Harrison George
”The first and most fundamental demand of scientific research in general, and of Marxian dialectics in particular, is that a writer should examine the connection existing between the present struggle of tendencies within Socialism – the current that cries of treason and sounds the alarm bell, and the one that sees no treason at all – and the struggle that preceded it for whole decades.” (Lenin in The War and the Second International, Little Lenin Library, Vol. 2, p. 35.)
UNDER DATE OF AUGUST 13, 1945, at the request of the Northern California Committee on Leadership of the (then) Communist Political Association, elected by the first (July 15) session of the State Convention, I submitted a letter to the said Committee in reply to its letter of August 8.[7]
Because of the connection with developments since then, I quote the opening paragraphs of my letter:
“The character of our revisionist errors is RIGHT OPPORTUNISM. This was so, due, firstly, to our growing adherence for 12 years to the bourgeois reformism of the Roosevelt Era. Secondly, and more basically, our Right Opportunism grew in the soil of the corruption, historically, of considerable sections of the United States proletariat by imperialist super-profits.
“Right Opportunism, therefore, has been and continues to be, the main danger. While the Party fought only the Left in the past long period, and in the time of its rankest revisionism ascribed Trotskyism even to correct Communist policies, Right Opportunism not only flourished, but took control of the Party from top to bottom.
“Politically, the persons who comprised the active leadership, as a rule, became habituated to Right revisionist thinking, in which their acceptance of the Party’s Teheran line was but a climactic incident. Organizationally, they became, as a rule, an encrusted and entrenched bureaucracy, with a subjectively liquidationist, and an objectively sectarian line. This does not deny the many praiseworthy exceptions to the rule, nor the possibility of these comrades so badly infected with Right Opportunism from redeeming themselves with the aid of the membership. But this must be proven by deeds, and not by words alone.
“The Party must fight on two fronts now, as it did not do before. But the main danger is still the Right, since it is so deeply rooted in what Comrade Foster describes as ’a whole system of revisionist thinking’ on the political plane, and in our leading cadres on the organizational plane.
“If we deal firmly with the Right, the Left danger will not constitute a difficult problem, for the Left has ever been ’the shadow of the Right.’ If we do not so deal with the Right, then the Left can, indeed, become a most serious danger. Both can have sectarian results. Therefore, merely to present the problem as one of guarding against ’sectarianism,’ as is at present the fashion, is to resort to meaningless generalization. And if it is implied as meaning only the Left, then it opens the door to the Right to maintain its past line in open, or what is more likely at present, concealed forms...
“To estimate the situation otherwise, is to ignore the lessons given us by the past history of our own Party, as well as the history of every brother Party. It would be to ignore the historical fact that no opportunism ever became deeply rooted for so long a time in any party, without struggling persistently, in open or disguised manner, to maintain its dominance. Particularly does it strive to cling to organizational control as it feels its ideological control slipping with any release of Party democracy. An instance in point is Comrade Browder.[8]
“In my opinion, it is naive, and dangerous to our Party, to imagine that other Right Opportunist revisionists have given up their opposition in more than outward form. We were not given the History of the CPSV to ignore, but to learn from, and apply in our own Party. And, if it teaches us anything, it teaches us to be extremely skeptical of merely verbal recantations of habitual opportunists. It is a foremost task of our whole Party now, to deal with this problem politically. It is your Committee’s especial task to deal with it organizationally at this juncture.”[9]
Now, then, what has been the result of ignoring the warning given by history (and merely called attention to by me in August, 1945), that “if we do not deal firmly with the Right, then the Left can, indeed, become a most serious danger”?
The result has been that we now “officially” have a serious “Left danger.” Already, in his July, 1946, Report to the National Committee, Comrade Dennis spoke of this “increasing menace,” and, curiously enough, spoke in the same breath of “right opportunist hangovers” (as much if not more obvious in his own report than elsewhere), while the situation in California has been given notoriety, though not dignity or truthful treatment, by Oleta Yates’s article in the December, 1946, Political Affairs.
More, and more apropos to the unprincipled character of the Schneiderman faction in the California party, a “Party Bulletin” was issued on December 11, 1946, containing, in libelous juxtaposition to a dishonest diatribe against “leftism” in general by the State Board, a statement by myself concerning a single case of genuine leftism given to the State Security and Review Commission six months before.
Why do I say the use made of that statement is libelous?
Because it is taken out of its historical setting, and put into another and a different setting.
