It’s the red dawn of a new day.
After a four-decade-long break, the Communist Party USA has picked up the hammer and sickle to resume the glorious struggle of electoral politics — and they’re already seeing success.
Three candidates the CPUSA ran in the Nov. 4 elections this year won; in Maine, Massachusetts, and Upstate New York. That doubles the number of open Communist Party members ever elected to US public office in the Party’s 106-year history.
And, yes, these are your grandfather’s commies.
According to one former CPUSA candidate who spoke to The Post, the Party — founded in 1919 after the Russian Revolution, which brought the first communists to power — is an actual Soviet-sympathizing, China-loving political party which believes a Marxist-Leninist one-party political structure needs to be implemented to achieve the “workers’ paradise.”
“The Communist Party believes that capitalism needs to be replaced fundamentally,” CPUSA co-chair Joe Sims said in an October interview with left wing program “The Daily Show,” calling the economic system which built the modern world and lifted billions from poverty “distasteful.”
He appeared on the show to draw a distinction between his party and now mayor-elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America — letting everyone know who really wears the proletariat pants.
“Socialists believe they can function within the framework of the Democratic Party,” Sims — whose resume includes attending “democratic youth festivals” in 1980s Berlin, Moscow, and Pyongyang — said, referring to Mamdani’s ilk as “reformers” not revolutionaries.
“We don’t believe the Democratic Party can be reformed.”
On Nov. 4 in Bangor, ME CPUSA member Daniel Carson won one of three city council seats up for grabs, while down the coast, Cambridge, Mass. elected Brazilian immigrant Luisa de Paula Santos — identified in Communist Party USA literature as a member — to the school board.
“I think he really flew under the radar,” Maine-based Chuck Ellis, who hosts a podcast about the state’s news and politics, told The Post of Bangor’s new city councilman Carson. “The mainstream media is pointing you to what’s happening in Washington rather than what’s happening in your backyard. These super local races, most people have absolutely no idea about any of the candidates.”
Ellis is not surprised such radical candidates are winning. “In the past, Mainers wanted more independent-minded people,” he said. “To use a biblical passage, there’s this idea of, if you’re lukewarm, God will spit you out of his mouth. And I think that a lot of voters are feeling the same way.”
In Ithaca, New York, Hannah Shvets, 20, was elected to the city’s Common Council. A member of the CPUSA, Shvets campaigned on building “denser” housing, reparations for black people, maintaining a sanctuary city status in Ithaca for illegal immigrants and easing sobriety requirements at homeless shelters.
Ithaca and Cambridge are both college towns. There has been a national resurgence in socialism fueled by young people drawn to aspirational goals like equality or ending oppression, although they don’t fully understand what they’re voting for, according to Benjamin Powell, an economics professor at Texas Tech University.
“Socialism means something to Karl Marx and to economists who have studied [his work]. It means government owning the major factors of production or abolishing private property. But most young people don’t think about socialism like that,” Powell told The Post.
“It’s not accidental that they’re running and winning in local elections because usually you work your way up the chain in politics and they’re breaking in at the lowest level,” said Powell, who wrote the book “Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World.”
“It’s also the case that the socialists and the communists are probably less scary at the local level than at the national level,” he said, adding that about ten percent of the people at socialist conventions he visits are true lovers of despots like Chairman Mao and Josef Stalin.
But even November’s red resurrection has been a sneaky operation by design. In April 2021 the CPUSA announced it would restart candidate fielding operations with a strategy to target non-partisan local elections — those where candidates are listed on the ballot without party labels.
This was the case in Maine, Upstate New York, and Massachusetts, so voters potentially don’t realize they’re supporting a member of the Communist Party.
“We really can’t be a political party if we don’t run candidates,” Party co-chair Joe Sims said at the time.
That year, 29-year-old US Army vet Steven Estrada became the first candidate since 1984 to run openly as a CPUSA member when he vied for a seat on Long Beach, CA city council. He wasn’t elected and came in third place.
Previously CPUSA members tended to run as Democrats or Independents.
“I support China,” Estrada told The Post. “I think in the general sense, they are a progressive force in the world.”
By contrast, Mamdani’s DSA, Estrada says, is a “big tent organization” where “hardcore Marxist-Leninists,” “anarchists” and other far-lefties can hob knob and plot how to inject radical hoopla into the existing political structure — and not a political party in its own right.
The DSA is more “general ideas and principles,” said Estrada.
“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (UUSR) was this grand experiment applying the general ideological principles of Marxism in its first political project. And I think it did a lot of good things,” Estrada added,saying he feels China is the “next step in the evolution” of Marxism and Leninism following the “dark times” after the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991.
“The official line on China is that [the CPUSA] is friendly towards China and the Chinese Communist Party,” he continued, noting it’s a sticky position as the Party attempts to recruit members and most Americans look at China with suspicion.
One thing the recent Bolshevik bidders all share is the slick look of their campaign materials — with this year’s crop of commies taking a cue from Mamdani and DSA-backed New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez by featuring bold, high-contrast colors; bold fonts and upward tilts in their branding.
The CPUSA leadership structure modernized in 2000 and today it has a co-chair leadership structure, shared by Sims and Rossana Cambron.
Neither Sims nor Cambron responded to multiple requests for interviews from The Post. Shvets, Santos, and Carson also did not respond to repeated requests for interviews.
Estrada, who still identifies as a Marxist-Leninist communist, said he recently left the CPUSA precisely because they were too friendly to Democrats.
Surprisingly, Estrada also said he was fed up with all the anti-Trump venom coming from the party, telling The Post that he believes the Make America Great Again political movement is the workers’ will and ought to be respected.
“I think MAGA is one of the sole populist and authentic political movements here in the country,” Estrada said, adding he now aligns with another communist offshoot that believes “MAGA represents the true underlying political will of the working class.”
He also thinks communists should learn from Trump, instead of swiping at him.
“The forces that really propelled MAGA are fueled fundamentally by regular working class people who want to see their interests in Washington, DC,” he said.
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