Harrison George
“And did Comrade Axelrod refer to Jacobins because – through his own mistakes – he found himself in the company of the Girondists of Social-Democracy?” – (Lenin, in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back)
UNDER DATE OF SEPTEMBER 29, 1946, and published in Political Affairs for November, 1946, the National Board of the Communist Party of the USA, issued a lengthy statement entitled “On the Recent Expulsions.”
On the face of it, this statement, concerning the expulsions of Vern Smith, Ruth McKenney, Bruce Minton and William F. Dunne, and what are called “their few scattered followers,” carries with it the important admission that the crisis which was precipitated (and not “avoided just in time,” as the official view held), by the Duclos article of May, 1945, is not yet solved.
The article by Comrade Duclos, leader of the Communist Party of France, pointed an accusing finger at the Right Opportunism then in complete control of the CPUSA. The September 29, 1946, statement of the National Board of the CPUSA, on the contrary, now depicts that the main danger at this “given moment” is Leftism, and asserts that Right opportunism (which it implies can consist only of Browderism) has been “decisively defeated.”
The four named expelled members and their few scattered followers are, therefore, indicted as “semi-Trotskyists” (a rather ill-defined term), and “left adventurists,” among other epithets.
Far more importantly, the statement asserts, as an accusation against “a section of our membership,” that such members “lack understanding of the Party’s policies, of Marxism-Leninism and the history of our Party and the world Communist movement.” Hence, the statement says, these members have “tolerated” Left sectarianism.
This is a grave charge, which, if true, indicts, not these “working class comrades,” whom the statement says “are still confused by and suffer from remnants of left’ sectarianism,” but the leadership itself.
For what kind of leadership is it, which must acknowledge that the members it leads so totally lack understanding of such elementary Communist equipment as: 1) the Party’s policies; 2) Marxism-Leninism; 3) the history of our Party, and; 4) the world Communist movement? What more could they lack?
And what kind of leadership is it which further along confesses that whole “sections” of the membership are “unclear” concerning “Communist principles of organization and democratic centralism”?
Or, is it that, having absorbed ideological principles and raised their theoretical level of understanding, a “section” of our membership prefers to “tolerate” Leftism? How is it that, after having seen and heard with their own eyes and ears what happens to those who, for instance in California, dare insist that Party policy as written into the National Convention Resolution be carried out, whole “sections” of our membership remain “unclear” on the fine distinction between what the Board declares is the “right and duty” of members to criticize, and the bad “freedom of criticism” condemned by the Board?[1]
The Board’s statement qualifies, it is to be noted, that the “right and duty” of every member to criticize be limited to criticism that is “healthy and constructive.” But this only raises the question: “Healthy” for whom? “Constructive” of what? And brings to issue whether or not Bolshevik criticism must invariably conform to some Emily Post conception of political etiquette established by the leadership – which is being criticized! – without the consent of the membership.[2]
One looks in vain through the National Board statement for some element of that “ideological struggle” which the emergence of genuine Leftism truly calls for and would receive in the Party of Lenin. There is, however, a maximum of unconvincing invective, and the wildly unconvincing assertion that Browder, Browder’s brother, and Browder’s bosom friend, Mr. Heller, having been expelled, the CPUSA, notorious to the whole world Communist movement as having previously been controlled by Right Opportunists from top to bottom, is entirely “cleansed,” and that “Leftism,” which was (and listen to this!) even at the time of the Duclos article, according to the Statement, “as serious a danger as Browderism,” has now become the main danger, as indeed, Browder himself insisted it was when he was on his way out of the Party.[3]
The Board’s statement says that those “sections” of our membership which continue to be “confused by and suffer from remnants of Left sectarianism,” must be won over through “patient explanation and increased mass activity,” and must not be “lumped” with those expelled. However, the statement itself is neither patient nor explanatory. And leans upon spontaneity when it prescribes increased mass activity as a cure for theoretical confusion. Obviously, confused comrades pressed into mass activity can only spread confusion, without losing any themselves.
How can Party members be otherwise than “confused” when they see comrades who have given their lifetime to the working class cause, some of them Charter Members of our Party, unceremoniously expelled as “alien elements”?
