In July 2024 the American Communist Party (ACP) was formed. It is unique in that it is a party led by online streamers who believe that the vanguard of the US working class is located among Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) Coalition. They are also unique among communists in that they believe that the primary enemy of working people is not the capitalist class but rather leftists. Their activity mostly consists of online aggression against those who they perceive to be leftists and they aim to dominate the social media space and win the information war, which for them would constitute the victory of American Communism over the hearts and minds of the people in the United States. How did this party come to be? What lessons does it hold? This article is an attempt to answer these questions.

The ACP praxis of engaging almost exclusively in social media activity fits in well with the essence of Schmitt’s theory of the Partisan, which is the Friend-Enemy distinction, as social media platforms are designed to create in and out groups. The Friend-Enemy distinction was utilized by the Nazis to justify their exclusionary policies. Schmitt used it to justify the burnings of books by Jewish authors and the purging of Jews, communists, and other undesirables in general from German society. This further morphed into decisionism, as the ultimate “Friend” was the supposed political party of the German People, the Nazis, thus the leaders of the Nazis had ultimate authority in deciding who are the friends and who are the enemies.

The ACP is not a Nazi party nor do its members carry that level of ruthlessness, but philosophically it bases its political practice on ideas that are fundamental to Nazism. To the ACP, the “friend” is the MAGA Coalition and itself, and the “enemy” are “Leftists.” Leftists are never defined by the ACP in concrete objective terms but rather by a broad subjectivity which makes the label applicable to anyone deemed an enemy by the party leaders.

Thus all of the people in organizations like the DSA, PSL non-profits, environmental groups, and broad groups of identities such as LGBTQ people, etc can be blindly labeled as the enemy, stripped of their sensuousness and their humanity. I have been around all of these sorts of people and on the ground the reality is that most leftists are people rooted in their soil and drawn from the working and middle classes. Most of these people are devoting their activism on top of paying their bills and struggling to get by. How destructive is a worldview which labels teachers, students, nurses, etc as enemies?

However, this kind of friend-enemy distinction is not limited to the ACP but can be observed in almost all political organizations in the US to various degrees.

The friend-enemy distinction is a foundational political philosophy of the ACP which exists alongside their acceptance of LaRouche’s “American System” and the fundamental premises of Benoist/Dugin’s core ideas.

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