Communist Party USA The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a Communist political party in the United States,[5] and is the largest communist party in the country. Established in 1919, it has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement. For the first half of the 20th century, the Communist Party was a highly influential force in various struggles for democratic rights. It played a prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in founding most of the countrys first industrial unions (which would later use the McCarran Internal Security Act to expel their Communist members) while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of U.S. racial segregation. Historian Ellen Schrecker concludes that decades of recent scholarship[6] offer a more nuanced portrayal of the party as both a Stalinist sect tied to a vicious regime and the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and 40s By August 1919, only months after its founding, the Communist Party claimed 50,000 to 60,000 members. Members also included anarchists and other radical leftists. In contrast, the more moderate Socialist Party of America had 40,000 members. The sections of the Communist Partys International Workers Order meanwhile organized for communism around linguistic and ethnic lines, providing mutual aid and tailored cultural activities to an IWO membership that peaked at 200,000 at its height. But the Communist Partys early labor and organizing successes did not last. As the decades progressed, the combined effects of the second Red Scare, McCarthyism, Nikita Khrushchevs 1956 Secret Speech denouncing the previous decades of Joseph Stalins rule, and the adversities of the continued Cold War mentality, steadily weakened the Partys internal structure and confidence. The Partys membership in the Comintern and its close adherence to the political positions of the Soviet Union made the party appear to most Americans as not only a threatening, subversive domestic entity, but also as a foreign agent fundamentally alien to the American way of life. Internal and external crises swirled together, to the point where members who did not end up in prison for party activities tended either to disappear quietly from its ranks or to adopt more moderate political positions at odds with the Communists party line. By 1957, membership had dwindled to less than 10,000, of whom some 1,500 were informants for the FBI. The party attempted to recover with its opposition to the Vietnam War during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but its continued uncritical support for an increasingly stultified and militaristic Soviet Union increasingly alienated them from the rest of left-wing America, which saw this supportive role as outdated and even dangerous. At the same time, the partys aging membership demographics and noticeably hollow calls for peaceful coexistence failed to speak to a new Left in the United States. With the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and his effort to radically alter the Soviet economic and political system from the mid-1980s, the Communist Party finally became estranged from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself. In 1989, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union cut off major funding to the CPUSA due to its opposition to glasnost and perestroika. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party held its convention and attempted to resolve the issue of whether the Party should reject Marxism-Leninism. The majority reasserted the partys now purely Marxist outlook, prompting a minority faction which urged social democrats to exit the now reduced party. The party has since adopted Marxism-Leninism within its program, but in 2014 the National Committee dropped all references to Marxism Leninism from the Party Constitution in the new draft adopted during the 30th National Convention The Communist Party USA is based in New York City. For decades, its West Coast newspaper was the Peoples World, and its East Coast newspaper was The Daily World.[11] The two newspapers merged in 1986 into the Peoples Weekly World. The PWW has since become an online only publication, called Peoples World. The partys former theoretical journal, Political Affairs Magazine, is now also published exclusively online, but the party still maintains International Publishers as its publishing house. In June 2014, the Party held its 30th National Convention in Chicago. Formation and early history (1919–1921) The first U.S. socialist political party was the Socialist Labor Party, formed in 1876 and for many years a viable force in the international socialist movement. By the mid-1890s, however, the SLP came under the influence of Daniel De Leon, and his radical views led to widespread discontent amongst the members, leading to the formation of the reformist-oriented Socialist Party of America around the turn of the 20th century. A left wing gradually emerged within the SP, much to the consternation of many Party leaders. In January 1919, Vladimir Lenin invited the left wing of the Socialist Party of America to join Comintern. During the spring of 1919 the Left Wing Caucus of the Socialist Party, buoyed by a large influx of new members from countries involved in the Russian Revolution, prepared to wrest control from the smaller controlling faction of moderate socialists. A referendum to join Comintern passed with 90% support, but the incumbent leadership suppressed the results. Elections for the partys National Executive Committee resulted in 12 leftists being elected out of a total of 15. Calls were made to expel moderates from the party. The moderate incumbents struck back by expelling several state organizations, half a dozen language federations, and many locals, in all two-thirds of the membership. The