In the period from 1919 to 1922, the US saw the birth of its first genuine party. The party was born out of a sharp two-line struggle with social democracy, a struggle that was led internationally by Lenin and the Bolshevik party. For the first time in the United States, a socialist party proclaimed the goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat, embraced the need for violent revolution, and targetted imperialism as a special stage of capitalism and not a mere policy. For the first time in the US, a basically Marxist-Leninist general line served as the basis for a revolutionary party. Despite its many shortcoming, for about 35 years beginning about 1920, the party was the foremost expression of the proletarian revolution in the US and embraced within its ranks the genuine communists in the country.
Based on its principally proletarian line, the party made many extremely significant contributions to the US and world working class movement. In the depression of the 1930’s, the party grasped the key question of the period for the US working class: the need to unionize the basic mass production industries. Thus the party played a leading role in building the CIO. During the period of the rise of fascism in the late 1930’s, the party firmly took the stand of proletarian internationalism and sent many of its finest cadres to Spain to assist the Spanish people in their fight against Franco and his Nazi backers.
From a few years after its founding, the party grasped the immense revolutionary significance of the Black liberation struggle in the US. The CPUSA was the first revolutionary party to pose the question of Black liberation as a revolutionary question and to take up the struggle for the particular and special demands of Black and other oppressed peoples in the US. Based upon this proletarian outlook the party was able to gain influence and for a time, played a leading role among the Black masses.
Still, within the party there were serious weaknesses from the moment of its founding and throughout its history. The main errors of the CPUSA were in the direction of right opportunism, though there were periods dominated by left opportunism as well.
At its founding, the party had a shallow grasp of even the general principles of Marxism-Leninism and had made little headway in developing the independent elaboration of Marxism-Leninism to the particularities of the US. The party generally made errors in the direction of pragmatism and failed to systematically raise the theoretical level of the leadership and membership as a whole. Without a firm grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory, the party tended strongly to glorify bourgeois democracy and exaggerate the particularities of the US – this is the seed of the false theory of “American exceptionalism”. During one period of its history, the party went so far as to dissolve itself as a party: Led by Earl Browder the party in 1944-45 became a “Communist Political Association” which abandoned the notion of irreconcilable antagonism between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Though the Browder line was repudiated in 1945 and Browder himself expelled, the party never undertook a thorough rooting out of the rightist deviation which had dominated its practice under Browder’s leadership. Thus the party was ill-equipped to navigate in the troubled waters after World War II, when the U.S. ruling class broke its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union and launched an anti-communist crusade worldwide. Though some parts of the party firmly resisted the attacks of the McCarthy period of the early 1950’s, the party’s internal weaknesses, the failure to have rooted out Browder’s line, severely inhibited the party’s ability to resist the right-wing offensive.
Another marked feature of the CPUSA’s history is its tendency toward flunkeyism toward the CPSU. The party’s low theoretical level and weak grasp of its own bearings was a favorable condition for such flunkeyism to develop. The US party was in no way a mere puppet of Moscow or the Comintern as many anti-communists have proclaimed, but neither did it develop the fullest relations of unity and struggle with other parties that are the mark of a mature and genuine party.
The CPUSA’s low theoretical level, tendency toward right errors and tendency toward flunkeyism were the seeds of its degeneration into revisionism in the mid-1950’s. In the mid-fifties the party faced a strong US bourgeoisie asserting its power throughout the world, a bourgeoisie which had succeeded to large degree in isolating communist influence within the US working class movement.
Further, the degeneration of the CPUSA cannot be understood apart from its context in the world communist movement, most especially from developments in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In the period after the death of Stalin, certain long-standing secondary weaknesses and contradictions in the CPSU were exploited as a means of revising the general line of that party and bringing to power the Khruschev revisionist clique. This grouping provided an international headquarters for modern revisionism which continues to be located in the leading center of the CPSU.
