Reply to an attempt to critically analyze the Houston Communist Party club

By James Thompson

Dave Adkinson writes in his critical analysis of the Houston CP club:

â€œIf those you criticise are as malicious as you say the i wonder why i cant find anything on the web where â€œtheyâ€ sling mud at you and your former club.â€

We applaud Mr. Adkinsonâ€™s efforts to provide some critical analysis of our club, but his arguments fall a bit short. Here is a posting from our Texas district leadership about our website which was posted on 11/28/11. The link is: http://tx.cpusa.org/houstonweb.htm .

We recently received the following statement from CPUSA leadership:

Statement on Houston Phony Web Site

The web page calling itself the Houston Communist Party (http://houstoncommunistparty.com/ ) and the associated Facebook page and Twitter feed are not affiliated with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The person or persons behind the web site know full well that the site does not reflect the views and positions of our party. By undemocratically and falsely identifying the site as affiliated with the CPUSA they are deliberately sowing confusion and misinformation.

The Texas Communist Party web site at (http://tx.cpusa.org/ ) is a web site of the CPUSA that is endorsed and supported by the party membership in Texas and the National Committee of the CPUSA.

National Board CPUSA

It should be explained that the reason Houston put up its own website was that the Texas District leadership repeatedly refused to send us the names of people from Houston who contacted the national website. I spoke directly to Sam Webb, Jarvis Tyner and many others and made the simple request that the names ofÂ people who contacted the national website or state website fromÂ Houston be provided to us so that we could attempt to recruit them into our club. This was at a time when I was writing many articles for the PWW and PW. At this time, I was also invited to and was attending party conferences at various locations around the country to include the conference on African American equality in St. Louis, Missouri, and regional conferences in El Paso, Texas and Oakland, California. I spoke to Sam Webb at the meeting in Oakland and to Jarvis Tyner at the march on Wall Street in NYC. I also made up the slogans for the signs used in the march on Wall Street as requested by Libero della Piana. I was also a delegate to the 2005 convention in Chicago and wrote the front page article for the PWW about the CPUSA support of the strike against the Congress Hotel in Chicago. We elected a delegate from Houston to the 2008 CPUSA convention. This individual is an accomplished journalist and could have put various party leaders on the Pacifica network. In fact, I suggested this to leadership and it was ignored.

The reason for putting up the website was simple. We wanted people in Houston to be able to contact us.

One of our current members attempted to contact us through the national website and state website within the last year and a half. He was ignored by the national office. When he contacted the state directly, he was told that our club in Houston did not exist. He found us by our website.

When we put up our website, we were told by district leadership in Dallas that we should take it down and that the party should file a lawsuit against us for putting up the website.

I wonder how many people in the party really think that these actions by party leadership represent a real desire to build the party and fully support one of its most active clubs. Instead of expressing appreciation for the hard work of comrades in Houston, leadership has chosen to split and divide our original club and fecklessly attempt to depose its elected leader.

Nevertheless, we continue to survive and thrive. We will continue to fight for the working class no matter what CPUSA leadership does to us. We will not surrender. We will not back down. We will continue to build our club since we believe the Communists will take up their historical role as the vanguard party of the working class. We believe that once again the CPUSA will fight for peace, civil rights and will return to an anti-imperialist stance. We believe the CPUSA will fight once again to enact legislation for working people such as single payer health care or a national health care system and the employee free choice act. We believe the CPUSA can and will fight anti-communist laws and other forms of voter suppression. We believe the CPUSA can and will field candidates for public office on its own ticket. We believe the CPUSA can and will be a fully democratic organization and operate from the bottom up rather than the top down.