Communist Party, USA

Communist Party USA
Party Chairman	Sam Webb
Senate Leader	N/A
House Leader	N/A
Founded	1919
Headquarters	235 W. 23rd Street New York, NY 10011
Political ideology	Communism; Marxism-Leninism
International affiliation	formerly Comintern; today, none
Color(s)	{{{colours}}}
Website	Cpusa.org

The Communist Party USA, formally known as the Communist Party United States of America ('CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States. During the first half of the twentieth Century it was the largest and most influential communist party in the country, playing a defining role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s and pursuing intense anti-racist activity in workplaces.

After WWII, the CPUSA's its close collaboration with the Soviet Union led to a major Red Scare on the grounds that the party was working to overthrow the American system of democracy and capitalism. Revelations that the CPUSA had become heavily involved in recruitment and espionage activities for the Soviet KGB and GRU resulted in government prosecutions of the party not only as subversive, but also as a foreign agent.

By the end of the 50s, the party transformed its militant revolutionary line into a more evolutionary one, echoing the Soviet policy of "peaceful coexistence." By the early 1960s this conciliatory shift led to dozens of angry breakaways by more militant CPUSA members and their children who, as the New Left, continued to follow the idea of armed class war and generally turned to Mao Zedong for inspiration. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 led to further disillusionment and defections.

With continued erosion of what little mass support remained, in the late 1980s the party became estranged from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself. Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika was unpopular with the CPUSA, leading to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union cutting off its support of the CPUSA in 1989. The fall of the Soviet Union dealt the CPUSA a major blow. The party today continues to call for a "peaceful transition to socialism" in the U.S.

History

Formation and early history (1919-1921)

Lenin in 1920

The first political party in the United States to advocate Marxism was the Socialist Labor Party, organized in 1890, some of whose members later formed the Socialist Party of America (SPA). In January, 1919, Soviet leader V.I. Lenin invited the left wing of the SPA to join Communist International (Comintern). Buoyed by a large influx of new members from countries involved in the Russian Revolution, elections for the party's national executive committee resulted in 12 far-leftists being elected out of a total of 15. Calls were made to expel moderates from the party, but moderates struck back by expelling several large state organizations, language federations, and many locals.

The language federations and others factions then turned away from the SPA and formed a new party, the Communist Party of America, at a convention in Chicago on September 1, 1919. Meanwhile, plans led by pro-Soviet journalist John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow to take the SPA down the Soviet path failed, resulting in the pro-Soviet faction of the SPA forming the Communist Labor Party on August 30, 1919.

The Comintern was not happy with two Communist parties in the USA. In January, 1920 it ordered that the two parties, which consisted of about 12,000 members, merge under the name United Communist Party and follow the party line established in Moscow. Part of the Communist Party of America, under the leadership of Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone, did as ordered. However, 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 re-established discipline, and the parties two parties were merged in May, 1921. Other members of the new United Communist Party were drawn from the ranks of the Industrial Workers of the World.

The First Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1919. The affiliation of the U.S. Communists with the Comintern led to the party's being forced underground as an agent of Soviet subversion.

The fit Red Scare (1919-1923)

From its inception, the party came scrutiny and attack from state and federal governments as an agent of Soviet revolution. After a series of bombings and attempted assassinations of government officials, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, acting under the Sedition Act of 1918, began arresting large numbers of party members in 1919. Many of these were foreign-born recent immigrants, whom the government soon deported.

The party apparatus was thus forced underground and went through various name changes. It reemerged in 1923 with a small, legal above-ground element, the Workers Party of America. As concern about the Soviet revolution coming to the US ebbed and the deportations of the early 1920s diminished, the party became bolder and more open. One element of the party, however, remained permanently underground, later known as the CPUSA secret apparatus. It was through this underground operation, often commanded by a Soviet official operating in the United States, that Soviet intelligence was able to use a select number of CPUSA members as agents.

Factional struggles (1923-1929)

Now that the above-ground element was again legal, the party, still known as the Workers Party of America, began to devote itself to developing roots within the US working class. This represented a move away from hopes of immediate revolution, and toward a longer-term approach. It was further facilitated by decisions of the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern held in 1925, which decided that period revolutionary upsurge had ended. The American Communists thus embarked then on the arduous work of locating and winning allies.

