The end of WW II, Roosevelt’s death and the new Truman administration brought with them an end to the war-time alliance between the US, England and the Soviet Union and the beginnings of the cold war. US Imperialism was on the offensive world-wide and it sought to stifle all domestic dissent to shore up the home front. Communists were driven out of the unions and public employment, witch-hunts were begun everywhere and the party leadership was tried and convicted for conspiracy to overthrow the government by force and violence.
The party’s response was to capitulate ideologically while fighting back organizationally. It argued in court that it favored a peaceful parliamentary road to socialism while sending many party leaders into the “underground” rather than face arrest and imprisonment. At the same time the Party imposed a witch-hunt on its own members including the shameful “white chauvinism” campaign.
In 1956 when the party was once again able to come above ground, it was confronted by the shock of Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin and the Soviet intervention in Hungary. These two events were only the culmination of a process of disillusionment which began with the party’s own mistakes and errors in the early fifties. How the seeds of the inner-party struggles and revisionism of the 1956-57 period were sown is the subject of this educational.
I. How did the CPUSA’s reaction to McCarthyism and the cold war demonstrate that it was unprepared for the change in the political situation? Discuss: the war danger and the fear that fascism was on the rise, the over-estimation of the strength of the Progressive Party, the decision to go underground, the strategy used in the Smith act trials.
II. Harry Haywood’s writings emphasize the “right” errors made in this period. Starobin’s book emphasizes the “left” errors. Are they both correct? How can we prevent a communist party (or organization) from vacillating back and forth between “leftism” and “rightism”? What is the role of theory/critical independence from a world center in this effort to prevent swinging from left to right?
III. At the end of this period (1955), the CPUSA was reduced in size, dispersed and semi-underground, divorced from the working class and Black liberation movements. Its political line was antiquated and its leadership bankrupt. To what degree was this situation a product of objective factors and to what degree was it a product of the Party’s own mistakes?. Given the unfavorable objective conditions, what actions and changes in its practices (internal and external) might the Party have made to minimize its losses and maintain itself?
Black Bolshevik, Harry Haywood, pps. 559-564, 566-569, 570-571, 574-5.
American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957, Joseph Starobin, pps. 121-130, 138-141, 155-162, 177-183, 195-203, 219-223.
Cold War Political Justice, Michael Belknap, pps. 58-61, 185-204.
“The Path of Renegacy,” Henry Winston, Political Affairs, pps. 43-6.