Socialist Party then called an emergency convention on August 30, 1919. The partys Left Wing Caucus made plans at a June conference of its own to regain control of the party, by sending delegations from the sections of the party that had been expelled to the convention to demand that they be seated. However, the language federations, eventually joined by C. E. Ruthenberg and Louis C. Fraina, turned away from that effort and formed their own party, the Communist Party of America, at a separate convention on September 1, 1919. Meanwhile plans led by John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow to crash the Socialist Party convention went ahead. Tipped off, the incumbents called the police, who obligingly expelled the leftists from the hall. The remaining leftist delegates walked out and, meeting with the expelled delegates, formed the Communist Labor Party on August 30, 1919.[13][page needed] The Comintern was not happy with two communist parties and in January 1920 dispatched an order that the two parties, which consisted of about 12,000 members, merge under the name United Communist Party, and to follow the party line established in Moscow. Part of the Communist Party of America under the leadership of Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone did this but a faction under the leadership of Nicholas I. Hourwich and Alexander Bittelman continued to operate independently as the Communist Party of America. A more strongly worded directive from the Comintern eventually did the trick and the parties were merged in May 1921. Only five percent of the members of the newly formed party were native English-speakers. Many of the members came from the ranks of the Industrial Workers of the World.[13][page needed][14] The Red Scare and the communist party (1919–1923)[edit] From its inception, the Communist Party USA came under attack from state and federal governments and later the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1919, after a series of unattributed bombings, and attempted assassinations of government officials and judges (later traced to militant adherents of the radical anarchist Luigi Galleani), the US Department of Justice headed by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, acting under the Sedition Act of 1918, began arresting thousands of foreign-born party members, many of whom the government deported. The Communist Party was forced underground and took to the use of pseudonyms and secret meetings in an effort to evade the authorities. The party apparatus was to a great extent underground. It re-emerged in the last days of 1921 as a legal political party called the Workers Party of America. As the red scare and deportations of the early 1920s ebbed, the party became bolder and more open. An element of the party, however, remained permanently underground and came to be known as the CPUSA secret apparatus. During this time, immigrants from Eastern Europe are said to have played a very prominent role in the CPUSA.[15] A majority of the members of the Socialist Party were immigrants and an overwhelming percentage of the CPUSA consisted of recent immigrants The factional war (1923–1929) Now that the above ground element was legal, the communists decided that their central task was to develop roots within the working class. This move away from hopes of revolution in the near future to a more nuanced approach was accelerated by the decisions of the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern held in 1925. The Fifth World Congress decided that the period between 1917 and 1924 had been one of revolutionary upsurge, but that the new period was marked by the stabilization of capitalism and that revolutionary attempts in the near future were to be stopped. The American communists embarked then on the arduous work of locating and winning allies. That work was, however, complicated by factional struggles within the CPUSA. The party quickly developed a number of more or less fixed factional groupings within its leadership: a faction around the partys Executive Secretary C. E. Ruthenberg, which was largely organized by his supporter Jay Lovestone; and the Foster-Cannon faction, headed by William Z. Foster, who headed the Partys Trade Union Educational League, and James P. Cannon, who led the International Labor Defense (ILD) organization. Foster, who had been deeply involved in the Steel Strike of 1919 and had been a long-time syndicalist and a Wobbly, had strong bonds with the progressive leaders of the Chicago Federation of Labor and, through them, with the Progressive Party (United States, 1924) and nascent farmer-labor parties. Under pressure from the Comintern, however, the party broke off relations with both groups in 1924. In 1925 the Comintern, through its representative Sergei Gusev, ordered the majority Foster faction to surrender control to Ruthenbergs faction; Foster complied. The factional infighting within the CPUSA did not end, however; the Communist leadership of the New York locals of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union lost the 1926 strike of cloakmakers in New York City in large part because of intra-party factional rivalries. Ruthenberg died in 1927 and his ally, Lovestone, succeeded him as party secretary. Cannon attended the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, hoping to use his connections with leading circles within it to regain the advantage against the Lovestone faction. However Cannon and Maurice Spector of the Communist Party of Canada were accidentally given a copy of Trotskys Critique of the Draft Program of the Comintern, that they were instructed to read and return. Persuaded by its contents, they came to an agreement to return to America and campaign for the documents positions. A copy of the document was then smuggled out of the country in a childs toy.