The empire produces its vile miasma as a result of its normal operations, and when left to simmer in the heat, this toxic waste congeals into a form of life of its own: today, this form of life is the ACP, or American Communist Party.

I recently wrote an essay on Vietnam’s liberation struggle and how they built a revolutionary movement to fight, for decades, against the French, the Japanese, the French again, and the US G.Is.

There are interesting parallels to be made with the latest venture from the certified communism-is-petty-bourgeois patsocs, which I will go into. I notice that while the community on Lemmygrad generally knows about the ACP, this remains surface level – if you live in the US, you unfortunately have no choice but to take these enemies seriously.

I’m going to quickly recap how Ho Chi Minh built a movement, but it’s generally the same as any ML party in history, and the reason they do so is because it works.

1. A movement is built over decades, strengthened, so that it can be put into action at the correct time.
2. In Vietnam, this started as far back as the early 1900s. Ho Chi Minh travelled the world, firstly finding his own line (he didn’t become a communist until he read Lenin in 1920).
3. At this time, he started establishing contact with other movements, i.e. solidarity. He was part of the PCF in France (back when it still had potential) as part of the colonial affairs committee. He travelled around the world to talk with
4. All this time though, he also agitated for Vietnam even as he travelled - writing a ton of press dispatches for his journal Le Paria, and even in 1919 writing a petition to the US and French presidents to ask for self-determination in Vietnam. Of course he knew better later, but this petition made him a name in Vietnam.
5. He was also an avid reader and learner during this time, learning English and Esperanto while in London, reading during his lunch break at the Carson Hotel (where he worked 6 days a week), etc.
6. Eventually he went to the USSR and then China. He lived in China for several years, near Guangdong (Canton), so close-ish to Vietnam. There he set up a school to teach revolutionary theory to not just Vietnamese but also other Asian refugees.
7. When Japan took over Vietnam from Vichy France in 1941, the movement had been built. This is what it all led up to. All you can do is make it as ready as it’ll ever be, and then when the conditions arise (in China it was the civil war started by Chang Kai Shek’s coup after Sun Yat Sen’s death, in the USSR it was the WW1 campaign and the decade-long mismanagement by the tsar), start. But, starting is just one phase of the process. You have to keep it going.
8. In Vietnam, they exploited the mismanagement that arose from a Japanese military occupation (where like in China they only really controlled the urban centers and rail lines) under French administration to start an armed revolution.
9. The Viet Minh set up in the north and quickly delimited their own zone of governance. They built dual power there, enacting policies (mainly revolving around food distribution, land redistribution, abolishing forced labor and doing literacy programs). This built support with the peasantry, whom they relied on for food, security and success. It also shows the people what your policies will be like after the war so your dual power just becomes state power. It makes more people want to join your movement, picking up arms and supporting you in general.
10. The war with Japan lasted until their surrender in 1945, but in the chaos of the withdrawal France quickly established a parallel government in the south. The war quickly picked back up with France bombing civilians at Hanoi, and lasted until the monumental defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
11. Notably, and this is often forgotten, I can confirm from official Vietnam websites that in 1950, the Viet Minh liberated border villages in the north so they could establish a logistics line with the newly-proclaimed PRC who provided military aid, food, and cadres to the struggle. I think it’s important to note this considering the later border skirmish that took place.
12. In talks at Geneva a ceasefire was agreed upon so that elections could happen to reunite the two countries. When Ngo Dinh Diem realized he was going to lose because he was a nobody, he pulled a Korea and announced separate elections in the south. After the defeat of the French, the US invasion started and you probably know all about that one already (spoiler alert: uncle sam lost).

All of this – this is how we organize a revolutionary movement. Learn as much as you can, teach others, build support at home and abroad before you need it. Support abroad is important with your diaspora in the case of a liberation struggle, but also to forge ties because you’ll need this international support – China provided help in 1950, and later the USSR and China were present at the Geneva Talks in favor of Vietnam (though by then the USSR was under Krushchev and we know how that went for international support. Notably if I’m not mistaken, the USSR was the one who pushed for Vietnam to be partitioned until elections while the CPV wanted to continue down to Saigon as it was called back then.)