Because it was not accompanied with another statement, given the State Secretariat on May 18, 1946, wherein I presented facts (which nobody has since then even attempted to dispute), proving that there was, and is, a Right Opportunist (and “sectarian”) faction within the Party which bends Party policy to its will, and does so with complete impunity.
Because six short articles against the ideological position of the “left” opposition to the June 15, 1946, Committee for Maritime Unity settlement with the ship-owners, articles requested of me by the Security and Review Commission at the same time this July 1 statement was also requested, were refused publication in the People’s World by direct order from Comrade Schneiderman. Yet without these articles, the statement loses its real significance, since only these articles made clear that my criticism of the “left” was one of principle, and hence to be distinguished from the merely denunciatory attacks made by the Schneiderman leadership.
What is to be said of a State leadership which wails about “the left danger,” which officially accuses you of being “a center of leftist opposition” (unanimous vote of State Board on Dec. 15, 1945), yet which – after requesting you to write against the only leftist tendency visible to you – refuses to publish it? This, although Foster told me the articles were “excellent,” and no one gives me the slightest explanation why those articles were suppressed.
What, still more, can be said of a national leadership, also purportedly concerned about the “left menace,” to which these articles (directed solely against the “left,” remember!) were sent for publication in the “theoretical” organ, Political Affairs, but which also suppressed them, and becomes accomplice to and protector of the opportunist Schneiderman faction dominating the California leadership of the CPUSA by publishing instead, the factional, untruthful and politically illiterate article by Oleta Yates, which could only incite “leftism” where none existed?[10]
Obviously, incitations against critics of its own Rightist practices, a diversion of membership attention from the fact that the elected leadership is not carrying out the program of the Party laid down for it by the National Convention, but is deviating to the Right from that program, and not any elimination of “leftist” tendencies by the only way they can be eliminate – an ideological campaign – is the purpose of such otherwise inexplicable behavior. If no “left danger” existed, it would be necessary for the opportunist leadership to invent one, to justify a regime of repressions and reprisals against ever freshly arising membership criticisms and doubts.
It required considerable audacity, after suppressing the articles that I was requested to write in July, 1946, to “propose” again to me on October 21, 1946, that I write some articles “dealing with the position of Vern Smith, particularly with regard to his opposition to our election coalition policy.” But Comrade Schneiderman, assured of national leadership protection, is nothing if not audacious. However, in spite of overwhelming physical handicaps, I agreed, as I intend to “serve the Party,” though not to serve Comrade Schneiderman. And I shall “deal with” Vern Smith’s position. But I shall not deal with it now as I dealt with the distinctly separate situation that prevailed in San Francisco on July 1, 1946.
Then, there was a real “Left” danger to the Party program (Part I, Section 3, National Convention Resolution, referring to “maximum unity of action” of all labor; also Section 4, referring to “labor’s joint and parallel action locally”), which the local leadership was upholding in the Maritime dispute, although the same leadership had violated these same sections grossly in the Machinist strike.
Then, there was the danger of blind, and hence unprincipled, opposition, arising from a factional feeling of many comrades who had correctly fought for the Party program against the local Party leadership in the 1945-46 Machinist strike in the San Francisco Bay area (and who had been driven by bureaucratic persecution into group resentment), accepting this “leftist” opposition to the CMU settlement to be as justifiable as their own.
Then, too, the revisionist errors of the leadership had not, as yet, clearly developed into a revisionist line.
Then, moreover, and because of this still remaining doubt as to the developing line of the leadership, there was still some faint hope that the national leadership might intervene against the Schneiderman opportunist faction (or bureaucracy, as you will) and the “leftism” arising locally over the June 15, 1946, settlement of the Committee for Maritime Unity, helped prejudice such an outcome.
Time and experience since July 1, 1946, has proven that hope vain, in that the national leadership has, since then, fully identified itself with the opportunism and factional bureaucracy of the California leadership; has demonstrated a line, itself, of increasing departure from the program of the Party, laid down for the leadership, as well as the membership, 1945; by its organizational reprisals and repressions against all criticism.
Through these actions, and by its voluntary surrender to Rightist influences within it, the national leadership has made necessary, and hence legitimatized, a discussion before the whole Party of present tendencies, and made imperative that, again, “the alarm bell” be sounded against treason and Right Opportunism as the main danger.
[7] At the repeated insistence of Ed Lee, committee member, now expelled, that I be called, Comrade ________, Committee Secretary, wrote me on August 8: “You are requested... to submit a letter dealing with your opinions on press and leadership and on the character of our revisionist errors. We would have liked to have had you appear before the committee but time limitation makes this impossible.” The Committee had been elected on July 15; this was on August 8. “Time limitation”!