True, old comrades do, sometimes, become traitors and require expulsion (oftener they deviate and need comradely correction). But where is the convincing explanation on the part of Bill Dunne and Vern Smith; an explanation such as Lenin or Stalin would always give in great detail, and with full credit for an honorable past, together with incontrovertible proof of how, when and where – and from what causes – their formerly meritorious conduct became altered into its complete opposite?
Nothing is said of Bruce Minton’s supposed development in this respect. But it certainly could be no worse than that of Samuel Sillen, the petty-bourgeois intellectual to whom was assigned the task of accusing Minton, in the Party press, of being, “a petty bourgeois intellectual.” Presumably, this was intended to serve as an accusation (though a similar charge might be laid against Karl Marx, himself). But, if so, to Minton remains the honor of having disagreed with Browder’s pipe-dreams of Teheran before they were exposed as such by Comrade Duclos.
As to Ruth McKenney (Bruce Minton’s wife), just when did she become, to our leadership, an “alien element”?
Our leadership saw nothing wrong with Ruth McKenney when, in 1940-41, she enunciated an anti-Marxist theory about the relation of the working-class housewife to capitalist production. Indeed, it was Irene Browder who encouraged Mc-Kenney’s arrogant defense of an indefensible theory which, in New Masses, was assailed by many comrades, including myself. Later, in 1941, her revisionism was adopted as the official Party position and it so remains to this day.[4]
No, Ruth McKenney never became an “alien element” to our Party leadership so long as she voiced such grossly bourgeois ideology. But when she exhibited some Communist ideology, and dared to speak out against the July, 1946, report of Eugene Dennis, she was expelled forthwith as an “alien element.”
What of Bill Dunne? He has had a political record of decades of worthy service to the proletariat. He is a founder and Charter Member of our Party. (An honor Comrade Foster does not have!) The National Board statement does not mention Dunne’s record. To the Board, Bill Dunne is just another “Joe Doakes.” And the Joe Doakeses of heavy and light industry are expelled without biographies. Indeed, without ceremony, statement or trial.
Why this evasion of political biographies, which Lenin urged should be gone into in the case of workers’ leaders, and gone into deeper than the official cosmeticians of such biographies quite desire? Bill Dunne was once on the Political Bureau of our National Committee.[5]
By tests of no little severity, Dunne has proven himself. Alone and at odds, he delibrately and repeatedly defied the thugs of the Anaconda Copper Company. He edited the Butte (Montana) Daily Bulletin when editorial equipment required not merely a typewriter, but a “30-30” rifle.
More, Dunne had political courage, as proven by his ringing challenge, speaking as a Communist, to the whole bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in its 1923 Portland, Oregon, convention; as shown still more clearly in his public denunciation of his own brothers as Trotskyists. Dunne fought the Right Opportunism of Lovestone when Foster quit in the middle of the struggle “to get on with practical work” – the standard excuse of conciliators.
Now, Bill Dunne is expelled as an “alien element” – and by whom? – without even a sorry excuse that can pass muster as an “explanation” to the membership.
And Vern Smith? He, too, is a Charter Member of our Party. Self-effacing and innately modest, he never aspired to leadership, which is sought too often by windbags and careerists. But he has never, to my knowledge, been on the wrong side of any major political struggle in our Party. Together with me, from 1923 to 1927, he fought the real Leftism of the anarcho-syndicalists, in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and greatly helped reduce the influence of anarcho-syndicalism among the American proletariat to a minimum. He went through the test of jail and prosecution more than once. In the international field, he discharged many missions of tact and trust most creditably. The Party owes an explanation to its membership, if not to Vern Smith as to why and how he suddenly has become an “alien element” and is thrown out of the Party he served for 27 years – without a trial.
The Board’s assertion that Dunne and Smith have suddenly become “anti-Party” at this moment, because of “intensified attacks against our Party by the ruling class” – explains nothing in view of their records of decades of revolutionary valor under fire of such attacks. And as for the charge that they have, at this late date, become conscious agents provocateur, serving reaction by “attempts to organize disruption from within,” that is a tale nobody believes, not even those who wrote it.
Confusion on the part of the membership can become suspicion when it encounters the following non-sequitur in the Board’s statement: “They (Dunne and Smith) tried to utilize the Party’s rejection of Browder revisionism, by posing as the only true opponents of Browderism.”