That work was, however, complicated by factional struggles. The Workers Party of America fairly quickly developed two main more or less fixed factional groupings within its leadership:

File:James p cannon 1922 Moskva.jpg

James P. Cannon (center) with fellow American Communists in Moscow in 1928

• a faction around the party secretary Charles Ruthenberg, largely organized by his supporter Jay Lovestone
• the so-called 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 and left-wing trade unionists. Foster's group had strong bonds with the "progressive" leaders of the Chicago Federation of Labor, the Progressive Party, and nascent farmer-labor parties. The Comintern, however, felt that these groups lacked adequate revolutionary potential, and the CPUSA broke off relations with both groups in 1924. In 1925 the Foster faction was ordered by the Comintern to cooperate more fully under Ruthenberg's leadership.

However, the factional infighting within the Workers Party of America did not end. Ruthenberg died in 1927 and his ally, Jay Lovestone, succeeded him as party secretary. Both Lovestone and Cannon traveled to Moscow in 1928 to attend the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, hoping to gain an advantage for their factions.

While there, Cannon was given a copy Trotsky's "Critique of the Draft Programme of the Comintern" and became convinced of its arguments that the Soviet Union had abandoned the principle of revolutionary internationalism in favor of Stalin's Soviet-centered policy. Lovestone, meanwhile, had impressed the Comintern leadership as a loyal supporter of Nikolai Bukharin, then the Comintern's general secretary.

Jay Lovestone's support for Nicholai Buhkarin (above) proved his undoing after Buhkarin was purged by Stalin.

Back in America, Cannon and his associates, such as Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, began to organize support for Trotsky's theses. As a result, Cannon was expelled from the CPUSA, and he and his followers organized the Communist League of America as a section of Trotsky's International Left Opposition.

Ironically, Lovestone's support of Buhkarin would have equally devastating consequences for his party prospects when, in 1929, Bukharin was on the losing end of a struggle with Stalin. Buhkarin was soon purged from the Politburo and removed as head of the Comintern. A Comintern delegation subsequently came to the United States and demanded that Lovestone resign as party secretary in favor of his other arch-rival, Foster. Lovestone, with strong support among the CPUSA's rank and file membership, traveled to the Soviet Union and appealed directly to the Comintern. However, Stalin, whose power was now absolute, was not convinced of his friendship.

When Lovestone returned to the United States, he was purged from party leadership, ostensibly on grounds of his support for the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, the thesis that socialism could be achieved peacefully in the USA, without violent revolution. Lovestone and his allies formed their own group called the Communist Party (Opposition), a section of the pro-Bukharin International Communist Opposition. With the party still enamored with Stalin and the Soviet cause, only a few hundred US Communists joined this new organization.

Consolidation under Stalin (1929-1935)

The upheavals within the party in 1928-29 echoed of a much more general change in Soviet policy: Stalin's decision to break off any form of collaboration with non-revolutionary western socialist parties, which were now condemned as "social fascists."

This, combined with a gradual awakening of U.S. communists to the reality of Stalinism and defections to the Trotskyists, resulted in a membership loss from about 24,000 CPUSA members in 1928 to approximately 6,000 members in 1932.

William Z. Foster was CPUSA general secretary from 1929-32 and again headed the part from 1945-58

Another impact of Stalin's edict was to abruptly end the party's investment in organizing within the American Federation of Labor (AFL), launching instead the Communist-controlled Trade Union Unity League, affiliated with the Red International of Labor Unions. As general secretary, Foster followed the Soviet line on this crucial issue, even though it contradicted the policies he had previously championed.

By 1930 the party had adopted the title of Communist Party of the USA. It devoted much of its energy in the Great Depression to attempting to found "red" unions, organizing the unemployed, attracting African Americans championing the Negro rights, and protesting the evictions of farmers and the working poor.

In 1932, William Z. Foster, upon his retirement as party head, 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 in the USA, based on the model of Soviet Russia. Earl Browder now became general secretary of the party.

Browder moved the party even closer to Soviet interests, helping to develop its underground secret apparatus within the US in cooperation with Soviet intelligence. He actively assisted in the recruitment of espionage sources and agents for the Soviet NKVD, while his younger sister Margerite was an NKVD operative in Europe until removed from those duties at Browder's request. The CPUSA's foreign policy platform came under the direct control of Stalin, who enforced his directives through the NKVD.

