this started as a comment that got way to long

At present it is often difficult for the British Communists even to approach the masses, even to make themselves heard. But if I address the masses as a Communist, and invite them to vote for Henderson against Lloyd George, I most certainly will be listened to. And, being listened to, I shall be able to popularize the idea, not only that Soviets are better than Parliaments, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the dictatorship of Churchill (disguised under the name of bourgeois “democracy”), but also that I am prepared to support Henderson by my vote in just the same way as a rope supports the man who has hanged himself. ​And, as the Hendersons draw nearer to the formation of their own government, it will be proved that I am right, it will draw the masses to my side and will facilitate the political death of the Hendersons and Snowdens, as happened in the case of their co-thinkers in Russia and in Germany.

The thing I want to point out about this quote, and why I like it so much, is that Lenin is talking to other communists here. He’s explicitly saying that, as an out and about communist, he could go to England and support Arthur Henderson, who was at the time a leader of the British Labour Party. He was telling communists in England that they should support Labour candidates so that their inevitable failure to deliver real change would expose the party’s true nature.

That is what a working class party does, and what it is capable of because it lives outside what is possible within liberal parties. This is, I think, the missing piece that Hasan seems to gloss over in his application of Lenin’s ideas to the American context. I think in order to make my point, though, I need to quote the man himself, because it’s not enough to say what I believe he thinks; we have to actually look at what he says.

So, what is Hasan’s actual position? In an AP interview, he is quoted as saying, “There is definitely, I think, a battle right now for who gets to be more representative of the national Democratic Party.” He continues, “The super wealthy are picking apart the scraps of the American carcass like a bunch of vultures, and some of the Democrats are talking about their affiliations with a Twitch streamer. I think Americans understand that this is totally ridiculous.” He describes himself as a “megaphone” for an angry electorate. He also believes that he is the sacrificial effigy for a more progressive, young wing of the Democratic Party: “I think they find me to be a more appropriate target than to just actively disparage the voters.”

He is a self-admitted reformist. I don’t think this is news to anyone here, and it shouldn’t be. It’s also clear that he is aware that his level of influence has manifested in Democratic entryism.

From Slate:

“Do I think that there are people that have basically grown up watching me and then got into politics and started getting lower-level campaign positions? Absolutely. Will they be chewed up and spit out by the machine or become the same feckless institutionalists later down the line when they actually do get some semblance of power? Possibly. That’s the reason I want to grow my community, so we can force the Democrats to do the right thing.”

Here is basically a full admission that what he is doing has nothing to do with the words of Lenin. At no point is Lenin telling British communists that they need to force Labour to do the right thing. Lenin is explicitly saying you should support Labour (the analogue of the Democrats), so that you can point to their governance failures as evidence that your position as a communist is correct.

In this Slate piece, he has lots to say about the Democratic Party and his relationship with them.

“I’m not changing. That’s the thing. I’m not above admitting when politicians do good things, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be a Democratic Party operative. That’s just not how I operate. Some people play catch-up with the Democratic Party and defend everything the Democrats do on principle, because they see that as a way to improve their social status. They’re just careerists. But I have a real political opinion, a real way I see the world. And I genuinely believe that it improves the living standards of everyday Americans. I think that’s not only good policy but also good politics.”

I think this is a true statement, and not just a line he’s feeding. Except, the problem is that once you are inside the Democratic Party, there is a whole new line and it doesn’t matter what your line was. You enter into a system built to maintain a party line (and the Democrats and Republicans all have a party line, make no mistake), and then you’ll be “chewed up and spit out by the machine or become the same feckless institutionalists later down the line when they actually do get some semblance of power.”

But again, he is a reformist: “If a day comes where I’m side by side with the Democratic Party, that means the Democratic Party has changed its ways.”

