(I wrote a long comment that starts on-point but then increasingly becomes a bit ranty. I’ve kept it in in case it is helpful. The ranty bit may seem defeatist or pessimistic. It’s not intended to be. I just think it would be unethical to encourage someone to join a party without knowing the risks. You have spotted some. If the risks are known, though, fill your boots.)

You could always feign the Marxist > Trot > Neo-con pipeline… I can’t comment about experience in the US, but… I also can’t see many repercussions from joining a college Communist org. Loads of politicians and pundits join radical orgs in university. Then they ‘mature’ out of it. You don’t have to sell your soul like Hitchens, but you can also claim youthful exuberance if it comes up in a job interview.

The only people who know the full extent to which e.g. the government cares about you being in a political party are the government. (Maybe a few of our three-letter handlers will come out the woodwork and tell us.) So we can only really guess, here.

That said… I don’t know about joining under an alias. The security state will know your name, anyway. Do employers care enough to ask? One thing I would do is avoid any politics on social media in your own name. Because employers will Google your name to see what you get up to in your free time. So even just having, say, anti-Trump FB posts under your real name could be held against you by a Trump supporting employer. And besides the employer’s politics they want their product etc to have mass appeal, which means not pissing off any demograph, which means opting for employees who appear ‘neutral’.

I’m not a member of a party, so I cannot speak to being discriminated against for that. But there is discrimination against union members. I suppose the difference is that you could feasibly separate party politics from work, but being in the union directly affects those at work who disagree with your politics. So in your day-to-day work life you can avoid the conflict from the former but not the latter.

Talking about Marxism in any positive light will beget discrimination in professional settings where I’m from. But in informal settings, nobody seems to care. Most university students will be curiously open minded and will treat political differences as a cause for banter. So as long as you remain personally friendly, I can’t see people avoiding you in college for being in a party. Unless it’s all you talk about. The key IME is to be humble about all knowledge and phrase things as uncertain rather than giving the impression that you have access to immortal truths. Let people see that you’re a normal (non-tyrant) person with political views, and they’ll generally give you the space to share those views and may have fruitful conversations.

Visitors to the US get asked if they’re part of a communist party or ever have been. So the state does care, if that indicates anything.

Almost everyone who has been an effective anti-capitalist in the US was murdered, imprisoned, tortured, or harassed until they retired to a quiet, unassuming, apolitical life. (Michael Parenti was beaten, arrested, blacklisted, and hounded out of academia for protesting the Vietnam war.) Or escaped. It’s not a reason to do nothing, but it is a reason to be cautious and to study radical history to learn from past mistakes. (It’s okay to do something before you know everything, though.)

There’s also a way of doing radical things in such a way that can be later sold to employers as extra curricular activities. Cynical, I know. For example, you could go to a language exchange and speak in English to immigrants. You could volunteer somewhere that provides food for poor children. The Black Panthers had great success with this kind of thing. IIRC, its acupuncture against drug use program (or something like that) gained a lot of public support, as did it’s food programs.

I’m not saying ‘just’ do voluntary work (although that could be a safer way of building community strength if party organising would be dangerous for you). But there may be a way of doing party work that can be explained away in a professional environment as volunteering (if that’s what you’re worried about).

I’ll also suggest, perhaps controversially, that ‘apolitical’ voluntary kind of work could be more effective than working for a political org that is co-opted and focuses on electoral politics. Many of the more successful radical US groups grew out of other successful political groups that had slightly different politics. At this point in the imperial core, it’s as much about building capacity for organising as much as ‘achieving revolution’. I mean, we can’t even get people to agree that starvation and homelessness are bad and unnecessary; never mind seize the means of production.

Marx argued, the people need years of struggle to ‘make [them]selves capable of political rule’.¹ Lenin argued that it may take three or more years to prepare someone for revolutionary government after five years already of Soviet rule.² It seems that learning organisational and administrative skills while reading theory is crucial, whether it is inside or outside a party that has all the right aesthetics. So even if you decide you cannot join a party, you can do something.

¹ ‘1850 Split in the German Communist League’.

² ‘Better Fewer, But Better’.