On January 22, 1940, Earl Browder, the leader of the Stalinist Communist Party USA, was convicted by a federal jury of using a US passport obtained by making a false statement, sentenced to four years in a federal prison and fined $2,000. The alleged infraction had taken place six years earlier, in 1934, an indication of the trumped-up nature of the case. The prosecution avoided any mention of Browder’s politics. The sudden action against Browder was due to the shift in policy by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union from seeking a popular front alliance with the “democratic” capitalist countries to signing a pact between the USSR and fascist Germany. Following orders from the Kremlin, Browder had ended the CP’s support for Roosevelt’s Democratic Party and instead opposed US imperialism’s preparations to enter World War II on the side of France and Britain and against Stalin’s new ally, Nazi Germany. During the years of the Popular Front, Browder had not hesitated to call upon the capitalist state to launch police actions against the Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyist movement in the US at the time. Nevertheless, the SWP took a principled position and defended Browder. The Trotskyist newspaper the Socialist Appeal wrote, “It is the working class itself that must deal with the Browders ...This is quite a different matter from allowing the Bosses to crack down at will. Our party ... has as part of its job the fight against the syphilitic germ of Stalinism. But against any assault of the Bosses we defend the Stalinists ... because we realize that any such assault will prove to be nothing but the prelude to an attack upon a far wider front against all workers organisations.”
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 12:16:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015