you only realize once it's too late, once you're embedded into the structure and become part of the pillar to the throne of eurocommunism.

But, please, don't think this is just my own experience talking. The criticism is there. It's plain to see. All these parties fell into the same pit traps.

But what can you do instead? Start your own party? In the age of resurgent fascism and a climate apocalypse it seems too little too late. A party is not "started", it emerges. You start with a study group, gathering regulars, and then branch into doing agitation work. Later this formalizes into a party once you have something to show for it. You don't start a party, like maoists do, with five of your friends and then fizzle out after a year until somebody else picks the same name by pure coincidence.

The Global South would be right to laugh at our "communism". We are scared of self-criticism because it would only highlight how ineffectual we are at building communism in the west. The only two parties I can think of in the west that are doing something is KKE (but terrible line otherwise so I doubt their praxis will get them far past the current contradictions) and PTB in Belgium, which I know we have comrades in, and I'm sure they have their issues as well but I couldn't point to them directly without knowing more about how the party works, I'd just be talking bullshit until I can back it up.

That's all. 44 countries in Europe, 2 huge countries in North America, Japan (if you count it as the West), Occupied Australia, Occupied New Zealand, and these are the two parties that get a tentative thumbs up.

We have our own issues in Europe -- namely eurocommunism as explained, but some countries like France or the UK also still have colonies and their parties also refuse to look at the question -- and American parties also have their own, namely relating to their settler-colonial status. Basically all parties I'm aware of in North America refuse to recognize this status, I guess because it would force them to contend with their own settler status and trying to organize communism for, ultimately, the benefit of a non-indigenous state. So they come up with weird fetishization of Quebec identity (lmao) or outright offer lukewarm "solutions" to the Indigenous nations without even consulting them, "promising" representation and other stuff that the colonizer has promised them before and failed to deliver, and then they wonder why Indigenous people don't want to organize with them. It's like the """Communist party of "Israel"""". It's nonsense.

best sublemmy i could find lol lmk

https://www.kauai.gov/files/assets/public/v/1/boards-and-commissions/documents/mmnhw-report.pdf

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6812031

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6812030

I'm sure everyone's heard about Musk's salute by now but this counts as this week's essay so here you go. We go a bit into why the ADL defends him. I think it's interesting but I'm biased of course :)

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6812030

I'm sure everyone's heard about Musk's salute by now but this counts as this week's essay so here you go. We go a bit into why the ADL defends him. I think it's interesting but I'm biased of course :)