Communist Party USA

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Communist Party USA
CPUSA.png
Party leader Rossana Cambron
Joe Sims
Chairman of the Senate parliamentary group N / A
Chairman of the House of Representatives N / A
founding September 1, 1919
Youth organization Young Communist League (1920-2015)
Alignment Marxism-Leninism
Communism
Colours) red
House of Representatives
0/50
senate
0/435
Number of members approx. 5000 ( 2017 )
International connections IMCPW
Website cpusa.org

The Communist Party USA ( CPUSA ) is the most important Marxist-Leninist party in the USA . While the CPUSA played a role in organizing industrial unions and defending African American rights in the 1930s and 1940s, it became a red fear during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s as a result of the anti-communist hysteria caused by the Cold War into political insignificance. It was directed by Gus Hall for many years . One of the world's best known former members of the CPUSA is Angela Davis .

Rossana Cambron and Joe Sims have been the chairpersons since 2019, and before that it was John Bachtell .

history

Foundation and early history (1919–1921)

The CPUSA's first predecessor, the Communist Party of America (CPA), was founded on September 1, 1919 by Charles Ruthenberg , Louis Fraina, and others who were expelled from the Socialist Party of America (SPA) as Bolsheviks . At the same time as the founding of the CPA, the founding event of the Communist Labor Party (CLP) took place around John Reed and Alfred Wagenknecht . These parties were inspired by the October Revolution and were linked to the Comintern . However, the Comintern was not enthusiastic about the existence of two communist parties in the United States, and so in January 1920 it gave instructions that the two parties should merge under the name of the United Communist Party. Part of the Communist Party of America, led by Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone, followed orders, but a splinter group led by Nicholas I. Hourwich and Alexander Bittelman continued to operate independently under the name of the Communist Party of America . A more forceful Comintern directive was likely the reason the two parties finally merged in May 1921 under the name of the Communist Party of America . Later it was renamed the Communist Party of the USA .

Red Fear and the Underground (1919–1923)

Since its inception, the CPUSA has been under attack by state and federal governments, and later by the FBI . One reason for this was the impression that the October Revolution and the Civil War in Russia since 1917 and the related events in Germany and Hungary since 1918 made in the United States . This led to the Palmer Raids (Palmersche raids), which also called Red Scare (Engl .: Red Scare ) were designated as in winter 1919 and in January 1920, the Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer , according to the law against sedition of 1918 thousands of party members arrested.

The party was forced to operate from underground, so it had different party names, as well as legal parties such as the Workers Party of America (WPA) and legal mass organizations such as the Friends of Soviet Russia (FSR), the US branch of the International Worker aid . During the early 1920s, the party machine worked almost entirely underground. However, part of the party remained permanently underground. Through the underground party, which often received orders from Soviet officials and was therefore viewed as illegal in the United States, the Soviet intelligence services were able to win over American members of the CPUSA.

In 1930 it adopted the name Communist Party USA , recruiting more disaffected members of the Socialist Party and an African-American organization called the African Blood Brotherhood , some of which later played a major role in communist work with African-Americans.

First internal party battles (1923–1929)

After the part of the party that was no longer underground was legalized, the communists decided that their central task was to gain more influence in the working class . This move towards a more nuanced approach dashed hopes for an imminent revolution, which in turn was accelerated by the resolutions of the Comintern's Fifth World Congress in 1925. Congress decided that the period between 1917 and 1924 was a period of turmoil, but the new period was marked by the stabilization of capitalism and the revolutionary attempts in the near future made no sense.

The American communists then embarked on the arduous work of identifying and gaining new allies.