Does that make sense? Obviously, it does not, for its conclusion does not follow from what it states in the premise. The mystery as to why such a meaningless sequence of words was written at all can be revealed only when three words are inserted, to make it read:
“They (Dunne and Smith) tried to utilize the Party’s laggard and enforced rejection of Browder revisionism, by posing as the only true opponents of Browderism.”
Why was the accusation written so obscurely as to be meaningless? Why else then to conceal the fact that Dunne and Smith had rejected Browder revisionism before the present Party leadership did? To put that admission into the sentence quoted, would have turned the accusation against the accusers of Dunne and Smith. It would have constituted the startling and dangerous (to the National Board) confession that the comrades who rejected Browderism before the Duclos article, and rejected it voluntarily, are being expelled by those who rejected Browder only after the Duclos article, and under the lash of its exposure.
More, it must be underscored that a rejection, complete and even sincere, of Browderism, is decidedly not equivalent to a certificate of absolution from revisionism in other forms. Still more, the basic policy of the Party, or Party Program, as laid down by the National Convention, is one thing. How it is applied, misapplied, or wholly ignored and violated, is quite another thing.
Comrade Foster, when he talked with (or rather to) me in San Francisco (first, on August 20, and again on August 24, 1946), seemed eager when first we met to “explain” to me how it happened that, when the storm of membership indignation at the whole leadership following the Duclos article had cleared away, the net result, minus Browder, was but some slight shifting of chairs among the leadership. “Ordinarily,” he said, “when such a thing happens, the faction which was in opposition would take over the leadership. But there was no faction... ”
Very well, there was, indeed, no faction. But that does NOT say that there was no opposition on the part of scores and hundreds of comrades (not in the then leadership) to the Browder line, before the Duclos exposure of that leadership. Nor does such “explanation” absolve Comrade Foster from complicity with the conciliation of a faction which mushroomed among Browder’s close assistants directly after the Duclos article, and has been given by Comrade Foster carte blanche to hound out of the Party, on any and every pretext, every articulate and especially any outstanding comrade who is so unfortunate as to have been a “premature anti-Browderite”–hence a menace only to those remaining in the leadership who are bent on continuing revisionism under new and more subtle forms than Browder’s open and unconcealed social-imperialism.
Comrade Duclos did not “accidentally” or for no purpose, put into his article the fact that Darcy, as well as Foster, opposed Browder’s liquidationist, Right sectarian and revisionist line, and the further fact that Foster helped Browder expel Darcy from the Party for trying to warn the membership against this revisionism, at a time when Foster himself lacked the Bolshevik courage to fight for his own beliefs.[6]
How much like the old songs that Browder used to sing, are the tunes intoned by the present leaders of our Party, including Comrade Foster. The titles are identical, too: “Factionalism” – “alien elements” – “semi-Trotskyists” – “Left-sectarians” – “anarcho-syndicalist adventurists...”
Such calling of names is easy. But where is the proof that they apply? Firstly, Trotskyism is not true Leftism, but is really Right Opportunism disguised with leftist phrases, a Right deviation which developed into outright class treachery and service to fascism. True leftism is epitomized in anarchism, which all the theoretical authorities of Marxism-Leninism have described as originating, objectively, in those periods when the bourgeoisie adopts ruthless force in the class struggle (as differing from those periods when the bourgeoisie adopts a policy of concessions and reforms designed to split the proletariat by corrupting its leaders with Right Opportunism); and originating subjectively within the proletariat, as a revulsion of honest revolutionaries against the reformist treachery of Right Opportunism.
Such true Leftism tends to over-estimate the degree of class consciousness of the masses, belittles the necessity of the preparation of the masses through daily struggle for immediate, partial demands, rejects the revolutionary use of parliament and elections in such preparation of the masses, tends to romantic, idealist concepts of waiting for “great days” and neglecting the “petty tasks” of preparation; disregards the necessity for the proletariat to obtain allies, regards the peasantry – as one, undifferentiated class – with hostility, runs ahead of the masses and thus becomes sectarian, resorting to phrase-mongering as a substitute for mass action, and, when impelled to act, tends to adventurism and “putschism.”
But where is the proof that any of these attributes of real Leftism belong to the persons described as ”Leftists” and expelled as ”Leftists” at the time they were expelled? The National Board has not produced such proof. Instead, it uses empty name-calling, without proof.
For a close-up view of how this situation came about, as seen and experienced by myself, although apparently duplicated elsewhere and hidden or glossed over by the leadership, I take you to the State of California, in August 1945.
