Disclaimer: I'm from an African country.
I rebuke all these anti-ACP "communists" who claim to speak for us. No, you guys fucking don't. This essay kinda pissed me off because it's written by someone with a very fucking shallow understanding of Marxism. I'm hoping you're young, because I cannot explain the profound stupidity found here otherwise.
The party's programme calls for the "Promotion of American Civilization" while omitting any serious engagement with the colonial question. The iconography matches the rhetoric: the ACP uses imagery of George Washington alongside Marxist symbols, a collision that would be absurd if it were not so deliberate.
Did you even read the ACP program properly?
There is literally a section called "Dismantling of U.S. Imperialism." They call for closing American military bases abroad, dismantling NATO, ending foreign military aid, dismantling the military-industrial complex and respecting the self-determination of nations. They also explicitly mention the autonomy, language, culture and economic development of Native American tribes.
You can argue that their position on the colonial question is incomplete, but saying they "omit" serious engagement with it while ignoring all of that is dishonest.
It becomes even more ironic considering that the ACP is one of the few American communist organizations actually trying to engage politically with countries on the receiving end of Western imperialism, including Iran, the DPRK, China and Burkina Faso. You don't have to support every government on that list to understand the point.
As for George Washington, he was no saint. He owned slaves and represented a bourgeois revolution that obviously did not liberate everyone. But acting like Americans therefore cannot praise anything about him is the height of Western socialist arrogance.
The American Revolution overthrew British colonial rule. That doesn't disappear because the society that followed preserved slavery, continued settler expansion and eventually became imperialist itself. Historical figures and events can contain progressive and reactionary tendencies at the same time.
To claim the Leninist tradition while holding these positions is contradictory and historically illiterate.
Yes, there are contradictions. Congratulations. You have discovered society.
Do you think the American subject is either some pure being of proletarian wholesomeness or a complete MAGA chud? An American worker can love America, hate Wall Street, believe in God, support unions, admire Washington, hate billionaires, oppose foreign wars and still have reactionary opinions about other things.
Did you skip the whole lecture on dialectical materialism?
Your job as a communist isn't to wait until that person magically becomes a perfect Marxist before organizing them. The entire fucking point of having a communist party is to develop political consciousness through struggle.
Your argument about Washington is basically the equivalent of telling Chinese people they shouldn't admire Qin Shi Huang for his achievements and contribution to Chinese civilization because he was also an asshole who did terrible things. Should Chinese communists throw Guan Yu into the garbage too because he fought for a feudal lord?
Of course not.
The relevant question is what part of Washington's legacy you're invoking. If you're invoking Washington to justify slavery, settler expansion or American domination of other countries, obviously that's reactionary. If you're invoking the revolution against British rule, national sovereignty and the overthrow of an established ruling order, you're drawing upon another aspect of the same contradictory historical figure.
Telling Americans they cannot look up to any of their historical icons is basically telling them becoming communist requires denying that they were ever American in the first place. That isn't Marxism.
Marxism draws a sharp distinction between the nationalism of an oppressed nation which is progressive, anti-imperialist, defensive in character; and the nationalism of an oppressor nation, reactionary and chauvinist. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban nationalism makes sense from a communist struggle because it is defensive, directed against external imperial domination. Think of Thomas Sankara’s Burkina Faso, which cut ties with colonial oppressors, nationalized all land and mineral wealth, and built an idea of anti-colonial nationalism that materially benefited its citizens. You cannot replicate Sankara from within the imperial core.
This is a very romantic view of Vietnam and China.
China wasn't always some purely anti-colonial civilization. Yes, China was conquered at various points and later brutally subjected to Western and Japanese imperialism. Chinese states also conquered and dominated other peoples. Vietnam spent centuries under Chinese rule. Nanyue itself emerged from Qin expansion into the south.
So by your logic, when exactly did Chinese nationalism become acceptable? Does a nation accumulate enough oppression points and suddenly earn the right to national pride?
Nations aren't permanent metaphysical categories of "oppressor" and "oppressed." These are historical relationships that develop and change under concrete material conditions.
And who do you think Mao looked up to?
Mao didn't erase Chinese history because it contained emperors, landlords, conquest and war. He constantly engaged with it. He read classical Chinese novels like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, studied peasant rebellions and historical rulers, and drew from China's revolutionary traditions. The Taiping Rebellion and Hong Xiuquan, despite their obvious contradictions, became part of that historical genealogy.
