lundi 30 janvier 2017
Obama’s administration made the “Muslim ban” possible and the media won’t tell you
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
I was outraged by the ban on refugees from war-torn countries in the Middle East. I’ve covered refugees fleeing war in Iraq and Syria over the last two years, meeting families on the road in Greece, Serbia and Macedonia, speaking to poor people in Turkey and Jordan and discussing the hopes and fears of people displaced in Iraq. If you want to ban “terrorists,” these are the last people to hit with a refugee ban. Instead the government should be using the best intelligence possible to find people being radicalized, some of whom have lived in the US their whole lives or who come from countries not affected by the ban, such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
So I was outraged, and then I read the executive order. There are many full texts of the order online, such as at CNN, the NYT, the WSJ or Independent. According to most reports Trump was banning “nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for at least the next 90 days.” This bars people from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. US Senator Elizabeth Warren said “Let’s be clear: A Muslim ban by any other name is still a Muslim ban,” and Senator Chris Murphy claimed “Trump has now handed ISIS a path to rebirth.” Media, such as Vox and the Independent, compared the ban to banning Jews from entry during the Holocaust and bashed Trump for singing the order on Holocaust memorial day. World leaders are “condemning Trump’s Muslim ban,” according to headlines.
I had to see for myself, so I read the executive order. The order does seek “to protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals admitted to the United States.” It says that it seeks “Suspension of Issuance of Visas and Other Immigration Benefits to Nationals of Countries of Particular Concern.” It also says “I hereby proclaim that the immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from countries referred to in section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12), would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 90 days from the date of this order.” And it targets Syrians specifically. “I hereby proclaim that the entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the interests of the United States and thus suspend any such entry until such time as I have determined that sufficient changes have been made to the USRAP to ensure that admission of Syrian refugees is consistent with the national interest.”
But, wait a sec. According to the reports “The order bars all people hailing from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.” Critics had attacked Trump for selecting these seven countries and not selecting other states “linked to his sprawling business empire.” Bloomberg and Forbes bought into this.
But, wait a sec. I read the order and Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen are not mentioned in it.
Go back and read it again. Do a “ctrl-f” to find “Iraq”. Where is “Iraq” in the order. It’s not there. Only Syria is there. So where are the seven nations? Where is the “Muslim ban”? It turns out this was a form of fake news, or alternative facts. Trump didn’t select seven “Muslim-majority” countries. US President Barack Obama’s administration selected these seven Muslim-majority countries.
The Department of Homeland Security targeted these seven countries over the last years as countries of concern. In February 2016 “The Department of Homeland Security today announced that it is continuing its implementation of the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 with the addition of Libya, Somalia, and Yemen as three countries of concern, limiting Visa Waiver Program travel for certain individuals who have traveled to these countries.” It noted “the three additional countries designated today join Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Syria as countries subject to restrictions for Visa Waiver Program travel for certain individuals.” It was the US policy under Obama to restrict and target people “who have been present in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, at any time on or after March 1, 2011 (with limited government/military exceptions).” This was text of the US Customs and Border Protection in 2015 relating to “the Visa Waiver Program and Terrorist Travel Protection Act of 2015“. The link even includes the seven nation list in it: “Iraq, Syria, Iran, SUdan, Somalia or Yemen.” And the media knew this back in May 2016 when some civil rights groups complained about it. “These restrictions have provoked an outcry from the Iranian-American community, as well as Arab-American and civil-liberties groups, who say the restrictions on dual nationals and certain travelers are discriminatory and could be imposed against American dual nationals.”
It was signed into law on December 18, 2015, as part of the Omnibus Appropriations Act of FY2016.
What? So there was a Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 two years before Trump? There was a kind of “Muslim ban” before the Muslim ban? But almost no one critiqued it in 2015 because it was Obama’s administration overseeing it.
So for more than a year it has been US policy to discriminate against, target and even begin to ban people from the seven countries that Trump is accused of banning immigrants and visitors from. CNN even hinted at this by noting “those countries were named in a 2016 law concerning immigration visas as ‘countries of concern.'” But why didn’t CNN note that the seven countries were not named and that in fact they are only on the list because of Obama’s policy?
Because mainstream media has been purposely lying, either due to ignorance or because of unwillingness to read the document and ask questions and because they are too ready to accept “facts” without investigating. They want to blame Trump for a “Muslim ban” because they were ready with that script since last year. And indeed Trump has enacted a harsh executive order cracking down on visitors from these countries (particularly Syrians), but his crackdown only includes those seven countries because of Obama’s policy. Trump’s decision to go beyond the policy and increase the Obama policy harms refugees, but it only increases an existing discriminatory policy, it doesn’t invent it. Reading media reports you would never know that. Most disingenuous, truly bordering on fake news, are the reports that claimed the seven countries were connected to Trump business interests, as if Obama’s DHS picked them because of Trump?
So why didn’t anyone of the thousands of reporters covering this read the same document and ask the same question and do the same investigation of where the seven “countries of concern” came from? A simply Google search would have revealed the history. A bit of searching around US code would have explained it.
I was outraged by the ban on refugees from war-torn countries in the Middle East. I’ve covered refugees fleeing war in Iraq and Syria over the last two years, meeting families on the road in Greece, Serbia and Macedonia, speaking to poor people in Turkey and Jordan and discussing the hopes and fears of people displaced in Iraq. If you want to ban “terrorists,” these are the last people to hit with a refugee ban. Instead the government should be using the best intelligence possible to find people being radicalized, some of whom have lived in the US their whole lives or who come from countries not affected by the ban, such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
So I was outraged, and then I read the executive order. There are many full texts of the order online, such as at CNN, the NYT, the WSJ or Independent. According to most reports Trump was banning “nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for at least the next 90 days.” This bars people from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. US Senator Elizabeth Warren said “Let’s be clear: A Muslim ban by any other name is still a Muslim ban,” and Senator Chris Murphy claimed “Trump has now handed ISIS a path to rebirth.” Media, such as Vox and the Independent, compared the ban to banning Jews from entry during the Holocaust and bashed Trump for singing the order on Holocaust memorial day. World leaders are “condemning Trump’s Muslim ban,” according to headlines.
I had to see for myself, so I read the executive order. The order does seek “to protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals admitted to the United States.” It says that it seeks “Suspension of Issuance of Visas and Other Immigration Benefits to Nationals of Countries of Particular Concern.” It also says “I hereby proclaim that the immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from countries referred to in section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12), would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 90 days from the date of this order.” And it targets Syrians specifically. “I hereby proclaim that the entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the interests of the United States and thus suspend any such entry until such time as I have determined that sufficient changes have been made to the USRAP to ensure that admission of Syrian refugees is consistent with the national interest.”
But, wait a sec. According to the reports “The order bars all people hailing from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.” Critics had attacked Trump for selecting these seven countries and not selecting other states “linked to his sprawling business empire.” Bloomberg and Forbes bought into this.
But, wait a sec. I read the order and Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen are not mentioned in it.
Go back and read it again. Do a “ctrl-f” to find “Iraq”. Where is “Iraq” in the order. It’s not there. Only Syria is there. So where are the seven nations? Where is the “Muslim ban”? It turns out this was a form of fake news, or alternative facts. Trump didn’t select seven “Muslim-majority” countries. US President Barack Obama’s administration selected these seven Muslim-majority countries.
The Department of Homeland Security targeted these seven countries over the last years as countries of concern. In February 2016 “The Department of Homeland Security today announced that it is continuing its implementation of the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 with the addition of Libya, Somalia, and Yemen as three countries of concern, limiting Visa Waiver Program travel for certain individuals who have traveled to these countries.” It noted “the three additional countries designated today join Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Syria as countries subject to restrictions for Visa Waiver Program travel for certain individuals.” It was the US policy under Obama to restrict and target people “who have been present in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, at any time on or after March 1, 2011 (with limited government/military exceptions).” This was text of the US Customs and Border Protection in 2015 relating to “the Visa Waiver Program and Terrorist Travel Protection Act of 2015“. The link even includes the seven nation list in it: “Iraq, Syria, Iran, SUdan, Somalia or Yemen.” And the media knew this back in May 2016 when some civil rights groups complained about it. “These restrictions have provoked an outcry from the Iranian-American community, as well as Arab-American and civil-liberties groups, who say the restrictions on dual nationals and certain travelers are discriminatory and could be imposed against American dual nationals.”
It was signed into law on December 18, 2015, as part of the Omnibus Appropriations Act of FY2016.
The Congress and Homeland Security selected these countries in 2016 and before (Screenshot of visa waiver categories, US Customs and Border Protection)
So for more than a year it has been US policy to discriminate against, target and even begin to ban people from the seven countries that Trump is accused of banning immigrants and visitors from. CNN even hinted at this by noting “those countries were named in a 2016 law concerning immigration visas as ‘countries of concern.'” But why didn’t CNN note that the seven countries were not named and that in fact they are only on the list because of Obama’s policy?
The “ban” didn’t exclude countries linked to business interests, it targeted countries of “concern” drawn up last year by Obama’s administration and Congress
So why didn’t anyone of the thousands of reporters covering this read the same document and ask the same question and do the same investigation of where the seven “countries of concern” came from? A simply Google search would have revealed the history. A bit of searching around US code would have explained it.
Chapter Thirty: The Communist Political Association (1944-1945)
30. The Communist Political Association (1944-1945)
The Teheran agreement of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, in December 1943, was basically a military one, setting the date, place, and strategy for the opening, on June 6, 1944, of the long-delayed western front in France. The three war leaders also took occasion to express the hope diplomatically that this wartime unity could be carried over into the post-war period and would result in peace "for many generations." On the basis of the Leninist policy of the possibility of the peaceful co-existence of the capitalist and Socialist powers, Stalin definitely planned for such a peace. But aggressive Anglo-American imperialism, which was already aiming at world conquest, and of which Churchill and Roosevelt were the representatives, had no such peaceful purpose in mind, as later events soon demonstrated.
Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party, immediately jumped to the conclusion that the post-war unity that the "Big Three" expressed in wishes at Teheran was, in fact, an actual agreement and that post-war peace and co-operation were therefore guaranteed. He assumed that the dominant circles of United States monopoly capital were interested in and favored a peaceful coexistence and friendly competition with the U.S.S.R. With the glib assurance of a Utopian and an opportunist, Browder undertook to state all the essentials of this imagined agreement at Teheran. This he did at the January 1944 meeting in New York, of the National Committee of the Communist Party. Later, in his book, Teheran: Our Path in Peace and War, he developed his thesis at length. In the face of much doubt and some opposition among our membership, Browder managed to get the Party to endorse his policy, if not to accept it wholeheartedly.
"Capitalism and socialism," said Browder, "have begun to find the way to peaceful coexistence and collaboration in the same world." Post-war unity of the "Big Three," he argued, was based upon assurances by Churchill and Roosevelt to Stalin that the Soviet Union would be left to develop in peace, and promises by Stalin to Churchill and Roosevelt "that a victorious Red Army would not carry the Soviet system and socialism on its bayonets to the rest of Europe." Thus old "fears and suspicions" had been liquidated and genuine world co-operation virtually established.
The expected revolutionary upheavals in Europe after the war need not, according to Browder, disrupt the new international unity; for, said he, "It is the most stupid mistake to suppose that any American interest, even that of American monopoly capital, is incompatible with the necessary people's revolution in Europe." The developing colonial revolutions were disposed of by Browder with equal ease. Obviously, American capitalism had a compelling profit interest, he argued, to create broad markets in the colonial and semi-colonial lands. Hence, highly practical (nay, inevitable) would be an agreement between the United States and Great Britain to liberate, industrialize, and democratize these areas. This was Truman's "Point Four," originated by Roosevelt and theorized about by Browder. Trade conflicts between the two powers could (would) also be worked out in friendly agreement.
Thus, in Browder's assumed "Teheran" post-war world the imperialists would abandon their innate hostility to the Soviet Union, liquidate their own trade rivalries, tolerate people's revolutions in Europe, and collaborate with the independence movements of the colonial peoples. Consequently, peace would be assured for many generations.
This idyllic international unity of Browder's also presupposed an equally idyllic national unity in the capitalist countries. In the United States the main consideration for such unity was economic. This involved, said Browder, disposing of $80 billion yearly in surplus commodities that would develop once the war industries returned to civilian production. This problem he prepared to solve, first, by increasing American foreign trade by $40 billion annually; that is, by upping United States exports to Latin America by $6 billion, to Africa $6 billion, to Asia $20 billion, to Europe $6 billion, and to the U.S.S.R. $2 billion. "I am quite willing," said Browder, " to help the free private enterprisers to realize the forty-billion dollar market that is required entirely and completely by their own methods." This was a suggestion to Wall Street to grab the trade of the world with the help of the working class.
In order to dispose of the $40 billion of American overproduction that would be left even after this vast extension of foreign trade, Browder expected that the employers would voluntarily double the real wages of the workers. "There seems to be no other way," said Browder, "but to double the buying power of the individual consumer. How that shall be done we will not suggest at this time. We look forward to practical suggestions from the capitalists who must find the solution in order to keep their plants in operation."