The Popular Front (1935-1939)

The ideological rigidity of the early 30s 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 Soviet line still favored creation of red unions, U.S. Communists chose to close these organization and lead their still small membership into the AFL-affiliated unions they had been attacking as "bourgeois."

The Seventh Congress of the Comintern accepted this change in policy in 1935, when it declared the need for a popular front of all groups opposed to fascism. The CPUSA thus abandoned its opposition to Roosevelt's "bourgeois socialist" New Deal and provided many of the organizers for the emerging Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which took a more militant left wing line than the AFL.

The party also sought unity with forces to its right. Earl Browder offered to run as on a joint Socialist Party-Communist Party ticket in the 1936 presidential election by the Socialists, unwilling to associate themselves with either violent revolution or the Soviet Union, rejected his offer.

Party members also rallied to the defense of the Spanish Republic after a right-wing 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 fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Culturally, the Popular Front period also witnessed the development of a strong communist influence in intellectual and artistic life, often through organisations influenced or controlled by the party or, pejoratively known "Communist fronts."

The Stalin-Hitler Pact and World War II (1939-1945)

The Washington New Dealer adopts the party line after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact

During the CPUSA's aggressive opposition to fascism in the Popular Front period, membership in the CPUSA rose to about 75,000. However, the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact allying the Soviet Union with Germany in 1939 resulted in a major crisis as thousands of Jewish and other anti-fascist members left in disgust. The CPUSA abruptly turned away from militant anti-fascism to focus its public activities on advocating "peace," opposing U.S. military preparations and condemning those opposed to Hitler as warmongers. The CPUSA accused Winston Churchill and Roosevelt of provoking aggression against Germany and denounced the Polish government as fascist after the Germans and Soviets joined in invading Poland. Thousands more members now found that their consciences could no longer allow them to remain in the party.

Suddenly, ever faithful to the Soviet line, the CPUSA once again changed it war policy after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Prominent CPUSA members and supporters, such as writer Dalton Trumbo and singer Pete Seeger, attempted to withdraw anti-war material they had previously released. The leadership of the CPUSA now became one of the most vocal pro-war voices in the United States. Throughout the rest of World War II, the CPUSA opposed strike actions at all costs as harming the war effort, even opposing A. Philip Randolph's efforts to organize a march on Washington to dramatize black workers' demands for equal treatment on the job.

Onset of the Cold War (1945-54)

Earl Browder expected the wartime coalition between the Soviet Union and the west to bring about a prolonged period of international harmony after the war. In order better to integrate the movement into American life, the party was temporarily dissolved in 1944 and replaced by the Communist Political Association. That harmony proved elusive, however, and the international Communist movement swung to the left after the war ended. As a result, in 1945 he was retired and replaced by former party leader William Z. Foster, who would remain the CPUSA's party chairman until 1958, while Eugene Denis, who had previously been a Comintern agent in China, served as general secretary.

In line with other Communist parties worldwide, the CPUSA swung to the left. Internal opposition to yet another shift in the party line resulted in the expulsion of a number of dissidents. More important for the party was the renewal of government suspicion of the the loyalty of the CPUSA and its members. The Truman administration's loyalty oath program, introduced in 1947, drove a number of Communists and other extreme leftists out of federal employment and legitimized the notion of Communists as subversives. On July 20, 1948, Foster, Dennis and ten other party leaders were arrested and charged under the Alien Registration Act. Foster was not prosecuted due to ill health, but Dennis and several others would eventually serve prison terms.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities made even brief affiliation with the CPUSA and its front groups grounds for public exposure, inspiring local governments to adopt loyalty oaths and investigative commissions of their own. Non-government associations, notably in the motion picture industry created watchdog groups, including the still controversial blacklist of actors, writers, and directors in Hollywood who had been Communists or who had fallen in with Communist fronts in the pre-war and wartime years.

The union movement purged party members as well. The CIO formally expelled a number of red unions in 1949, while labor leaders sympathetic to or controlled by the CPUSA were driven out of their unions or disowned their alliances with the party.

The widespread fear of Communism became more acute after the Soviets' explosion of an atomic bomb in 1949 and the discovery of Soviet espionage which gave them state secrets to do so. Liberal groups, such as the Americans for Democratic Action and others, distanced themselves Communist causes and formally defined themselves as anti-Communist. In the early 1950s, politicians like Richard M. Nixon and Joseph McCarthy made names for themselves by exposing Communists within the Truman administration. However, McCarthy's grandstanding and sometimes irresponsible tactics would provide a basis a reaction against the new Red Scare.