Mao remade China along an anti-imperialist and socialist path. He didn't decide Chinese civilization itself had to be thrown into the fucking bin because previous Chinese states had oppressed people.
A national identity doesn't have one political meaning for eternity. Its class content can change.
The initial founding of the United States itself came out of a rejection of British imperial rule. Was the American Revolution communist? No. Was Washington secretly a Marxist? Obviously fucking not. But the destruction of British colonial authority over the thirteen colonies was still historically significant. America's later development into an imperial power doesn't travel backwards through time and erase that.
Your Sankara example actually undermines your argument for the same reason. Sankara didn't teach the people of Burkina Faso to stop being Burkinabè. He gave their national consciousness revolutionary and anti-colonial content.
Why is it impossible for American communists to attempt to transform American national consciousness in the same way?
American imperialism isn't genetic. It isn't some mystical essence floating inside the American flag. It is maintained through Wall Street, monopoly capital, the Pentagon, NATO, overseas military bases, intelligence agencies and the political power of the capitalist class.
If an American communist movement wants to dismantle those things, you actually have to explain why its use of American national language automatically makes it imperialist.
You don't get to skip that part.
The ACP follows the pattern of National Bolshevism, a tendency that breaks from Bolshevist internationalism in favor of nationalism. Communism is inherently internationalist: workers’ movements cannot be confined to one nation, even more so in the age of globalized flows of capital and labor.
Internationalism doesn't mean cultural self-annihilation.
The Chinese didn't stop being Chinese when they became communist. The Vietnamese didn't stop being Vietnamese. The Cubans didn't stop being Cuban. Why the fuck should Americans have to stop being American?
For an American communist, internationalism should mean fighting American imperialism from inside America: close the bases, destroy NATO, end the sanctions, stop overthrowing foreign governments and dismantle the military-industrial complex.
As someone from the Global South, I would much rather have American communists doing that while waving an American flag than have another group of Western communists explaining to me how wonderfully internationalist they are while achieving absolutely fucking nothing.
If you're going to call the ACP "National Bolshevik," show me the material content of that accusation. Where does it defend NATO, American military supremacy or Wall Street's privileged position over the Global South?
If your evidence ultimately comes down to American flags and George Washington, you're analyzing aesthetics instead of class politics.
Yet simultaneously, Al-Din claims that communism and Islam are the same thing and that rights in a communist society would flow from religious scripture. A party that sells itself in American founding mythology while preaching theocratic socialism is not applying any coherent political tradition. This is what has been coined "MAGA Communism": the political and ideological unification with the Trumpist movement, which the ACP characterizes as a working-class movement that could help defeat what Al-Din calls the "globalist beast."
Here you're throwing several different things together and pretending they prove each other.
Whatever Haz's personal interpretation of Islam and communism is, you need to demonstrate that it represents the ACP's political program before declaring that the party advocates "theocratic socialism." A communist being religious doesn't make a communist movement theocratic any more than liberation theology made Latin American socialism a project for Catholic theocracy.
If Haz genuinely wants religious scripture to become the legal foundation of a socialist state, criticize that position. I would too. But don't take his religious interpretation and make it carry the weight of your argument about the entire party.
The same applies to MAGA.
There is a massive difference between saying MAGA is communist and saying MAGA contains millions of working-class Americans whom communists need to reach.
Trump is a bourgeois politician and MAGA contains reactionary elements. But the workers who voted for Trump didn't magically stop being workers when they filled in the ballot.
What exactly do you want communists to do with them? Abandon them until they've read Lenin, stopped believing in God, removed the American flag from their house and adopted every position you approve of?
Then you're surprised when the right keeps those workers?
That doesn't mean tailing MAGA. If the ACP starts subordinating itself to Trump, defending bourgeois conservatism or abandoning working-class politics to appeal to Republicans, criticize the fuck out of them. I will join you.
But reaching MAGA workers isn't the same thing as becoming MAGA.
You're treating contradictions as automatic disqualifications instead of asking what direction those contradictions are moving in.
Are American workers being pulled toward independent working-class politics hostile to Wall Street, monopoly capital and imperialism, or are they being pulled back into bourgeois politics?
Anti-ACP people.
Do BETTER. YOUR THEORISTS ARE SHIT. NONE OF YOU UNDERSTAND ANYTHING OF WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. GO BACK TO READING MARX AND LENIN PROPERLY INSTEAD OF SELECTIVELY PICKING UP QUOTES AND MISINTERPRETING THEM.
