The ('''CPUSA''') is one of several
Marxist-Leninist groups in the
United States . For approximately the first half of the
20th Century , it was the largest and most widely influential
Communist group in the country, and
Played A Defining Role in the first phase of the U.S. labor movement, organizing and leading most major
Industrial Union s and
Prominently Defending The Rights Of African-Americans throughout that period. However, the CPUSA was effectively eliminated as a political force by
McCarthyism and the
Cold War .
Under the current leadership of
Sam Webb the party continues to exist. It is based in
New York City . Its newspaper is the ''
People's Weekly World ''; its monthly magazine is ''
Political Affairs Magazine ''. Current membership is around 5,500 and has been slowly growing. In the late
1980 s the party became estranged from the leadership of
Mikhail Gorbachev and criticized his policy of
Perestroika , leading to the
Communist Party Of The Soviet Union cutting off its support of the CPUSA in
1989 .
The CPUSA's
1991 convention was consumed by a debate on the future orientation of the party following the collapse of the
Eastern Bloc . One faction urged the leadership to reject
Leninism and take the party in a
Democratic Socialist direction, but the party majority reasserted its classic line. Unable to influence the CPUSA, the group soon left and established itself as the
Committees Of Correspondence For Democracy And Socialism .
In
this PWW article in and the Chinese people are going about the complex, long-term process of building socialism in a vast developing country, which is of necessity part of an increasingly globalized economy."
Although advocates of a
Socialist Revolution , the party calls for a
Peaceful and
Democratic transition to a
Socialist system in the United States and rejects the use of
Violence in a U.S. uprising.
According to its s,
Lesbian s,
Bisexual and
Transgender people…"
Among the points in the party's "Immediate Program"
{Link without Title} are a $12/hour
Minimum Wage ;
Social Welfare programs such as universal
Unemployment Insurance for all workers, universal
Health Care , and opposition to
Privatization of
Social Security ; economic measures such as increased taxes on "the rich and corporations," strong regulation" of the financial industry, "regulation and public ownership of utilities", and increased federal aid to cities and states; opposition to the
Iraq War and other military interventions; opposition to
Free Trade treaties such as
NAFTA ;
Nuclear Disarmament and a reduced military budget; various
Civil Rights provisions;
Campaign Finance Reform including public financing of campaigns; and
Election Law reform, including
Instant Runoff Voting .
The CPUSA recognizes the right of independence-seeking groups, many of whom have been led by Communist and communist-oriented partisans, to defend themselves from
Imperialism , but rejects the use of violence in any
United States uprising. The CPUSA argues that most violence throughout modern history is the result of capitalist
Ruling Class es violently trying to stop social change.
In January,
1919 ,
Lenin invited the left wing of the
Socialist Party Of America to join the
Communist International (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 the Comintern passed with 90% support but the incumbent leadership suppressed the results. Elections for the party's 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 to be held in
Chicago on
August 30 ,
1919 . The party's 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
Charles Ruthenberg and
Louis Fraina , turned away from that effort and formed their own party, the Communist Party of America, at a separate convention in
Chicago on
September 2 ,
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
September 1 ,
1919 .
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 ten 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 .
From its inception, the Communist Party USA came under attack from state and federal governments and later the
FBI . In late 1919 Attorney General
A. Mitchell Palmer , acting under the Sedition Act of 1918, began arresting thousands of party members, particularly the foreign-born, whom the government deported. The Communist Party was forced underground and went through various name changes to evade the authorities.
During the early 1920s, the party apparatus was to a great extent underground. It reemerged in 1923 with a small legal above ground element, 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. It was through this underground party, often commanded by a Soviet official operating as an illegal in the United States, that Soviet intelligence was able to co-opt CPUSA members.
By 1930 it adopted the title Communist Party of the USA, recruited more disaffected members of the Socialist Party and an organization of
African-American socialists called the
African Blood Brotherhood , some of whose members would later play important roles in communist work among blacks.