Thus, in the struggle leading up to and concluding in the CPUSA’s 16th national congress of 1956-57, the right opportunist, revisionist elements, influenced by and egged on by their revisionist leaders in Moscow, carried the day. They succeeded in altering the basic character of the party’s general line from a principally proletarian line to a principally bourgeois, revisionist line. The goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat was abandoned and replaced with the notion of a peaceful and constitutional path to socialism. The opportunists got such a strong grip on the party apparatus that any genuine elements were forced to leave the party, and the possibility to rectify the bankrupt, revisionist line of the party from within its ranks was foreclosed.
Since 1956-57, the CPUSA has become the organizational expression in the US of the line of modern revisionism internationally. Though a final, all-sided settling of accounts with modern revisionism internationally and within the US remains an uncompleted theoretical task before our movement, there can be no question that a definitive ideological, political, and organizational break with modern revisionism has been and must be made by all genuine communists. Modern revisionism stands in antagonistic contradiction to Marxism-Leninism. Among the principal features of modern revisionism which highlight this abandonment of Marxism-Leninism are:
1) the abandonment of the goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the need for a violent revolution to smash the bourgeois state. In the countries yet under the domination of the bourgeoisie, the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat is watered down and objectively liquidated in content, and it is replaced with the notion of a peaceful transition to socialism. In countries such as the Soviet Union where socialist revolution had occurred, the dictatorship of the proletariat was abandoned in favor of the classless theory of the state of the whole people.
2) the abandonment of the leading role of the Marxist-Leninist party. With the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism, the revisionist parties no longer become the conscious elements who have to lead the working class, who have to combat bourgeois ideology. Instead, they become bureaucratic apparatuses which tail after bourgeois ideology and serve to sustain the careers and prestige of their opportunist leaders. In the USSR this is most blatant with the notion that the CPSU is no longer a party of the proletariat, but a “party of the whole people.” In the US, it is reflected in the CPUSA’s tailing after every bourgeois reformist leader that comes along, and criticizing every attempt by the masses or by conscious elements to push beyond bourgeois reformism as “ultra-left”.
3) subordinating proletarian internationalism to the defense of the narrow interests of the ruling group in the Soviet Union, thus making peaceful co-existence, peaceful competition and detente–rather than proletarian internationalism–the lynchpins of international line. Proletarian internationalism holds that the interests of any particular detachment of the world struggle are subordinate to the whole, and that only the resolute struggles of the workers and oppressed peoples against their exploiters can bring independence, peace, democracy and socialism.
The revisionists of the CPSU and the CPUSA deny this basic principle. For them it is the development of the Soviet Union, not the struggles of the peoples, that will insure the victory of revolution. Thus, peaceful co-existence and detente become absolute necessities to maintain favorable conditions for the growth of Soviet power. The revisionists foster the myth that imperialism can be made sensible, that it can abandon its warlike character. For the revisionists, the “shining example of socialist construction” in the USSR will lead the peoples of the world to socialism without the necessity of struggle in each and every country against the bourgeoisie.
All this is justified by pointing to new phenomena in the world, such as the existence of nuclear weapons or the increased economic and military power of the Soviet Union. These phenomena do need to be analyzed by Marxist-Leninists, but they do not, as the revisionists claim, alter the basic social relations of capitalism, or the basic principles Marxist-Leninists have used to analyze those social relations.
In summation, modern revisionism abandons the working class to the bourgeoisie. It concilliates imperialism. It misleads the peoples of the world. The CPUSA in its line and organizational efforts is a faithful representative of modern revisionism and a faithful supporter of every design of the international revisionist headquarters located in the CPSU.
Though the main features of modern revisionism, internationally and in the CPUSA, are fairly well settled among Marxist-Leninists, a thorough all-sided summation of this phenomena, its roots and origins in the Soviet Union, its roots and origins in the history of the CPUSA has not yet been done. A thorough examination of the history of the CPUSA, its strengths and weaknesses, its fall into revisionism, as well as an analysis of revisionism internationally, remains a paramount theoretical task before our movement.