Below I am posting the lecture that I gave on the most important themes in teaching the history of the CPUSA as part of the CPUSA's exciting New Roots Program. Below that is the material that was sent out to participants.
These are notes but they are the background for my presentation. I also did send three short video clips of CPUSA History which I will add to the blog separately. This is just a bare bones outline, one that also stresses the answers to traditional anti-Communist bias in its various forms
Norman Markowitz
Teaching party History
1. The first point that should be made is that the history of the Communist party and the history of the working class and peoples movements are indivisible, however mass media try to deny that.
2. The Communist party develops and was and influenced by earlier movements struggling to change the “mainstream” of U.S. Society, many movements, but most importantly, the unifying abolitionist movement before the civil war, and the workers/labor movement after it.
3. First we might look at an important section of the Communist Manifesto released in 1848 at a time of revolutions in Europe.
4. In America, the “Democratic Party president James Polk defined Democracy as Manifest Destiny, the “right of superior Anglo Saxons to Conquer the Western Hemisphere. But abolitionists organized against that exactly the way Communists would. The denounced the war as a slaveholder’s war to conquer territory. The advocated resistance to it in the form of non payment of taxes. But they also worked within the existing repressive political system by pressuring a Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot to introduce a resolution in Congress that would bar any territory taken from Mexico to become slave territory. They were unsuccessful but they organizationally and ideologically helped to create the conditions where the struggle between the slaveholders and their capitalist allies and the industrial capitalists and their allies among farmers, workers, and free blacks would be decided. Mention Thaddeus Stevens
5.
Karl Marx referred to capitalism as wage slavery. With the rise and concentration of industrial capitalism, there occurred the necessary rise and concentration of an industrial working class. There also occurred the necessary expansion of capitalism through the world in the interests of great syndicates of capital, like the Morgan and Rockefeller Syndicates in the U.S.,which meant colonial empires, militarization, major population shifts as millions of largely rural people from less developed areas of Europe, Southern and Eastern Europe, Italy, regions of the Russian Empire, especially Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
In the U.S. a socialist movement developed in the face of widespread multi-layered oppression. There was oppression everywhere European and British centers of Industrial capitalism, but there were some very important American characteristics. First, capitalists were able to use the ethnic religious/language differences between new groups of immigrants from these regions to play them against the older immigrant groups, against each other, and especially against the former slaves, after whose struggle for land and freedom the industrial capitalists betrayed and abandoned their liberation struggle. Second, in the U.S., the political system meant that their were layers of oppression, local police, state militia, and the federal army. Along with an often corrupt judicial system where “midnight judges” acting as the paid agents of capitalists would issue injunctions used to suppress demonstrations, strikes, and arrest leaders. Finally, there developed a cottage industry of privatized oppression, industrial espionage and strikebreaking represented by private detective agencies, of which the Pinkerton Agency was the most most famous, later to be joined by the Burns Detective Agency. It wasn’t in the U.S. as it was in France, Italy, Germany, that is, the workers could organize and struggle to repeal anti-strike and anti socialist laws. Here, workers had the right on paper to organize and capitalists had the right to destroy their organizations with force and violence, even to compel workers to sign legally binding contracts that they would not join unions.
These divisions also undermined the socialist movement in the U.S., as nationality groups tended to stick to themselves, extremes of the left, labor anarchism, an emphasis on armed struggles against the capitalists and extremes of the right, opportunism in the form of building alliances with the local democratic and republican, machines, excepting segregation in some instances in Southern party locals even.
The First World War, an imperialist war and the greatest war in human history to that time, produced a schism in the Marxist Socialist parties through the world, on a whole series of questions, how to organize the working class to advance to socialism, the role of nationalism and internationalism, reactions to colonialism and imperialism, as rightwing socialists supported their governments in the war and left socialists opposed the war, each group using concepts drawn from Marx and Engels they said to support their positions. The Russian Empire Socialist Revolution transformed this developing schism into competitive political parties and international organizations, the war the conflicts between Paul and Jesus Brother James about whether or not to bring Christianity to the Gentiles produced a revolutionary transformation in early Christianity, and the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th century produced a revolutionary transformation within Christianity in Europe that was both a product and an exhilarant to the victory of merchant capitalism and the end of the feudal system.
The Communist Movement globally based itself on what came to be called Marxism-Leninism, meaning the general theory as developed by Marx and Engels primarily updated by Lenin to deal practically with the development of monopoly capitalism and imperialism.
Leninism was first and foremost a science of politics as Marxism was a science of society. It advocated first a party of a new type, a revolutionary party organizing the struggles of the working class and the whole people, advancing and empowering them in order to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism.
