Socialism in national forms
Can communists be Republicans, or vice versa?
Carlos L. Garrido, in an insightful commentary published in his Substack column “Philosophy in Crisis” on August 1, emphasizes the need to develop in theory and practice a US form of Marxism and socialism. The commentary is a transcript of a speech given at the Subversion Summer Camp in the Bridgeport community of Chicago. The Camp was criticized in a national segment on Fox News, which highlighted the presence of Garrido and the American Communist Party. Garrido is a professor of philosophy, the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. The Midwestern Marx Institute is an American Marxist-Leninist thinktank founded in 2020, which has become the largest Marxist thinktank in the United States, with a following of over half a million and with hundreds of millions of views annually.
Philosopher that he is, Garrido defines commonly used terms and addresses the question of how we arrive to insight or correct understanding. He defines a leftist as someone who is committed to moving the arc of history forward to social justice. And he maintains that most leftists are not reared with a leftist orientation. Rather, they come to the Left through an event that ruptures their everyday assumptions and forces then to think, in order to make sense out of something that has happened, something that appeared to be impossible. Leftists, he maintains, do not evade the significance of the event, as most people do by forcing it back into the rationality of their established worldview. Leftists possess the courage to accept what has happened and to pursue with fidelity the significance of the event, until they arrive at the truth that the event reveals.
Garrido reports that the event in his case was the unanimous recommendation by his Cuban-American extended family that his mother ought to go to Cuba for free surgery, inasmuch as the necessary medical procedure was available in the United States only at a prohibitively expensive price. This recommendation ruptured Garrido’s everyday reality, because these were the very same folks who always were maligning Cuba and socialism as catastrophic, and characterizing the Cuban government as authoritarian.
Garrido was only ten at the time, but the event planted a seed in his developing understanding, which the Bernie Sanders campaign nourished, inasmuch as Sanders explained that profits were central to the healthcare system of the United States, unlike other advanced countries that placed people over profits. When the Sanders campaign failed and revealed that it was not a true political revolution, Garrido ended his alignment with social democratic politics. But he continued with the will to fight for social justice that had been nourished by the Sanders campaign, driving him on a road toward communism.
Garrido here is speaking, of course, of true leftism, and not the toxic and superficial leftism that has emerged during the last decade or two. I would suspect that many of today’s superficial leftists have arrived at their current beliefs through everyday processes of socialization in academic and online environments that are infected by leftist ideological distortions and incivility.
I like Garrido’s emphasis on mind-blowing experiences. In my case, such an event occurred in 1966, when I was twenty years of age. It involved the careful reading of an assigned 100-page book on Vietnam, which explained the colonialist character of US military involvement in Vietnam, debunking the official narrative. This led me to a center for black nationalist studies, which had nothing in common with today’s anti-racist ideology, where I learned a colonial analysis of the world. I was well on my way in my quest for understanding social justice when I arrived in Cuba in 1993, and I discovered to my great surprise that there are elections in Cuba and that the Communist Party does not participate in them. Events in my personal experiences were prompting me to ask questions about the worldwide phenomenon of US and Western imperialism, the structures and functions of colonialism and neocolonialism, and the alternative political process of people’s democracy. Increased understanding emerges from addressing relevant questions that have been discovered in life’s experiences, especially mind-blowing events.
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In the Subversion Summer Camp speech, Garrido presents the key ideas of his recent book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, which describes the obsession of Western Marxists with the need for Marxist organizations that are “pure,” that is, that live up to an abstract ideal of socialism, an ideal that unfortunately is not based in observation of existing socialist projects in nations of the real world, which unavoidably are developing in the context of political and economic contradictions. The idealist obsession with purity leads to simplistic condemnation of States that are constructing socialism, which Garrido identifies as the first of three manifestations of the purity fetish. With unusual insight, Garrido further observed that the abstract ideal fetish is “rooted in an American exceptionalism, since it says that the whole global south has failed at socialism, but we, the virtuous Americans, are the ones that will succeed.”
I recently came across an example of the abstract ideal purity fetish in an article on the London-based website, In Defence of Marxism, which is the organ of the Revolutionary Communist International. I wrote about it in my commentary of June 13, 2025, “Western Marxism against Cuban socialism.”