However, this work was made more difficult by internal party struggles within the CPUSA. The party quickly developed a number of more or less established inner-party groups under the leadership of the party leadership: an inner grouping formed around party chairman Charles Ruthenberg, which was largely organized by his supporter Jay Lovestone, and the Foster Cannon group, which was chaired by William Z. Foster , who also chaired the party's Trade Union Educational League and was supported by James P. Cannon , who led the International Labor Defense . This first party group attracted many of its members from the party's foreign language unions, while the latter found more support among the "real" workers. Deeply implicated in the 1919 steel strike and a longtime union socialist, Foster had strong ties with the progressive leader of the Chicago Workers 'Union, and through him with the Progressive Party and the emerging peasant and workers' parties. However, under pressure from the Comintern, the Communist Party "USA" broke off relations with both groups in 1924.

In 1925, the representative of the Comintern, Sergei Gussew , ordered that the strong party group around Foster should submit to the control of the Ruthenberg party group; Foster finally gave in. The internal party struggles in the CPUSA did not stop.

The communist leadership of the New York International Ladies' Garment Worker's Union lost the packaging industry strike in New York City in 1926 largely because of the rivalries within the party groups within the party. Ruthenberg died in 1927, and his party friend Jay Lovestone succeeded him as general secretary of the party. Cannon attended the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, hoping to use his own contacts in the governing bodies to regain the advantage over the Lovestone party group. However, he and Maurice Spector were accidentally given a copy of Trotsky's Critique of the Draft Program of the Comintern by the Communist Party of Canada , and were told to read it and then come back. Convinced of the contents, they came to an agreement to return to the United States and promote the views and positions contained in the document. A copy of the document was then smuggled out of the country in a children's toy.

Back in the United States, Cannon and his close confidantes Max Shachtman and Martin Abern began to organize support for Trotsky's theses. However, they and their supporters were disfellowshipped when it became known that they were about to create a Left Opposition. Cannon and his followers organized themselves in the Communist League of America as a section of Trotsky's International Left Opposition .

At the same congress, Lovestone, as a supporter of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , Secretary General of the Comintern, was impressed by the leadership of the CPSU . This would have devastating consequences for Lovestone when Bukharin was relieved of his posts in the Politburo and as chairman of the Comintern in 1929 at the end of a dispute with Stalin .

Looking back on the events of 1925, a Comintern delegation was sent to the United States calling on Lovestone to step down as General Secretary of the Communist Party in favor of his arch-rival Foster, despite the fact that Lovestone had the support of the vast majority of its members American party could be sure. Lovestone then traveled to the Soviet Union and appealed directly to the Comintern to reconsider the decision. Stalin informed Lovestone that "they have had a majority in the American Communist Party so far because they were seen as supporters of the Communist International ".

When Lovestone returned to the United States, he and fellow party member Benjamin Gitlow were expelled from the party despite serving in the leadership of the party. Allegedly, the exclusion was not due to Lovestone's insubordination to fight a decision by Stalin, but to support for US exceptionalism , which said that socialism could be implemented peacefully in the US.

Lovestone and Gitlow formed their own group called the Communist Party (Opposition) . It was a section of the pro-Bukharin International Communist Opposition , which was much larger than the Trotskyists , but had no perspective after 1941. Lovestone called his party group the Communist Party (Majority Group) in the expectation that the majority of the CPUSA members would join his party group, but ultimately only a few hundred people joined this new organization.

The third period (1928-1935)

The CPUSA adopted the social fascism thesis in 1928 . The membership fell from 28,000 to 6,000 in 1932.

The third period was marked by the termination of the attempt by the CPUSA to organize itself in the American Federation of Labor through the Trade Union Educational League , and the attempt to transfer the organization of so-called dual unions to the Trade Union Unity League . Foster carried on these attempts even though they contradicted the views for which he had previously fought. However, he did not remain chairman of the CPUSA: in 1932 he was replaced by the party's general secretary -  Earl Browder  .

The party slogan at this time was: "The united front from below". During the Great Depression, the party spent many times its energies organizing the unemployed, trying to form “red” unions, promoting rights for African-Americans, and fighting the displacement of peasants and the poor. At the same time, the party tried to link its revolutionary policy to the daily defense of the workers, but it met with little success.