The later 50s, 60s and 70s

The US government formally outlawed the CPUSA as an agent of Soviet revolution by passing the Communist Control Act in 1954. The 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary Nikita Khrushchev denunciation of Stalinism had a cataclysmic effect on the previously staunchly Stalinist membership of the CPUSA. Many internal critics departed from the party demoralized, but others would remain active in leftist causes and become 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, whose policy of strict adherence to the Soviet line tolerated neither opposition from anti-Stalinists who criticized the Soviet policy in Hungary nor from those who felt Khrushchev's policy had gone too far in denouncing Stalinism.

In the 1970s, the CPUSA managed to grow in membership to about 25,000 members, as it championed popular front groups opposed to the Vietnam war, despite the exodus of numerous Anti-Revisionist and Maoist groups from its ranks.

Current Era

In 1984, due to the popularity of Ronald Reagan's anti-Communist administration and decreased CPUSA membership, Gus Hall chose to end the CPUSA's nation-wide electoral campaigns. During the 1990s, the party recruited heavily in impoverished minority neighborhoods in the US, particularly in Black neighbourhoods. 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, at times, "fascist." As part of a pragmatic stance, the CPUSA strongly supports the Democratic Party against the Republicans,^{[citation needed]} as they see the Republican Party as a menace to be defeated. The Communist Party still maintains that both parties are capitalist in nature, and only support the Democrats as a means to topple conservative domination in America. Many in the communist movement disagree with this "lesser of two evils" strategy, and it may have encouraged some defections from the CP to other leftist groups.

Ideologically, much appears to be up for grabs. A recent article in Political Affairs 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."^{[citation needed]} Other articles published by Political Affairs have been critical of this process in China as well.

In a 2002 article in People's Weekly World, CPUSA correspondents Marilyn Bechtel and Debbie Bell said of their trip to the People's Republic of China: "...[W]e came away with a new respect for the thoughtfulness, thoroughness, energy and optimism with which the Communist Party of China 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."

An overview of the Communist Party's current ideology can be found in the near-definitive report, "Reflections on Socialism," by Sam Webb, the Party's national chair. The article explains the Party's support for a democratic, anti-racist, anti-sexist, immediate left-wing change for the United States. The report also covers the fall of the Socialist Bloc, claiming that democracy was not sufficiently developed in these countries. The report states that, "On the one hand, socialism transformed and modernized backward societies, secured important economic and social rights, assisted countries breaking free of colonialism, contributed decisively to the victory over Nazism, constituted by its mere presence a pressure on the ruling classes in the capitalist world to make concessions to their working classes and democratic movements, and acted as a counterweight to the aggressive ambitions of U.S. imperialism for nearly fifty years." The report stresses its dedication to revolutionary struggle, but states that Americans should look for peaceful revolutionary change. Webb says that capitalism cannot solve problems such as economic stagnation, racism, gender discrimination, or poverty. The report explains that there will be many transitory stages from capitalism, to socialism, and finally to communism. On the issue of markets in a socialist society, Webb states, " Admittedly, market mechanisms in a socialist society can generate inequality, disproportions and imbalances, destructive competition, downward pressure on wages, and monopoly cornering of commodity markets – even the danger of capitalist restoration. But this is not sufficient reason for concluding that markets have no place in a socialist economy."

The archives of the Communist Party USA were donated in March, 2007 to the Tamiment Library at New York University. The massive donation, in 12,000 cartons, included history from the founding of the party, 20,000 books and pamphlets, and a million photographs from the archives of the Daily Worker. The Tamiment Library also holds a copy of the microfilmed archive of Communist Party documents from Soviet Archives held by the Library of Congress as well as other materials which documents radical and Left history.

