Redouble Our Efforts
Kyle Pettis
Abstract
This article, Redouble Our Efforts: Speech at the 1st National Convention of the ACP, outlines the organizational strategy and ideological priorities of the American Communist Party (ACP) as articulated by Kyle Pettis, the Party’s Director of Personnel and Chief Labor Analyst. Focusing on the Party’s three-pronged domestic strategy — community service, chapter enterprises, and social investigation — Pettis emphasizes the need to root communist activity in the everyday life of working-class Americans. He argues that genuine revolutionary organization arises not from abstract ideological debate but from embedded, material engagement within local communities. By developing cooperatives and community-based enterprises, the ACP aims to construct “dual economic power,” fostering economic independence from capitalist institutions while addressing the concrete needs of the people. Social investigation, meanwhile, serves as a dialectical tool for understanding and transforming popular consciousness by learning from the masses themselves. Pettis warns against the degeneration that plagued the historical CPUSA, calling for rigorous internal discipline, democratic participation, and universal literacy in the Party’s Constitution and platform. The speech concludes with a call to transform the ACP from a nominal organization into a living political force — one inseparable from the people and capable of rebuilding a “true American Republic” grounded in socialism. The paper contributes to contemporary Marxist organizational theory by proposing a pragmatic, community-centered model of revolutionary practice in the imperial core.
Keywords
Marxism–Leninism, Party-building, community organization, dual power, American working class, Kyle Pettis
