Depends on the Communist Party, but most work for current reforms and work with activist groups on the ground.
Other times, they may field their own candidates or they may endorse lower-ranking or leftist candidates, since they are political parties, and it generally behooves them to participate in elections of some sort.
Often times, you’ll find Communist Party members in the labor movement, depending on the Communist Party and their history.
Mutual aid may also be done.
One of the main objects is to accrue goodwill in order to develop the struggle in a positive direction and to a higher level and to create “dual power,” forming the ground for an eventual revolution of some sort, whether that be democratic or then socialist.
I’m talking about mainly SolidNet parties, btw.
SolidNet parties
They also make lofty proclamations and congratulate one another on another year of existence.
From time to time.
Communist parties do not “await” revolution. When you only wait for revolution, you will keep doing that forever. Communist parties work towards forcing a revolution (to the best of their abilities), by bringing about the conditions under which revolutions are successful, and this means organising, building a public presence, teaching theory, and supporting the actions of the revolutionary element of society, such as unionised labour, student groups, and the proletariat in industry and service economy.
They also protest against the police state and the war machine, engage in antifascist activism, and try mitigating the most immediate environmental and psychological effects of capitalism while they are unfolding.
and try mitigating the most immediate environmental and psychological effects of capitalism while they are unfolding
Won’t doing this make people feel that there is nothing wrong with the system and prevent them from getting fed up enough to engage in revolution? I mean reforms are meant to destroy revolutionary spirit by keeping workers complacent, right?
This is an age-old debate (see Luxembourg’s “reform or revolution”).
The Marxist-Leninist line holds that protecting or enhancing the material conditions of the proletariat before the revolution can both increase the number of prospective party-members or militants (i.e. you can’t organise rallies if you’re starving) and gain the confidence of the working class by representing their immediate interests (i.e. protecting workers rights) unlike bourgeois parties.
Smaller more tangible reform fights are also ripe ground for recruitment of militants, as inexperienced comrades can get a lot of first hand experience organising for, for example, solutions for food security (Black Panther Party’s free breakfasts).
However those reforms are means to an end, and that end is revolution. So reforms should not be a one-and-done thing (see the UK’s NHS) but rather a front in heightening class war and highlighting capital as the enemy and their resistance to reform as evidence. I once saw a comment in another Lemmy instance that said something like “we tried to implement public healthcare, but capital resisted too hard so there’s no hope”. That is due to social-democrat and reformist monopoly over the discourse about public healthcare, which needs to be challenged by communists.
The term “class war” is not hyperbole. In a war, you should settle only for defeating your opponent, hopefully forcing them to capitulate or maybe even eradicating them. You don’t take your single victory in a battlefield and pack your bags to go home, that’s the reformist line represented by Jeremy Corbyn and in a more aesthetic sense, Bernie Sanders. But you also don’t wait while your enemy marches into your territory hoping that their cruelty will materialise an uprising to defeat your opponent in a single blow, that is the spontaneists line held by every other Trotskyist splinter party or academicist communists.
What is academicist communists?
There’s plenty of destruction going on by the machine of capital. It’s not likely to be stopped whole cloth by a revolutionary organization without the power of a state.
No.
The opposite will demoralize them.
Accelerationism never works.
What are the most competent parties that you know of outside AES States in the organising, building, teaching and supporting? I’m trying to find more reading on the subject
Maybe this is a semantic thing, but communist parties actually don’t force revolutions. A revolutionary situation from capitalist crisis must occur for that to happen. This is clarified by Lenin. Trying to force a revolution before a truly revolutionary situation is an error ultra-left parties and orgs do and it ends up alienating them from the masses.
(Good) communist parties aren’t passive though; they build revolutionary consciousness, provide alternative systems for addressing people’s needs, and form networks with other organizations and unions and ultimately win over as much as the working masses and their allies that they can, so that when a revolutionary situation occurs the people have a party to turn towards. Communists don’t wait; they organize and prepare.
Knit, mostly.
