It’s dire, and I don’t have a ready-made solution beyond “just make your own party comrade ez”. It’s not that ez.

Most western parties are completely ossified, existing only to justify their existence (a paradox) and capture well-meaning, engaged comrades into perpetual ineffectual tailism.

As some EU/US parties are now celebrating their 75th or even 100th anniversary, we are reminded that they have achieved absolutely nothing in those 100 years, so what’s there to celebrate? When someone pointed that out to me, it suddenly got the gears turning in my head and all made sense.

EU (broadly european, not European Union) parties have basically all turned to eurocommunism after 1991. They became heavily dependent on soviet funding in the 20th century and when the funds dried up, they had nothing left to show for it. When you look at the history of these parties, you can see the eurocommunism though already back in the 20th century. CPUSA particularly is just one mistake after another throughout the 20th century, the chauvinism in hindsight is plainly there and nothing has improved in that party. I’m singling out CPUSA because I know its history very well, but this is a story that repeats across tons of parties.

This is a mistake China is thankfully not committing. They correctly consider it’s not their responsibility to take over the revolution for other countries.

The situation we are in today, in the west, is that we have ossified parties who only exist to collect dues and justify their existence. What I mean by ossified is they have become ineffectual, going through the formal motions to elect more ineffectual leaders one after the other. They’re fossils, basically. Rigid, unable to move even if they wanted to. They just kinda exist there to point at. One thing that demonstrates this nature is that most western parties exist as mass parties when they should be having cadre parties. They are far too marginal (again, most of them), to be thinking about making a mass party at this stage.

When I point this out people generally tend to agree, but are quick to point at the youth wings as being much more radical. Yes, they are. But it doesn’t matter. They’ll get captured into the machine anyway. Either the party will beat the revolutionary spirit out of you and you’ll fold to their formalism, or you’ll leave it. We’re not the first youth generation to be radical, you know. I’m sure students in the 60s were also hopeful they could correct the krushchevist trajectory or whatever of their respective parties - they didn’t. We’re not the first kids to try and redress the party line.

When joining a party, or looking at your party, ask yourself: what are they actually doing? I was having a discussion about the CPCanada the other day, started on their decolonial line (it’s absolutely terrible, they think Quebec is a nation and have some sort of weird reverence for what is, without question, just colonialism but French instead of English). Eventually the defense turned to “but they have members in parliament!” Yeah, and so do liberal parties. “But we go to protests”, yes, and so do liberal parties. They even organize some of these protests. “But if we went too far we would get censored!” Good?? Use it?? How are you a communist and afraid of getting censored, not even jailed, unless as a party you only existed to collect dues and money to feed the central committee with.

The person I was talking to, though my point is not to name and shame, was likely a baby communist and perhaps reading these lines above you might also think their arguments were poor while finding different arguments in favor of the CPCanada. But I believe that these arguments were fed to them by the party, because they tried to join it and so likely got the spiel about how cool the party is. At least that’s what I choose to believe.

Or they love to say “we get fraternal greetings from AES countries!” Yes, fucking everyone does. Holy shit. I hear that one so much, it’s not a fucking endorsement and stop trying to make it sound like it is. This is a legacy of the comintern, every fucking party that existed in the first half of the 20th century gets these greetings. You’re not special. CPUSA is a huge proponent of that one as if it somehow erases all their other failures (their cute podcast where they’re all smiles reading from a script lmao). You’re not the fucking Communist Party of China, don’t pretend like you two are on the same level. And this goes for any western party.

All of the above applies to “my” party by the way. I put it between quotes because I was part of its youth wing and still retain some contact, but eventually just kinda fell out naturally. I think the turning point for me was realizing the people I looked up to in there were basically eurocommunists who knew nothing out of their very specific bubble. Lots of callbacks to Rosa Luxembourg (and specifically Rosa for some reason, though I have to say they also liked Lenin), but very little in action aside from electoralism and more electoralism.