Soviet funding of the Party and espionage

From 1959 until 1989, when Gus Hall attacked the initiatives taken by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the CPUSA received a substantial subsidy from the Soviet Union. There is at least one receipt signed by Gus Hall in the KGB archives. Starting with $75,000 in 1959 this was increased gradually to $3,000,000 in 1987 . This substantial amount reflected the Party's subservience to the Moscow line, in contrast to the Italian and later Spanish and British 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 1990 of the Party newspaper, the People's Daily World, to weekly publication, the People's Weekly World. (references for this section are provided below)

Much more controversial than mere funding, however, is the alleged involvement of CPUSA members in espionage for the Soviet Union. Whittaker Chambers has alleged that Sandor Goldberger—also known as "Josef Peters," who commonly wrote under the name J. Peters—headed the CPUSA’s underground secret apparatus from 1932 to 1938 and pioneered its rôle as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence activities. Bernard Schuster, Organisational 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 NKVD 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 favour 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. Theodore Hall, a Harvard-trained physicist who did not join the CPUSA until 1952, 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 whose members assisted Soviet intelligence in the clandestine infiltration of American government . This is the "traditionalist" view of some in the field of Communist studies such as Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, since supported by several memoirs of ex-Soviet KGB officers and information obtained from VENONA and Soviet archives.

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

In 1993, experts from the Library of Congress travelled to Moscow to copy previously secret archives of Communist Party USA (CPUSA) records, sent to the Soviet Union for safekeeping by party organisers. The records provided an irrefutable link between Soviet intelligence and information obtained by the CPUSA and its contacts in the U.S. government from the 1920s through the 1940s. Some documents revealed that the CPUSA was actively involved in secretly recruiting party members from African-American groups and rural farm workers. Other CPUSA records contained further evidence that Soviet sympathizers had indeed infiltrated the State Department, beginning in the 1930s. Included in CPUSA archival records were confidential letters from two U.S. ambassadors in Europe to Roosevelt and a senior State Department official. Thanks to an official in the State department sympathetic to the Party, the confidential correspondence, concerning political and economic matters in Europe, ended up in the hands of Soviet intelligence.

The Communist Party and U.S. political movements

The Communist Party was heavily involved in the U.S. labour movement, especially before 1950, and was an early proponent of equality for African-Americans. Beginning in the 1960s, the Communist Party was involved in opposing U.S. foreign policy, particularly U.S. wars against Communist regimes and movements abroad.

The Communist Party and the U.S. labor movement

See Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1919-1937), Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1937-1950)

The Communist Party and African-Americans

See main article: The Communist Party and African-Americans

The Communist Party USA played a significant role in defending the rights of African-Americans 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 Benjamin O. Davis Jr., William L. Patterson, Harry Haywood, James Jackson, Henry Winston, Claude Lightfoot, Alphaeus Hunton, Doxey Wilkerson, Claudia Jones, and John Pittman contributed in important ways to the 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 were one-time members or supporters of the Party. The party's work to appeal to African-Americans continues to this day. It was instrumental in the founding of the Black Radical Congress in 1998.

The Communist Party and the U.S. peace movement

The Communist Party opposed the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the invasion of Grenada, and U.S. support for anti-communist military dictatorships and movements in Central America. During the Vietnam War, as a tactical move, the CPUSA did not call for an immediate end to the war, but instead for negotiations between the North Vietnamese leadership and the U.S. While some on the left have criticized the CPUSA for this position, it was in fact in line with that of the Vietnamese Communist leadership.^{[citation needed]} Meanwhile, some in the peace movement and the New Left rejected the CPUSA for what it saw as the party's bureaucratic rigidity and for its steadfastly close association with Soviet Union.

The CPUSA has been consistently opposed to the U.S.'s current war in Iraq. United for Peace and Justice, currently the largest peace and justice coalition in the U.S., includes the CPUSA as a member group, with Judith LeBlanc, who chairs the CPUSA's Peace and Solidarity Commission, being a member of the Steering Committee of UFPJ.

Notable figures of the Communist Party USA

Party Leaders

• Charles Ruthenberg, General Secretary (1919-1927), James P. Cannon, Party Chairman, (1919-1928)
• Jay Lovestone (1927-1929)
• William Z. Foster (1929-1934)
• Earl Browder (1934-1945)
• Eugene Dennis, General Secretary (1945-1959) and William Z. Foster, Party Chairman (1945-1957)
• Gus Hall (1959-2000)
• Jarvis Tyner, [Executive Vice Chair] (since 1993)
• Sam Webb (since 2000)