Now that the aboveground element, or "open party" as it was known, 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 , which 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 spurned. 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 party's Chairman Charles Ruthenberg, which was largely organized by his supporter
Jay Lovestone , and the Foster-Cannon caucus, headed by
William Z. Foster , who headed the Party's
Trade Union Educational League , and
James P. Cannon , who led the
International Labor Defense organization. The first faction drew many of its members from the party's foreign language federations while the latter found more support among 'native' workers.
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 and nascent farmer-labor parties. Under pressure from the Comintern, however, the party broke off relations with both groups in
1924 .
In
1925 Comintern representative
Sergei Gusev ordered the majority Foster faction to surrender control to Ruthenberg's 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,
Jay 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 he and
Maurice Spector of the
Communist Party Of Canada were accidentally given a copy of
Trotsky 's "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 document's positions. A copy of the document was then smuggled out of the country in a child's toy.
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", began to organize support for Trotsky's 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 Trotsky's
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 devastating 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 party's 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 supporters 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 Lovestone's insubordination in challenging a decision by Stalin but for his support for
American Exceptionalism , the thesis that socialism could be achieved peacefully in the USA.'''
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
Trotskyist s 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 CPUSA's members would join him, but only a few hundred people joined his new organization.
''See also External link to
Stalin's comments .'' and
Exceptionalism
The upheavals within the CPUSA in 1928 were an echo of a much more significant change: Stalin's decision to break off any form of collaboration with western socialist parties, which were now condemned as "social fascists", had particularly severe consequences in
Germany , where the
German Communist Party not only refused to work in alliance with the
German Socialist Party , but attacked it and its members. In 1928 there were about twenty-four thousand members. By 1932 the total had fallen to six thousand members.
In the United States the principal impact of the Third Period was to end the CPUSA's efforts to organize within the AFL through the TUEL and to turn its efforts into organizing one of his subordinates,
Earl Browder , replaced him.
The Party's slogan in this period was "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. 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.
In 1932
William Z. Foster , then head of the CPUSA published a book entitled ''
Toward Soviet America '', which laid out the Communist Party's plans for revolution and the building of a new socialist society based on the model of Soviet Russia.
The ideological rigidity of the third period began to crack, however, with two events: the election of
Franklin D. Roosevelt in
1932 and
Adolf Hitler 's rise to power in
1933 . Roosevelt's election and the passage of the
National Industrial Recovery Act in
1933 sparked a tremendous upsurge in union organizing in 1933 and 1934. While the party line still favored creation of autonomous revolutionary unions, party activists chose to fold up those organizations and follow the mass of workers into the AFL unions they had been attacking.
The
Seventh Congress Of The Comintern made the change in line official in
1935 , when it declared the need for a "popular front" of all groups opposed to fascism. The CPUSA abandoned its opposition to the New Deal and provided many of the organizers for the
Congress Of Industrial Organizations .
The party also sought unity with forces to its right. Earl Browder offered to run as
Norman Thomas '
Running Mate on a joint Socialist Party-Communist Party ticket in the
1936 Presidential Election but Thomas rejected this overture.
The gesture did not mean that much in practical terms, since the CPUSA was, by
1936 , effectively supporting Roosevelt in much of its trade union work. While continuing to run its own candidates for office the CPUSA pursued a policy of representing the
Democratic Party as the lesser evil in elections.
Party members also rallied to the defense of the
Spanish Republic during this period after a
Fascist military uprising moved to overthrow it, resulting in the
Spanish Civil War (
1936 to
1939 ). The CPUSA, along with leftists throughout the world, raised funds for medical relief while many of its members made their way to Spain with the aid of the party to join the
Lincoln Brigade , one of the
International Brigades . Among its other achievements, the Lincoln Brigade was the first American military force to include blacks and whites integrated on an equal basis.
Intellectually, the Popular Front period saw the development of a strong communist influence in intellectual and artistic life. This was often through various organizations influenced or controlled by the Party or, as they were pejoratively known, "
Fronts ."