[1] All comrades are urged to read carefully Lenin’s article, printed on pages 25 to 31 of Marxism and Revisionism, Little Lenin Library, Vol. 29, under the interrogative title: “What is Freedom of Criticism?”
In posing that question, Lenin was exposing exactly what the revisionists of that day, the Bernsteinists, meant by their demand for “freedom to criticize Social-Democratic (Marxist) theory.” He exposed the fact that, behind the abstraction about “freedom,” they concretely wanted to revise Marxist theory, and in a way, it must be said, strangely similar to some revisionists of today. Lenin did not oppose “freedom,” but what was concretely being done in its name. Indeed, he went on to say:
“You (Bernsteinists) are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh (of opportunism – HG). Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us and don’t besmirch the grand word ’freedom’; for we, too, are ’free’ to go where we please, free not only to fight against the marsh, but also against those who are turning toward the marsh.”
Lenin, evidently, was not a good Leninist, according to our National Board.
Lenin wrote that in 1902. But more exactly to the point on his conception of Party of organizational principles and democratic centralism is Lenin’s “Appeal to the Party by the Delegates to the Unity Congress Who Belonged to the (take note! – HG) Late Bolshevik Faction.” This was written in May, 1906, after the Stockholm Congress which was dominated by the Mensheviks. In part, it read:
“In a revolutionary epoch like the present, all theoretical errors and tactical deviations of the Party are most ruthlessly criticized by life itself...At such a time, it is the duty of every Social Democrat to strive to bring about a state of affairs in which the ideological struggle within the Party on questions of theory and tactics will be conducted as openly, as widely and as freely as possible, but under no circumstances should it disturb or hamper the unity of revolutionary action of the Social Democratic proletariat...
“We must and shall fight ideologically against those decisions of the Congress which we regard as erroneous. But at the same time we declare to the whole Party that we are opposed to a split of any kind, we stand for submission to the decisions of the Congress. Rejecting the boycott of the Central Committee and valuing joint work, we agreed to our adherents going on the Central Committee, although they will comprise a negligible minority in it. We are profoundly convinced that the workers’ Social Democratic organizations must be united, but in those united organizations there must be wide and free discussion of Party questions, and free comradely criticism and estimates of events in Party life...
“We are all agreed on the principles of democratic centralism, on the guarantee of the rights of all minorities and all loyal opposition, on the autonomy of every Party organization, on the recognition that all Party officials must be elected, accountable to the party and liable to be dismissed by it. We are of the opinion that the observance of these principles of organization, their sincere and consistent application, will serve as a safeguard against splits, a guarantee that the ideological struggle in the Party can and must prove fully consistent with strict organizational unity, with the subordination of all to the decisions of the Joint Congress.
“We call upon all our adherents to submit to such subordination and to take part in such an ideological struggle.” (Selected Works, Vol. III, pp. 467-472.)
That is the Leninist concept of Party organizational principles. That is the Leninist theory and practice of democratic centralism. Acceptance of and subordination to the elected leading committees, thus assuring unity of action in the external tasks of the Party, but always providing, within “the united organization, wide and free discussion of Party questions, and free comradely criticism and estimates of events in Party life.”
Again, Lenin in writing on Party discipline said:
“We defined it (discipline) as unity of action, freedom of discussion and criticism. Only such a form of discipline is worthy of a democratic party of the progressive class... Without the freedom of discussion and criticism, the proletariat does intelligent workers must never forget that sometimes serious violations of principles occur, which make the break-off of organizational relations absolutely necessary.” – Lenin on Organization, pp. 31-32.
Still more, Lenin upheld—even in the period of Party illegality under the persecution of the Tsar, the necessity of a referendum of the membership on all “important questions” requiring “action by the masses themselves.” Writing on how this was done in the St. Petersburg Party organization in 1907, he first explained how that organization was run by an elected delegate conference. Then he adds:
“But this is not all. In order to make sure that a decision shall be really democratic, it is not sufficient to gather together delegates of the organization. It is necessary that all the members of the organization, in electing the delegates, shall independently, and each for himself, express their opinion on all controversial questions which interest the whole of the organization.