Maybe he doesn’t believe he is a reformist, but all I can do is read his words. The thing that I think is interesting, though, is that he’s not a reformist in words. It’s his actions that signal his reformist tendencies. I think this might be an extension of the same misinterpretation of Lenin. Hasan believes that because there is no “workers party” in America, “meeting people where they are” means Democratic Party infiltration. We like to talk about him reading Lenin, and I wanted to quote him again so we can see his words directly:

“In the absence of an established viable working-class alternative third party, you have to work within the confines. You have to work within the existing platform that is afforded to you. And it’s very obvious that in this moment of weakness within the Democratic party, which is a bourgeois party, it is a center-right party that is a liberal party. Clearly, there is an opportunity there, an opportunity to seize…”

When Lenin is talking about the Duma, and using that as the example for what the British Communists should do, he is not saying “You British Communists do not have a workers party, so you have to hitch your wagon to Labour.” He is not saying that at all. What he is saying is that you should support the progressive wings of the electoral system available to you, so that you can then use their failures to advance your party’s position. The thing about the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks is that they were, from the start, a Marxist party. Their eventual participation in the Duma was not born from repression; it was a response to new political openings won by the 1905 revolution. The Tsar, under pressure, was forced to grant limited liberties and a legislative assembly. The Bolsheviks initially boycotted the First Duma, seeing it as a rigged concession. They reversed course only when the political situation made it tactically advantageous to use the Duma as a tribune for agitation. But in every case, they entered that arena as an already existing party, not as a loose network of activists hoping to pull the institution left. In Russia at the time, they did not have political freedoms in the same way the British communists did when he wrote Left-Wing Communism, just as we in America do today.

This is explicitly counter to the conditions here in the states. We have a “free press” in the sense that anyone, any group of people, is free to develop a collective output of work critical of the state. There are limits to this critique, no doubt, and historically, the level of critique has had dire consequences. In Tsarist Russia, your publication had to be approved by the state, and everything you published had to pass through direct Tsarist censors. We joke that Lenin today would be a poster, but the contrast is actually much more profound. In Tsarist Russia, the absence of political freedom meant he could not hold a public meeting, form a legal union, run a candidate for office, or publish a newspaper without police infiltration. Every basic function of building a mass party was criminalized. Today, a communist in America can do all of these things openly. The conditions are not just different from Tsarist Russia; they are its mirror opposite. Today, it’s more of a socialized enforcement of censorship, and frankly, I think that is only really true online.

Hasan seems to be aware of this when talking about Left-Wing Communism:

“I’m not running around being like Lenin would want you to vote for the Democratic party. I’m not saying that at all. That is a bastardization of my fucking approach. I’m saying that if you want to unlock class consciousness amongst the American working class, okay? You have to at least put socialism on the fucking board.”

I find this to be interesting, because, even in Lenin’s time, to be a “Social Democrat” in Tsarist Russia meant, by definition, to be a criminal. It was a state where there was no right of assembly, press, or association. Any worker circle, any party meeting, any leaflet was a criminal offense. The Okhrana (secret police) and gendarmes were omnipresent. This was not a neutral enforcement of law but a state apparatus actively designed to crush, not regulate, socialist activity. The very existence of the “underground” and its culture of konspiratsiia (the fine art of not getting arrested) was a response to a state that had already pre-labeled all party members as dangerous subversives. Socialism was never on the board in Tsarist Russia either. Hasan’s ideas seem to stem more from what has taken shape in the Republican Party than from that of Lenin, in my opinion:

“What Trump has done in the fascist direction for the Republican party must be done in the socialist direction within the Democratic party. It’s a lot harder of a bargain, but we’re not even moving in that direction at all.”

This, I think, exposes something within Hasan’s understanding of the political landscape. It imagines that there was a time when there were “respectable” Republicans, that somehow they’ve become more unhinged than they used to be, and that this was a result of internal transformation of the party. Except, we know that this isn’t true; this is just the falling of the mask of humanity and the revealing of capital’s true face. These currents have been inside the Republican party for a very long time, and there hasn’t been a moment in its history where it wasn’t a racist, genocidal, killing machine. We know that the Democrats are the carrot to the Republican’s stick, and that they are tied at the waist: where one moves to the right, so does the other.

Why should we infiltrate a party that has such a long history of bloodthirst, when you can instead exist outside of it and not need to expose yourself to their influence? Again, I think there is a clear misunderstanding of the lessons of Lenin, but also of the conditions under which he struggled. What Hasan believes is that the social consciousness of the masses of Americans is not capable of hearing from a communist about what is possible.