Garrido rejects the negative attitude of many leftists toward working-class supporters of MAGA, which is the second manifestation of the purity fetish. He maintains that he was able to move beyond caricatures and develop a more accurate understanding of working-class supporters of MAGA, as a result of his having lived in Iowa and Southern Illinois for ten years. He arrived to understand “that some of these people have a righteous anger toward the system—the deep state, as they call it—and a general mistrust of all established institutions.”
Accordingly, the working-class sector of the MAGA movement should be seen as fertile ground for recruitment to socialism. Garrido maintains that the task of socialism is to show the working class that America can be made great again only through socialism. The task is to show that Trump’s rhetoric against endless war in distant lands, against the autonomous bureaucracy known as the deep state, and in support of the revitalization of American industry cannot be realized under Trump or in the system of two-party duopoly. Garrido argues that socialists must work to delink the MAGA working-class sector from Trump.
Although I am in agreement with Garrido’s positive evaluation of the working-class sector of the MAGA movement, I submit that he appears to underestimate the historical significance of Trump. In the Republican presidential primaries of 2016, Trump called the MAGA political movement into being, with a conversational style discourse that improvised on the headlines and that identified the key concerns of the working class and middle America, who already had developed a deep sense of estrangement from mainstream American institutions. Trump marshalled this negative energy, initially toward voting for and supporting one person, which evolved to a phenomenon that includes a MAGA brand of conservative thinktanks and a second Trump administration with a well-defined program that is obtaining the support of the other branches of government.
In said political context, a delinking of Trump from the MAGA movement is impossible to imagine, except for a situation in which the second Trump administration is widely perceived as a failure by its social base. On the other hand, if the MAGA movement is consolidated during the second Trump administration on the basis of a successful implementation of its economic and political project, it would be possible that Trump will retire from the scene while the MAGA movement continues to evolve with strength on the political landscape. In this scenario, the delinking of Trump from the MAGA movement would occur in a natural form.
With awareness of the ultimate delinking of Trump from the MAGA movement in one way or another, new questions emerge. Will the MAGA movement continue to maintain control of the Republican Party? Will the post-Trump Republican Party continue its evolution toward a Party opposed to the premises of the American political establishment from 1948 to 2024? Will it continue to be a Party strongly supported by the industrial working class, small towns, and rural America? If such questions are ultimately answered in the affirmative in practice, then this would imply that the two-party duopoly is being transformed by Trump into a genuine two-party system, with partisans of the people in one party, and lackeys of the corporate elite in the other. If this possibility were to become a reality, then socialists and all those committed to making social justice the arc of history would confront an option between a people’s Republican Party and an alternative political party, with the American Communist Party having much to recommend it.
Garrido’s speech makes a strong concluding statement in defense of a personal decision for the American Communist Party. He maintains that the Party collectively is able to develop an advanced form of American Marxism, necessary for understanding the form of class struggle in the nation; that the Party offers an organized collective of disciplined individuals, turning people away from shallow and hedonistic individualism; and that the Party provides a collective group of support with respect to local union and unionizing activities and service to the people in response to natural disasters and other types of community service.
Of course, the option need not be reduced to an either-or proposition. The Party could form an alliance with a people’s-controlled Republican Party, with clearly defined and politically intelligent strategies.
Check out my book on the MAGA Phenomenon
The need for socialism with a national form
A third manifestation of the purity fetish, Garrido maintains, is “the attitude of condemning your country wholeheartedly because of its past evils.” He cites Georgi Dimitrov, the Hungarian anti-fascist leader of the Communist International, who called the phenomenon “national nihilism.” Dimotrov maintained that socialist content has to be given a national form, by appropriating the concepts and proposals that have been put forth by progressive leaders in national history, seeing them as the foundation for the building of socialism in the nation. He argued that it would be political folly for the socialist movement in the United States to turn against George Washington and the values of the revolution of 1776 or against Abraham Lincoln and the concept of government of, by, and for the people. The correct strategy involves putting forth the argument that socialism is the way to make real the dreams of the American experiment in democracy.
Garrido notes in this vein an irony, which I also have commented upon in previous commentaries. The US Left seeks to erase from the people’s consciousness the progressive elements of the American Revolution, by portraying the nation as having been founded on racist and patriarchal assumptions. On the other hand, the greatest revolutionaries of the Global South, including Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, were inspired by the American Revolution and appropriated its principal concepts.
