Build Your Business, Build Your Party
Noah Khrachvik
Abstract
This article, Build Your Business, Build Your Party: Speech at the 1st National Convention of the ACP, articulates a Marxist-Leninist strategy for the material and organizational development of the American Communist Party (ACP) in the 21st century. Noah Khrachvik argues that in the absence of foreign financial support or institutional backing, the survival and growth of the Party depend upon self-reliance, discipline, and the creation of productive enterprises rooted in working-class communities. Drawing inspiration from the Chinese Communist Party’s slogan “Follow your Party, start your business,” Khrachvik reformulates it as “Build your business, build your Party,” urging each chapter to establish community-oriented cooperatives, farms, and small enterprises that embody socialist principles while providing practical means of sustenance and outreach. The speech emphasizes the dialectical relationship between individual initiative and collective organization — each local effort simultaneously shaping the Party’s concrete form and advancing class consciousness among workers. Rejecting both liberal individualism and petty-bourgeois careerism, Khrachvik situates this approach within the Marxist-Leninist understanding of praxis, where the unity of thought and action forges revolutionary character and capacity. The article ultimately frames economic self-sufficiency not as a retreat into entrepreneurship, but as the necessary foundation for a people’s movement capable of challenging U.S. oligarchy and reconstructing political power from below.
Keywords
Marxism–Leninism, party-building, proletarian self-reliance, community economy, revolutionary organization, Noah Khrachvik