The movement is built inside and out. You will have soldiers, but you will also have agitators, civil servants, and just workers. Not everyone in Vietnam at the time was a soldier and couldn’t have been anyway. Stalin was not a soldier, and in the Bolshevik faction he was printing Pravda. But all participate in the struggle in their own way. At Dien Bien Phu, General Võ Nguyên Giáp of the People’s Army of Vietnam had the genius idea to bring the artillery up the hills surrounding the base in the valley, so as to pound it from above. They built tunnels too in the hillside for the artillery. It took months of labor, and they relied on locals to help – this was in the north, in areas they controlled – to do this project. Thousands of workers. I’m not sure if and how they were compensated, but that’s a detail for the broader point that an army does not march on its own two feet.

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When seeing this and comparing to the operations of the ACP, we might at first glance think the two operate alike. The ACP also goes to establish contact with other movements – Hinkle and runaway deadbeat dad Chris Helali just went to Yemen to meet with (possibly) Ansarallah. They interviewed Hamas officials, they went to Russia, China, etc.

But what do these meetings do? In China, Hinkle was invited by a private news network, Guancha, which was founded by a Stanford venture capitalist. Of course it’s based in Shanghai, the most liberal city in China and the only place he could make Guancha. He later made a Weibo account but was banned there, though we can only speculate as to the reason why. Seems to me this venture was more to build an audience in China. Ho Chi Minh was meeting leaders, both deposed and current. It’s not a “foot in the door” thing. You can arrange these meetings, maybe not with Xi, but certainly with an ambassador or someone in the Central Committee.

He is currently in Yemen with Chris Helali, dressed in traditional Yemeni clothes (by who and why? He never says, and in the pictures is the only one in this clothes)

The man to his left by the way is Mick Wallace, also a pro-Palestine MP in Ireland. I don’t want to claim that they travelled together by the way, as far as I know they were just sat next to each other in the seat order. Where was this photo taken? At the Third Palestine Conference in Sana’a – a very good thing to hold! But listening to ACP, you’d think only Helali and Hinkle were there and nobody else. The Yemen Press Agency doesn’t even mention the two of them by name: https://en.ypagency.net/351804.

What did they do while there? Seems like they’re just attending. Hinkle is posting pictures of him in the attire and pretending to speak in front of a camera and that’s about it. It’s clout-chasing. I don’t necessarily need an interview or the transcript of all that was said, but at least explain how this is beneficial to the ACP, since you’re in it. Is Yemen going to support your people’s war? Do you even plan for a people’s war? Why are you there exactly aside of the photo op? You need to say.

But I figured maybe if Hinkle’s twitter account does not mention communism at all, at least the ACP account would mention this visit and why it was taken. But they don’t. Not at all.

Rather, the ACP account (@ACPMain) talks about what they’re doing in the US. So let’s talk about it - what is their mass movement? Where even is it? Certainly a movement is built over time (literally decades), but it doesn’t seem as if they are trying to build anything. Any attempt they have made to rally MAGAs to their party (and before that to their “MAGAcommunism” or Mecha Tankie movement – yes, that one was real, and has now been scrubbed from history) have utterly failed. And yet, they insist on continuing to court MAGAs. A mass movement is a mass movement, you don’t pick and choose – and I think many people could stand to hear that! :) But this means there are ways to go about building mass support; this has been done before, and it has left us theory we must use. In Vietnam, the Viet Minh called for all patriotic Vietnamese to join them against Japan. They didn’t say, “you’re not patriotic if you have blue hair or pronouns though”. There is also, mind you, a difference between a mass party and a cadre party; but I digress.

In ACP theory, only blue collar workers are real workers, and they conflate those with MAGAs as if all MAGAs are not petit bourgeois but uneducated unwashed factory workers. They are clear in who they want in their party, and, by definition (and in practice we see that as well), anyone else is rejected. They don’t want the “blue-haired” baristas. Therefore, they are not building a mass movement.

ACP Main is happy to repost what their chapters elect to do. From what I can tell looking from the outside in, it seems that chapters essentially run their actions how they want and do what they want on their own dime. Because telling them what to do is work, it’s easier to be travelling to Yemen to get cool gift bags and make content for your podcast or whatever Hinkle is on nowadays. Haz is still on Twitch I think, where he has donations turned on. Shouldn’t these go to party dues? Why are you competing with your own party?

Really seems to me as though the chapters are doing whatever they want and funneling money to the streamers committee which the streamers then use to fund their private interests.