Presidential tickets

• 1924 - William Z. Foster & Ben Gitlow
• 1928 - William Z. Foster & Ben Gitlow
• 1932 - William Z. Foster & James W. Ford
• 1936 - Earl Browder & James W. Ford
• 1940 - Earl Browder & James W. Ford
• 1948 - no candidates, but supported Henry Wallace, the Progressive candidate
• 1952 - no candidates, but supported Vincent Hallinan, the Progressive candidate
• 1968 - Charlene Mitchell & Michael Zagarell
• 1972 - Gus Hall & Jarvis Tyner
• 1976 - Gus Hall & Jarvis Tyner
• 1980 - Gus Hall & Angela Davis
• 1984 - Gus Hall & Angela Davis

See also

• Communist party
• List of political parties in the United States
• List of Communist parties
• History of Soviet espionage in the United States
• Harry Haywood
• Earl Browder
• Dorothy Healey

Further reading

General Books

• Howe, Irving and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History, Beacon Press, 1957
• Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War, Wesleyan University Press, 1982 and 1987, University of Illinois Press, 1993, trade paperback, ISBN 0-252-06336-8, reprint edition ISBN 0-8195-6111-8
• Jaffe, Philip J., Rise and Fall of American Communism, Horizon Press, 1975, hardcover, ISBN 0818008172
• Klehr, Harvey and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself, Twayne Publishers (Macmillan), 1992, hardcover, 210 pages, ISBN 080573855X, trade paperback ISBN 0-8057-3856-8
• Haynes, John Earl, and Klehr, Harvey, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (2000)
• Lewy, Guenter, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life, Oxford University Press, 1997, hardcover, ISBN 0195057481
• Solomon, Mark, "The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936, University of Mississippi Press, paperback, ISBN 1-57806-095-8
• Weinstein, Allen, and Vassiliev, Alexander, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999)
• Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, Basic Book, ISBN 0-465-07110-4
• Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin, John Barron, Regnery Publishing, 1996, ISBN 0-89526-486-2; 2001 edition, ISBN 0-7091-6061-5. 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.

The CPUSA Constitution and Program

According to its 2001 constitution, the party operates on the principle of democratic centralism, and its highest authority is its quadrennial National Convention. Article VI, Section 3 of that constitution lays out certain positions as non-negotiable: "struggle for the unity of the working class, against all forms of national oppression, national chauvinism, discrimination and segregation, against all racist ideologies and practices… against all manifestations of male supremacy and discrimination against women… against homophobia and all manifestations of discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people…"

Among the points in the party's "Immediate Program" are a $12/hour minimum wage; for all workers, universal health care, and opposition to privatisation 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 recognises 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 classs violently trying to stop social change.

“

While some governments run by people calling themselves Communists have been responsible for horrible acts of violence and repression, notably the Pol Pot régime in Cambodia, much if not most of the violence often blamed on revolutionary governments and parties is actually the responsibility of the conservative, reactionary, capitalist governments and parties. ... Many revolutions have been relatively peaceful, including the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Vietnamese Revolution of 1945 . The bloodshed comes when those formerly in power initiate a civil war, or foreign armies invade, trying to reestablish capitalist, feudal, or colonial power. …While we think that an objective, detailed analysis of most situations over the last century would conclude that capitalist and reactionary governments and parties are responsible for most of the violence, it is true that Communists have engaged in armed struggle, are not pacifists, and that some who called themselves Communists have engaged in repressive tactics.

”

External links

• CPUSA website, including a collection of FAQs
• Young Communist League USA youth group
• People's Weekly World weekly newspaper
• Political Affairs monthly theoretical publication
• Guide to the New York Workers School materials, 1926-1935. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.

CPUSA publications

Past publications

• Foster, William Z. PDF. Published in The Workers Monthly. 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. The Communist Party: A Manual on Organisation. First Published: July, 1935. Workers Library Publishers, NYC. Transcription/Markup: Brian Basgen. Reprinted on Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved May 3, 2005.
• Victor Perlo. The Economics of Racism, II. New York. International Publishers. 1996. ISBN 0-7178-0698-7

Recent publications

• 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. Reflections on Socialism. June 3, 2005.
• Webb, Sam. What the Communist Party’s draft program is all about. People's Weekly World. 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. Retrieved 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" People's Weekly World. February 25, 2006.

Non-CPUSA websites

• Communist Party of America (1919 - 1946) documents, officials, images and chronological history and Early American Marxism resources of Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved April 4, 2006
• Communism in Washington State History and Memory Project. Retrieved August 19, 2006.

Political Parties of the United States
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