Consciousness of the need for socialism to take national forms, Garrido maintains, has especially emerged with importance in the neocolonized region of the world, which has confronted various forms of imperialism. The movements in said region emphasize, as they must, national liberation and the achievement of true sovereignty. Therefore, the struggle for the attainment of sovereignty is “one of the central forms of the class struggle in the age of imperialism,” a struggle, I would note, in which formally independent States are the principal actors.
Garrido mentions important examples of socialist projects taking national forms, including Cuba, Bolivia, China, and Venezuela. These socialist projects of the Global South and East are included in the scope of Garrido’s empirical investigations, functioning as the political practice that grounds his theoretical reflections with respect to the necessary characteristics of socialism in the USA.
Garrido, therefore, wants to rewrite American history from a perspective that sees the progressive unfolding of the promise of democracy put forth by the American Revolution, culminating in socialism. His article mentions a number of progressive intellectuals and leaders integral to this project, many of whom are not presently included in our consciousness. Especially important are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who expressed support for a democratic form of socialism in 1966 and 1967; and WEB DuBois, whom Garrido considers to be the father of American Marxism, inasmuch as DuBois viewed the struggle against racism to be the form that the class struggle took in the United States in the period following abolition and Reconstruction. A stage that was ended, I would add, by the great reforms in civil and political rights in 1964 and 1965.
The concept that socialism must take a national form in each nation, forged by the leaders and intellectuals of each nation, is consistent with common-sense and political intelligence. It sets aside dysfunctional abstract assertions that are not based on empirical observations, whether they be assertions for or against socialism. It calls upon those who have decided for socialism in a general sense to develop the form of socialism appropriate for their particular nation.
In identifying the progressive foundations of socialism in the United States, I would emphasize the African-American movement from 1917 to 1972 as well as the women’s movement from 1848 to the 1970s. The black movement stressed full political and civil rights for all and equality of opportunity in education and employment, regardless of race; and it called upon the State to take decisive measures in defense of these rights. The movement proclaimed these principles as the fulfillment of the founding principles of the American Republic; it thus constituted itself as a social movement within the ongoing and evolving American Revolution.
Similarly, the first two waves of the women’s movement emerged as a revolution within the American Revolution. The first wave was initiated with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, which declared the self-evident inalienable rights of men and women, thus basing the movement on the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence. The second wave erupted during the social turmoil of the late 1960s and continued for two decades. Going beyond the legal equality demanded by the first wave, the second wave of the women’s movement envisioned broader social and political equality, including a rethinking of women’s roles in the home and in the workforce.
However, during the 1990s, in the context of the fall of American capitalism into decadence, and the historic failure of the various strains of the Left to attain maturity, both the black and women’s movements lost their way. Black intellectuals and “activists” began to construct non-empirical theoretical concepts like systemic racism and white privilege, which functioned to defend the interests of the black middle class as against the interests of the black proletariat and lumpenproletariat. I have written about this phenomenon in previous posts. See, for example, “Postmodern wokism destroys the foundations: Provoking confusion and division among the people, to the benefit of a few,” September 5. 2023; “The rise and eclipse of black power: The abandonment of the black community by the black middle class,” November 26, 2024; and “The ideology of anti-racism: The negation of black empowerment,” November 29, 2024.
A similar phenomenon occurred with respect to the women’s movement. A third wave emerged in the 1990s, which, among other characteristics, rejected the American Revolution, because of its patriarchal assumptions. It turned to French post-modern assumptions, which led, in the fourth wave that began about 2012, to a separation of “woman” from biology, such that “woman” is no longer a sex, but a gender, and as such, it is a cultural construction, which can be claimed by biological men on a basis of a subjective sense of identification. These notions stood against the philosophical conceptions of the American Revolution as well as various Western philosophical and religious currents of thought, which continued to have resonance among significant numbers of the American people. Thus, beginning in the 1990s, the women’s movement divorced itself from the previous political practice of a revolution within the American Revolution.
These recent tendencies in the principal progressive movements have divided the people and have served the interests of the corporate elite. Therefore, in developing American socialism with national characteristics, we must return to the sources of these progressive movements, appropriating their principles, and formulating a national narrative that discerns the progressive movement of the American Republic, initiated at its founding and progressively moving toward and culminating in socialism.