It advocated second a new view of government, a more flexible view, rejecting both the view of the left sectarians that government was the enemy and could and should be smashed, and the right opportunists that government was a neutral force that could be influenced and eventually taken over through existing processes to establish socialism.
Government was an instrument of the ruling class, a coordinator of capitalism, and the role of the Communist party was, as a coordinator of the working class movement to fight both inside and outside government forms and bounderies, both with and against government as situations changed, but with a clear commitment to educate, organize and coordinate the struggles of the working class.
Finally, the establishment of socialism would mean a new government in both form and content, a government t hat would serve the interests of the working class as old monarchies/aristocracies served the interests of feudal landlords and as capitalist republics, both democratic and dictatorial, served the interests of capitalists.
The third point in Lenin’s updating of Marxism was his analysis of imperialism, which called upon Communists to see the struggle against imperialism in all of its forms, colonialism, racism, national oppression in all of its forms, as indivisible from the struggle against capitalism nationally and internationally.
I have stressed these three points in great detail here because they are the foundations of Communist parties through which Communist activists work and live in all countries through the world, the basis of Communist internationalism however they may be developed in regard to national characteristic. Members should be encouraged to understand them. Here there is an old but clear work, a chapter of John Eaton’s Political Economy that I would suggest reading.
Now, let me go forward. In the U.S. as in European countries, Communist parties were formed through the left factions of existing socialist parties and other groups, in the U.S. primarily the labor anarchist IWW.
The Russian Revolution changed everything, as a new International of Communist Parties was established and in a short period of time the Communist movement became a major force in semi-colonial China, a force in British Empire India, Dutch Empire Indonesia, and of course Europe and the U.S. Communists everywhere made the struggle against imperialism a prime area of work.
In the U.S., Communists made the struggle against racism, for the organization of what is now called the African-American people, giving first priority to the struggle against white chauvinism in the working class, in the labor movement, in the denial of elemental citizenship rights to the African-American as necessary to make possible the advance of a unified working class movement. I cover some of this in my PA article which you have. I would also suggest as reading a few pages from Studs Terkel’s Hard Times, where Terkel interviews one of the greatest of all CPUSA leaders, William Patterson, who discusses his experiences in the period.
The Communist party also committed itself in both words and deeds to developing inclusive industrial unions in the U.S., something that the Socialist party, still in the field as its rival, had done in words in the past but not in deeds. Without the role of the Communist Party as a party, its forming a coalition with some of its enemies to build the CIO.
What the Communist party as a party did in the period 193- -1935, through its grassroots activists, was to coordinate mass struggles that led the New Deal government to enact major legislation, social security, unemployment insurance, a massive public works program, that had previously been associated with Communists and national labor legislation to regulate and protect union organization and collective bargaining.
What the Communist Party then did was play the decisive role in the CIO organizing drives and following the great New Deal center-left victory in the 1936 national elections, use the working class confidence that victory created to play the leading win the General Motors Strike, the most important victory in the history of the U.S. trade union movement and bring activist communities, students, tenants organizations, to the side of this struggle, and it effect to consolidate the gains which the new laws, themselves inspired by mass action, had made possible, gains that would last until the 1980s, after decades of persecution, decades of collaboration with capital and with imperialism on the part of the leaders of the AFL-CIO
A famous Prussian General once said that war is politics by other means. We can say that politics is class war although everything is done by ruling classes to cover that up.
While these victories were being won capital and its many allies launched a huge counter-offensive against the Industrial Unions, the New Deal government, the whole center-left coalition, the Communist party particularly. Led by a racist reactionary Texas Democrat, Martin Dies, A House Un-American Activities Committee was formed which became a coordinating center for red scare activities, using hearings as a form of intimidation, establishing long lists of individuals and organizations which were disseminated widely to local police forces, school boards, chambers of commerce, the American Legion, “fellow traveling” politicians, to use their language in order to intimidate as many people as possible from participating in any form of progressive political action and to foment purges, Blacklisting, even in some communities physical attacks on individuals, violently break up meetings, etc.
The Communist Party USA, its allies on the broad left, and pro New Deal progressives responded to this campaign in a variety of ways, sometimes with real success, sometimes not, although it lingered and with the postwar development of the cold war saw an enormous quantitative expansion which created a new political situation, qualitatively
What we should teach our members though was that these attacks were part of a general attack on the gains of the working class across the board and that focusing on the Communist Party was not just appealing to long established traditions of red-baiting, but an understanding that no other group had the organizational and ideological commitment, the militancy and the flexibility to make these contributions, and that if you took the Communist Party out of the equation, you would at least beat back the working class, at most eliminate the gains, which was what the right was demanding.