)]]
The CPUSA was adamantly opposed to fascism during the Popular Front period. Although membership in the CPUSA rose to about 75,000
{Link without Title} by 1938, many members left the party after the signing of the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Nonaggression Pact of 1939. Signing of a pact with
Hitler meant that the CPUSA turned the focus of its public activities from anti-fascism to an advocate of peace. The CPUSA accused
Winston Churchill and Roosevelt of provoking aggression against Hitler and denouncing the
Polish government as fascist after the German and Soviet invasion. In allegiance to the Soviet Union, the party changed this policy again after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on
June 22 ,
1941 . So sudden was this change that CPUSA members of the UAW negotiating on behalf of the union reportedly changed their position from favoring strike action to opposing it in the same negotiating session.
Throughout the rest of
World War II , the CPUSA continued a policy of militant, if sometimes bureaucratic trade unionism to opposing strike actions at all costs. The leadership of the CPUSA was among the most vocal pro war voices in the United States, advocating unity against fascism, not opposing the prosecution of leaders of the
Socialist Workers Party under the newly enacted
Smith Act , and opposing
A. Philip Randolph 's efforts to organize a march on Washington to dramatize black workers' demands for equal treatment on the job. Prominent CPUSA members, such as
Dalton Trumbo and
Pete Seeger , recalled anti-war material they had previously released.
Earl Browder expected the wartime coalition between the Soviet Union and the west to bring about a prolonged period of social harmony after the war. In order to better integrate the communist movement into American life the party was officially dissolved in
1944 and replaced by a Communist Political Association.
That harmony proved elusive, however, and the international communist movement swung to the left after the war ended. Browder found himself isolated when a critical letter from the leader of the
French Communist Party received wide circulation. As a result of this, he was retired and replaced by
William Z. Foster , who would remain the senior leader of the party until his own retirement in
1958 .
In line with other communist parties worldwide, the CPUSA also swung to the left and, as a result, experienced a brief period in which a number of internal critics argued for a more leftist stance than the leadership was willing to countenance. The result was the expulsion of a handful of "premature anti-revisionists".
More important for the party was the renewal of state persecution of the CPUSA. The
Truman administration's loyalty oath program, introduced in
1947 , drove some leftists out of federal employment and, more importantly, legitimized the notion of communists as subversives, to be exposed and expelled from public and private employment. The
House Committee On Un-American Activities , whose hearings were perceived as forums where current and former Communists and those sympathetic to Communism were compelled under the duress of the ruin of their careers to confess and name other Communists, made even brief affiliation with the CPUSA or any related groups grounds for public exposure and attack, inspiring local governments to adopt loyalty oaths and investigative commissions of their own. Private parties, such as the motion picture industry and self-appointed watchdog groups, extended the policy still further. This included the still controversial
Blacklist of actors, writers and directors in Hollywood who had been Communists or who had fallen in with Communist-controlled or influenced organizations in the pre-war and wartime years.
The union movement purged party members as well. The CIO formally expelled a number of left-led unions in
1949 after internal disputes triggered by the party's support for
Henry Agard Wallace 's candidacy for
President and its opposition to the
Marshall Plan , while other labor leaders sympathetic to the CPUSA either were driven out of their unions or dropped their alliances with the party.
The widespread fear of communism became even more acute after the Soviets' explosion of an and
Joseph McCarthy , made names for themselves by exposing or threatening to expose Communists within the Truman administration or later, in McCarthy's case, within the
United States Army . Liberal groups, such as the
Americans For Democratic Action , not only distanced themselves from communists and communist causes, but defined themselves as anti-communist.
One of America's most prominent sexual radicals,
Harry Hay , developed his political views as an active member of the CPUSA, but his founding in the early
1950s of the
Mattachine Society —America's first gay rights group was not seen as something Communists, who feared even further political prosecution, should associate with organizationally, despite their personal support. In 2004, the editors of ''
Political Affairs '' published articles detailing
their self-criticism of the Party's early views of gay and lesbian rights and praised Hay's work.
From . This substantial amount reflected the Party's subservience to the Moscow
Line , in contrast to the
French and later
Italian Communist parties, whose
Eurocommunism deviated from the orthodox line in the late 1970s. Releases from the Soviet archives show that all national Communist parties that conformed to the Soviet line were funded in the same fashion. From the Communist point of view this international funding arose from the internationalist nature of Communism itself; fraternal assistance was considered the duty of Communists in any one country to give aid to their comrades in other countries. From the anti-communist point of view, this funding represented an unwarranted interference by one country in the affairs of another.