Browder declared that the "intelligent" capitalists would establish national unity on the basis of all his projects—acceptance of the European and colonial revolutions, doubling the workers' wages, abolition of anti-Semitism and Negro persecution—in accordance with their "true class interests." In his enthusiasm for a class collaborationist national unity he declared in a speech at Bridgeport, Connecticut, on December 12, 1943, "If J. P. Morgan supports this [pro-Teheran] coalition and goes down the line for it, I as a Communist am prepared to clasp his hand on that and join with him to realize it."1
On such a basis Browder foresaw national unity in the United States. There would be, he said, "very little discontent in labor's ranks and very little strained relations between labor, government, and management." The trade unions would have few problems. Working under an incentive wage and a no-strike pledge, which he wanted carried over into the post-war period, Browder expected that the unions would surely arrive at "an agreed practical program, which grants to the capitalists the maximum initiative in working out the problems of distribution in their own way."
One of the worst elements in Browder's so-called national unity was his abandonment of the fight of the Negro people for self-determination. His theory was that the Negro people, by their attitude at the close of the Civil War, had exercised their right of self-determination and given up all perspectives of being a distinct nation. This was a repudiation of the national character of the Negro question. The political substance of this was that the Negro masses, like the workers, had no real need for further struggle against the supposedly benevolent ruling class, but would automatically achieve their rights. The ultimate results of this conception were a grave weakening of the Party's fight among the Negro people and a virtual liquidation of the Communist Party in the South.2
Browder's national unity also presupposed the workers' acceptance indefinitely of the two-party electoral system. He said, "The working class shares very largely the general national opinion that this 'two-party system' provides adequate channels for the basic preservation of democratic rights." He defended this system and said, "The political aims which we hold with the majority of Americans we will attempt to advance through the existing party structure of our country, which in the main is that of the peculiarly American two-party system."
On the basis of his acceptance of capitalism, class collaboration, the two-party system, and the elimination of the Negro people's struggle for national liberation, logically enough Browder also saw no need for the Communist Party. So he proposed its dissolution and the reorganization
of the Communists into an educational institution. This body should put up no election candidates of its own and would "be non-partisan in character." It would carry on "Marxist" work among the masses. As for Leninism, the Marxism of the present period, that was out entirely; Lenin's name was not even mentioned by Browder in the whole presentation of his Teheran thesis.
THE ESSENCE OF BROWDER'S OPPORTUNISM
The heart of Browder's opportunist ideas was the traditional "American exceptionalism," the illusion that the capitalist system in this country is basically different in that it is not subject to the laws of growth and decay that govern capitalism in other countries. Because of the relatively favorable conditions of its development—the absence of a feudal political past, the control of tremendous natural resources, a vast unified land area, and, in late years, its ability, because of its strategic situation, to profit from the world wars that were destroying other capitalist countries, capitalism in the United States has retained the appearance of great strength in a world of developing capitalist weakness. Lenin long ago explained this phenomenon by his law of the uneven development of capitalism; but opportunists such as Lovestone and Browder, in full harmony with the bourgeois economists, considered that the superficial, specific features of American capitalism set it apart basically from capitalism in general. This "American exceptionalism" saturated Browder's entire political outlook.
Browder's opportunist plan, as is customary with "American exceptionalists," contained an enormous overestimation of the power of American capitalism. His Teheran thesis virtually showed the American monopolists running the entire world, and conceded Wall Street imperialist world hegemony. Henry Luce never portrayed "the American century" so vividly as Earl Browder did.
Another major element in Browder's opportunism was its Keynesism. That is, he undertook to show that by government planning the United States could overcome its crises of overproduction. The false implication of this was that capitalism could thereby vanquish its general crisis. Browder's Utopia was the characteristic Keynesian illusion of a "progressive capitalism," moving ahead in an ever-rising spiral. The picture he painted was one of the evolutionary advance of an all-satisfying capitalism, not of militant struggles to socialism.
Browder's opportunism also had in it the typical right Social-Democratic policy of class collaboration, which means the subordination of
the working class to the dictation of the capitalist class. He put the whole control of society in the hands of "intelligent capitalists." The working class had no revolutionary role, nor had the Communist Party.
Browder's scheme was a crass revision of Marxism-Leninism. In his Teheran thesis he obliterated the class struggle, overcame the basic contradictions of capitalism, eliminated the conception of imperialism (the very word "imperialism" became taboo to him), and he did away with the perspective of socialism. For, if the capitalists should voluntarily double the wages of their workers, industrialize and democratize the undeveloped areas of the world, abolish war, and establish rising living standards all over the world, as Browder maintained they would, where would be the grounds for the proletarian revolution and socialism? Browder was even more ambitious than all this in his revisionism. He was insolently striving to rewrite the whole body of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist principles and program.
Browder's opportunist Teheran policy was the climax of his several years of wrong attitudes toward the Roosevelt coalition and the national unity of the pre-war and war years. This systematic misinterpretation produced a whole series of developing errors, from the time the Party began to support Roosevelt in 1936. Among these errors, as we have remarked in passing, were Browder's failure to criticize Roosevelt and his dictum of "follow Roosevelt and subordinate everything to his policies" (as early as 1937, a prominent European Marxist said that Browder was "bedazzled by Roosevelt"), his betrayal of the national liberation movements in Asia and Latin America, his "crossed-the-Rubicon" theory of Anglo-American imperialism in the war, his wrong conception of the national liberation struggle in China, his refusal to insist upon a wartime coalition government, his incentive wage, his centralized war economy, his ousting of 4,000 foreign-born from the Communist Party, his abolition of shop groups, his growing assumption in practice that the class struggle had disappeared, his underplaying of the leading and independent role of the working class and the Communist Party, and, all along, his opportunistic interpretation of American history. The Teheran policy was only the final maturing of Browder's ever-more-marked orientation to the right.
In his Teheran policy, Browder was a voice of American imperialism. He glorified the "progressive" role of American monopoly capitalism; he sowed imperialist illusions among the workers; he sought to demobilize the labor movement and the colonial peoples in the face of aggressive imperialism, and he tried to wipe out the greatest of all enemies of American imperialism, the Communist Party. The Teheran policy was an attempt to write an effective program in the interest of the American big bourgeoisie, not of the working class. It was designed to further Wall Street's post-war drive to master the world and to get the working class to support it.
HOW BROWDER'S REVISIONISM ORIGINATED
In the present period of sharp domestic class struggles, international war danger, and the Leninist position of the Communist Party, it seems almost incredible that the Party could ever have made the fundamental error of accepting Browder's impossible Teheran scheme. The basic reason for this error was the inadequate Marxist-Leninist development of the Party and its leaders. The mistake was a mistake of the Party, not merely of its then leader, Browder. He merely capitalized upon the weak Marxist-Leninist development of the Party. He was the theoretician, spokesman, and originator of the deviation.
The Party at the time was part of a national unity made up of all classes, and it was supporting a bourgeois government allied with the U.S.S.R. in a great war against fascism. This was basically a correct line. But the Party had been so conditioned in the complex situation by the development of Browder's opportunism over the previous several years as to exaggerate grossly the progressive significance of the existing national and international unity. Browder, a cunning sophist, was able to give a sinister plausibility to his Teheran project. Hence, the Party was deceived into believing, or at least partially believing, that the wartime national and international unity would be continued and greatly developed in the post-war period. Other Communist parties at the time, especially in the western hemisphere, made similar mistakes, endorsing either Browder's line or variations of it.
Browder's revisionism had deep roots in the inadequate social composition of the Party. The Party's strength was relatively weak among the workers in the basic industries, and this weakness was accentuated by the Browder-inspired liquidations of the shop units in this period. There had also been a large influx of ideologically undeveloped white collar workers and professionals into the Party. Many, if not most, of these elements eventually developed into sound Communists, but Browder, himself a white collar worker, an accountant, systematically allied himself with the right-wing currents among them. He also had close ties with those opportunist (later renegade) Communist trade union leaders, who had become corrupted by the high wages and political opportunism prevalent in the C.I.O. official circles. Browder cultivated all these right tendencies, based himself upon them, and directed his inner Party fire solely against the real Marxists in the Party. All this was akin to the petty-bourgeois opportunism which historically had ruined the Socialist Party.
Browderism was also enabled to flourish through the lack of democratic centralism in the Party. Under a correct Leninist system of democratic centralism, there must be within the Party full political discussion, penetrating self-criticism, sound discipline, a vigorous fight against both right and "left" deviations, and an energetic application of Party decisions. These are the conditions for a strong Party and correct policies. An approximation to this regime has normally been the life of our Party, but not always. During the long factional fight of 1923-29, for example, the Party's democratic centralism was stifled by the prevailing captious criticism, factional attitudes, lack of discipline, and the placing of group interests before those of the Party. Then again, under the Browder regime, the violation of democratic centralism went to the opposite, but related extreme, in the drastic curtailment of real political discussion, the virtual abolition of self-criticism, the cultivation of bureaucratic methods of work, the general development of a super-centralization, and the almost complete abandonment of the fight against right tendencies in the Party. Browder, to stifle political discussion, harped demagogically upon the dangers of factionalism, vivid memories being still prevalent in the Party of the great harm done by the long factional fight of 1923-29. It was under such artificial conditions, alien to Marxist-Leninist Party life, that Browder's revisionist Teheran thesis, without adequate discussion, was foisted temporarily upon the Party.
The Teheran deviation of our Party was essentially of a Social-Democratic character. The right Social-Democracy, as its settled policy, always tails after the bourgeoisie. This policy, as we have seen, has, among other treacheries, brought it to the point of supporting the program of American imperialism for world conquest through a major war. Browder's policies would have led our Party in this same general direction. The Party, however, proved its Communist quality by recognizing its serious error and drastically correcting it. This is something which the right Social-Democracy cannot possibly do. Marxist-Leninists are not infallible. They, too, occasionally make mistakes. What characterizes them, however, is that they make fewer mistakes than any other Party and then, on the basis of penetrating self-criticism, they openly correct these mistakes and learn the lessons from them.
FOSTER OPPOSES BROWDER'S LINE
Browder made his report on Teheran, on January 7, 1944, to the National Committee and other leading Party workers, about 500 in all.
William Z. Foster, national chairman of the Party, presided over the meeting. As soon as Browder had concluded, Foster put his name on the speakers' list and notified the Political Committee that he was going to speak against Browder's report. Several members of the Committee strongly urged him not to do this, on the ground that it would throw the Party into grave confusion in the midst of the war. They also assured him that Browder had spoken without a previous review of his speech and that the whole matter would be taken up shortly for reconsideration by the Political Committee.
With this understanding Foster withdrew his name from the speakers' list. But as no Political Committee discussion of Browder's report took place, on January 20th he addressed a letter to the National Committee expressing his views.3 In this letter Foster challenged the whole line of Browder's report. In the sphere of foreign policy, he attacked Browder's underestimation of the general crisis of capitalism, his illusions about the liquidation of imperialism and his "progressive" role of American capitalism, his belief that the big capitalists in Great Britain and the United States would no longer assail the Soviet Union. He pointed out that Roosevelt was an imperialist, and he warned of the post-war drive for world domination that would come from American imperialism.
In the domestic sphere Foster showed the fallacy of proposing a postwar national unity that would include the "biggest capitalists," assailed the Browder-Morgan symbol of national unity, foresaw a post-war perspective of class struggle instead of class peace, opposed Browder's acceptance of the two-party system, attacked the post-war no-strike policy, condemned the discarding of socialism, and warned the Party of the danger of falling into the right Social-Democratic error of tailing after the bourgeoisie. As for the dissolution of the Party, Foster and other comrades had opposed this ever since it had been proposed some weeks before. Obviously, however, he should have again pressed this question in his letter to the National Committee. On Browder's thesis as a whole, Foster's letter said: "In this picture, American imperialism virtually disappears, there remains hardly a trace of the class struggle, and socialism plays practically no role whatever."
Foster demanded that a new meeting of the National Committee be called to discuss his letter. This was refused, but instead an "enlarged meeting" of the Political Committee, of some 80 leading Party workers was held on February 8, 1944. Foster's letter was read and overwhelmingly rejected, only one of those present voting with him. Browder then served notice upon Foster that if he carried his position to the membership, this action would be met by his expulsion. Foster's letter was suppressed by Browder and kept from the Party as a whole.
Convinced that any attempt to raise the issue broadly among the membership would result in a fruitless Party split, Foster decided, for the time being at least, to confine his opposition to the National Committee—"a course which," he said, "I followed for the next year and a half by means of innumerable criticisms, policy proposals, articles, 4 etc., all going in the direction of eliminating Browder's opportunistic errors. I was convinced that the course of political events and the Communist training of our leadership would eventually cause our Party to return to a sound line of policy."5 And so matters turned out in reality.
DISSOLUTION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
Browder, in the earliest discussions of his general Teheran thesis, proposed the liquidation of the Communist Party. Among other arguments, he cited the dissolution of the Communist International in May 1943, which, however, had taken place, as we have seen, for reasons completely different from Browder's opportunist purposes. He encountered much opposition in the Political Committee, but eventually won his point.
