Carlos Garrido is a Cuban-American philosopher who serves as one of the directors of the Midwestern Marx Institute and as one of the executives of the American Communist Party. In his role at the American Communist Party, he oversees the party’s education program. Recently, he joined me for a discussion regarding the party.
Grant Klusmann: Before realizing you are a communist, what political activities were you involved in?
Carlos Garrido: That is an excellent question. I became politicized with the Bernie Sanders movement in 2016. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of myself necessarily as a Marxist. Still, I was thinking of myself as some form of socialist. I wasn't thinking of myself as a Marxist, mainly because I hadn’t read any Marxist literature until then, not out of dismissal of the tradition, but just out of sheer ignorance. I come from a sports background, and my first book read was in my second year of undergraduate school or something like that. So, I was with the Sanders campaign for about a year, maybe less, until I went into college. Because I was committed to becoming a lawyer then, I was told that philosophy would be the best route to getting good LSAT scores. So, I jumped into philosophy and quickly fell in love with it. I wasn’t really big into school and hated every class I had until my first philosophy class in university. I had no interest in learning, since it seemed like what passed as learning was simply memorizing dead facts. But then in my first philosophy class I was asked a question that forced me to think for the first time, creatively and openly. And the metaphor I've always used is that it produced in my mind what I would feel at the gym when I had a pump. So, I loved that feeling and had the good fortune that my first philosophy professor was a Marxist at my school. My counselor was a Marxist, and all my other political science, sociology, and philosophy professors were Marxists. Some were more based than others, as the kids might say. But they were all involved in things like the local DSA, which surprisingly didn’t exhibit as many flaws as we would see with the more woke chapters of the DSA. We had quite a few workers there, which was the atmosphere that developed. But before that, I was a democratic socialist for about six months to a year.
Grant Klusmann: When did you first come into contact with the other members of the American Communist Party who currently sit on the executive board?
Carlos Garrido: I met Eddie in undergraduate school when we were organizing for the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Democratic primaries in Iowa. We saw how the Democratic establishment had cheated Bernie just like they had in 2016. That led us to the understanding that you couldn’t do anything to advance socialism within the Democratic Party. In addition, we watched the 2019 Socialism Conference, where I saw some of the flaws of the “left” I would eventually develop a critique of in my book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism. There was a panel, for instance, where the speakers were condemning socialist countries like Cuba and Nicaragua as authoritarian. How could these people who call themselves socialists have these views on actually existing socialist states? How could they end up accepting that everyone has failed in socialism while believing we, the virtuous Americans, are the first ones who are going to make it happen? Within a few days of that conference, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton, two names you don't usually hear together anymore, published an article about how this series of individuals were taking money from the National Endowment for Democracy. I noticed there was a deep crisis as far as the U.S. left’s relationship with existing socialist states. I had also started seeing a crisis in terms of how people analyze the national trajectory of the U.S. I was seeing in the more cosmopolitan parts of the U.S. the people who call themselves leftists and people in other organizations that I had already aligned a little bit more with ideologically because of their self-proclamation as Marxist-Leninists, which I considered myself already at the time, would burn the American flag and advocate for the abolition of America. I felt this was very foolish. The story of America as an embryonic civilizational project is a lot more complex than just the evils that the leftists reduce it to. Because if we’re real dialectical thinkers, which means frankly if we are Marxists, we have to understand that wherever there is intense oppression and things like genocide or enslavement, there’s going to be resistance to that. Where there’s one pole, you'll usually find the other pole by necessity. America is defined by that tension between the people who have struggled against imperialism, slavery, and for workers, and those that fought to sustain the dictatorship of capital. At the beginning of my political journey, when I saw the left rejecting American history fiercely, I just understood that as a form of liberal tainted American exceptionalism because I was aware of enough of the history of socialism to understand that, for instance, in my country of birth, Cuba, it had to be extremely patriotic to win. And I was familiar enough with the Russian and Chinese Revolutions to understand that that’s what they did, too. I also started studying Pan-Africanism and African colonial struggles, and I understood that that’s what they did, too. Socialism had to have a national form, and we can’t just somehow remove ourselves from that duty. The other major critique I had of the left was their approach to Trump country, which was evident in the Bernie campaign and in general, as well as with socialists and some of the so-called communist organizations. In the old party, they treated the MAGA base as a basket of deplorables. As someone who is living in MAGA