The cutoff of funds in 1989 resulted in a financial crisis, which forced the CPUSA to cut back publication in )
Much more controversial than mere funding, however, is the alleged involvement of CPUSA members in espionage for the Soviet Union. —headed the CPUSA’s underground secret apparatus from 1932 to 1938 and pioneered its role as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence activities.
Bernard Schuster , Organizational Secretary of the New York District of the CPUSA, is claimed to have been the operational recruiter and conduit for members of the CPUSA into the ranks of the secret apparatus, or "Group A line".
Stalin publicly disbanded the Comintern in 1943. A Moscow NKVD message to all stations on
12 September 1943 detailed instructions for handling intelligence sources within the CPUSA after the disestablishment of the Comintern.
Earl Browder had been both Chairman of the CPUSA and recruiter for the
NKVD (in the
Venona Project he is known as Agent "HELMSMAN"). In 1941, with the approval of the USSR, he disbanded the party into a committee. However, after the USSR shifted from attempted cooperation to opposition towards the USA in the years following World War II, Browder was expelled from the leadership of the CPUSA when he attempted to unify the left in a proposed renewed popular front, which included a proposal to support Truman for re-election in 1948. The
NKGB thought his services worth keeping, and they succeeded in covertly financing him, by setting him up as a representative of Soviet publishers. Even then, that didn't work, as Browder was dropped after violating the Soviet line again in favor of
Titoism .
There are a number of decrypted World War II Soviet messages between
NKVD offices in the United States and Moscow, also known as the
Venona Cables . The Venona cables and other published sources appear to confirm that
Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage. However his role as an "atomic spy" was grossly exaggerated, the only involvement in atomic espionage being the provision of a crude diagram of the core of a plutonium bomb by his brother in law,
David Greenglass , a machinist at Los Alamos. The case against his wife,
Ethel Rosenberg , was even shakier, the death penalty being imposed with little legal basis in the vain hope that Julius Rosenberg would strike a plea bargain and lead investigators to other spies.
Theodore Hall , a
Harvard -trained
Physicist and CPUSA member, began passing information on the atomic bomb to the Soviets soon after he was hired at
Los Alamos at age 19. Hall, who was known as Mlad by his KGB handlers, escaped prosecution. Hall's wife, aware of his espionage, claims that their NKVD handler had advised them to plead innocent, as the Rosenbergs did, if formally charged.
It was the belief of opponents of the CPUSA such as
J. Edgar Hoover , long-time director of the FBI, and
Joseph McCarthy , for whom
McCarthyism is named, and other
Anti-communists that the CPUSA constituted an active
Conspiracy , was secretive, loyal to a foreign power, and dedicated to the clandestine
Infiltration of American cultural and political institutions. This is the "traditionalist" view of some in the field of
Communist Studies such as Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes.
At one time this view was shared by the majority of the
United States Congress . In the "Findings and declarations of fact" section of the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 (50 U.S.C. Chap. 23 Sub. IV Sec. 841), it stated,
"although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy... prescribed for it by the foreign leaders... to carry into action slavishly the assignments given...acknowledges no constitutional or statutory limitations...its dedication to the proposition that the present constitutional Government of the United States ultimately must be brought to ruin by any available means, including resort to force and violence...as the agency of a hostile foreign power renders its existence a clear present and continuing danger
Based on views such as these, the United States government prosecuted Communist Party members on criminal charges of conspiracy.
When the Communist Party was formed in 1919 the United States government was engaged in prosecution of Socialists who had opposed World War I and military service. This persecution was continued in 1919 and January, 1920 in the
Palmer Raids or the
Red Scare . Many ordinary members of the Party were arrested and deported; leaders were prosecuted and in some cases sentenced to prison terms. In the late 1930s, with the authorization of President
Roosevelt , the
FBI began investigating both domestic Nazis and Communists. Congress passed the
Smith Act , which made it illegal to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government, in 1940.
