Commentary
When Donald Trump, Jr. recently told Fox News that the 2020 election would be “about communism versus freedom,” he was not exaggerating.
The United States’ four major communist groups: Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) (and its close affiliate LeftRoots), and America’s largest Marxist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), are all working together in the innocuously named “Left Inside/Outside Project” to mobilize their 65,000-plus members to take over the Democratic Party.
Lest the word “socialist” in their names fool you, the first four groups support the People’s Republic of China, while DSA is allied to several European communist parties, including the former Stalinist East German ruling party now known as Die Linke.
The Marxist takeover of an existing mainstream politic party in a First World Western country should not be easy.
When the Trotskyist group “Militant Tendency” tried to infiltrate the British Labour Party in the 1970s and 1980s, the media and Labour moderates exposed the Marxists and they were expelled from the party. Unfortunately, in the United States today, the infiltration is on a much larger scale and neither the mainstream media nor the Democratic Party seem at all interested in exposing or countering it.
In a recent article by the leftist “Truthout” titled “A Left Strategy for the 2020 Elections and Beyond,” two prominent American Marxists Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Carl Davidson laid out their ideas for conquering and even eventually replacing the Democratic Party.
Fletcher is a leader of FRSO and is also a member of DSA. He has been active since the 1960s in Maoist groups in Boston and in the 1980s with Jesse Jackson’s famous Rainbow Coalition. Now based in Washington D.C., Fletcher has been a labor movement leader and a scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). IPS has been described as the “perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.” In 2008, Fletcher was a co-founder of the FRSO/DSA-aligned Progressives for Obama.
Davidson was a leader of the 1960’s radical group Students for a Democratic Society. Later he was a leader in several Maoist groups including the October League, Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist), and the League of Revolutionary Struggle. He was also an influential supporter of the young Barack Obama. Davidson later became a leader of the CCDS and now runs a DSA chapter in Western Pennsylvania. He also contributes financially to LeftRoots.
According to Davidson and Fletcher:
“As the 2020 presidential campaigns begin in 2019, nearly everyone on the left knows the stakes are high. The defeat of Donald Trump and the ejection of his right-wing and white supremacist populist bloc from the centers of political power is a tactical goal of some urgency not only for Democrats but also for leftists. The outcome of the upcoming election will have a direct effect on thwarting right-wing populism and the clear and present danger of incipient fascism and war.
“The removal of Trump’s bloc would also remove a stubborn obstacle to a range of urgent progressive reforms much needed at the grassroots — Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, no new wars and interventions, a $15 minimum wage, and so on. Given how unlikely Trump’s resignation or impeachment is, the election of the candidate running on the Democratic Party line seems like the likeliest path toward his removal. ...
“The most fruitful strategy would not only accomplish that goal but would also strengthen the left’s leverage in other upcoming rounds of class and democratic struggles, keeping the country on a socialist road.”That’s the goal. But what’s the method?
Davidson and Fletcher invoke Antonio Gramsci, a famous Marxist theoretician and once-leader of the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci theorized that communism would not be achieved by workers revolt but by long-term infiltration of society’s leading institutions—what he termed a “war of position”—and the mobilizing of those institutions and mass organizations—the “war of movement.”
“This requires a wide-awake assessment of our current conjuncture, a fresh survey of the terrain, and a good estimate of the balance of forces. The dramatic growth of left forces since 2016 — especially Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) surging to 60,000-plus members located in every congressional district, plus the election in 2018 of two DSA members to Congress and many more to state and local offices — is the most obvious change. But we are still in a period of overall strategic defensive, within which we view the war of position strategically and the wars of movement tactically. This is our orientation through 2020 and its immediate aftermath.
“This means election campaigns are not a bothersome, if still required sideshow. They are at the center of our work.”
In the past Marxists have tended to simply join the local Democratic Party and try to gain as much influence as the can. Davidson and Fletcher believe they have a better approach. That is, to build independent socialist organizations while still working under the Democratic Party banner. In other words, don’t just join the “Dems” and follow their orders. Work inside the Democrat Party to build your own independent socialist organizations.