country, I could tell that what they were saying about MAGA country and what I was experiencing in my interactions with them were two completely different things. The working-class identified with Trump because of his more anti-establishment positions, which reflect what they want, to overturn the existing state of affairs and push history forward. If a base of people is organized against the system, that is a very positive foundation to build on. And we did so by building an organization that was a part of the working class. And so, we saw the left’s rejection of them without engaging with them as the left shooting itself in the foot. They’re preventing what’s left of the industrial base of America from being organized in a socialist matter. And for what? It was for this dumb purity fetish that says that they have to live up to these pure, socially enlightened positions. So, based on these central critiques, which I will formulate as manifestations of the purity fetish worldview, that one would only support or work with things that measure up to the level of these pure ideals that one would have in their head, Eddie and I started the Midwestern Marx Institute initially as just a blog. Still, it became more popular with Eddie’s TikTok posts. We grew within the first year to almost half a million followers. That instilled a responsibility to move beyond just being a blog. We developed into a proper Institute, with YouTube shows, a website, an academic journal, Marxism School classes, and a strong presence on social media. Within the first year and a half, we brought in Noah. We encountered Infrared a couple of years ago. I was initially hesitant to work with them. I found them entertaining, but I didn't find them serious enough. A couple years before we found Infrared we had got some good advice from more experienced people who told us to professionalize and be more serious. While we thought that the ideas they were developing were very helpful in critiquing the left and understanding the U.S. (some of which were quite similar to us and developed independently), we were hesitant because of this framework of professionalization we had embarked on. It wasn't until Haz went to Russia and professionalized more that we began discussing working together. We realized how much we had in common. With the 32nd CPUSA National Convention, we realized we had to pull our forces together if we wanted the change that needed to happen. We met Jackson a couple of years before Haz, and Chris Helali about half a year before the party’s launch. Jackson’s work is perhaps one of the most important developments in American Communist history. He, almost single handedly, brought communist to the mainstream in a positive light. This is huge and unprecedented. And Chris, while he didn’t have a social media presence, we saw him as a very impressive individual, someone who is committed to excellence in their work. I think he has a couple of degrees from Ivy League schools. One of them is from China. He speaks multiple languages, and he’s traveled to, like, every country on the planet. He’s been responsible for leading men into battle against ISIS, and now he's elected as high bailiff of his county.
Grant Klusmann: When was the decision to form a new communist party?
Carlos Garrido: The initial plan was to democratically exert our influence over the old CPUSA. But we thought in the back of our heads that if their leadership wouldn’t follow the procedures of democratic centralism, then we need to have a plan B at some point. While the MWM Institute had plans for a new party if our strategy within the CPUSA was curtailed by the corrupt leadership, it was Infrared’s Tekiya strategy that was central to the reconstitution of the CPUSA as the American Communist Party, something us at the MWM Institute helped through our weight behind during the 32nd National Convention. We enacted this when we combined our efforts after what we expected would happen at the 32nd CPUSA National Convention occurred, in which the old party disregarded the practice of democratic centralism.
Grant Klusmann: How has the party managed to form such a unified movement consisting of many people from ideological backgrounds ranging from leftist to conservative?
Carlos Garrido: That's a great question! We're open to anyone of any background who wants to join us. We have people from far-right backgrounds who have reformed and become communists. We have people who left the so-called left spaces where they will try to cancel you if you do not hold views that are in perfect alignment with their own. With this, we are united, not necessarily by ideology alone (except an elementary basic acceptance of Marxism-Leninism), but by acknowledging the principal contradictions of our time and recognizing the primacy of results - of proving the correctness of ML theory in practice... In addition, we look to recruit members who are upstanding people in their communities and workplaces.
Grant Klusmann: Where do you see the American Communist Party in the future?
Carlos Garrido: We will continue integrating ourselves into our communities by serving their needs, thus demonstrating what communists are really about. Online, we will continue to expand our position in the existing American discourse. Economically, we will develop our strategy, enumerated by Noah in the first party convention, of “build your business, build your party.” And politically, we will continue to try to translate the former work into real political victories at the local level…
Grant Klusmann: If one thing is sure, the American people have become fatigued by the illusion of choice offered by the two-party duopoly. It will be interesting to witness the impact that the American Communist Party will have on American politics. Thank you for joining me today.
Carlos Garrido: Thank you too, Grant.
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