Consequently, the National Committee of the Communist Party, on January 11, 1944, sent out a letter to the Party districts recommending that the Party as such be dissolved and reorganized into a "political-educational association." This was endorsed practically unanimously by all the districts. During May 20-22, 1944, therefore, the plan was carried out at the regular twelfth convention of the Party held in New York City.
The Communist Party convention proper lasted only a few minutes. Browder made the proposition to dissolve the Party, stating, "I hereby move that the Communist Party of America be and hereby is dissolved and that a committee of three consisting of the Chairman, General Secretary, and Assistant Secretary of the Party, be authorized to take all necessary steps to liquidate its affairs and that such committee be further authorized to dispose of all its property and to turn over any surplus that may remain to any organization or organizations that in their opinion are devoted to our country's winning of the war in which it is presently engaged and in the achieving of a durable peace." The motion was adopted without discussion, whereupon the C.P. convention adjourned.
The delegation then immediately reconvened and proceeded to organize itself into the Communist Political Association. Browder made the main political report, along the lines of his by then well-known Teheran thesis. This was adopted as the general program of the C.P.A. The old structure of the C.P., with considerable changes, was taken over by the new organization, and so, too, were its journals, properties, and funds, the special committee placed in charge of this matter at the C.P. convention so deciding. The leadership, district and national, remained substantially the same, except that Foster, because of his opposition stand, was dropped as national chairman, Browder taking over this position with the title of president. Eleven vice-presidents were also elected, thus centralizing more power in Browder's hands. The heads of the state organizations were called presidents.
The Preamble to the Constitution was drastically modified in line with the new political orientation. The C.P.A. dubbed itself "a nonpartisan association of Americans," which "adheres to the principles of scientific socialism, Marxism" [not Marxism-Leninism]. The Preamble said nothing of the class struggle, of imperialism, of the revolutionary role of the working class, of the establishment of socialism. Instead, "it looks to the family of free nations, led -by the great coalition of democratic capitalist and socialist states, to inaugurate an era of world peace, expanding production and economic well-being, and the liberation and equality of all peoples regardless of race, creed or color." Some months later Browder proposed dropping the word Communist from the title of the C.P.A., but was defeated by one vote in the Political Committee.
Thus Browder's system of revisionism had reached its ultimate expression. It had gone to its last extreme in the liquidation of the Party. Browder had not only revised the principles and policies of the Party, he had also dissolved the Party itself. He did this under the pretext that the C.P.A. was a better instrument to work with. This was an abandonment and betrayal of the most fundamental concepts of Marxism-Leninism. It was a surrender to the Social-Democratic and bourgeois demand that the C.P. be abolished, an attempt to deprive the working class of its indispensable leading political party. In its convention of May 1944, the Communist Party of the United States made the greatest political mistake in all its history.6
EFFECTS UPON THE MASS WORK
Browder's revisionism promptly had weakening effects upon all branches of Communist mass work. In the trade unions attempts to develop a post-war no-strike outlook along the lines of the Teheran thesis badly misfired, and the right-wing opposition correspondingly prospered. In the work among the Negro masses Browder's theory that the Negro people, having abandoned (satisfied) their national aspirations, were now integrated into the white population, threw confusion into the ranks of the Communists and their sympathizers and undermined their fight for the rights of the Negro people. In the field of women's work, Browder's reliance upon the progressive role of the bourgeoisie tended to liquidate all conceptions that the women would actually have to fight for their rights in order to get them. In the national group work similar opportunist conceptions took root, and for the first time in American Communist history bourgeois nationalism became an acute problem among the left forces in this sphere. In cultural work, Browder's bourgeois catering to "big names" was a debilitating influence. And in the South, where the Communists had carried on so heroically for so long, work was practically abandoned.
The Young Communist League suffered early and heavily from Browder's revisionism and liquidationism. On October 16, 1943, the Y.C.L. in convention dissolved and then reorganized its forces into the American Youth for Democracy. This was not an effort to find the basis for a broader Marxist organization-the traditional Y.C.L. objective-but an attempt to wipe out Marxism-Leninism in youth work. Says Betty Gannett, "The new organization was conceived as educating the youth not in socialism, but in the traditions of the best in bourgeois democracy. It was to be a non-partisan organization, with free discussion of the policies and theories proposed by all political parties. . Fraternal ties with the Communist Party were dissolved. . . . Emphasis was laid on the service character of the organization, thus differentiating it but little from other youth service organizations. And Marxism was to be studied on a voluntary basis, as one of the important 'currents of democratic thought.' This opportunist trend was intensified as Browder-ism grew. The effects of revisionism negated every basic principle of Marxist-Leninist work among the youth." 7 Corrections were made in this line in 1945 after Browder's defeat, and these were amplified at the formation of the L.Y.L. in May 1948.
In the 1944 presidential elections, with the sick Roosevelt leading the Democratic ticket together with Harry S. Truman, Browder, in line with his Teheran program, tried to make a grandiose maneuver. In a speech in Cleveland he proposed that the heads of the Republican and Democratic parties should come together and agree upon a single win-the-war ticket. This step was logical from Browder's revisionist position. He was contending that the bulk of finance capital was supporting the Teheran policy, therefore to him it made small difference whether the Republicans or Democrats won, both parties being controlled by "progressive" finance capital. The election, consequently, had little real significance to him, and all the election fury was mere narrow partisanship without real political content. Therefore, the two parties should pick a common ticket. This scheme obviously would imply the ditching of Roosevelt; for, of course, the Republicans would never agree upon him. But Browder quickly backed away from his hare-brained project, owing to vigorous opposition in the Political Committee and also to clear indications that his proposal would have been almost unanimously condemned by the strong Roosevelt forces among the broad masses. So the C.P.A. continued its endorsement of Roosevelt and helped elect him to his fourth term.
GROWING OPPOSITION IN THE C.P.A.
The Party membership from the outset accepted Browder's revisionist Teheran policy without firm conviction. Before long this uncertainty began to develop into doubt and opposition. This changing attitude was primarily due to the fact that the course of American and world events was swiftly exposing the fallacy of Browder's whole line. Obviously, in the field of labor what the post-war period was bringing would not be Browder's long period of peaceful class collaboration, but many hard-fought strikes. And in the realm of foreign policy, although the war was not yet over, American imperialism (with its new political chieftain, Truman) was clearly preparing to grab what it could of the war-stricken world. This became especially evident with the opening of the United Nations founding conference in San Francisco on April 25, 1945. "All the great struggles of the conference," says Frederick V. Field, "revolved around the effort of imperialism to reassert itself against the forces of democracy to which the war had given such impetus."8 Particularly sinister signs of this basic fact were the admission of Peron's Argentina to the U.N. and the exclusion of democratic Poland.
The threatening domestic and international situation produced increasing doubts in the C.P.A. about its political line. These were reflected in the Political Committee. Eugene Dennis began to develop a perspective of active struggle, instead of class peace, in the post-war United States; Gilbert Green proposed that a National Committee meeting be held to review the post-war situation (to which Browder's thesis was supposed to be the basic answer); Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., warned of the evil effects that the present policies were having in Negro work; Jack Stachel spoke of American imperialism (which supposedly Browder had liquidated); Robert Thompson expressed growing doubt on various aspects of the Browder line; John Williamson complained of the lethargy in the C.P.A. and the big loss of members. Foster cultivated all these doubts about the correctness of the Party line and lost no occasion of criticizing the Browder policy and exposing its fallacies. Browder, therefore, had all plans laid for Foster's expulsion in the near future.
THE DUCLOS ARTICLE
In the midst of this rapidly developing internal situation, Jacques Duclos, secretary of the Communist Party of France, published in the French journal, Cahiers du Communisme, in April 1945, an article colliding head on with the Browder policies. 9 Duclos was motivated to write his article primarily because, some time before, an article had appeared in France Nouvellej a Communist paper, lauding Browderism, and also because Browder's dissolution of the Communist Party in the United States was encouraging liquidationist tendencies in the French Communist Party.
In his article, Duclos made a long statement of Browder's policy, counterposing to it copious quotations from Foster's letter to the National Committee. In drawing his own conclusions, Duclos declared that "one is witnessing a notorious revision of Marxism on the part of Browder and his followers, a revisionism which is expressed in the concept of a long-term class peace in the United States, of the possibility of the suppression of the class struggle in the post-war period and the establishment of harmony between labor and capital." He condemned Browder's distortion of the Teheran diplomatic declaration "into a political platform of class peace," and he excoriated the liquidation of the Communist Party. He declared that "nothing justifies the dissolution of the American Communist Party." Instead, the situation "presupposes the existence of a powerful Communist Party."
The Duclos article had an electrifying effect upon the C.P.A. It speedily matured the already developing opposition to the Browder policies. Within a matter of weeks the whole Party, from the local clubs to the Political Committee, almost unanimously rejected the Teheran opportunism. Undoubtedly, with events at home and abroad daily showing the stupidity of Browder's revisionism, the American Communists, without Duclos' intervention, would eventually have cleared the Party of this political poison. But it would have been a difficult process, probably involving a serious Party split. As it was, his famous article greatly facilitated the smashing of Browder's opportunist system; for which the Communist Party of the United States remains deeply indebted to Jacques Duclos and the French Communist Party.
THE EMERGENCY CONVENTION
The C.P.A. received a copy of Duclos' article on May 20, 1945.10 It was immediately discussed in the Political Committee. The whole policy of the C.P.A. quickly came under survey, with the result that Browder's line was rejected by a two-thirds majority of the Committee, which soon became unanimous, except for Browder. The latter, packed with conceit and arrogance and devoid of any trace of self-criticism, clung to his position, despite its obvious bankruptcy. Consequently, a few days later he was suspended as general secretary, and a secretariat of three—William Z. Foster, Eugene Dennis, and John Williamson—was chosen in his stead.
On June 18-20, a meeting of the National Committee was held. The Committee, reflecting the virtually solid sentiment of the membership, unanimously condemned Browder's line, agreed with the Duclos article, fully endorsed Foster's earlier letter to the National Committee, and adopted the draft of a new policy resolution. It also supported the removal of Browder as general secretary, making this permanent, and it called a special convention for July 26-28, in New York City.
The Emergency (thirteenth) Convention unanimously endorsed the actions taken by the Political Committee and the National Committee. It was a convention of deep self-criticism for the great mistake that had been made in the Party's falling victim to Browder's revisionism. In this respect the convention declared, "The source of our past revisionist errors must be traced to the ever active pressure of bourgeois ideology and influence upon the working class."
The convention set about thoroughly cleansing the Party of Browderism and putting it once more upon a solid Marxist-Leninist basis. The C.P.A. was liquidated and the Communist Party reconstituted. The Party Constitution was correspondingly rewritten. A secretariat was chosen to head the Party, consisting of William Z. Foster, Eugene Dennis, and Robert Thompson. Foster was reinstated as national chairman. Numerous changes were made in the composition of the National Committee and, later by local action, also in the state and local committees.
The Preamble of the Party Constitution was also rewritten and given substantially its present text. It broke with Browder's adulation of bourgeois democracy and struck a clear note of proletarian democracy and socialism. It declared that "The Communist Party of the United States is the political party of the working class, basing itself upon the principles of scientific socialism, Marxism-Leninism." While defending the achievements of American democracy, it pledged an uncompromising fight "against imperialism and colonial oppression, against racial, national and religious discrimination, against Jim Crovism, anti-Semitism and all forms of chauvinism," and for socialism. It was sharply and clearly based upon the class struggle.
The main resolution11 made a realistic survey of the world situation— the war with Japan being not yet concluded at the time. It repudiated all the Browder nonsense about the "progressive" role of American imperialism and pointed out the sinister dangers in the international policies being followed by Wall Street and the Truman government. The resolution declared that "the most aggressive circles of American imperialism are endeavoring to secure for themselves political and economic domination of the world." It also stated that "if the reactionary policies and forces of monopoly capital are not checked and defeated, America and the world will be confronted with new aggressions and war and the growth of reaction and fascism in the United States." This incisive Marxist-Leninist analysis gave a clear picture of the international situation and made a forecast of the course of events which remains completely valid today.
In the domestic sphere the resolution broke completely with Browder's class collaborationism. It rejected the post-war no-strike line, incentive wage, subservience to the two-party system, and "organized capitalism" of Browder, and it wrote a program of class struggle. It outlined a militant win-the-war program; urged the workers to prepare-for the difficult struggles of the post-war period; retained the sound Communist policy of building the Roosevelt coalition and set out to strengthen it in a Leninist sense. The resolution sharply criticized Truman, who had been president for only a few months, and declared, "It is of central importance to build systematically the political strength of labor, the Negro people, and all true democratic forces within the general coalition for the struggle against imperialist reaction, for combating and checking all tendencies and groupings in the coalition willing to make concessions to reaction. The camp of reaction must not be appeased. It must be isolated and routed." The resolution restated a correct policy on the Negro question. The Party had reasserted its Communist quality.