“Democratically organized parties and leagues cannot, on principle, avoid taking the opinion of the whole of the membership without exception, particularly in important cases, when the question under consideration is of some political action, in which the mass is to act independently, as for example, a strike, elections, the boycott of some local establishment, etc.
“A strike cannot be conducted with enthusiasm, elections cannot be intelligently conducted, unless every worker voluntarily and intelligently decides for himself whether he should strike or not, whether he should vote for the Cadets (bourgeois liberals) or not, etc.
“Not all political questions can be decided by a referendum of the whole Party membership. This would entail continuous, wearying and fruitless voting. But the important questions, especially those which are directly connected with definite action by the masses themselves, must be decided democratically, not only by a gathering of delegates, but by a referendum of the whole membership.
“That is why the Petersburg Committee has resolved that the election of delegates shall take place after the members of the Party have discussed the question whether an alliance should be concluded with the Cadets, after all the members of the Party have voted on this question.
“Elections are a business in which the masses directly take part. Hence, every Party member must intelligently decide the question as to whether we should vote for Cadets at the elections, or not. And only after an open discussion of this question, Will it be possible for each one of us to take an intelligent and firm decision.” – Lenin on Organization, pp. 20-21.
That this concept of democratic centralism is also Stalin’s, and was laid down by him as guidance for all Communist parties, may be easily seen by reading his report to the Enlarged Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on Dec. 7, 1926, and published in Marxism and Revisionism (Little Lenin Library, Vol. 29, pp. 46-51), under the title “Inherent Contradictions of Party Development.” (Incidentally, a mimeographed reprint of this Stalin classic reproduced for a San Francisco party unit for the education of its members was held to be “factional” by the State and National leadership, in direct contravention to the National Convention Resolution.)
Again, let us look in the book What Is Leninism?, pages 99 to 101, where Stalin, on June 8, 1929, in a letter to the members of the Party Structure Circle of the Communist Academy, excoriated “Right Opportunist Distortions of Self-Criticism” by flatly declaring:
“It would be wrong to deny to Party members the right to criticize the line of the Central Committee. Moreover, I concede the members of your circle have the right within their close circle even to set up their own special thesis in opposition to the position of the Central Committee.”
Still later, again, the “Democracy in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” was given detailed description in the June, 1940, issue of the magazine The Communist International (published by the CPUSA), in an article by G. Stein.
Now then, what is our own Party’s policy and program regarding inner-party democracy, destroyed by the whole leadership under Browder? It is set forth in the National Convention Resolution, Part II, Sec. 6:
”The incoming National Committee and Board, by example (sic!) and with the active assistance of the membership (sic!), must undertake an ideological and organizationa1 (sic!) struggle to root out all vestiges of bureaucracy, and be constantly on guard against relapses to old bureaucratic methods of work and opportunistic practice which could only obstruct (sic!) the most rapid and complete correction of our revisionist errors.” (July, 1945.)
How has the California State and National leaderships of our Party fulfilled this command of the National Convention? How has the leadership, itself, lived up to and educated the membership in the Leninist-Stalinist principles of democratic centralism as set forth above? Deeds speak louder than words!
On May 4, 1946, the San Francisco County and State Educational Departments of our Party, published a pamphlet entitled Democratic Centralism, the entire content of which is a caricature of its title. And the National Board, by its export to the State leadership on disciplinary measures taken in consequence of this pamphlet meeting membership disapproval, has involved itself in this disgraceful distortion.
In that pamphlet, according to the Party lawyer who concocted it, a kind of “sedition act” is invoked. If Comrade A should complain that a leading committee made a mistake concerning Problem X; and if, then or thereafter, Comrade B should criticize the leading committee on the claim that it had erred in dealing with Problem Y, then, ipso facto, the existence of a “faction” is proven, and both Comrade A and Comrade B are subject to expulsion for “factionalism.” Indeed, under this weird distortion of the “right and duty” of members to criticize, however correctly, some score of comrades, who could not swallow with open mouth this dish of bureaucracy, were expelled.
The trouble with our leading comrades is that they have not only violated the National Convention Resolution cited above, but through the years have become so saturated with bourgeois lies against our brother party in the Soviet Union: slanders to the effect that it is a “dictatorship” bossed by a fearsome “Polit-bureau.” that they have set up a real dictatorship to conform with that false image. To protect their revisionist line, they have institutionalized a regime so bureaucratic that it would not be tolerated five minutes in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And thus they furnish convincing arguments and easy victims to the sneaking Trotskyists.
