On "The Nature, Role, and Work of the Communist Party"

This year is an exciting time for the Communist Party, USA. We are beginning a Party-wide discussion on the very role of the Party itself and its necessity for progressive struggles today an all the way up to Socialism. This discussion includes issues of how and where we work, with whom we work, what are our goals and objectives and how to achieve them. Most importantly, it is a discussion about how to overcome the barriers to and maximize the potential for Party growth.

In recent weeks we have tried a new experiment on our web page. National Chairman Sam Webb's article "The Role, Nature and Work of the Communist Party" generated a lot of discussion in the comments, some thoughtful and some not. While most of the discussion was civil an comradely, a few violated our standards of conduct.

While the Party is engaging in a discussion of the issues Sam raised in his paper and the challenge of building a bigger, stronger Communist Party and press, we want to encourage well-thought, developed and edited responses, critiques, additions, and approvals of this main document and others from other Party leaders that we will be posting the weeks to come.

From now on, the comments section of the main article will be turned off and any comments, suggestions or contributions should be sent to discussion [*at*] cpusa.org where we will consider them for publication in this section of the site.

We appreciate your comments and find them useful. We are publishing below the full text of the comments originally posted to the website (minus some that violated our standards).

We will consider some contributions for publication in a print media as well.

Please note whether you want the contribution to be considered for publication on the web or if it is simply to contribute to the thinking of the Party leadership. Also, please abide by the following guidelines:

1) Please confine your comments to 2000 words if you want them considered for publication. This is a limit not a goal. Significantly shorter articles are encouraged as well. (In rare circumstances, we will consider longer pieces for publication).

2) No profanities, slander, racist, sexist, homophobic or other bigoted language will be tolerated.

3) This discussion is made with the goal of improving and strengthening the Communist Party, USA and its work, though we may disagree on how to do so. The Party Constitution and The Road to Socialism, USA (our Party Program) are foundational documents that define our general strategy and structure.

4) Please think through your comments. Make sure they have not already been said in this forum and that they are helpful to the discussion. We will avoid printing several articles from the same author unless they are on substantially different topics. Please reread and edit your work.