[19] Back in America, Cannon and his close associates in the ILD such as Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, dubbed the three generals without an army,[20] began to organize support for Trotskys theses. However, as this attempt to develop a Left Opposition came to light, they and their supporters were expelled. Cannon and his followers organized the Communist League of America as a section of Trotskys International Left Opposition. At the same Congress, Lovestone had impressed the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a strong supporter of Nikolai Bukharin, the general secretary of the Comintern. This was to have unfortunate consequences for Lovestone when, in 1929, Bukharin was on the losing end of a struggle with Stalin and was purged from his position on the Politburo and removed as head of the Comintern. In a reversal of the events of 1925, a Comintern delegation sent to the United States demanded that Lovestone resign as party secretary, in favor of his archrival Foster, despite the fact that Lovestone enjoyed the support of the vast majority of the American partys membership. Lovestone traveled to the Soviet Union and appealed directly to the Comintern. Stalin informed Lovestone that he had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporter of the Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American Communist Party.When Lovestone returned to the United States, he and his ally Benjamin Gitlow were purged despite holding the leadership of the party. Ostensibly, this was not due to Lovestones insubordination in challenging a decision by Stalin, but for his support for American Exceptionalism, the thesis that socialism could be achieved peacefully in the United States. Lovestone and Gitlow formed their own group called the Communist Party (Opposition), a section of the pro-Bukharin International Communist Opposition, which was initially larger than the Trotskyists but failed to survive past 1941. Lovestone had initially called his faction the Communist Party (Majority Group) in the expectation that the majority of the CPUSAs members would join him, but only a few hundred people joined his new organization. The Third Period (1928–1935) The upheavals within the CPUSA in 1928 were an echo of a much more significant change: Stalins decision to break off any form of collaboration with western socialist parties, which were now condemned as social fascists. This policy had particularly severe consequences in Germany, where the German Communist Party not only refused to work in alliance with the German Social Democratic Party, but attacked it and its members. The impact of this policy in the United States was counted in membership figures. In 1928 there were about 24,000 members. By 1932 the total had fallen to 6,000 members. Opposing Stalins Third Period policies in the Communist Party USA was James P. Cannon. For this action, he was expelled from the party. He then founded the Communist League of America with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, and started publishing The Militant. It declared itself to be an external faction of the Communist Party until, as the Trotskyists saw it, Stalins policies in Germany helped Hitler take power. At that point they started working towards the founding of a new international, the Fourth International. In the United States the principal impact of the Third Period was to end the CPUSAs efforts to organize within the AFL through the Trade Union Educational League and to turn its efforts into organizing dual unions through the Trade Union Unity League. Foster went along with this change, even though it contradicted the policies he had fought for previously. By 1930, the party adopted the title of Communist Party of the USA, with the slogan of the united front from below. The Party devoted much of its energy in the Great Depression to organizing the unemployed, attempting to found red unions, championing the rights of African-Americans and fighting evictions of farmers and the working poor. It abandoned its previous plans to ship all African Americans back to the South and establish them in a Soviet Negro Republic with the departure of Lovestone. [23] At the same time, the Party attempted to weave its sectarian revolutionary politics into its day-to-day defense of workers, usually with only limited success. They recruited more disaffected members of the Socialist Party and an organization of African-American socialists called the African Blood Brotherhood, some of whose members, particularly Harry Haywood, would later play important roles in communist work among blacks. In 1932, the retiring head of the CPUSA, William Z. Foster, published a book entitled Toward Soviet America, which laid out the Communist Partys plans for revolution and the building of a new socialist society based on the model of Soviet Russia. In that same year Earl Browder became General Secretary of the Party. At first Browder moved the party closer to Soviet interests, and helped to develop its secret apparatus or underground network. He also assisted in the recruitment of espionage sources and agents for the Soviet NKVD. Browders own younger sister Margerite was an NKVD operative in Europe until removed from those duties at Browders request.[24] It was at this point that the CPUSAs foreign policy platform came under the complete control of Stalin, who enforced his directives through his secret police and foreign intelligence service, the NKVD. The NKVD controlled the secret apparatus of the CPUSA, including responsibility for various political murders, kidnappings, and assassinations. waa faa iiido aqrisoruux walbooow by ifraax cumar realisticlady
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 17:02:43 +0000
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