You need to actually lead some struggles. A point of pride for them was that we knew how to organize better than the other socialist youth wings. Yes, that’s great. And it’s true. But what do we do with that? If you just attach your name to a campaign along with the other socialist parties people are just gonna see the other parties because they’re “safer”.

Basically if nothing separates you from socdems you’re doing something wrong

And I can’t believe I have to explain that to some communists. People will go to the 🌹 party if you give them a choice between socdem-but-we-like-lenin and socdem-but-we-like-flowers. you need to offer something different, and electoralism is not it. But it’s safe. And then you capture young engaged communists, use their labor for your electoral campaigns so you don’t have to pay money for it, and the cycle continues. It looks good on paper and 100 years later you pat yourself on the back for having failed at doing any revolution. A party doesn’t get my involvement on virtue of calling itself a communist party. It needs to earn me. It needs to earn you.

you know what I participated in in my years with “my” party? Went to marches not organized by the party. Put electoral pamphlets in envelopes or something, idr. Designed their 201X program on the computer. That’s about it. Everything I hear them talking about is where to put the fucking electoral posters with the fucking greens and social fascists so that we can get two fucking candidates elected into a useless parliament. couldn’t organize themselves out of a paper bag. you may laugh, but this is common across most european “communist” parties. And that’s just what you see on the surface. Beneath that they have ENDLESS debates about whether China is socialist or what to say about the war in Ukraine. Apparently that one almost caused a split. That should never happen, jesus. A split happens because of organizational differences, not because one side thinks Russia is imperialist and the other thinks it’s Ukraine that’s imperialist. You have to think about what led to such a situation in the first place.

I offered to run a seminar/course/talk/just-ten-fucking-minutes-please-that’s-all-I-ask-for about modern China and the CPC, because this party doesn’t do any education, they take you as you are and then you’re kinda just left to your own devices. They told me I should go to the whatever meetings first for whatever reason. They have no interest in educating each other. This is what goes on beneath the surface, the kind of stuff you only realize once it’s too late, once you’re embedded into the structure and become part of the pillar to the throne of eurocommunism.

But, please, don’t think this is just my own experience talking. The criticism is there. It’s plain to see. All these parties fell into the same pit traps.

But what can you do instead? Start your own party? In the age of resurgent fascism and a climate apocalypse it seems too little too late. A party is not “started”, it emerges. You start with a study group, gathering regulars, and then branch into doing agitation work. Later this formalizes into a party once you have something to show for it. You don’t start a party, like maoists do, with five of your friends and then fizzle out after a year until somebody else picks the same name by pure coincidence.

The Global South would be right to laugh at our “communism”. We are scared of self-criticism because it would only highlight how ineffectual we are at building communism in the west. The only two parties I can think of in the west that are doing something is KKE (but terrible line otherwise so I doubt their praxis will get them far past the current contradictions) and PTB in Belgium, which I know we have comrades in, and I’m sure they have their issues as well but I couldn’t point to them directly without knowing more about how the party works, I’d just be talking bullshit until I can back it up.

That’s all. 44 countries in Europe, 2 huge countries in North America, Japan (if you count it as the West), Occupied Australia, Occupied New Zealand, and these are the two parties that get a tentative thumbs up.

We have our own issues in Europe – namely eurocommunism as explained, but some countries like France or the UK also still have colonies and their parties also refuse to look at the question – and American parties also have their own, namely relating to their settler-colonial status. Basically all parties I’m aware of in North America refuse to recognize this status, I guess because it would force them to contend with their own settler status and trying to organize communism for, ultimately, the benefit of a non-indigenous state. So they come up with weird fetishization of Quebec identity (lmao) or outright offer lukewarm “solutions” to the Indigenous nations without even consulting them, “promising” representation and other stuff that the colonizer has promised them before and failed to deliver, and then they wonder why Indigenous people don’t want to organize with them. It’s like the “”“Communist party of “Israel””“”. It’s nonsense.