The convention, in short, made a clean sweep of the reformist trappings of Browderism. But it took the work of the next few years to eliminate from the Party the many revisionist moods and practices that had been growing for so long under Browder's cultivation. After the Emergency Convention a great surge of joy and enthusiasm went through the ranks of the Communist Party. But the adventure into revisionism of the C.P.A. had been a costly one, the Party losing some 15,000 members, who were repelled by Browder's opportunism. This had been evident earlier when large numbers of Party members had refused to register in the C.P.A. A report by Betty Gannett in mid-1944 stated that but 63,044 members, or 88 percent of those on the rolls of the C.P. (not counting 15,000 in the armed services) joined the C.P.A., a loss of 9,000 at this point. The Party registration of January 1946 showed but 52,824 members, a figure which was raised to 59,172 in the registration of 1947.
An aftermath of Browder's revisionism was the organized defection of a few dozen disgruntled sectarians in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and elsewhere. These included Sam Darcy, William F. Dunne, Harrison George, Vern Smith, and others. They developed a leftist line of criticism, charging that the new Party leadership was centrist. This was their way of retreating from the increasingly difficult class struggle under cover of revolutionary phraseology.
THE EXPULSION OF BROWDER
Browder promised the Party to obey the convention decisions, and the Party leadership offered to give him minor Party work. He refused this, however, as he had obviously decided upon breaking with the Party. Soon he began a factional correspondence inside the Party, and toward the latter part of 1945 he started publishing a sheet called Distributors Guide. This paper propagated Browder's revisionist line and made sneaking attacks on the Party. He also tried to build a factional grouping.
Although repeatedly warned, Browder continued his unprincipled maneuvering. He challenged the authority of the Political Committee and the secretariat to examine his political activities. Therefore, at a meeting of the National Committee, on February 12-15, 1946, upon the report of Robert Thompson,12 he was unanimously expelled from the Communist Party. A mere handful—his wife, his brother, his financial "angel," and a few others—departed with him as his following.
Once outside of the Party, Browder intensified his anti-Party activities. But he could never assemble more than a baker's dozen in his group. With the whole world situation daily giving the lie to his absurd Teheran thesis, Browder went right on reiterating it to "fit" the completely contradictory political conditions. He disintegrated into an open enemy of the Communist Party, a shameless mouthpiece for American imperialism, and a snide vilifier of the Soviet Union.13
30. The Communist Political Association (1944-1945)
The Teheran agreement of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, in December 1943, was basically a military one, setting the date, place, and strategy for the opening, on June 6, 1944, of the long-delayed western front in France. The three war leaders also took occasion to express the hope diplomatically that this wartime unity could be carried over into the post-war period and would result in peace "for many generations." On the basis of the Leninist policy of the possibility of the peaceful co-existence of the capitalist and Socialist powers, Stalin definitely planned for such a peace. But aggressive Anglo-American imperialism, which was already aiming at world conquest, and of which Churchill and Roosevelt were the representatives, had no such peaceful purpose in mind, as later events soon demonstrated.Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party, immediately jumped to the conclusion that the post-war unity that the "Big Three" expressed in wishes at Teheran was, in fact, an actual agreement and that post-war peace and co-operation were therefore guaranteed. He assumed that the dominant circles of United States monopoly capital were interested in and favored a peaceful coexistence and friendly competition with the U.S.S.R. With the glib assurance of a Utopian and an opportunist, Browder undertook to state all the essentials of this imagined agreement at Teheran. This he did at the January 1944 meeting in New York, of the National Committee of the Communist Party. Later, in his book, Teheran: Our Path in Peace and War, he developed his thesis at length. In the face of much doubt and some opposition among our membership, Browder managed to get the Party to endorse his policy, if not to accept it wholeheartedly.
"Capitalism and socialism," said Browder, "have begun to find the way to peaceful coexistence and collaboration in the same world." Post-war unity of the "Big Three," he argued, was based upon assurances by Churchill and Roosevelt to Stalin that the Soviet Union would be left to develop in peace, and promises by Stalin to Churchill and Roosevelt "that a victorious Red Army would not carry the Soviet system and socialism on its bayonets to the rest of Europe." Thus old "fears and suspicions" had been liquidated and genuine world co-operation virtually established.
The expected revolutionary upheavals in Europe after the war need not, according to Browder, disrupt the new international unity; for, said he, "It is the most stupid mistake to suppose that any American interest, even that of American monopoly capital, is incompatible with the necessary people's revolution in Europe." The developing colonial revolutions were disposed of by Browder with equal ease. Obviously, American capitalism had a compelling profit interest, he argued, to create broad markets in the colonial and semi-colonial lands. Hence, highly practical (nay, inevitable) would be an agreement between the United States and Great Britain to liberate, industrialize, and democratize these areas. This was Truman's "Point Four," originated by Roosevelt and theorized about by Browder. Trade conflicts between the two powers could (would) also be worked out in friendly agreement.
Thus, in Browder's assumed "Teheran" post-war world the imperialists would abandon their innate hostility to the Soviet Union, liquidate their own trade rivalries, tolerate people's revolutions in Europe, and collaborate with the independence movements of the colonial peoples. Consequently, peace would be assured for many generations.
This idyllic international unity of Browder's also presupposed an equally idyllic national unity in the capitalist countries. In the United States the main consideration for such unity was economic. This involved, said Browder, disposing of $80 billion yearly in surplus commodities that would develop once the war industries returned to civilian production. This problem he prepared to solve, first, by increasing American foreign trade by $40 billion annually; that is, by upping United States exports to Latin America by $6 billion, to Africa $6 billion, to Asia $20 billion, to Europe $6 billion, and to the U.S.S.R. $2 billion. "I am quite willing," said Browder, " to help the free private enterprisers to realize the forty-billion dollar market that is required entirely and completely by their own methods." This was a suggestion to Wall Street to grab the trade of the world with the help of the working class.
In order to dispose of the $40 billion of American overproduction that would be left even after this vast extension of foreign trade, Browder expected that the employers would voluntarily double the real wages of the workers. "There seems to be no other way," said Browder, "but to double the buying power of the individual consumer. How that shall be done we will not suggest at this time. We look forward to practical suggestions from the capitalists who must find the solution in order to keep their plants in operation."
Browder declared that the "intelligent" capitalists would establish national unity on the basis of all his projects—acceptance of the European and colonial revolutions, doubling the workers' wages, abolition of anti-Semitism and Negro persecution—in accordance with their "true class interests." In his enthusiasm for a class collaborationist national unity he declared in a speech at Bridgeport, Connecticut, on December 12, 1943, "If J. P. Morgan supports this [pro-Teheran] coalition and goes down the line for it, I as a Communist am prepared to clasp his hand on that and join with him to realize it."1
On such a basis Browder foresaw national unity in the United States. There would be, he said, "very little discontent in labor's ranks and very little strained relations between labor, government, and management." The trade unions would have few problems. Working under an incentive wage and a no-strike pledge, which he wanted carried over into the post-war period, Browder expected that the unions would surely arrive at "an agreed practical program, which grants to the capitalists the maximum initiative in working out the problems of distribution in their own way."
One of the worst elements in Browder's so-called national unity was his abandonment of the fight of the Negro people for self-determination. His theory was that the Negro people, by their attitude at the close of the Civil War, had exercised their right of self-determination and given up all perspectives of being a distinct nation. This was a repudiation of the national character of the Negro question. The political substance of this was that the Negro masses, like the workers, had no real need for further struggle against the supposedly benevolent ruling class, but would automatically achieve their rights. The ultimate results of this conception were a grave weakening of the Party's fight among the Negro people and a virtual liquidation of the Communist Party in the South.2
Browder's national unity also presupposed the workers' acceptance indefinitely of the two-party electoral system. He said, "The working class shares very largely the general national opinion that this 'two-party system' provides adequate channels for the basic preservation of democratic rights." He defended this system and said, "The political aims which we hold with the majority of Americans we will attempt to advance through the existing party structure of our country, which in the main is that of the peculiarly American two-party system."
On the basis of his acceptance of capitalism, class collaboration, the two-party system, and the elimination of the Negro people's struggle for national liberation, logically enough Browder also saw no need for the Communist Party. So he proposed its dissolution and the reorganization
of the Communists into an educational institution. This body should put up no election candidates of its own and would "be non-partisan in character." It would carry on "Marxist" work among the masses. As for Leninism, the Marxism of the present period, that was out entirely; Lenin's name was not even mentioned by Browder in the whole presentation of his Teheran thesis.
THE ESSENCE OF BROWDER'S OPPORTUNISM
The heart of Browder's opportunist ideas was the traditional "American exceptionalism," the illusion that the capitalist system in this country is basically different in that it is not subject to the laws of growth and decay that govern capitalism in other countries. Because of the relatively favorable conditions of its development—the absence of a feudal political past, the control of tremendous natural resources, a vast unified land area, and, in late years, its ability, because of its strategic situation, to profit from the world wars that were destroying other capitalist countries, capitalism in the United States has retained the appearance of great strength in a world of developing capitalist weakness. Lenin long ago explained this phenomenon by his law of the uneven development of capitalism; but opportunists such as Lovestone and Browder, in full harmony with the bourgeois economists, considered that the superficial, specific features of American capitalism set it apart basically from capitalism in general. This "American exceptionalism" saturated Browder's entire political outlook.
Browder's opportunist plan, as is customary with "American exceptionalists," contained an enormous overestimation of the power of American capitalism. His Teheran thesis virtually showed the American monopolists running the entire world, and conceded Wall Street imperialist world hegemony. Henry Luce never portrayed "the American century" so vividly as Earl Browder did.
Another major element in Browder's opportunism was its Keynesism. That is, he undertook to show that by government planning the United States could overcome its crises of overproduction. The false implication of this was that capitalism could thereby vanquish its general crisis. Browder's Utopia was the characteristic Keynesian illusion of a "progressive capitalism," moving ahead in an ever-rising spiral. The picture he painted was one of the evolutionary advance of an all-satisfying capitalism, not of militant struggles to socialism.
Browder's opportunism also had in it the typical right Social-Democratic policy of class collaboration, which means the subordination of
the working class to the dictation of the capitalist class. He put the whole control of society in the hands of "intelligent capitalists." The working class had no revolutionary role, nor had the Communist Party.
Browder's scheme was a crass revision of Marxism-Leninism. In his Teheran thesis he obliterated the class struggle, overcame the basic contradictions of capitalism, eliminated the conception of imperialism (the very word "imperialism" became taboo to him), and he did away with the perspective of socialism. For, if the capitalists should voluntarily double the wages of their workers, industrialize and democratize the undeveloped areas of the world, abolish war, and establish rising living standards all over the world, as Browder maintained they would, where would be the grounds for the proletarian revolution and socialism? Browder was even more ambitious than all this in his revisionism. He was insolently striving to rewrite the whole body of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist principles and program.
Browder's opportunist Teheran policy was the climax of his several years of wrong attitudes toward the Roosevelt coalition and the national unity of the pre-war and war years. This systematic misinterpretation produced a whole series of developing errors, from the time the Party began to support Roosevelt in 1936. Among these errors, as we have remarked in passing, were Browder's failure to criticize Roosevelt and his dictum of "follow Roosevelt and subordinate everything to his policies" (as early as 1937, a prominent European Marxist said that Browder was "bedazzled by Roosevelt"), his betrayal of the national liberation movements in Asia and Latin America, his "crossed-the-Rubicon" theory of Anglo-American imperialism in the war, his wrong conception of the national liberation struggle in China, his refusal to insist upon a wartime coalition government, his incentive wage, his centralized war economy, his ousting of 4,000 foreign-born from the Communist Party, his abolition of shop groups, his growing assumption in practice that the class struggle had disappeared, his underplaying of the leading and independent role of the working class and the Communist Party, and, all along, his opportunistic interpretation of American history. The Teheran policy was only the final maturing of Browder's ever-more-marked orientation to the right.
In his Teheran policy, Browder was a voice of American imperialism. He glorified the "progressive" role of American monopoly capitalism; he sowed imperialist illusions among the workers; he sought to demobilize the labor movement and the colonial peoples in the face of aggressive imperialism, and he tried to wipe out the greatest of all enemies of American imperialism, the Communist Party. The Teheran policy was an attempt to write an effective program in the interest of the American big bourgeoisie, not of the working class. It was designed to further Wall Street's post-war drive to master the world and to get the working class to support it.
HOW BROWDER'S REVISIONISM ORIGINATED
In the present period of sharp domestic class struggles, international war danger, and the Leninist position of the Communist Party, it seems almost incredible that the Party could ever have made the fundamental error of accepting Browder's impossible Teheran scheme. The basic reason for this error was the inadequate Marxist-Leninist development of the Party and its leaders. The mistake was a mistake of the Party, not merely of its then leader, Browder. He merely capitalized upon the weak Marxist-Leninist development of the Party. He was the theoretician, spokesman, and originator of the deviation.
