It is important to note through his death, Lenin himself regarded what they were doing as
"just basic Marxism though with (conjectural) 'post-Russian Imperial but lest missing German etc continental revolutions' characteristics"
the whole way through — the 'making virtue of necessity' overtheorizations that got 'canonized' into the "early & Lenin-lucid Comintern"-theses — were as much dynamically 'bottom-up' responses to the international movement's conjectural situations as well as simulatiously & interpretating with 'Soviet state-internal' conjectural conditions
"Marxism-Leninism" was dogmatization (in the Catholic sense) of what was built upon 'emergent' those 'Lenin-lucid' kludges and improvisations and theoretical conjectures + together with the collective-dictatura rei gerenda causa's self-perpetuating opportunism & realpolitik
So for the WPA / W(C)PA, ITTL, "Marxism- DeLeonism" is just as much the same Lenin-authentic "just simple Marxism but with American characteristics in the international conjecture" because of their different conditions
I mean 1933-USA IOTL is already demographically:
[ 1 ] majority urban, near-60%:
( a ) vast-majority proletarian
( b ) minority professionals, white-collars, shopkeepers, etc
[ 2 ] while the of rural population (somewhat greater than 40%) are split between:
( a ) sharecroppers ['formal-subsumption' toilers]
( b ) rural workers
( c ) ruined to near-ruin mortgaged diehard wannabe family commercial farmers
( d ) well-capitalized resident commercial farmers / farming operators
— so at a stroke, the USA-1933 vs 'Empire of All-the-Russia's'-1917
enjoys a proletarian vs non-proletarian balance of easily >50% urban proletarians + >20% rural proletarians or near-proletarians = >60-70% proletarians or near-proletarians total
while latter had <20% proletarians
— any even crude Marxist would simply use a mechanistic material-deterministic formula to say that USA-1933 would call for a different implementation for "simple basic Marxism" than would 'Empire of All-the-Russias'-1917
I've said before even though it's more complicated in the fine-grain of course [namely: in developed capitalist regimes, the communist movement had failed to solve the problem of institutionally subordinating the labor movement & left-political officialdom as such; while the more mature capitalist regimes had already put out feelers to rule with support of their loyalty pledges]: that if you just map the political support demographically proportionally from Red October 1917 in the II All-Russian Congress of Soviets to that of Germany in 1919
Then the "Bolshevik / Left-SR / etc"-equivalent in Germany-1919 handedly sweeps not only the Reichskongress der Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte but also even ( albeit with reduced dominance of the revolutionaries ) theVerfassunggebende Deutsche Nationalversammlung
The key issue was solving the question of political independence vis-a-vis the constitutional regime ahead of time so as to pose a credible and clear alternative the workers were already politically agitated and educated to, and also of course, in the absence of the poisoned chalice of Russian Bolshevik 1918 emergency expenditures mixed with opportunism
Incidentally, is why I think a 'Soviet-type' system is more likely to be plausibly adopted and believed by American workers is if in pre-1933 agitation ITTL it is openly asserted in party education that the 'Russian system' is for modernizing a peasant country without literacy; while an 'American system' would require multi-candidate, multi-party elections, and any councilar system would feature open-list MMP proportionality with binding proportionality through self-selection upwards, and disavowal of a single-party state: you can pick your party leaders & you can pick your government
Such that the concept of a "workers' / socialist" republic is filtered down to masses at some scale, been experienced in practice in the union federation & party, and there are hard commitments that these are the principles that the communists intend for any revision of the bourgeois constitutional republic in favor of the workers'-people's charter
It was a serious problem that 'Cominternism' was saddled with prettifying the Soviet exigencies from a rather early date, as even putting aside bourgeois hysterical propaganda it still was readily apparent that the Russian state was not the promise which had been agitated and educated to the mass organized and left politicized workers and there was little getting away from that
