yeah honestly the defeatism and erasure is driving me up the wall. We’ve had unprecedented actions and growth of said actions every few years by the masses who are the ones who make history; from the mobilization and then radicalizations of disaffected left-liberals after the Bernie failure, to the George Floyd uprising and its aftershocks, and now these sustained anti-zionist protests calling to free Palestine that never would have happened like this a decade ago; while communists and socialist-unionists like IWW are and have been out there every day doing work organizing workplaces, including the PSL getting near nationwide ballot access and more coverage than the active corporate censorship of them when mentioning 3rd parties would have liked; and every socialist gun club from JBGC to SRA to MRA has seen swelling in numbers for the past 8 years. CPUSA grew so much that fed-opportunist-revisionist-national couldn’t manage its rank-and-file and had to purge a huge amount of branches of real communists around the country who were banding together to petition national against electoralism-for-genociders and for recognition of the colonial question — and are now free from that dead-end controlled organization who siphons people on name recognition alone. People are being increasingly screwed over and have been increasingly sympathetic to socialism. The degree to which it has become easier for me to express communist views and be heard compared to years ago (even early as pre-2016) is night and day. And there’s still work to be done.

Communism faces more undermining and damage from defeatists who think online doom-saying and bourgeois-media-landscapes are real reality and then project that outward to people who need to be inspired rather than deflated, than from the liberals and reactionaries themselves. Everyone who is able needs to join an org, and if one can’t, the least one can do is inspire and not erase your comrades who’ve been in the struggle for years as “no real leftist movement exists” or belittle and sap energy from mass movements with essentializing opportunist “it’s hopeless its all liberals and they all want genocide fascist victory is inevitable and we must flee or die;” which also ignores that everyone other than people raised by Marxists will start as liberals in the USA by default; and many of the people who came out in the Floyd uprisings and now against genocide were and are libs, or vague ‘leftists’ without political education and organization who just need onboarded, so liberals with socialist sympathies.

Ironically it’s a symptom of unpurged Liberalism for the socialists here who started out as Liberals to not have the long-term continuity of memory of one’s own transformation to do this derision of liberals as a ‘lost cause’ for bringing to our side. Imagine if others who affected their own political transformations said the same, where would they be? It’s naked opportunism at best; because most of the masses are liberals; even the “apolitical” disaffected workers are mostly liberals who have withdrawn from political activism because that’s the default of our western societies. Communists don’t fall from the sky, they are made by us leading by example proving demonstrating we are fighting and we are right and we are right to fight, as their own lived experiences and worsening conditions make it impossible to deny or ignore any longer. And as empire and climate collapses, this will only rapidly accelerate.

We need to be realistic and materialist with how we can best utilize our energy in the face of great odds against us (as has always been the case in every revolutionary movement) and not direct it uselessly toward petty bourgeois contrarians with no interest in the truth let alone organizing with us; but that being realistic goes both ways. Writing off the masses, who are the people who make history, and so the people that communists need to figure out how to lead; and writing off the people doing the work now and every day as ‘not going to make a difference’ rather than helping and joining them, is actively counter-revolutionary, and it is also not materialist; as capitalist crises will continue to get worse for working masses, that “centrist” position will vanish, and it is our job to lean the scales our way for the working masses and have the roads forward already opened for them and our slogans exposing the points-of-attack on the capitalist and imperialist contradictions burning in their minds from having already been hearing them.