The Party at the time was part of a national unity made up of all classes, and it was supporting a bourgeois government allied with the U.S.S.R. in a great war against fascism. This was basically a correct line. But the Party had been so conditioned in the complex situation by the development of Browder's opportunism over the previous several years as to exaggerate grossly the progressive significance of the existing national and international unity. Browder, a cunning sophist, was able to give a sinister plausibility to his Teheran project. Hence, the Party was deceived into believing, or at least partially believing, that the wartime national and international unity would be continued and greatly developed in the post-war period. Other Communist parties at the time, especially in the western hemisphere, made similar mistakes, endorsing either Browder's line or variations of it.
Browder's revisionism had deep roots in the inadequate social composition of the Party. The Party's strength was relatively weak among the workers in the basic industries, and this weakness was accentuated by the Browder-inspired liquidations of the shop units in this period. There had also been a large influx of ideologically undeveloped white collar workers and professionals into the Party. Many, if not most, of these elements eventually developed into sound Communists, but Browder, himself a white collar worker, an accountant, systematically allied himself with the right-wing currents among them. He also had close ties with those opportunist (later renegade) Communist trade union leaders, who had become corrupted by the high wages and political opportunism prevalent in the C.I.O. official circles. Browder cultivated all these right tendencies, based himself upon them, and directed his inner Party fire solely against the real Marxists in the Party. All this was akin to the petty-bourgeois opportunism which historically had ruined the Socialist Party.
Browderism was also enabled to flourish through the lack of democratic centralism in the Party. Under a correct Leninist system of democratic centralism, there must be within the Party full political discussion, penetrating self-criticism, sound discipline, a vigorous fight against both right and "left" deviations, and an energetic application of Party decisions. These are the conditions for a strong Party and correct policies. An approximation to this regime has normally been the life of our Party, but not always. During the long factional fight of 1923-29, for example, the Party's democratic centralism was stifled by the prevailing captious criticism, factional attitudes, lack of discipline, and the placing of group interests before those of the Party. Then again, under the Browder regime, the violation of democratic centralism went to the opposite, but related extreme, in the drastic curtailment of real political discussion, the virtual abolition of self-criticism, the cultivation of bureaucratic methods of work, the general development of a super-centralization, and the almost complete abandonment of the fight against right tendencies in the Party. Browder, to stifle political discussion, harped demagogically upon the dangers of factionalism, vivid memories being still prevalent in the Party of the great harm done by the long factional fight of 1923-29. It was under such artificial conditions, alien to Marxist-Leninist Party life, that Browder's revisionist Teheran thesis, without adequate discussion, was foisted temporarily upon the Party.
The Teheran deviation of our Party was essentially of a Social-Democratic character. The right Social-Democracy, as its settled policy, always tails after the bourgeoisie. This policy, as we have seen, has, among other treacheries, brought it to the point of supporting the program of American imperialism for world conquest through a major war. Browder's policies would have led our Party in this same general direction. The Party, however, proved its Communist quality by recognizing its serious error and drastically correcting it. This is something which the right Social-Democracy cannot possibly do. Marxist-Leninists are not infallible. They, too, occasionally make mistakes. What characterizes them, however, is that they make fewer mistakes than any other Party and then, on the basis of penetrating self-criticism, they openly correct these mistakes and learn the lessons from them.
FOSTER OPPOSES BROWDER'S LINE
Browder made his report on Teheran, on January 7, 1944, to the National Committee and other leading Party workers, about 500 in all.
William Z. Foster, national chairman of the Party, presided over the meeting. As soon as Browder had concluded, Foster put his name on the speakers' list and notified the Political Committee that he was going to speak against Browder's report. Several members of the Committee strongly urged him not to do this, on the ground that it would throw the Party into grave confusion in the midst of the war. They also assured him that Browder had spoken without a previous review of his speech and that the whole matter would be taken up shortly for reconsideration by the Political Committee.
With this understanding Foster withdrew his name from the speakers' list. But as no Political Committee discussion of Browder's report took place, on January 20th he addressed a letter to the National Committee expressing his views.3 In this letter Foster challenged the whole line of Browder's report. In the sphere of foreign policy, he attacked Browder's underestimation of the general crisis of capitalism, his illusions about the liquidation of imperialism and his "progressive" role of American capitalism, his belief that the big capitalists in Great Britain and the United States would no longer assail the Soviet Union. He pointed out that Roosevelt was an imperialist, and he warned of the post-war drive for world domination that would come from American imperialism.
In the domestic sphere Foster showed the fallacy of proposing a postwar national unity that would include the "biggest capitalists," assailed the Browder-Morgan symbol of national unity, foresaw a post-war perspective of class struggle instead of class peace, opposed Browder's acceptance of the two-party system, attacked the post-war no-strike policy, condemned the discarding of socialism, and warned the Party of the danger of falling into the right Social-Democratic error of tailing after the bourgeoisie. As for the dissolution of the Party, Foster and other comrades had opposed this ever since it had been proposed some weeks before. Obviously, however, he should have again pressed this question in his letter to the National Committee. On Browder's thesis as a whole, Foster's letter said: "In this picture, American imperialism virtually disappears, there remains hardly a trace of the class struggle, and socialism plays practically no role whatever."
Foster demanded that a new meeting of the National Committee be called to discuss his letter. This was refused, but instead an "enlarged meeting" of the Political Committee, of some 80 leading Party workers was held on February 8, 1944. Foster's letter was read and overwhelmingly rejected, only one of those present voting with him. Browder then served notice upon Foster that if he carried his position to the membership, this action would be met by his expulsion. Foster's letter was suppressed by Browder and kept from the Party as a whole.
Convinced that any attempt to raise the issue broadly among the membership would result in a fruitless Party split, Foster decided, for the time being at least, to confine his opposition to the National Committee—"a course which," he said, "I followed for the next year and a half by means of innumerable criticisms, policy proposals, articles, 4 etc., all going in the direction of eliminating Browder's opportunistic errors. I was convinced that the course of political events and the Communist training of our leadership would eventually cause our Party to return to a sound line of policy."5 And so matters turned out in reality.
DISSOLUTION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
Browder, in the earliest discussions of his general Teheran thesis, proposed the liquidation of the Communist Party. Among other arguments, he cited the dissolution of the Communist International in May 1943, which, however, had taken place, as we have seen, for reasons completely different from Browder's opportunist purposes. He encountered much opposition in the Political Committee, but eventually won his point.
Consequently, the National Committee of the Communist Party, on January 11, 1944, sent out a letter to the Party districts recommending that the Party as such be dissolved and reorganized into a "political-educational association." This was endorsed practically unanimously by all the districts. During May 20-22, 1944, therefore, the plan was carried out at the regular twelfth convention of the Party held in New York City.
The Communist Party convention proper lasted only a few minutes. Browder made the proposition to dissolve the Party, stating, "I hereby move that the Communist Party of America be and hereby is dissolved and that a committee of three consisting of the Chairman, General Secretary, and Assistant Secretary of the Party, be authorized to take all necessary steps to liquidate its affairs and that such committee be further authorized to dispose of all its property and to turn over any surplus that may remain to any organization or organizations that in their opinion are devoted to our country's winning of the war in which it is presently engaged and in the achieving of a durable peace." The motion was adopted without discussion, whereupon the C.P. convention adjourned.
The delegation then immediately reconvened and proceeded to organize itself into the Communist Political Association. Browder made the main political report, along the lines of his by then well-known Teheran thesis. This was adopted as the general program of the C.P.A. The old structure of the C.P., with considerable changes, was taken over by the new organization, and so, too, were its journals, properties, and funds, the special committee placed in charge of this matter at the C.P. convention so deciding. The leadership, district and national, remained substantially the same, except that Foster, because of his opposition stand, was dropped as national chairman, Browder taking over this position with the title of president. Eleven vice-presidents were also elected, thus centralizing more power in Browder's hands. The heads of the state organizations were called presidents.
The Preamble to the Constitution was drastically modified in line with the new political orientation. The C.P.A. dubbed itself "a nonpartisan association of Americans," which "adheres to the principles of scientific socialism, Marxism" [not Marxism-Leninism]. The Preamble said nothing of the class struggle, of imperialism, of the revolutionary role of the working class, of the establishment of socialism. Instead, "it looks to the family of free nations, led -by the great coalition of democratic capitalist and socialist states, to inaugurate an era of world peace, expanding production and economic well-being, and the liberation and equality of all peoples regardless of race, creed or color." Some months later Browder proposed dropping the word Communist from the title of the C.P.A., but was defeated by one vote in the Political Committee.
Thus Browder's system of revisionism had reached its ultimate expression. It had gone to its last extreme in the liquidation of the Party. Browder had not only revised the principles and policies of the Party, he had also dissolved the Party itself. He did this under the pretext that the C.P.A. was a better instrument to work with. This was an abandonment and betrayal of the most fundamental concepts of Marxism-Leninism. It was a surrender to the Social-Democratic and bourgeois demand that the C.P. be abolished, an attempt to deprive the working class of its indispensable leading political party. In its convention of May 1944, the Communist Party of the United States made the greatest political mistake in all its history.6
EFFECTS UPON THE MASS WORK
Browder's revisionism promptly had weakening effects upon all branches of Communist mass work. In the trade unions attempts to develop a post-war no-strike outlook along the lines of the Teheran thesis badly misfired, and the right-wing opposition correspondingly prospered. In the work among the Negro masses Browder's theory that the Negro people, having abandoned (satisfied) their national aspirations, were now integrated into the white population, threw confusion into the ranks of the Communists and their sympathizers and undermined their fight for the rights of the Negro people. In the field of women's work, Browder's reliance upon the progressive role of the bourgeoisie tended to liquidate all conceptions that the women would actually have to fight for their rights in order to get them. In the national group work similar opportunist conceptions took root, and for the first time in American Communist history bourgeois nationalism became an acute problem among the left forces in this sphere. In cultural work, Browder's bourgeois catering to "big names" was a debilitating influence. And in the South, where the Communists had carried on so heroically for so long, work was practically abandoned.
The Young Communist League suffered early and heavily from Browder's revisionism and liquidationism. On October 16, 1943, the Y.C.L. in convention dissolved and then reorganized its forces into the American Youth for Democracy. This was not an effort to find the basis for a broader Marxist organization-the traditional Y.C.L. objective-but an attempt to wipe out Marxism-Leninism in youth work. Says Betty Gannett, "The new organization was conceived as educating the youth not in socialism, but in the traditions of the best in bourgeois democracy. It was to be a non-partisan organization, with free discussion of the policies and theories proposed by all political parties. . Fraternal ties with the Communist Party were dissolved. . . . Emphasis was laid on the service character of the organization, thus differentiating it but little from other youth service organizations. And Marxism was to be studied on a voluntary basis, as one of the important 'currents of democratic thought.' This opportunist trend was intensified as Browder-ism grew. The effects of revisionism negated every basic principle of Marxist-Leninist work among the youth." 7 Corrections were made in this line in 1945 after Browder's defeat, and these were amplified at the formation of the L.Y.L. in May 1948.
In the 1944 presidential elections, with the sick Roosevelt leading the Democratic ticket together with Harry S. Truman, Browder, in line with his Teheran program, tried to make a grandiose maneuver. In a speech in Cleveland he proposed that the heads of the Republican and Democratic parties should come together and agree upon a single win-the-war ticket. This step was logical from Browder's revisionist position. He was contending that the bulk of finance capital was supporting the Teheran policy, therefore to him it made small difference whether the Republicans or Democrats won, both parties being controlled by "progressive" finance capital. The election, consequently, had little real significance to him, and all the election fury was mere narrow partisanship without real political content. Therefore, the two parties should pick a common ticket. This scheme obviously would imply the ditching of Roosevelt; for, of course, the Republicans would never agree upon him. But Browder quickly backed away from his hare-brained project, owing to vigorous opposition in the Political Committee and also to clear indications that his proposal would have been almost unanimously condemned by the strong Roosevelt forces among the broad masses. So the C.P.A. continued its endorsement of Roosevelt and helped elect him to his fourth term.
GROWING OPPOSITION IN THE C.P.A.
The Party membership from the outset accepted Browder's revisionist Teheran policy without firm conviction. Before long this uncertainty began to develop into doubt and opposition. This changing attitude was primarily due to the fact that the course of American and world events was swiftly exposing the fallacy of Browder's whole line. Obviously, in the field of labor what the post-war period was bringing would not be Browder's long period of peaceful class collaboration, but many hard-fought strikes. And in the realm of foreign policy, although the war was not yet over, American imperialism (with its new political chieftain, Truman) was clearly preparing to grab what it could of the war-stricken world. This became especially evident with the opening of the United Nations founding conference in San Francisco on April 25, 1945. "All the great struggles of the conference," says Frederick V. Field, "revolved around the effort of imperialism to reassert itself against the forces of democracy to which the war had given such impetus."8 Particularly sinister signs of this basic fact were the admission of Peron's Argentina to the U.N. and the exclusion of democratic Poland.