In
1949 , the federal government put
Eugene Dennis ,
William Z. Foster and ten other CPUSA leaders on trial for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. Because the prosecution could not show that any of the defendants had openly called for violence or been involved in accumulating weapons for a proposed revolution, it relied on the testimony of former members of the party that the defendants had privately advocated the overthrow of the government and on quotations from the work of
Karl Marx , Lenin and other revolutionary figures of the past. During the course of the trial the judge held several of the defendants and all of their counsel in contempt of court.
All of the remaining eleven defendants were found guilty. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of their convictions by a 6-2 vote in
United States V. Dennis , . The government then proceeded with the prosecutions of more than 100 "second string" members of the party.
Panicked by these arrests and the fear that it was compromised by informants, Dennis and other party leaders decided to go underground and to disband many affiliated groups. The move only heightened the political isolation of the leadership, while making it nearly impossible for the Party to function.
The widespread persecution of communists and their associates began to abate somewhat after Senator
Joseph McCarthy overreached himself in the
Army-McCarthy Hearings , producing a backlash. The Supreme Court brought a halt to the Smith Act prosecutions in
1957 in its decision in
Yates V. United States , , which required that the government prove that the defendant had actually taken concrete steps toward the forcible overthrow of the government, rather than merely advocating it in theory.
See Also: New Communist Movement
Progressive Labor Party
The '' editor
John Gates , which wished to democratize the party. Perhaps the greatest single blow dealt to the party in this period was the loss of the ''Daily Worker'', published since
1924 , which was suspended in
1958 due to falling circulation.
Most of the critics would depart from the party demoralized, but others would remain active in progressive causes and would often end up working harmoniously with party members. This
Diaspora rapidly came to provide the audience for publications like the ''National Guardian'' and ''Monthly Review'', which were to be important in the development of the
New Left in the
1960s .
The post-1956 upheavals in the CPUSA also saw the advent of a new leadership around former steel worker
Gus Hall . Hall's views were very much those of his mentor Foster, but the younger man was to be more rigorous in ensuring the party was completely orthodox than the older man in his last years. Therefore, while remaining critics who wished to liberalize the party were expelled, so too were
Anti-revisionist critics who took an anti-
Khrushchev stance.
Many of these critics were elements on both U.S. coasts who would come together to form the
Progressive Labor Movement in 1961. Progressive Labor would come to play a role in many of the numerous
Maoist organizations of the mid-
1960s and early
1970s .
Jack Shulman , Foster's secretary, also played a role in these organizations; he was not expelled from the CP, but resigned.
The CPUSA itself was largely eclipsed by the New Left in the 1960s; while it supported and claimed to start the
Civil Rights Movement . While Communists supported
Martin Luther King, Jr , and other movement leaders, civil rights leaders kept communists and former communists at arm's length for fear of being branded communists themselves. Similarly, the peace movement and the New Left rejected the CPUSA for both its bureaucratic rigidity and its association with Soviet Union.
In the
1970s , the CPUSA managed to grow in membership to about 25,000 members, despite the exodus of numerous
Anti-Revisionist and
Maoist groups from its ranks. However, in
1984 , seeing the onslaught of
Ronald Reagan 's anti-Communist administration and decreased CPUSA membership, Gus Hall chose to end the CPUSA's nation-wide electoral campaigns. But in the decade ending in 1989, the membership in the CPUSA grew from 10,000 to 50,000, making it the fastest growing major party on the Far Left in the US.
Terri Albano, a high-ranking party member, stated in 1998 that membership was still around 50,000. During the 1990's, the party recruited heavily in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the US, particularly in Black neighborhoods. As a result, there are many young Black and Hispanic members of the CPUSA. The CPUSA still runs candidates for local office. In recent years, the party has strongly opposed the Republican Party in the US, who they term "ultra-right" and "fascist". As part of a pragmatic stance, the CPUSA strongly supports the Democratic Party against the Republicans, as they see the Republican Party as a menace to be defeated.
Ideologically, much appears to be up for grabs. A recent CPUSA theoretical journal voiced support for the Chinese Communist Party, including their heavy reliance on capitalism. The article stated, "The transition to capitalism may be more on order of decades than years, as Lenin had thought." The same article said, "Democracy is an essential element of any socialist system."