The triumph of the world Communist movement’s concept of working class or proletarian internationalism was most powerfully seen in the Second World War, a war in which the New Deal government of the U.S. allied itself with the Conservative Government of the British Empire and the Communist Government of the Soviet Union to defeat the fascist imperialist German-Italian-Japanese Axis
Cost perhaps as much as 70 million lives, a war that devastated Europe-Asia, and the Pacific, and a war in which a global center left coalition, with Chinese, Vietnamese Korean, Filipino Yugoslav, Greek, Italian, and French Communists organizing millions of partisan, underground and resistance fighters as the Soviets(taking on the overwhelming majority of European fascist Axis forces) the Americans, and the British organized and funded the regular military forces.
Without the Communist contribution in its fullest sense, Hitler and Hirohito would have won the war and billions of people would have been treated, to use one of Hitler’s terms for the “inferior” races, “useless eaters.” I personally would have died at a very early age and it is quite likely that most of our members, if they were of African American, Latino, ethnic Jewish or for that matter Slavic backgrounds, would not have been born, not to mention those of East and South Asian background who would be experiencing life in and under the Japanese Imperialists Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
But the revolutionary situation and triumph that the war represented globally was not repeated here, even though many veterans, trade union activists, African-Americans and other people of color, struggled to have it repeated
The war strengthened American monopoly capitalism at home, giving it enormous wartime profits and devastating literally all of its traditional big capitalist rivals, Britain, Germany, France, Japan, for global markets, investments, access to raw materials, technology. Capital used this greatly strengthened position to fund what I would call an anti-peoples front, supporting anti-Communist trade unionists, rivals of the Communist party from various socialist, trotskyist and other political groupings, supporting an informal alliance between HUAC and the FBI.
This postwar development was not an offensive but a counter offensive, and here the CPUSA’s struggle to save the Center-Left Coalition and advance its postwar program, failed. Why did it fail? Those who blame Communists for “following the Soviet Union” as the cause are literally blaming the victim.
Communists had played the leading role in building the industrial unions. The Republican dominated 80th Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Law, which barred Communist Party members from holding union office and made all union officiers sign an oath that they were not members of the Communist party. This was in effect a bill of attainder, denying Communists equal protection of the laws, violating their most elemental rights, and of course a selective version of what is done in open dictatorships. It was at first upheld and later revoked by a more progressive Supreme Court, but the damage was done, and not only to Communist Party militants. Taft-Hartley had many provisions, all of them very bad for workers. In the long run, the worst was the so called “right to work state provisions, allowing states to marginalize unions by passing anti-union shop laws under the big lie propaganda that this was “right to work.” From 1947 on trade unionists and their allies have called these laws “right to work for less” laws, and they certainly are, creating in effect 24 cheap labor states, which are also because of the weakness of the labor movement, states in which reactionary republican politicians have a built in advantage.
Except for the activist groups who brought about the American revolution and the abolitionists in the pre civil war period, I doubt that any political group could have survived the kind of multi-faceted political persecution that the CPUSA did, its leaders imprisoned for long terms and/or forced.
While it is true that the Communist Party USA did lose the great majority of its members on the period 1947-1960, we must teach party members to understand and teach others that this was the result of the longest period of political repression in U.S. history, not the result of “discoveries” about Soviet espionage or revelations concerning the crimes of the Soviet leadership, especially the role of Joseph Stalin, who emerged as an ecumenical devil
Another point that we should make to party members is that many who left the party did not become active anti-Communists(although some prominent ones who did were highlighted and rewarded) but continued to work in mass struggles and make significant ongoing contributions to peoples struggles in two central areas, the struggles for civil rights and against legal segregation and all forms of racism, and the struggles for peace and against military interventionism in the name of the cold war, the nuclear arms race, and nuclear testing, which prepared people to accept all of the escalations, which as even an American President, John Kennedy, said, create a situation where the odds were that the U.S. would either be bankrupt military spending went on unchecked indefinitely, or dead, if these escalating conflicts finally did result in WWIII
Although we still have a long way to go, let me conclude by saying that our members must understand that the Biggest Lie of Capitalist propaganda is that our party ceased to exist except for a handful of elderly diehards after 1956 when most of our remaining members realized that they had been Soviet dupes all along and disappeared quietly into the sunset, something like a bad Ronald Reagan B movie.
The post 1960 history of the CPUSA has really yet to be written. Among exchange value historians, it is a forbidden subject;instead, some try to deal with the activities of former party members in mass struggles, ignoring their continued relationships and work with ongoing party members.