The threatening domestic and international situation produced increasing doubts in the C.P.A. about its political line. These were reflected in the Political Committee. Eugene Dennis began to develop a perspective of active struggle, instead of class peace, in the post-war United States; Gilbert Green proposed that a National Committee meeting be held to review the post-war situation (to which Browder's thesis was supposed to be the basic answer); Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., warned of the evil effects that the present policies were having in Negro work; Jack Stachel spoke of American imperialism (which supposedly Browder had liquidated); Robert Thompson expressed growing doubt on various aspects of the Browder line; John Williamson complained of the lethargy in the C.P.A. and the big loss of members. Foster cultivated all these doubts about the correctness of the Party line and lost no occasion of criticizing the Browder policy and exposing its fallacies. Browder, therefore, had all plans laid for Foster's expulsion in the near future.
THE DUCLOS ARTICLE
In the midst of this rapidly developing internal situation, Jacques Duclos, secretary of the Communist Party of France, published in the French journal, Cahiers du Communisme, in April 1945, an article colliding head on with the Browder policies. 9 Duclos was motivated to write his article primarily because, some time before, an article had appeared in France Nouvellej a Communist paper, lauding Browderism, and also because Browder's dissolution of the Communist Party in the United States was encouraging liquidationist tendencies in the French Communist Party.
In his article, Duclos made a long statement of Browder's policy, counterposing to it copious quotations from Foster's letter to the National Committee. In drawing his own conclusions, Duclos declared that "one is witnessing a notorious revision of Marxism on the part of Browder and his followers, a revisionism which is expressed in the concept of a long-term class peace in the United States, of the possibility of the suppression of the class struggle in the post-war period and the establishment of harmony between labor and capital." He condemned Browder's distortion of the Teheran diplomatic declaration "into a political platform of class peace," and he excoriated the liquidation of the Communist Party. He declared that "nothing justifies the dissolution of the American Communist Party." Instead, the situation "presupposes the existence of a powerful Communist Party."
The Duclos article had an electrifying effect upon the C.P.A. It speedily matured the already developing opposition to the Browder policies. Within a matter of weeks the whole Party, from the local clubs to the Political Committee, almost unanimously rejected the Teheran opportunism. Undoubtedly, with events at home and abroad daily showing the stupidity of Browder's revisionism, the American Communists, without Duclos' intervention, would eventually have cleared the Party of this political poison. But it would have been a difficult process, probably involving a serious Party split. As it was, his famous article greatly facilitated the smashing of Browder's opportunist system; for which the Communist Party of the United States remains deeply indebted to Jacques Duclos and the French Communist Party.
THE EMERGENCY CONVENTION
The C.P.A. received a copy of Duclos' article on May 20, 1945.10 It was immediately discussed in the Political Committee. The whole policy of the C.P.A. quickly came under survey, with the result that Browder's line was rejected by a two-thirds majority of the Committee, which soon became unanimous, except for Browder. The latter, packed with conceit and arrogance and devoid of any trace of self-criticism, clung to his position, despite its obvious bankruptcy. Consequently, a few days later he was suspended as general secretary, and a secretariat of three—William Z. Foster, Eugene Dennis, and John Williamson—was chosen in his stead.
On June 18-20, a meeting of the National Committee was held. The Committee, reflecting the virtually solid sentiment of the membership, unanimously condemned Browder's line, agreed with the Duclos article, fully endorsed Foster's earlier letter to the National Committee, and adopted the draft of a new policy resolution. It also supported the removal of Browder as general secretary, making this permanent, and it called a special convention for July 26-28, in New York City.
The Emergency (thirteenth) Convention unanimously endorsed the actions taken by the Political Committee and the National Committee. It was a convention of deep self-criticism for the great mistake that had been made in the Party's falling victim to Browder's revisionism. In this respect the convention declared, "The source of our past revisionist errors must be traced to the ever active pressure of bourgeois ideology and influence upon the working class."
The convention set about thoroughly cleansing the Party of Browderism and putting it once more upon a solid Marxist-Leninist basis. The C.P.A. was liquidated and the Communist Party reconstituted. The Party Constitution was correspondingly rewritten. A secretariat was chosen to head the Party, consisting of William Z. Foster, Eugene Dennis, and Robert Thompson. Foster was reinstated as national chairman. Numerous changes were made in the composition of the National Committee and, later by local action, also in the state and local committees.
The Preamble of the Party Constitution was also rewritten and given substantially its present text. It broke with Browder's adulation of bourgeois democracy and struck a clear note of proletarian democracy and socialism. It declared that "The Communist Party of the United States is the political party of the working class, basing itself upon the principles of scientific socialism, Marxism-Leninism." While defending the achievements of American democracy, it pledged an uncompromising fight "against imperialism and colonial oppression, against racial, national and religious discrimination, against Jim Crovism, anti-Semitism and all forms of chauvinism," and for socialism. It was sharply and clearly based upon the class struggle.
The main resolution11 made a realistic survey of the world situation— the war with Japan being not yet concluded at the time. It repudiated all the Browder nonsense about the "progressive" role of American imperialism and pointed out the sinister dangers in the international policies being followed by Wall Street and the Truman government. The resolution declared that "the most aggressive circles of American imperialism are endeavoring to secure for themselves political and economic domination of the world." It also stated that "if the reactionary policies and forces of monopoly capital are not checked and defeated, America and the world will be confronted with new aggressions and war and the growth of reaction and fascism in the United States." This incisive Marxist-Leninist analysis gave a clear picture of the international situation and made a forecast of the course of events which remains completely valid today.
In the domestic sphere the resolution broke completely with Browder's class collaborationism. It rejected the post-war no-strike line, incentive wage, subservience to the two-party system, and "organized capitalism" of Browder, and it wrote a program of class struggle. It outlined a militant win-the-war program; urged the workers to prepare-for the difficult struggles of the post-war period; retained the sound Communist policy of building the Roosevelt coalition and set out to strengthen it in a Leninist sense. The resolution sharply criticized Truman, who had been president for only a few months, and declared, "It is of central importance to build systematically the political strength of labor, the Negro people, and all true democratic forces within the general coalition for the struggle against imperialist reaction, for combating and checking all tendencies and groupings in the coalition willing to make concessions to reaction. The camp of reaction must not be appeased. It must be isolated and routed." The resolution restated a correct policy on the Negro question. The Party had reasserted its Communist quality.
The convention, in short, made a clean sweep of the reformist trappings of Browderism. But it took the work of the next few years to eliminate from the Party the many revisionist moods and practices that had been growing for so long under Browder's cultivation. After the Emergency Convention a great surge of joy and enthusiasm went through the ranks of the Communist Party. But the adventure into revisionism of the C.P.A. had been a costly one, the Party losing some 15,000 members, who were repelled by Browder's opportunism. This had been evident earlier when large numbers of Party members had refused to register in the C.P.A. A report by Betty Gannett in mid-1944 stated that but 63,044 members, or 88 percent of those on the rolls of the C.P. (not counting 15,000 in the armed services) joined the C.P.A., a loss of 9,000 at this point. The Party registration of January 1946 showed but 52,824 members, a figure which was raised to 59,172 in the registration of 1947.
An aftermath of Browder's revisionism was the organized defection of a few dozen disgruntled sectarians in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and elsewhere. These included Sam Darcy, William F. Dunne, Harrison George, Vern Smith, and others. They developed a leftist line of criticism, charging that the new Party leadership was centrist. This was their way of retreating from the increasingly difficult class struggle under cover of revolutionary phraseology.
THE EXPULSION OF BROWDER
Browder promised the Party to obey the convention decisions, and the Party leadership offered to give him minor Party work. He refused this, however, as he had obviously decided upon breaking with the Party. Soon he began a factional correspondence inside the Party, and toward the latter part of 1945 he started publishing a sheet called Distributors Guide. This paper propagated Browder's revisionist line and made sneaking attacks on the Party. He also tried to build a factional grouping.
Although repeatedly warned, Browder continued his unprincipled maneuvering. He challenged the authority of the Political Committee and the secretariat to examine his political activities. Therefore, at a meeting of the National Committee, on February 12-15, 1946, upon the report of Robert Thompson,12 he was unanimously expelled from the Communist Party. A mere handful—his wife, his brother, his financial "angel," and a few others—departed with him as his following.
Once outside of the Party, Browder intensified his anti-Party activities. But he could never assemble more than a baker's dozen in his group. With the whole world situation daily giving the lie to his absurd Teheran thesis, Browder went right on reiterating it to "fit" the completely contradictory political conditions. He disintegrated into an open enemy of the Communist Party, a shameless mouthpiece for American imperialism, and a snide vilifier of the Soviet Union.13
1 The Communist, Jan. 1943.
2 Resolution, Emergency Convention, C.P.U.S.A., July 28, 1945.
3 Full text in Political Affairs, July 1945. Beginning with the issue of Jan. 1945, The Communist was renamed Political Affairs.
4 William Z. Foster in Political Affairs, June 1945.
5 William Z. Foster in On the Struggle against Revisionism, p. 18, N. Y., 1945.
6 See Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the Communist Political Association, New York, 1944.
7 Betty Gannett in Political Affairs, Sept. 1948.
8 Frederick V. Field in Political Affairs, Aug. 1945.
9 Political Affairs, July 1945.
10 Daily Worker, May 27, 1945.
11 Political Affairs, Sept. 1945.
12 Robert Thompson, The Path of a Renegade, N. Y., 1946.
13 For the later political decay of Browder, see articles by Gilbert Green in Political Affairs, Oct., Nov., 1949, and March 1950
samedi 28 janvier 2017
Ουάσινγκτον
Η πρωθυπουργός της Βρετανίας Τερέζα Μέι συναντήθηκε με τον Ντόναλντ Τραμπ στον Λευκό Οίκο νωρίς το βράδυ της Παρασκευής (ώρα Ελλάδος).
Αναφερόμενη στο ΝΑΤΟ, η πρωθυπουργός είπε ότι και οι δύο χώρες αναγνωρίζουν την αξία του και διατηρούν τη δέσμευσή τους στη Βορειοατλαντική Συμμαχία. Συγκεκριμένα, η Μέι είπε ότι ο Τραμπ της επιβεβαίωσε πως είναι «100% υπέρ του ΝΑΤΟ».
Ο αμερικανός πρόεδρος έχει επικρίνει πολλές φορές τη Συμμαχία και έφτασε στο σημείο να την χαρακτηρίσει «παρωχημένη».
Η Μέι είπε ότι το ΝΑΤΟ θα πρέπει να εξοπλιστεί ώστε να είναι σε θέση να αντιμετωπίζει τον κυβερνοπόλεμο και ότι η ίδια θα προσπαθήσει να πείσει τους Ευρωπαίους ηγέτες να τηρήσουν τις δεσμεύσεις τους όσον αφορά τη χρηματοδότηση της Συμμαχίας.
Η βρετανίδα πρωθυπουργός αποκάλυψε ότι ο νέος πρόεδρος των ΗΠΑ έκανε δεκτή την πρόταση της βασίλισσας Ελισάβετ να επισκεφθεί τη Βρετανία μέσα στο 2017.
Η Μέι δήλωσε ότι οι δύο χώρες θέλουν να οικοδομήσουν στρατιωτικές και εμπορικές σχέσεις.
Στη συνέντευξη Τύπου που παραχώρησε, μαζί με τον Τραμπ, μετά τις συνομιλίες που είχαν στο Οβάλ Γραφείο, η Τερέζα Μέι είπε ότι το Λονδίνο εξετάζει το πώς θα επιτευχθεί μια εμπορική συμφωνία με τις ΗΠΑ και ότι συζητήθηκαν τα πρακτικά βήματα που μπορούν να γίνουν ώστε να καταστούν ευκολότερες οι εμπορικές συναλλαγές.
Στις επαφές που είχε με τον Τραμπ η Μέι είπε ότι συζητήθηκε επίσης η καταπολέμηση του Ισλαμικού Κράτους και είπε ότι εντείνονται οι προσπάθειες για την αντιμετώπιση των τζιχαντιστών στον κυβερνοχώρο.
Για τις κυρώσεις που έχουν επιβληθεί στη Ρωσία, η πρωθυπουργός είπε ότι πιστεύει πως θα πρέπει να συνεχιστούν μέχρι η Μόσχα να εφαρμόσει τις συνθήκες του Μινσκ.
Σχολιάζοντας τις σχέσεις μεταξύ της ίδιας και του προέδρου Τραμπ, η Μέι είπε ότι «θα υπάρξουν φορές που θα διαφωνεί» μαζί του, όμως η ειδική σχέση των δύο χωρών σημαίνει ότι η συζήτηση είναι ανοιχτή και ειλικρινής. Πρόσθεσε ότι υπάρχουν πολλά ζητήματα στα οποία οι δύο χώρες συμφωνούν και ότι «ακούει τον πρόεδρο και ο πρόεδρος ακούει εμένα».
Ερωτηθείς για τις δηλώσεις του για τα βασανιστήρια, ο Τραμπ είπε ότι ο νέος υπουργός Άμυνας, στρατηγός Μάτις δεν πιστεύει στα βασανιστήρια και τόνισε ότι αν και δεν συμφωνεί απαραιτήτως θα σεβαστεί την απόφαση του υπουργού Άμυνας.