In 1932, the later chairman of the Communist Party of the USA, William Z. Foster, published a book entitled Toward Soviet America , which exposed the CPUSA's plans for a revolution and the establishment of a new socialist society based on the model of the Soviet Union.

The Popular Front (1935-1939)

The ideological rigidity of the Third Period began to break apart, however, with two events: the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as American President in 1932 and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Roosevelt's election and the entry into force of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 caused tremendous changes in the way union work was organized in 1933 and 1934. While the party line was still looking to favor the creation of independent revolutionary unions , party activists chose to enter into these organizations and join the mass of workers in the AFL who had previously attacked them.

The Comintern's Seventh Congress changed its official stance in 1935 when it declared that there had to be a need for a popular front in which all groups fighting against fascism would be represented. The CPUSA gave up its resistance and brought in many organizers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations .

The party also sought unity with forces that were politically to its right. Earl Browder offered to run as an ally of Norman Thomas on a joint list of candidates for the Socialist Party and the Communist Party in the 1936 presidential election, but Thomas turned down the overture. This gesture didn't mean very much at the time, as the CPUSA effectively supported Roosevelt in his union work from 1936 onwards. While the Communist Party continued to put forward its own candidates for president, it also pursued a policy that the Democratic Party saw as the lesser evil in the elections.

The US Communist Party supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War . Many of its members joined the Lincoln Brigade (one of the first International Brigades ). Among its other accomplishments, the Lincoln Brigade was the first American military unit in which black and white soldiers worked as equals. The spirit of the Popular Front envisaged the development of a strong communist influence in intellectual and artistic life. This was often achieved through various organizations that were under the influence or control of the party.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Second World War

The Communist Party of the United States fought fascism on a global scale and in the United States itself, with the Popular Front being the theoretical background here. The number of members in the CPUSA rose to over 38,000 by 1938, after which, however, many members left the party after the Hitler-Stalin pact between the German Reich and the Soviet Union was concluded in 1939. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States also entered World War II , the CPUSA largely supported US policy. A strike avoidance policy was maintained until the end of the Second World War. The leadership of the CPUSA stuck to a patriotic line during these years. She saw herself as an advocate for social peace. She supported the persecution of leaders of the Socialist Workers Party who were legal under the newly created Smith Act . She also opposed the efforts of A. Philip Randolph to organize a march to Washington, DC, to reinforce the demands of African American workers for professional equality.

The beginning of the cold war

Earl Browder expected that the war coalition between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies would bring a longer period of social harmony after the war. In order to better integrate the communist movement into American life, the party was dissolved in 1944 and replaced by the Communist Political Association . However, this harmony was difficult to maintain and the international communist movement turned to the left after the end of the war. Browder found himself in isolation after a critical letter from the leader of the French Communist Party was widely circulated. One result was that he retired and was replaced by William Z. Foster, who remained chairman of the party until his retirement in 1958.

Like other communist parties around the world, the CPUSA also leaned on the left. This happened because of internal party criticism. The result was the exclusion of a handful of the "unteachable" people. Much more important for the party was the resumption of the state's persecution of the CPUSA. The Truman government introduced the oath of allegiance in 1947, which drove some leftists out of their government jobs and, more importantly, legitimized the view of communists as subversive elements to be excluded from public and private life.

The Committee on Un-American Activities , which forced communists and their associates to retract their views and denounce or blacklist other communists if they refused, even provided brief membership in the CPUS or other similar groups as grounds for public Exclusion and personal attacks. This encouraged the federal government to introduce oaths of loyalty and to set up investigative commissions. Private parties like the film industry or self-appointed surveillance groups carried out this policy much more strictly.

The trade union movement also excluded party members. The CIO expelled a number of left-wing unions in 1949, while other CPUS-affiliated workers' representatives from either theirs , following internal disputes sparked by Henry Agard Wallace 's candidacy for the presidency and her rejection of the Marshall Plan Unions were excluded or terminated their participation in the unions.