So what do ACP cells do? They distribute flowers to women on International Women’s Day (while Hinkle has said on stream once, ‘women are not people’) – Int. Women’s Day is a day of struggle, for the struggles women have faced and continue to face, and in which they are instrumental. I’ve talked about how I’m disappointed in “my” party, but at least on March 8 they’re out there marching, making the men hold up the signs, and giving speeches after the march. Also in the videos posted, the 3 women are the ones giving out the flowers while the 8 men are nowhere to be seen in the frame… you can’t make this shit up. Also they don’t show any ACP affiliation anywhere, no flags or even a pin or anything. For all I know (and someone on Twitter hinted to this), they just claimed someone else’s event as their own.

What else do we see? Haz is out there organizing striking truck drivers! Cool! Except, well, you only see him for a few seconds at the beginning, and only him in the frame – for all I know he recorded this outside his patio and then went back inside. In the rest of the video, ACP members are portrayed distributing leaflets to the drivers. That’s great. But you don’t see Haz anywhere. They also didn’t post the leaflet, which is a missed opportunity. Because while I could certainly admit my first point (about haz not being anywhere in the video) could be bad faith, organizationally speaking, it’s a huge missed opportunity not to post the leaflet online; and more importantly, it doesn’t allow for its criticism or critical reading. I can’t make a point about what’s in the leaflet because this leaflet has not been made public. Why would you not do that? You made a cool tiktok edit-style video, you know how social media works, so why did you just conveniently forgot to post the actual leaflet? Secondly, seeing that I have no idea about why the truckers are striking, I also can’t talk about that - this seems like important information for a communist party to cover. Not just why you’re there but why they’re striking and how that ties into the broader political context. Because if they’re striking to deport immigrants, that’s a very different thing than if they’re striking for higher wages.

They posted an article from Ted Reese for their newspaper but don’t provide a link to the article but to subscribe to the journal. I’ve honestly never seen this, except maybe from Trots. Usually communist papers republish their articles online because the point is to do agitprop, and it’s counter-productive to paywall that. You run the paper at a loss and that’s to be expected (I’m sorry, are we doing commodity production now?). And sorry but the thumbnail provided made me laugh. “Socialism has a long-term tendency to decentralize wealth and power” what the fuck does that even mean lmao.

Looking at the link provided to subscribe to the paper, most of the articles are written by the grifters in chief, with some written by outsiders, or at least I don’t think they’re in the ACP. Again, that’s not really how you run a communist paper. It’s a great idea to put out a submissions call to your members to write these articles, because it allows in more perspectives and also things you don’t necessarily know to talk about that they can fill in. I will give the grifters this, at least they write for it lol. If they didn’t write anything, it’s true, I could easily make the point that they are using their members’ labor to sell subscriptions. At the same time, I feel like I’ve definitely seen some of these titles around before they were in the journal, like “Civilize the Mind and Make Savage the Body” by Edward Smith (he stole the wording from Mao but I’m pretty sure he talked about it before)

If you want to subscribe to this incredible paper, they first ask for your email address lol. Never seen that before but okay. I log in, and the digital subscription is $15 fucking dollars a month. Print is 25. For context, my party’s newspaper comes out to 7 a month, in an expensive place, and you get both print and digital. You can also contact them for preferential rates depending on your situation. It also comes out once a month in a magazine form.

Finally, they claim they are working “in tandem with” Randolph United, a tenants union, in Randolph, Massachussetts. The video they show was produced by Randolph United and never once mentions or shows anything related to ACP.

In tandem means that they are working parallel to them but never once together. It means Randolph is out there doing their thing, and ACP is leeching off of that to say “no we’re here too!”. In a reply to their own tweet, ACP posted a press release by Randolph that also never once mentions ACP. Can you imagine if people like Lenin, Mao or Ho Chi Minh had done that? We would rightfully have criticized their action, and even maybe not have ever considered them examples of the communist movement, because how can you be a communist when you consider leeching off another movement’s achievements to be good praxis? Like, what does it say about you as a whole?

Seems to me like ACP only exists to fund the individual ventures of the unelected, we-picked-ourselves central committee – who just happen to all be streamers that have been orbiting around each other for years now. It’s the TikTok Hype House, where some TikTok producers and friends live together to produce content together. Võ Nguyên Giáp was picked for his skills at organizing an army (he was not a military officer before the war) and revolutionary education. What skills do people like Edward Smith of MWM possess, beyond having TikTok followers?

This is how you know you are operating in a cult. And this is how we know the ACP is nothing but a self-serving, twisted (and theory-twisting) investment venture. The only thing it can bring about is more pestilence.