Such organizations already exist: Our Revolution, Indivisible, Working Families Party, and Progressive Democrats of America—all Marxist-led—have been infiltrating the Democratic Party, in some cases for more than a decade.
As Davidson and Fletcher explain:
“At the moment, there are two major caucuses: the social democratic Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) and the neo-Keynesian New Democrat Coalition (NDC)/Third Way Caucus. ... DSA, Working Families Party (WFP) and Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) make up the left wing of the CPC. ...
“The Congressional Progressive Caucus gets even greater reach at the grassroots through Our Revolution and Indivisible. Our Revolution grew out of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and has hundreds of local chapters. Indivisible was formed in the protests around Trump’s inauguration, first around a manual on how to organize. It now boasts a reported 3,800 local groups.
“The implications? Socialists shouldn’t work ‘within the Democratic party,’ but with one of its clusters, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, especially its DSA/WFP/PDA left wing and its mass allies. The Progressive Caucus is by far the largest of the Democratic Caucuses, with numbers above 100 members. ... The goal would be to develop and expand the CPC, win over as many of the New Democrats as possible …”
These groups aim to shift the balance of forces in the Democratic Party well to the left, so that Marxist-inspired policies may be put on the party’s agenda.
“How could people on the left do so? By simply fighting for what people need, defined as those redistributionist and structural reforms that can unite a progressive majority of voters. Medicare for All is now a case in point, and the Green New Deal is becoming one. When connected with the base communities in the local congressional districts, the left could elect progressives until it becomes a solid majority among Democrats in the House.”The left’s long-term goal may shock many “moderate” Democrats. The communists don’t intend to merely infiltrate and use the Democratic Party. Ultimately, they want to replace the Democratic Party with an openly socialist new formation.
“Some on the left have asked: Why doesn’t DSA just start a new party? The answer: because DSA and its close allies, objectively, are already helping to do so by growing the social-democratic bloc and giving it an organized and independent grassroots base in the working class and communities of the oppressed. But the work begins under the Democratic tent as a largely inside job. Once you get over 100,000 or even 200,000 new DSA members from the organizing and base-building of backing Sanders on the Democratic line, you’ve created at least one key component of the large bloc needed for a new First Party. ...
“If there is a DSA/PDA/CPC bloc strong enough, it will fall to the left progressive bloc to gather all the best mass elements of the working class and its allies and make a new party. ...”This is a direction for laying the basis for a new political party configuration. First, the Democrats have already shifted to the left in major ways, as seen in the nature of the struggle already underway in the lead-up to presidential primaries. Much of what Sanders articulated in 2016 — and was treated as radical at the time — has come to be accepted since.”
All of this is for one purpose, the radical socialist transformation of society. This will be accomplished through a combination of elections, mass actions, the systematic infiltration of the institutions, and the harnessing of racial and ethnic minorities (the rainbow) into a new “progressive” majority—all led by the communist movement.
“Our combination of the ‘war of position’ and the ‘war of movement’ aims for a new transformational upheaval, a radical rupture with the old alliances. It is not likely to be won in one round at the top, even though victories there can be very helpful. We still have what the German socialist Rudi Dutschke described as the long march through the institutions of government and civil society from the local, metro and state levels. Currently, our strong points are in the cities with a robust “rainbow” multinational working class, but they are not enough. We can and will aim for shaping up a new national historic bloc that can take the lead in most, if not all, areas of the country.”We cannot say we haven’t been warned. Pro-Beijing and European communist-aligned socialist forces are infiltrating the Democratic Party on a mass level. State by state and city by city the communists are moving the Democratic Party to the hard left.
If the Democratic Party loses the next election, the communist strategy will be set back years—maybe decades. If the Democrats win, the communist program will go into overdrive—probably past the point of no return.
President Donald Trump has warned us about the dangers of socialism. Donald Trump, Jr., even more explicitly warned us about what this really means—communism.
We all have a big choice to make in the run-up to 2020. We’d better take it seriously—or it may be last meaningful political decision we ever get to make.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