- In the Civil Rights movement where they were compelled to act in a semi underground existence, Communist activists played an important role in rallying support for the Civil Rights movement, the important work of the Civil Rights Congress, forced out of existence by FBI and government persecution, in publicizing and organizing around major racist atrocity cases, its last great act the Emmit Till Murder Case—Communists working in and through the heroic Highland Folk School in solidarity with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in advancing the mass struggle against legal segregation and disenfranchisement through the South—the heroic actions of William Patterson and his friend of nearly thirty years Paul Robeson in developing and bringing to the United Nations and the world the Study “We Charge Genocide, “ a “Ja Accuse” of the history of persecution and repression directed against the African American People—the role of Communists in the establishment of the Women’s Strike for Peace, in chapters of the Committee for a SANE nuclear policy, in chapters of and support for the Student Peace Union.
- This work was well- known to J. Edgar Hoover who continued through the FBI’s Cointelpro Progam its extralegal campaign against the CPUSA, using the Attorney General, foundations, to coerce groups like SANE into taking anti-Communist membership oaths, intimidating Martin Luther King into formerly removing his key advisor, Jack Odell. Groups like the Student Peace Union and the Students for a Democratic Society and others increasingly resisted these oaths.
We should not dwell on the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the FBI and other agencies of the state. They were a fact of life, more comprehensive than what other movements had faced in U.S. history, but essentially the same—demonization, guilt by association, attempts to purge and blacklist, the difference being not only in the name of God, Family, and Country, as in most other nations under capitalist rule, but here also in the name of “freedom and democracy.”
Gus Hall, a longtime CPUSA leader out of the trade union movement a Smith Act political prisoner, became General Secretary of the CPUSA in 1960 and continued in that rule to his death, the longest lived General Secretary of the CPUSA in the party’s history. In this period, many party organizations, the WEEB Dubois Clubs, the Young Workers Liberation League, the American Institute for Marxist Studies, was launched and the Daily Worker, the party’s press organ, although it would become a weekly, change its name a number of times, survived the relentless decades old campaign of the FBI to destroy it.
It is my opinion that had the party been able to play the role in the great upsurge of the 1960s that it played in the great upsurge of the 1930s, the disasterous defeats suffered by the labor movement, the whole American people, and the people of the world in the Reagan-Bush Family era, would have been resisted with a much stronger and more militant labor movement, a much more effective organized anti-racist, anti-sexist campaign, and a much more effective opposition to the neo fundamentalist “religious right” and its sinister involvement in U.S. politics. But we can’t rewrite history. We can only learn from it.
Party members should take this from the long period the the Gus Hall leadership as a legacy(and I am certain our present General Secretary, Sam Webb would agree) as a legacy: Gus Hall’s concept of Bill of Rights Socialism
We should also saw to working people that we are Communists and if you believe in economic and social democracy, employment, education, housing, health care, as inalienable human rights, so are you.
We're excited to announce that on December 4 teleconference will be on how to teach THE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY USA to our new members! Our presenter will be Professor Norman Markowitz of Rutgers University, a specialist in this field.
Comrade Norman has shared some readings to help us prepare for this meeting. Here are links to a few articles on the CPUSA's fascinating history through the 1960s that he has written for Political Affairs. We highly recommend reading these articles before the teleconference:
“Fighting for Change: The Great Depression, The New Deal, and the CPUSA,”
Political Affairs online journal, September 2, 2009,
http://politicalaffairs.net/fighting-for-change-the-great-depression-the-new-deal-and-the-cpusa
“The Roller Coaster: The Communist Party in the 1940s,”
Political Affairs online journal, November 3, 2009,
http://politicalaffairs.net/the-roller-coaster-the-communist-party-in-the-1940s
“Repression and Resistance: The Communist Party from 1949 to 1959,”
Political Affairs online journal, December 10, 2009,
http://politicalaffairs.net/repression-and-resistance-the-communist-party-from-1949-1959/
“Old Struggles in a ‘New Age’: The CPUSA and the 1960s,”
Political Affairs online journal, April 22, 2010,
http://politicalaffairs.net/old-struggles-in-a-new-age-the-cpusa-and-the-1960s/
We hope all comrades on the Council can be part of this conversation on how we can best transmit the essentials of our Party's remarkable history to the comrades in our new clubs. You're cordially invited to phone in on Wednesday, October 2. The number to dial is 1-605-475-4850, and the access code is 1053538#. Our meeting will begin later than usual this month, so please note the starting time for where you live:
Eastern, 9:10 PM
Central, 8:10 PM
Mountain, 7:10 PM
Pacific, 6:10 PM
Alaska, 5:10 PM
Our calls usually last around fifty minutes.