Η Μέι, η πρώτη ξένη ηγέτιδα που συναντιέται με τον νέο Ρεπουμπλικανό πρόεδρο, έγινε δεκτή από τον ίδιο τον Τραμπ. Μηνύματα στη νέα αμερικανική ηγεσία έστειλε η πρωθυπουργός της Βρετανίας, λίγο προτού συναντηθεί με τον Ντόναλντ Τραμπ.
Νωρίτερα, μιλώντας σε εκδήλωση των Ρεπουμπλικάνων, η Μέι τόνισε ότι ΗΠΑ και Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο δεν μπορούν να γυρίσουν στις εποχές των «αποτυχημένων στρατιωτικών επεμβάσεων», για να φτιάξουν έναν κόσμο, όπως θέλουν να τον βλέπουν.
Σαφέστατη αναφορά, όπως φάνηκε, σε πολέμους στο Ιράκ και το Αφγανιστάν, για τους οποίους υπήρξε σύμπτωση πολιτικών Λονδίνου-Ουάσινγκτον.
Αναφερόμενη στο ΝΑΤΟ, η πρωθυπουργός είπε ότι και οι δύο χώρες αναγνωρίζουν την αξία του και διατηρούν τη δέσμευσή τους στη Βορειοατλαντική Συμμαχία. Συγκεκριμένα, η Μέι είπε ότι ο Τραμπ της επιβεβαίωσε πως είναι «100% υπέρ του ΝΑΤΟ».
Ο αμερικανός πρόεδρος έχει επικρίνει πολλές φορές τη Συμμαχία και έφτασε στο σημείο να την χαρακτηρίσει «παρωχημένη».
Η Μέι είπε ότι το ΝΑΤΟ θα πρέπει να εξοπλιστεί ώστε να είναι σε θέση να αντιμετωπίζει τον κυβερνοπόλεμο και ότι η ίδια θα προσπαθήσει να πείσει τους Ευρωπαίους ηγέτες να τηρήσουν τις δεσμεύσεις τους όσον αφορά τη χρηματοδότηση της Συμμαχίας.
Η βρετανίδα πρωθυπουργός αποκάλυψε ότι ο νέος πρόεδρος των ΗΠΑ έκανε δεκτή την πρόταση της βασίλισσας Ελισάβετ να επισκεφθεί τη Βρετανία μέσα στο 2017.
Η Μέι δήλωσε ότι οι δύο χώρες θέλουν να οικοδομήσουν στρατιωτικές και εμπορικές σχέσεις.
Στη συνέντευξη Τύπου που παραχώρησε, μαζί με τον Τραμπ, μετά τις συνομιλίες που είχαν στο Οβάλ Γραφείο, η Τερέζα Μέι είπε ότι το Λονδίνο εξετάζει το πώς θα επιτευχθεί μια εμπορική συμφωνία με τις ΗΠΑ και ότι συζητήθηκαν τα πρακτικά βήματα που μπορούν να γίνουν ώστε να καταστούν ευκολότερες οι εμπορικές συναλλαγές.
Στις επαφές που είχε με τον Τραμπ η Μέι είπε ότι συζητήθηκε επίσης η καταπολέμηση του Ισλαμικού Κράτους και είπε ότι εντείνονται οι προσπάθειες για την αντιμετώπιση των τζιχαντιστών στον κυβερνοχώρο.
Για τις κυρώσεις που έχουν επιβληθεί στη Ρωσία, η πρωθυπουργός είπε ότι πιστεύει πως θα πρέπει να συνεχιστούν μέχρι η Μόσχα να εφαρμόσει τις συνθήκες του Μινσκ.
Σχολιάζοντας τις σχέσεις μεταξύ της ίδιας και του προέδρου Τραμπ, η Μέι είπε ότι «θα υπάρξουν φορές που θα διαφωνεί» μαζί του, όμως η ειδική σχέση των δύο χωρών σημαίνει ότι η συζήτηση είναι ανοιχτή και ειλικρινής. Πρόσθεσε ότι υπάρχουν πολλά ζητήματα στα οποία οι δύο χώρες συμφωνούν και ότι «ακούει τον πρόεδρο και ο πρόεδρος ακούει εμένα».
Ερωτηθείς για τις δηλώσεις του για τα βασανιστήρια, ο Τραμπ είπε ότι ο νέος υπουργός Άμυνας, στρατηγός Μάτις δεν πιστεύει στα βασανιστήρια και τόνισε ότι αν και δεν συμφωνεί απαραιτήτως θα σεβαστεί την απόφαση του υπουργού Άμυνας.
Η Μέι, η πρώτη ξένη ηγέτιδα που συναντιέται με τον νέο Ρεπουμπλικανό πρόεδρο, έγινε δεκτή από τον ίδιο τον Τραμπ. Μηνύματα στη νέα αμερικανική ηγεσία έστειλε η πρωθυπουργός της Βρετανίας, λίγο προτού συναντηθεί με τον Ντόναλντ Τραμπ.
Νωρίτερα, μιλώντας σε εκδήλωση των Ρεπουμπλικάνων, η Μέι τόνισε ότι ΗΠΑ και Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο δεν μπορούν να γυρίσουν στις εποχές των «αποτυχημένων στρατιωτικών επεμβάσεων», για να φτιάξουν έναν κόσμο, όπως θέλουν να τον βλέπουν.
Σαφέστατη αναφορά, όπως φάνηκε, σε πολέμους στο Ιράκ και το Αφγανιστάν, για τους οποίους υπήρξε σύμπτωση πολιτικών Λονδίνου-Ουάσινγκτον.
Newsroom ΔΟΛ
vendredi 27 janvier 2017
POLITICAL STATEMENT
Large
Sections of U.S. imperialism dumped Obama; workers did just the same
By Daniel
Paquet dpaquet1871@gmail.com
|
“
|
This time
last year, fewer than four in 10 were happy with Obama’s economic
policies. When asked last week to assess
progress under Obama, 56% of Americans said the country had lost ground or
stood still on the economy; while 48% said it had lost ground on the gap
between the rich and poor – against just 14% who said it gained ground. These were the Obama coalition – black and
young and poor – who did not vote in November, making Trump’s victory
possible. Those whose hopes are not being
met: people more likely to go to the
polls, because they are inspired about a better future than because they fear a
worse one.”[1]
In Canada,
different theses are under monitoring, but basically, many media try to supply
their audience with a basic answer: why
Trump and not Clinton?
“At the
risk of undermining the resistance, here are a few notes of cautious
optimism. I do not believe that Mr.
Trump’s agenda is racist or sexist or that he hates Mexicans or even Muslims (peaceful
ones that is). Most of his closest
advisers are reasonably sane. (In fact, I’d feel incredibly relieved if Jared
and Ivanka ran the White House while he tweets away.) Many of his cabinet
appointments are fine, and some are outstanding. Rex Tillerson, his secretary
of state, has Vladimir Putin’s number.
He is tough and crafty. He makes
John Kerry look like a eunuch. I hate to
say it, but if Mr. Trump can juice the economy and avoid a war, he could prove
pretty popular. Meantime, the Democrats are all but dead. They have no comeback strategy and no younger
generation of potential leaders. They’re
going to lose more Senate seats. At the
state level, they have only 16 governors left.
Outrage isn’t going to solve their problem. And it won’t stop Mr. Trump. Sad! Maybe it’s time to think long and hard
about what will.”[2]
Nevertheless,
Mr. Trump deserves to be heard, read and scrutinized before any conclusion. In his first speech as President he
underscored the following intentions:
“(that) he was decidedly inward looking marked by a pledge to follow an
‘only America first’ vision that would roll back globalization in a bid to
protect jobs from moving to other countries. (He added) We must protect our
borders from the ravages to other countries making our products, stealing our
companies and destroying our jobs.’ To
Mr. Trump’s supporters, however, he is straight-talker willing to confront
harsh realities and restore a declining America.”[3]
On the
opposite side and according to an editorial, The Globe and Mail says:
“Mr. Obama had it right in his goodbye speech in Chicago two weeks
ago. ‘The work of democracy has always
been hard, contentious and sometimes bloody.
For every two steps forward, it often
feels we take one step back. But
the long sweep of America has been defined by forward motion, a constant
widening of our founding creed to embrace all, and not just some.’ History is not on Mr. Trump’s side. This is greatest weakness, and the reason to
never lose hope.”[4]
At last on
this chapter, “the media, the Democrats, and especially Mr. Trump’s own party
have a duty to hold him to account. But
in the end, it’s the active involvement of citizens that will matter the most.”[5]
Actually,
the feud is raging amidst the Canadian mass-media, especially in the Province
of Québec. There has been a deep
disappointment in the news room, since they believed strongly in their own lies
about Democrats and Hillary
Clinton. In fact, Parti québécois is well in advance in the number of personnel
working for instance at Ici Radio-Canada Première (the
State-owned television and radio networks).
For them, t he worst the situation is, the best it is for their proper
agenda: the separation of Québec and the
continuation of a political trend in U.S.A. that is in favour of such a
separation that would encourage the petite-bourgeoisie and its businesses. Already, they are trying their luck at doing
everything that would put in force this issue.
De facto, they have been
trying just anything, including the creation of many political parties: Parti
québécois, Coalition Avenir Québec,
Québec solidaire and various
satellite movements gravitating mostly around Parti québécois (the oldest protagonist).
On the
other hand, Parti libéral du Québec,
closer to big business (the bourgeois party in Québec), they will eventually
rally the Trump camp.
Altogether, through the prism of the
presidential campaign and election in our major trade partner, Québec
nationalists signal that they did not change their vision of Canada, that is a
broken country without its Québécois
part; it boils down that on the menu, it will be again and solely
‘French-Canadian pea soup’.
Conclusion:
some journalists could dread the future; after all, ‘promotions’ could
come sooner than they expect.
Blog: Communist News www.dpaquet1871.blogspot.com
En français: La
Nouvelle Vie Réelle www.lnvr.blogspot.com
Archives :
La Vie Réelle www.laviereelle.blogspot.com
Pour la KOMINTERN now ! www.pourlakominternnow.blogspot.com
[1] Younge,
Gary, How Obama paved the way for Trump,
The Guardian Weekly, London, 20.01.17, page 18
[2] Wente,
Margaret, Don’t set your hair on
fire. It won’t help, The Globe and Mail,
Toronto, Saturday, January 21, 2017, page F7
[3] Morrow,
Adrian, Winning like never before,
The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Saturday, January 21, 2017, page A3
[4] Keep calm and carry on, Saturday January 21, 2017, page F6
[5] Editorial, Only the people can hold him to account,
The Guardian Weekly, London, 20.01.17, page 22
mercredi 25 janvier 2017
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Communists in the War (1941-1945)
29. The Communists in the War (1941-1945)
Throughout the early stages of the war, as we have seen, the American people were overwhelmingly—at least 90 per cent—opposed to the United States entering the war. This, too, in general, was the basic position of the Communist Party of the United States.
When Hitler, on June 22, 1941, attacked the Soviet Union, however, the Party realized that all possibility of limiting the war had vanished and that now there was a world people's war. The Party therefore shifted its political position to one of military participation in what had now become a full-fledged people's anti-fascist war. In its statement of June 22nd, condemning the Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R., the Party called for "full support and co-operation with the Soviet Union in its struggle against Hitlerism."1 Six days later the National Committee elaborated its position to "Defend America by giving full aid to the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and all nations who fight against Hitler," and "For full and unlimited collaboration of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union to bring about the military defeat of Hitler."2
The Party called upon the workers at home to be especially alert to defend their living standards, to protect the rights of the Negro people, to fight against anti-Semitism, and to establish national and international trade union unity. It especially warned against the danger of a new Munich, aimed at transforming the war into a struggle of the capitalist world against the Soviet Union. For the reactionaries felt that at last, in the struggle between Germany and Russia, they had the "right war." Another Munich sell-out was the aim of Hess's fantastic flight to England at this time, even as it was that of Hoover in his N.B.C. radio broadcast of June 29, 1941, when he declared that there would be "no possibility of bringing the war to conclusion except by a compromise peace" with Hitler against the U.S.S.R. Calling for an organized fight against reaction abroad and at home, the Communist Party conducted an active struggle during the next six critical months in the midst of a rising war spirit among the American people.
The Japanese attack upon the United States forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, radically changed the sentiment of the American people. Their hopes of staying out of the war, which had persisted even after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, now disappeared overnight. The American masses girded themselves for war.