It goes without saying, of course, that anti-working class views and Trotskyist arguments are not permissible in Party discussion. But who, outside of the encrusted bureaucracy, can contend that such were the character of the differences voiced by Vern Smith, Bill Dunne, Bruce Minton and Ruth McKenney? It is no argument to cite that, after their expulsion, they banded together with this or that person, and do or say this or that “anti-Party” thing. Having driven them out of the Party, the Party leadership forfeits its authority over them, and they are bound no longer by their Party duties of “acceptance of and subordination to” the Party’s leading committees.
This, therefore, is not at all a defense of any action by any one of the expelled comrades since their expulsion. It is not a defense of them, but of the Leninist concept of democratic centralism, the principles of which have been violated in their expulsion. What they may have done afterward is something else. Expelled, isolated, seeking reorientation in a formative period of chaos in theory (a chaos introduced by the Party leadership), with little or no collective leadership, it was to be expected that all kinds of deviations, errors of both Right and “Left,” would appear among the expelled. But it is dishonest for the leadership, which has caused all this, to claim that, because of these errors (neither so gross nor so dangerous as its own), all the expelled are “enemies of the working class.”
Vital theories of the class struggle cannot be quarantined successfully from the membership, by official orders that the expelled comrades must be shunned. The National Board statement itself admits that “sections of the membership” are influenced by the ideology of the expelled comrades. The disputed ideological and theoretical struggle, therefore, goes on; and the expulsions have settled exactly nothing, except the fact that the leadership has violated the Party National Convention program and policy on bureaucracy. That is self-evident.
[2] “Oh, do not take offense at my ’un-comradely method’ of arguing,” said Lenin, in What Is To Be Done?, ”I am not trying to cast aspersions upon the purity of your intentions. As I have already said, one may be a demagogue out of sheer political simplicity. But I have shown that you have actually descended to demagogy and I shall never tire of repeating that demagogues are the worst enemies of the working class... because the ignorant worker is unable to recognize his enemies in men who represent themselves, and sometimes sincerely represent themselves, to be his friends.”
It was Trotsky, however, who, while still in the CPSU, wrote a treatise on the necessity of “politeness.” And it was Comrade Foster who, when I talked with him on August 24, 1946, became highly incensed over Vern Smith’s telling him that, in San Francisco, membership criticism of the Schneiderman leadership was punished by what Vern concisely termed “the thought police.”
[3] Like the “Party Ivanushkas” mentioned by Lenin in What Is To Be Done?, our leaders “keep shouting to laggards: ’Don’t run ahead!’ ” Thus, Comrade Foster cautioned at the time Browder was ousted (and Father Sheen, represented by Louis Budenz, remained!): “We mustn’t over-correct our mistake.”
Lenin, however, held a different view on the correction of mistakes. In What Is Leninism? (p. 88) we find Lenin saying: “Nothing is more despicable than self-complacent optimism. It would merely be a recognition of shortcomings equivalent, in the cause of the revolution, to no more than half correcting them.”
Obviously, while we may make another mistake, no one can ever “over-correct” any mistake. And how eagerly the “laggards” seized upon this invitation to Right Opportunism to conciliation, as voiced by “Ivanushka” Foster, to limit and circumscribe the correction of their Right Opportunist line, not to “run ahead” in changing their “whole system of revisionist thinking.”
[4] Browder’s former National Educational Director, A. Landy, came to the rescue of McKenney’s ”theory,” first in The Communist for September, 1941, then in an official Party pamphlet, Marxism and the Woman Question, in 1943, in the ascendancy of Browder revisionism, in the development of which Landy played a big role generally; and on this question, most particularly.
Falsely purporting to “answer” Mary Inman’s book, Woman-Power, a slashing exposure of the McKenney-Landy revisionism on the woman question, Landy’s pamphlet is, itself, a prize example of revisionism, as well as of misrepresentation, double-talk and obscurantist economics. Pursuing a Teheranist line a few months before Browder’s official discovery that the Teheran Pact outlawed revolution and made socialism unnecessary, Landy set about furnishing a “theoretical basis” for the forthcoming Browder claim that bourgeois democracy (under monopolist-Imperialist rule!) had been transformed by the anti-Hitler war into something “just as good” as socialism, even for women.