See
Communists In The U.S. Labor Movement (1919-1937) ,
Communists In The U.S. Labor Movement (1937-1950)
The Communist Party USA played a significant role in defending the rights of
African-American s during its heyday in the
1930s and
1940s . Throughout its history many of the Party's leaders and political thinkers have been African Americans. James Ford,
Charlene Mitchell ,
Angela Davis , and Jarvis Tyner, the current executive vice chair of the Party, all ran as presidential or vice presidential candidates on the Party ticket. Others like
Benajmin Davis ,
William L. Patterson , James Jackson,
Henry Winston , Claude Lightfoot, Alphaeus Hunton, Doxey Wilkerson,
Claudia Jones , and John Pittman contributed in important ways to Party's approaches to major issues from human and civil rights, peace, women's equality, the national question, working class unity, Marxist thought, cultural struggle and more. Their contributions have had a lasting impact on not only the Party but the general public as well. Noted African American thinkers, artists, and writers such as Claude McKay,
Richard Wright , Ann Petry,
W. E. B. Du Bois , Shirley Graham Du Bois, Lloyd Brown, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Robeson, Frank Marshall Davis, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more too numerous to list here were one-time members or supporters of the Party. The party's civil rights work continues to this day. It was instrumental in the founding of the
Black Radical Congress in 1998.
- Foster, William Z. ''The Workers Party to the Fore'' PDF document . Published in . Chicago. v. 4, no. 1 (Nov. 1924), pp. 9-11. Reprinted on line in the Early American Marxism Archive . Retrieved May 3, 2005. Party official Foster defines the early Workers Party against Progressivism .
- Peters, J. . First Published: July, 1935. Workers Library Publishers, NYC. Transcription/Markup: Brian Basgen. Reprinted on Marxists Internet Archive: Depression Era American Marxism . Retrieved May 3, 2005.
- CPUSA National Board. ''The Road to Socialism USA: Unity for Peace, Democracy, Jobs and Equality'' . Draft Program of the CPUSA. Published February 2, 2005. Retrieved June 8, 2005.
- Webb, Sam . ''What the Communist Party’s draft program is all about'' . . April 14, 2005. Retrieved May 19, 2005.
- CPUSA National Board. "For the Sake of the Union: Change Congress in November" . Communist Party website . Feb. 2, 2006. Retrieved March 9, 2006.
- CPUSA National Committee. "Defeat Anti-Immigrant HR 4437" . Communist Party website . Dec. 22, 2005. Retrived March 9, 2006.
- Susan Webb. "Political Storm in US -- CPUSA report to the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties" . Communist Party website . Dec. 22, 2005, Retrieved March 9, 2006.
- CPUSA National Committee. "Communist Party, USA: Emergency Action on Winter Heating and Fuel Crisis" . Communist Party website . Dec. 22, 2005, Retrieved March 9, 2006.
- Sam Webb . "Fighting Racism is at the Heart of Our Struggles" . February 25, 2006.
- Victor Perlo. ''The Economics of Racism, II''. New York. International Publishers . 1996. ISBN 01717806987
- ''The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB'', Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin , Basic Books, 1999, hardcover edition, p. 287-293, p. 306, ISBN 0465003109. Vasili Mitrokhin was an archivist who worked for the KGB . After 1972 , when the KGB established its new modern offices at Yasenovo, Mitrokhin was entrusted with transferring the corpus of KGB files from its old office at the Lubyanka in Moscow to the new offices. During the next ten years while performing these duties he copied many files which he turned over to British intelligence when he defected in March, 1992.
- ''Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin'', John Barron , Regnery Publishing, 1996, ISBN 0895264862; 2001 edition, ISBN 0709160615. This biography of Morris Childs, who together with his brother Jack arranged for and handled the money transfers during the 1960s and 70s , contains much of the same material.
''General Articles''
''General Books''
- Draper, Theodor , ''The Roots of American Communism'', Viking, 1957
- Draper, Theodor , ''American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period'', Viking, 1960
- Howe, Irving and Lewis Coser , ''The American Communist Party: A Critical History'', Beacon Press, 1957
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