Fear of communism was reinforced by the fact that the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb in 1949 and Soviet espionage cases were discovered. Ambitious politicians such as Richard M. Nixon and Joseph McCarthy self-advertised by threatening to expel Communists from the Truman administration or, later, in McCarthy's case, from the United States Army . Liberal groups like the Americans for Democratic Action not only distanced themselves from communists, they called themselves anti-communist.

The CPUSA during the McCarthy era

When the Communist Party was founded in 1919, the US government was busy persecuting socialists who opposed World War I and refused to serve in the army . This persecution continued in 1919 and in January 1920 in the Palmer raids . Many ordinary members of the party have been arrested and expelled, and leaders have been persecuted and, in some cases, sentenced to prison terms.

In the late 1930s, with President Roosevelt's permission , the FBI began searching for both Nazis and Communists. In 1940, Congress passed the Smith Act , which forbade any desire to overthrow the government, articulate or incite others to do so.

In 1949 the government indicted Eugene Dennis , William Z. Foster and ten other members of the CPUS for promoting the overthrow of the government. Since the prosecutors could not prove that the defendants had openly incited violence or were involved in the procurement of weapons for a planned revolution, it all depended on testimony from previous members of the party and on quotes from the works of Karl Marx , Lenin and others Revolutionaries from the past. During the trial, the judge sentenced some of the defendants and all of their lawyers for contempt of court. Each of the 11 defendants was found guilty. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the proceedings.

Terrified by the convictions and the fear that they were brought about by informants from the party, Dennis and other party leaders decided to go underground and expel many related groups from the party. This step increased the political isolation of the leadership, which almost rendered the party unable to act.

US President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Communist Control Act of 1954 on August 24, 1954 , which criminalized membership and support of the party.

The 1956 crisis

The Soviet invasion of Hungary on the occasion of the 1956 popular uprising and Khrushchev's secret speech to the CPSU in which he criticized Stalin had a disruptive effect on the CPUSA. Membership plummeted and senior management faced a lost conflict led by the editor of the Daily Worker , John Gates . This sought a democratization in the party.

Many members left the party demoralized, but remained active in progressive affairs, on which they also worked amicably with party members. This minority also provided audiences for publications such as the National Guardian and the Monthly Review , which were important to the development of the New Left in the 1960s.

The upheavals in the CPUSA after 1956 also brought the appearance of a new management team around the former steelworker Gus Hall . Hall held views that coincided with those of his mentor, Foster, but Foster was more concerned with making sure the party adhered entirely to conventional ideas. For this reason, members who stood out as critics and who called for liberalization of the party were repeatedly excluded. The expelled members formed the Progressive Labor Movement in the early 1960s .

The CPUSA after the McCarthy era

Parallel to the internal party upheavals, the CPUSA came under pressure from 1956 onwards from the secret FBI program COINTELPRO , the aim of which was to use subversive and often illegal methods to wear down political groups that were classified as politically dangerous. The communists were the main target of the FBI's actions, which continued until 1971. The tactics used included a. anonymous discrediting intended to destroy the personal or employment relationships of the target persons.

From the 1960s onwards, the CPUSA was largely dwarfed by the New Left. While supporting the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King and other leaders of the movement kept the communists at bay for fear of being branded as communists themselves. The peace movement and the New Left also opposed the CPUSA, largely because of its political orientation towards the USSR . At the same time it was known that the CPUSA had been massively infiltrated and at the end of the 1970s hardly any member trusted the other.

In the early 1970s the number of members in the party rose to 25,000, but could not maintain this number in the 1980s. As a result, the CPUSA decided to stop national election campaigns and only run for offices at the local level.