Imitating Kautsky’s class-betraying “philosophy” during World War I, Landy said that World War II was already “undermining the entire material foundation of woman’s inequality ... in the only way such a fundamental advance can genuinely come – by way of industry” (p. 5). And, again: (p. 39) “The road to woman’s equality and freedom is the road... which leads to the complete defeat of Hitlerism.”
The overthrowal of capitalism thus being held unnecessary, there was no need to involve the feminine half of the American proletariat in struggle for that aim. And this theory was put into practice. The development of the Landy-McKenney theory from 1941 to 1943 was accompanied by the Party’s liquidation of women’s organizations and suspension of women’s publications. Women (like the Negro people)
To lend this some pretense of justification in economics, Landy adopted as his basic line, permeating his whole pamphlet, the anti-Marxist-Leninist theory invented by the Soviet revisionist, Nicolai Bukharin, already shot in 1937 as a counter-revolutionary traitor to the Soviet Government.
Bukharin held (Historical Materialism, by N. I. Bukharin, p. 156) that the worker’s family had become a “consumption unit only.” Landy’s pamphlet repeatedly (on pages 34, 57 and 58, for example) says the same thing.
Now, it is obvious that, only after the production of the commodity, labor-power, in which the average proletarian housewife in the average proletarian family is presently engaged, has been not only partially, but fully socialized and removed from the home, and the housewife concurrently transformed fully into an industrial worker, with no home-labor to perform, can the worker’s family cease, in reality, to be a production unit. And it is equally obvious that this can come about only after the overthrowal of capitalism.
Engels says as much in his Origin of the Family (see Kerr edition, pages 90, 91 and 124), in declaring that, until this happens, the worker’s family is “an economic unit” or “industrial unit” of society. “With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society,” says Engels on page 66 (International Publishers edition, 1942), adding: “Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry.”
Basically, Landy contends (despite much evasive double-talk) that this has already taken place, under capitalism, and that the family at present only “consumes” as a “blood and sex unit.” On page 34 of his pamphlet he describes “... the character of the family as a blood and sex unit,” wherein ”the housewife is engaged in helping to consume the wages brought home by her husband” (p. 58). Again, on page 57, he says that “her only connection” with production ”is through the consumption of its products.”
Just as the present critics of revisionism are accused by the bureaucracy of “attacking the Party” because they attack revisionism in the Party, so also, already in 1943, was Mary Inman (author of In Woman’s Defense) charged with “attacking the Party” and using “pseudo-Marxism.” No more absurd distortion of facts into their complete opposite could be conceived than the further solemn warning given by Landy – who was already proudly championing Browder’s notorious Right opportunist revisionism – that those who agreed with Inman and who disputed his “Marxism” were (p. 42) taking “the road to Right opportunist mistakes.”
This Landy libel on Marxism is still circulated as the official Party position on the woman question. And, indirectly, I learn that Ruth McKenney still insists that her original position, which the Landy pamphlet supports, was and remains “Marxist.” Thus, while she remains in agreement with the revisionists on the woman question, she joined with her husband in denouncing the revisionism of Dennis and, with Minton, suffered expulsion as a “leftist.”
[5] The New York District statement regarding Bill Dunne speaks of his past “irresponsibility,” in a way to imply a lack of proletarian principle. The fact is that, many years ago, Dunne suffered from dipsomania, or periodic drinking, a medically-recognized illness which, however, the leadership at that time never considered as impugning his class loyalty or Marxist-Leninist understanding.
[6] “Like Foster,” said Duclos, “Darcy violently criticized the interpretation given by Browder of the Teheran decisions... Afterwards, Darcy was expelled from the Party by the congress on the proposal of a commission named by the Central Committee and headed by Foster, because, as the decision says (sic!), by sending to Party members a letter containing slanderous declarations on the Party leaders, he attempted to create a faction within the Party.”
It is worth noting that, in answer to a question about Darcy, put to Comrade Schneiderman in the California State Convention, in August, 1945, after Schneiderman had, in words, foresworn Browderism and all its bureaucratic works, and after, it appears, he thought time enough had elapsed for comrades to forget what Duclos had said about Darcy, Comrade Schneiderman replied to the effect that Darcy had out-Browdered Browder, and had proposed “some crazy theory that the bosses would triple wages, instead of double them, as Browder had proposed.”