“Yes, because we don’t have a parliamentary structure. We don’t have a viable working third party. So, I’m using the tools that are readily available. That’s why I stress the importance of analyzing the existing material conditions as opposed to fantasizing about an alternative one.”

Because of this, he believes that not just electoralism, but actually the Democratic Party, is the gateway to their minds.

So when it comes to electoralism, we have to remember that Lenin’s support for it comes off the back of the 1905 revolution. Under pressure from that action, however, the Tsar allowed for the Duma, bringing new political freedoms to Russia that didn’t exist before then. Even at the time, internally, there was lots of debate about participating. Lenin’s support for engagement with electoralism came after the first Duma was dissolved; initially he supported a boycott. The Duma brought new conditions to the fold, ones that allowed the party more direct contact with workers, so they could agitate openly for an end to the war, land to the peasants, and bread for the starving cities, something they were not able to do as effectively under the boycott.

In America, we already have a robust electoral system; the conditions are practically the opposite of those faced by Lenin. This is why his advice in Left-Wing Communism is what it is. He is working from a framework where the conditions are flipped. By 1920, when Lenin was writing, the British Communists were operating in an environment that was everything Tsarist Russia was not. They had full political freedom: a free press, the right to assemble, the right to form trade unions, and, crucially, a genuine parliamentary system where a mass workers’ party, the Labour Party, already contested elections and could form a government.

In this new context, the task was no longer to win the basic liberties to build a party, as it had been in Russia. The task was to use those existing liberties to tear the mass of workers away from reformist leaders and win them to the Communist pole. Hasan is right, however, in the sense that there isn’t a current socialist or communist pole in America, but that is also exactly where his strategy and his misunderstanding of Lenin shines in the light of day.

Because when Lenin was advocating for participation in the Duma, he was a member and leader of a Marxist revolutionary political party and movement that nearly succeeded in its goals. It needed to maintain its momentum and build mass support through the Duma and its failures, the same kind of tactical engagement with a bourgeois institution that Lenin would later recommend to the British Communists. When the February 1917 revolution overthrew the Tsar and created the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks were an independent pole with a program. ‘Peace, Land, and Bread’ was the cry that the masses could rally around. The October Revolution was carried out by the organized power of the Soviets, with the Bolshevik majority acting on a revolutionary mandate that had been built over years through every available platform, including the Duma.

And when Lenin was advocating for the Communist Party of Great Britain to utilize the Labour ballot, he was doing so because Communists had ready access to political freedoms that put them in front of the masses. This is, I think, where Hasan gets his idea from specifically. Because it is true, from what I can understand, that Lenin was advocating for supporting Labour candidates while denouncing their leaders as traitors. It gave you an audience with workers who still trusted those leaders.

The difference, however, is that the goal isn’t to build the Labour Party, but to peel off workers into the CPGB by allowing the workers to “be able to convince themselves on the basis of their own experience of the correctness of the communist views.” When Henderson, in Lenin’s view, inevitably fails the workers, when his government defends capitalism, attacks strikes, and remains loyal to the British Empire, then it leaves the Communists having not compromised themselves. They have been there, in the fight, pointing out the betrayal in real time. The Labour Party then becomes the architect of its own political death.

When I hear of Marxist-Leninists working on campaigns for people like Mamdani, I see the core problem: there is no unified Communist pole to act as a lightning rod. Right now, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party positions itself as that rod, but its function is to draw the energy of working-class anger and safely channel it into the earth, dissipating it before it can strike anything. A genuine Communist pole would be a lightning rod built to direct that same energy toward a target: the overthrow of the system itself.

If we want to stop that from happening, it’s not enough to build up the “left flank” of the Democratic Party. We need to be building a true workers party, one that, at first, might not win elections but can use the electoral process as a vehicle for bringing their message to the masses. We do not even have that yet, which puts me into agreement with Hasan on what the conditions are. The reality, however, is that a workers party must exist prior to this kind of engagement in electoralism. The PSL currently is the only party I can see that has the potential to be that vehicle, one that can be the “rope” that ultimately supports the “hanged man” that is capitalism.