The end of an era - the collapse of the Soviet Union

The era of glasnost and perestroika and the final collapse of the Soviet Union led to an intra-party crisis. In the late 1980s, the CPUSA felt alienated from Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership style and criticized his policies. This resulted in the CPSU ceasing to support the CPSU in 1989. The 1991 party congress was marked by debates about the future direction of the party after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc . A moderate minority urged Gus Hall to reject Leninism and steer the party along social democratic lines.

Since 1991

Former logo of the KPUSA

In 1991 a larger group of members (including Angela Davis ), who advocated an undogmatic conception of Marxism, left the party and constituted themselves as Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism . The CPUSA 's party newspaper is called People's Weekly World. There is also a monthly journal called Political Affairs . The number of members rose again during President Trump's tenure and was around 5,000 in 2017. The KPUSA also had a youth department, the YCLUSA. The party was politically involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

CPUSA financial support and espionage during the Cold War

Disclosure of FBI files on the CPUSA, as well as Russian archives that hold records of the Communist International and CPUSA, and encrypted Soviet embassies between KGB offices in the United States and Moscow (also known as the Venona Papers ), one can Get an idea of ​​the extent of the CPUSA's involvement in espionage today. The Soviet Union supported the CPUSA from its foundation in 1919 until 1989, when Gus Hall criticized Gorbachev for his actions in the Soviet Union.

In 1959 this support was still at $ 75,000 and rose to $ 3 million in 1987. The capping of the support in 1989 led to a financial crisis, so that as a result, for example, the party newspaper could only appear weekly and not daily.

Regarding espionage activities, it is known, for example, that on April 10, 1943, KGB agent Vasili M. Zarubin, who lives in New York , met CPUSA representative Steve Nelson in Oakland and discussed espionage with him. Even Robert Meeropol, the son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg , admitted on the US talk show PBS's Frontline that his father may have been involved in espionage activities after reading Venona documents about Julius Rosenberg's meeting with the KGB and NKVD -Agent is the topic. He also argues that his mother's role was completely overrated and that his parents were executed for a crime they did not commit. David Greenglass , who played a far greater role than Julius Rosenberg in the Venona documents, was not prosecuted after he denounced his sister Ethel and Julius as spies.

Theodore Alvin Hall , a Harvard- trained physicist and CPUS member, began giving information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union shortly after being hired in Los Alamos at age 19 . Hall, who went by the code name Mlad at the KGB , escaped prosecution. Hall's wife, who knew about the espionage, claimed that her KGB liaison had instructed her to plead innocent , like the Rosenbergs , in case they should be tried.

Leaders of the CPUSA

Election participation and election results

The CPUSA has not yet succeeded in gaining mandates at the federal or state level. The New York MP Vito Marcantonio , who was a member of the House of Representatives from 1935 to 1951 , was closely associated with the party, albeit without being a member.

When assessing the election results of the CPUSA, it should be noted that the party never had the opportunity to take part in national elections nationwide. From the 1930s onwards, the states in which the CPUSA was comparatively strong first set up high and in some cases insurmountable hurdles to keep the party off the ballot in one way or another. Illinois, for example, increased the number of required support signatures from 1,000 to 25,000 in 1931, including at least 200 from at least 50 different counties (although the CPUSA went to court in vain). Massachusetts now required 52,977 signatures instead of 1,000. In 1937 California increased the requirement again from 23,610 to 236,608 signatures - for the CPUSA "a synonym for impossible". Ohio refused to vote for any "new" party that did not have the endorsement of at least 15% of the electorate in the most recent gubernatorial election. Florida , where a particularly restrictive electoral law still applies today, has only allowed members of the Democratic and Republican parties to vote for several decades since 1931, apart from individual cases approved by special law . In 1940, 19 states - including Indiana , Arkansas , Georgia , California, and Kentucky  - adopted legislation to ban Communist candidates from voting and holding public office. In some cases these regulations are still in force. The corresponding passage in the electoral law of Texas reads:

“RESTRICTIONS. (a) The name of a communist may not be printed on the ballot for any primary or general election in this state or a political subdivision of this state. (b) A person may not hold a nonelected office or position with the state or any political subdivision of this state if: (1) any of the compensation for the office or position comes from public funds of this state or a political subdivision of this state; and (2) the employer or superior of the person has reasonable grounds to believe that the person is a communist. "

"RESTRICTIONS. (a) The name of a communist may not be printed on ballot papers for primary elections or parliamentary elections in that state or any regional authority of that state. (b) A person may not hold an unelected office or function in the service of this state or a regional authority of this state if: (1) Remuneration for the office or the function comes wholly or partly from public funds of this state or a regional authority of this state ; and (2) the person's employer or superior has reasonable grounds to suspect that person is a communist. "

The CPUSA has not nominated its own presidential candidate since 1984. In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election , she more or less openly supported the campaign for Barack Obama's re-election , but - since this course was controversial within the party - she did not expressly call for him to be elected. In presidential elections, the party has achieved the following results so far:

Election year Presidential candidate Vice candidate Votes received (absolute) Votes received (%)
1924 William Z. Foster Benjamin Gitlow 38,669 0.13%
1928 William Z. Foster Benjamin Gitlow 48,551 0.13%
1932 William Z. Foster James W. Ford 103,307 0.26%
1936 Earl Browder James W. Ford 79,315 0.17%
1940 Earl Browder James W. Ford 48,557 0.10%
1968 Charlene Mitchell Michael Zagarell 1,077 0.00%
1972 Gus Hall Jarvis Tyner 25,597 0.03%
1976 Gus Hall Jarvis Tyner 58,709 0.07%
1980 Gus Hall Angela Davis 44,933 0.05%
1984 Gus Hall Angela Davis 36,386 0.04%

See also

literature

  • On the history of the Communist Party of the USA: 60 years of struggle. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-320-00679-7 .

Web links

Commons : Communist Party  - collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Sergio Alejandro Gómez: Communist Party membership numbers climbing in the Trump era. Long View Publishing Co., April 19, 2017, accessed April 7, 2020 .
  2. ^ Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans , Book II (final report of the Church Committee )
  3. ^ Guenter Lewy: The Cause That Failed. Communism in American Political Life . New York / Oxford 1990, p. 212.
  4. ↑ In detail Richard Winger: How Ballot Access Laws Affect the US Party System . In: The American Review of Politics , No. 16, 1995, passim.
  5. ↑ James T. Bennett: Not Invited to the Party. How the Demopublicans Have Rigged the System and Left Independents Out in the Cold . New York / Dordrecht / Heidelberg / London 2009, p. 38.
  6. ↑ Quoted from James Thompson: The dirty little secret in Texas . ( Memento of August 11, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) In: Morning Star , March 25, 2012; Retrieved September 11, 2012.
  7. ^ Joelle Fishman: 2012: A United People's Crusade for Truth, Workers' Rights, Human Rights and Justice . cpusa.org, April 27, 2012; Retrieved September 11, 2012.
  8. ↑ Statistics on the 1924 presidential election. Accessed January 22, 2010 (English)
  9. ↑ Statistics on the 1928 presidential election. Accessed January 22, 2010
  10. ↑ Statistics on the 1932 presidential election. Accessed January 22, 2010 (English)
  11. ↑ Statistics on the 1936 presidential election. Accessed January 22, 2010 (English)
  12. ↑ Statistics on the 1940 presidential election. Accessed January 22, 2010 (English)
  13. ↑ Statistics on the 1968 presidential elections. Accessed January 22, 2010 (English)
  14. ↑ Statistics on the presidential elections 1972 Accessed on September 13, 2009 (English)
  15. ↑ Statistics on the 1976 presidential elections. Accessed on September 13, 2009 (English)
  16. ↑ Statistics on the 1980 presidential elections. Accessed on September 13, 2009 (English)
  17. ↑ Statistics on the 1984 presidential elections. Accessed on September 13, 2009 (English).