No I agree. Im not from the US, in fact Im a cadre in the M-L party in my country (Belgium) and weve been making lots of progress and I hope the same for the US. So I know it is possible. In fact we have become very close with a party in the US (the PSL) and they have been saying they will try to learn from us and our success.
Some bg on my party in case you are interested: we used to be a very small, sectarian ML party. We were seen as “crazy commies” because of all the red scare propaganda since the fall of the soviet union. It wasnt as bad as in the US but it was still bad. In the late 90s the situation worsened and our party almost disappeared. Thankfully we took a new approach (we definitely still made many mistakes along the way) and decided to adapt Lenins Left Wing Communism to the situation in Belgium.
Before we paid no attention to the fact that the people were so effected by anti communist propaganda and ended up scaring them off when we openly campagned for m-l and defended AES. But we marched on with iron stubbornness like you said and decided to become way more flexible in our tactics. We modernized our communication and stopped using m-l terminology that regular people didnt understand that made it easy for the bourgeois parties to slander us as “commies”.
We realized we had to be materialist. Belgium is in the heart of the imperial core so we cant just come out and say “most of what you heard about Stalin and Mao are bourgouis lies” and “bourgeois democracy is fake and only revolutionary violence can put an end to capitalist oppression”. We tried that and we just ended up shooting ourselves in the foot. In our country we also have a “cordon sanitair” against parties that are seen as being “anti democratic”. Which means they are essentially shunned. Far right politicans have already proposed laws against “organisations that call for violence” that were clearly meant against us. So if we came out and said what we truly believed we would be banned in a heartbeat.
But what we can do is make the people angry. So instead of telling the people the only way out of their misery is using violence to overthrow the capitalist class, every mistake the capitalists and the bourgeois politicans make, we draw as much attention to it as possible. You cant just say “violence is the only way out” you have to get them angry enough to get to that point. And we have been very succesful at that. We realized we have to start from what the people can understand today. When you teach a child you cant just start with the most difficult math you have to start with the things they can understand and gradually move up from there.
Since we started working like that our members have been growing exponentialy and even though we have to be careful with what we say in public once people join the party and rise in the ranks they are educated in m-l theory. And then we obviously do explain they have been lied to on the AES and how there will need to be a revolution to overthrow capitalism. Now this process wasnt easy. In the beginning we were being attacked from all sides. The ultra left called us revisionists, reformists and worse and the right still used every chance they had to paint us as “evil commies”. But all our hard work is paying off. We have kept our m-l identity and have been able to organize and educate a large amount of people. We are now even polling as the biggest party in Brussels, the capital of Europe. And even though we obviously dont believe in bourgeois elections or polling this still means we have gained a large amount of support and influence.
Because so many people support us we have now gradually started to reintroduce m-l terminology into the popular discourse such as “class struggle” and even “working class”. Words that were taboo here for a long long time. We now also have to be much less careful with working with openly m-l parties and its easier for us to actually defend AES. We still have to be very careful tho. For a long time we had to watch out with what we said about the DPRK for example because in our bourgeois media they are portrayed as being “worse than hitler” and we were crucified for saying anything positive about them. But recently we started working with nodutdol, an organisation that fights bourgouis propaganda against the DPRK. So we will gradually start fighting against the caricature in our media of the DPRK again, but for the longest time the most we could get away with was saying “we were for peace on the Korean peninsula”.
Another recent victory is that we got our good friend Vijay Prashad to give an interview in a popular soc dem newspaper in which he was able to refute some of the US slander against the Venezuelan government. Its still not easy to defend AES here, most people here are convinced Maduro is a dictator and when we didnt go along with all the bourgeois propaganda about the Uyghur people we were painted as “pro-China” and some even accused us of our foreign policy as being “treasonous” lol. As our chairman Raoul reminded us as ML have no loyalty to any bourgeois government, only to the proletariat, so to use his words in a way our foreign policy is indeed treason. (But he obviously would never say that in public.)
But yes we have to be very careful to not be painted as defenders of “communist dictatorships” or treasonous. In the case of the Uyghurs the bourgeois parties for example tried to make it look like we were supporting a “genocide”. So we had to be really smart about what we said and said we were against all forms of repression and at the same time tried to sow the seeds of doubt about the official narrative. We coordinate closely with the CPC and they are obviously very happy to have a ML ally that looks out for them in a place as important as Brussels but we have to be very careful about what we say about them because our bourgeois press will use anything it can against us and if we said the wrong thing that influence could disappear or we could be banned very quickly.
So step by step we are building our party, our platform, our relationships with other ML parties (our friend Vijay Prashad has been great at connecting us with ML parties and organisations) and AES and we try to gradually and carefully educate the masses and raise their revolutionary conscience. If its this hard here to build a ML party I can only imagine how hard it must be in the US, but yes you are right there is hope but I maintain that there will have to be a serious ML party first that can reach the masses and organize and mobilize them and use the appropriate tactics to reach them despite all the red scare propaganda.
TL;DR: We have channeled our inner koba and I hope the US can do the same.
I’m very sorry you have to go through this each and every day comrade. I also want to thank you for sharing this with us. It is like others have pointed a logical consequence of our capitalist reality and a good reminder of what we are fighting against every day and why we do it. I dont know what advice I could possibly give you instead of saying I admire you immensely.
If you want to post more I will try to read it.