[8] Browder, at the National Board meeting of June 2, 1945, demanded the Board vote to expel from itself those whom he called “Trotskyists and semi-Trotskyists,” and when this was rejected, he told the National Committee on June 18, that: “I failed to foresee such a crisis of leadership and therefore failed to make any adequate preparation against it.” This oversight is, however, being taken care of currently by Browder’s successors, as we have seen.
[9] In the light of subsequent developments it is necessary to outline briefly the further contents of that letter and the strange misfortunes it fell upon. Aside from the paragraphs quoted, it contained:
1. Facts showing that a bureaucratic control of the People’s World by Comrade Schneiderman had supplanted collective direction by the Editorial Board (consisting ”officially” of myself as Editor-in-Chief, Vern Smith as Foreign Editor, and John Pittman as Managing Editor); that with Pittman’s assistance and strategic control over what was, and what was not, printed, an effective ban against anything not conforming to Schneiderman’s opportunist outlook was effected; that such bureaucracy destroyed the editorial authority of Comrade Smith and myself, and with it any responsibility for the policy being voiced by the paper. Collective Party guidance is one thing; one man dictation is quite another.
2. Facts showing that, despite this, a concerted attack upon Smith and myself, by the entire Schneiderman leadership, began directly following the first session of the State (CPA) convention on July 15, 1945, under the quaint excuse that, although Smith and I “had not swallowed the Teheran policy,” we were, nevertheless, “responsible” because we “had not given guidance” (our frequent attempts were always haughtily rejected!) and thus “had not lived up to our responsibilities.”
3. Facts proving that this attack was obviously “factional,” as my letter charged; facts proving Schneiderman’s double-dealing in asking the National Office to supply a new Editor-in-Chief because of my health, while in California he continually represented the replacement as due to my political delinquencies. It must be noted that this factional activity was a direct violation of the National Convention Resolution (Part II, Section 9) against “all tendencies toward factionalism,” although Comrade Schneiderman had, as delegate to that convention, currently voted for that Resolution. Deeds belie words!
What happened to my letter to the Leadership Committee equally illumines subsequent events. I personally delivered it at the reception desk of the State Office early on August 14 (1945). But it “got lost” for four days, finally “arriving by mail” at that same office on August 18, a few hours before the second, and final, session of the State Convention was to open. On the convention floor, delegate James Kiernan, member of the Committee (now expelled), protested that the Committee had not given my letter consideration – and no one denied his charge. Later, I learned the Committee had read the letter in Schneiderman’s presence, listened to his denunciation of me as a “damned leftist,” and taken no other action.
Since the convention, as well as the Committee, in the absence of any opposition caucus, was dominated by an organized Schneiderman faction, I could only hope that a ”Press Committee,” to be chosen by the ”new” State Board from nominations made by the convention, might consider at least that part of my letter dealing with the paper. I took the floor and so proposed (as a matter of personal privilege, since I was not a delegate) the removal of my letter to the future “Press Committee.”
I felt that “unity” in the convention required this. Also, since I had sent a copy to Comrade Foster and the National Secretariat, some sort of remedial action was ”naturally” to be expected to restrain the factionalism of the Schneiderman leadership.
>However, while getting a brush-off from that quarter (See Part VIII), the State Board dallied for months on choosing the personnel of the Press Committee. When it finally met, my letter was never even read. And, by a strange coincidence, Smith and myself, the majority of the Editorial Board, were excluded from the Press Committee by the “new” State Board (virtually the same as the “old” Board), though both of us were nominated by the convention. This is the way the National Convention decision “against all tendencies toward factionalism” is “observed” in California.
[10] It must be emphasized that a party leadership can also function as a “faction,” that factions and factionalism are not limited to oppositions to leaderships. This was true, for example, of the Lovestone leadership prior to 1929; it was profoundly true of the Browder leadership; it was true of the leadership of the French Communist Party in 1929 (see Political Affairs, August, 1945, Page 711, second column, in an article by Maurice Thorez). In such cases, however, official factionalism functions in the “legal” form of a bureaucracy, stifling party democracy and membership criticism under charges of “disruption,” and, of course, “factionalism.” Since it is obviously unnecessary for any leadership which pursues a policy conforming to the interests of revolutionary workers to suppress such workers’ questioning and criticism, it has become axiomatic that “Bureaucracy always shelters a wrong line.”