The Communist Party, on the day of the attack, denounced the attack on Pearl Harbor as "the culminating outrage of Axis aggression aimed at the domination of the entire world. The fate of every nation and every people has been thrown into the arena for determination by military means." The Party declared, "The Communist Party pledges its loyalty, its devoted labor and the last drop of its blood in support of our country in this greatest of all crises that ever threatened its existence." The Party called for "Everything for National Unity!" "Everything for victory over world-wide fascist slavery!"3
During the ensuing years of hard-fought war the Communists loyally lived up to these patriotic pledges. No organization in the country made a better record in the people's war than did the Communist Party and the Young Communist League. They gave 15,000 of their men and women members to the armed services. On the battle fronts the fighters conducted themselves with characteristic Communist courage and devotion. Many became officers and many others were decorated for personal bravery, notable among these being Robert Thompson, Alexander Suer, and Herman Boettcher, all of whom received the Distinguished Service Cross.4 Suer and Boettcher, both captains, were killed in action. There were many others, too, who never returned, among the numerous Communist casualties being Hank Forbes, district secretary in Pittsburgh.
On the home front the Communists were in the forefront of all work calculated to strengthen the national war effort. They were outstanding fighters for a strong anti-fascist war policy by the government; they stood second to nobody in rallying the workers for all-out production; they were militant participants in all phases of civilian defense work; and they carried on a ceaseless battle against all "isolationists" and other reactionary compromisers and saboteurs of the war effort.
Through the war the women comrades in the Party especially distinguished themselves; during the absence of so many men leaders at the front, they came forward and took over a very large share of leadership in the Party. Four women were members of the National Committee —Mother Bloor, Anita Whitney, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Alice Burke. Five were members on the editorial staff of the Daily Worker. Hundreds of women comrades fulfilled leading functions in state, county, and branch organizations all over the country. Similarly the left and progressive unions drew heavily upon their women members to fill leading posts during the war.
THE BATTLE FOR PRODUCTION
The most important contribution of the United States toward winning the war was in the field of producing war munitions. Production in general went up almost 100 percent over pre-war times.5 This production included 297,000 military planes, 86,388 tanks, 16,438 armored cars, 2,434,535 trucks, 123,707 tractors, 2,700,000 machine guns, 17, 400,000 rifles, 315,000 pieces of field artillery, 71,060 naval vessels, 45 million tons of merchant shipping, etc.6 This tremendous output was achieved by lengthening the work-day, speeding up the workers, and expanding American industrial capacity to the extent of $25 billion in new plants. To accomplish all this a veritable battle for production was organized.
The Communist Party, recognizing the immense importance of production in winning the war, threw its whole force into this phase of the struggle. With its characteristic vigor, it activated all its members in the unions, in its press, and elsewhere to speed the wheels of industry. None served with better results in this general sphere than did the Communists.
The workers, who had displayed little or no interest in increasing munitions production during the imperialist World War I, made big efforts to turn out the maximum output during the anti-fascist World War II. Nearly all the trade unions shared in this effort, with the C.I.O. in the lead, under the heavy influence of the left. Among the more important means used to increase production were the union-management production committees, of which by 1945 there were 5,000 in leading industrial plants. Another vital production factor was labor's no-strike pledge. It was adopted by both C.I.O. and A.F. of L. at their 1941 conventions. This action cut the number of strikers in 1942 to one-third of what it had been in 1941. Organized labor in the main lived up to this pledge, and during die war there were no authorized strikes. John L. Lewis managed, however, to conduct several big mine strikes, and the
Walter Reuther faction in the United Auto Workers, while publicly proclaiming support for the no-strike pledge, surreptitiously promoted many local walkouts in the plants. As for the Communist Party and the left-led unions, they insistently enforced the pledge—even too rigidly where shop grievance stoppages were concerned. They also actively supported the plant production committees.
During the war years, although prices were supposedly frozen, there was a steady rise in the cost of living. The employers, as always, put their profits before the national interest and wrung out of the lush war production all possible financial benefits for themselves. They reaped even greater profits than they did in World War I, and monopoly domination of the country was enormously strengthened during the war. At the outset of the war the capitalists conducted their notorious "sit-down strike of capital" until they secured from the government such profit rates as they demanded.7 Besides, seeing that the workers had their wages frozen and that the unions had pledged themselves not to strike, the employers maneuvered on all government levels to keep wage rates down. This necessitated an energetic fight by the unions to have wages at least keep pace with soaring prices. In this broad fight to maintain living standards, the Communists were naturally in the front line.
Late in 1942, however, Earl Browder introduced into the Party a proposition that threatened to compromise the Party's struggle to protect the workers' living standards. This was his so-called "incentive wage." Browder proposed, in substance, that henceforth wages should be tied to production. That is, the workers would be paid in accordance with their output. It was correct that the workers, in the war against fascism, should turn out maximum production; it was correct also that, because of their greater productivity, they should get higher wages; but Browder applied all this wrongly in both theory and practice. He drew fantastic pictures of the beneficial results to be achieved by his payment-by-results system, declaring that "we could have a general increase in productivity that would give us in the course of six months or a year twice as much war production as we have today. For the workers that would mean, under this principle, at least twice as much wages."8 Browder's plan, supposedly able to reap such great advances for the workers, placed no stress, however, upon the improvement of existing hourly, daily, and weekly wage rates, which he considered an obsolete system. This was an error. The scheme, which had been adopted by the Party after considerable opposition, was not widely advocated in the unions.
THE FIGHT FOR THE SECOND FRONT
The struggle to induce, or rather to compel, the United States and British governments to open up the western front in France, occupied the center of attention of the Communist Party during the 1941-44 period. The Red Army was bearing the whole burden of the war against the main fascist fortress, Nazi Germany, and its two big "allies" in the West were calmly standing aside allowing it to do so, under the obviously false pretext that they as yet lacked sufficient forces to carry through a successful invasion of France. It was imperatively in the interest of the whole allied forces, including the United States, that the second front be opened as soon as possible. The Communist Party utilized all of its strength and influence in a prolonged and persistent agitational struggle to bring about the long and deliberately delayed attack upon Hitler from the West. The Party stood out in the whole country, for its clarity and militancy on this decisive question.
The American people, in general, were full of admiration for the Red Army's magnificent struggle and undoubtedly favored the opening of the second front at the very earliest opportunity, even though they realized what the cost would be to them in casualties. But they were constantly deluged by the flood of propaganda from the let-Germany-and-Russia-fight-it-out reactionaries, in the government and outside, to the effect that we were "not yet ready." The A.F. of L. top leaders—Soviet-haters and reactionaries—also displayed no haste about the second front, and they were willing to leave the matter to the anti-Soviet military experts to decide. Large numbers of their international, state, city, and local affiliates, however, joined in the popular demand for the early invasion of France. The C.I.O., with its then characteristic left orientation, took a forthright position for the second front. Thus, at its 1943 convention it declared that "coalition warfare of the United Nations is the key to our victory," and that "the issue before the United Nations is the decisive, full-scale invasion of Europe."
As remarked earlier, it was only when the Anglo-American reactionaries could no longer delay the opening of the western front without imperiling their imperialist interests, that they finally agreed with the Russians upon the long-delayed date for the beginning of the invasion. This was done at the famous conference of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Teheran, Iran, in December 1943.
Browder made two grossly opportunist errors on the general question of the second front. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, in view of the fact that Great Britain and the United States had agreed to help the U.S.S.R., Browder hopped to the conclusion that henceforth they would be trustworthy allies. "They have crossed the Rubicon," he sent word from the Atlanta jail to the National Committee. "Munich-ism is now at an end. We have nothing further to fear on that score." This belief, that there had been a solid merger of the war effort simply because the U.S.S.R. and the western powers were in the war together on the same side, contained the embryo of Browder's later Teheran revisionism. The Party rejected Browder's opportunist estimate of the type of the war alliance, and the correctness of its action was evidenced by the fact that almost immediately afterward the Party had to begin the two-and-a-half-year struggle against the reluctant British and American governments to have the second front established. Browder's second error on the western front question came at the very conclusion of that historic struggle, after he had been released from jail. It was based on an enormous overestimation of the significance of the Teheran agreement to open the second front. It was a great irony that the Party should conclude its otherwise splendid struggle for the second front by making in this connection, upon Browder's initiative, by far the most serious political mistake in its career. This error will be discussed in full in the next chapter.
THE FAIR EMPLOYMENT PRACTICES COMMISSION
During the war the employers put a halt to Roosevelt's social security program on the basis of economy, although they themselves were making two to three times as much profit as they had immediately before the war. One of the major casualties in this respect was the Wagner-Dingell Bill for compulsory health insurance. In the same vein, Congress passed the notorious Smith-Connally Act in 1943, which outlawed strikes in defense plants and restricted the political activities of trade unions. Nevertheless, the workers in the democratic spirit of the people's war, did manage to secure some concessions, following the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), and buttressed the 40-hour week. Also in 1944 Roosevelt enunciated the Economic Bill of Rights.9 But the most important advance was the setting up of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, devised to break down some of the discrimination against Negro workers in industry.
On June 25, 1941, the president, in his Executive Order 8802, declared that it shall be the "policy of the United States that there shall be 414 no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin." On July 18th Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce this directive.
Previously the president, although assuming a friendly attitude toward the Negro people, had done practically nothing to mitigate the outrageous discrimination practiced against them. With his heavy support in the South, he had never made a real attack upon Jim Crow there. Also throughout the war the 920,000 Negro men and women in the armed forces suffered the indignities of segregation, when Roosevelt by a word could have abolished it. Nor did the president actively support the anti-poll tax. and anti-lynching bills, so valorously championed for years by Vito Marcantonio, House member from the 18th Congressional District of New York City, and which almost became law. If the F.E.P.C. was set up it was due primarily to the need for workers in the war emergency, to the pressure of the mass of Negro trade unionists, to the fighting spirit of the Negro people, and to the growing unity in struggle between Negro and white progressives. The Communist Party, by its never-ending fight for and with the Negro people, also deserved no little of the credit for the measure.10
The F.E.P.C, while relieving somewhat the conditions of Negro workers during the war and establishing in principle their rights in industry, never became federal law. Roosevelt did not support the Marcantonio bill, H.R. 173a, designed to put teeth into his Executive Order. When the reactionary Truman became president he managed to slough off the F.E.P.C. altogether, under cover of his usual cloud of demagogy, as we shall see later. The A.F. of L. and Railroad Brotherhoods, with the aim of preserving their Jim Crow restrictions, also opposed the F.E.P.C. practices and legislation as "an infringement upon the trade unions' right to regulate their own internal affairs."
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL
On June 10, 1943, the Communist International was dissolved by the unanimous action of all its affiliated parties. On May 15th a motion to this effect had been submitted to the various parties.11 Thus came to a conclusion the great world organization of Communists founded by Lenin in March 1919.
This serious action was taken as a war measure, as a means to further strengthen the unity of the peoples fighting against fascist aggression. Stalin, in an interview with Harold King, Reuters correspondent, stated that "The dissolution of the Communist International . . . facilitates the organization of the common onslaught of all freedom-loving nations against the common enemy—Hitlerism. It exposes the lie of the Hitlerites to the effect that 'Moscow' allegedly intends to intervene in the life of other nations and to 'Bolshevize' them." Stalin also showed concretely that the action would aid in organizing the progressive forces in the various countries, and would also help to "unite all the freedom-loving peoples into a single international camp for the fight against the menace of world domination by Hitlerism."12
The dissolution of the Comintern was a heavy sacrifice by the Communists for the common cause of victory. From the days of its foundation the C.I. was the indomitable leader of the world forces for freedom, national independence, and socialism. It was an invaluable body, where working class leaders of all countries could discuss the situation facing the workers everywhere, thus helping in the formation of programs for advancing the welfare of the working people of each country, based on their real needs and their real situation. It was also the means of educating, in the fire of actual struggle, tens of thousands of militant Communist fighters, many of whom are now the leaders of the governments of their respective countries. The Communist International represented the world Socialist movement at a vastly higher level than was the case with either the First or Second International.
The Communist Party of the United States, as we have seen in the course of this history, owes a great debt to the Comintern for its own Marxist-Leninist development. In meeting the difficult post-war problems it has seriously felt the loss of its one-time direct contact with the world's best Marxists through that organization.
OPPORTUNIST CONCEPTION OF NATIONAL UNITY
Above we have dealt in passing with some of Browder's developing deviations. But these were only the beginning of a veritable system of distorting Marxism-Leninism. While Browder was in prison, the Communist Party correctly called for national unity of the anti-Hitler forces to prosecute the war. But Browder later proceeded to give this sound policy a highly opportunistic orientation. He interpreted national unity as "uniting the entire nation, including the biggest capitalists, for a complete and all-out drive for victory."13 This all-inclusive conception of national unity attempted to ignore the basic fact that the "biggest capitalists," following a course dictated by their own imperialist interests, had nothing politically in common with the masses of the American people, who were fighting to destroy Hitlerism. Instead of uniting with such reactionaries in order to have a sound war policy, it was necessary for the great masses of the people to organize and fight against them.
Browder's conception of national unity, which was essentially of a Social-Democratic character, also subordinated the political role of the working class to bourgeois dictation. During the war situation organized labor, with a membership which advanced from 11 million to 14 million in the war years, should have united its forces politically, however loosely. Inasmuch as labor was fully supporting the war, it should also have demanded that its relation to the Roosevelt government be placed on a coalition basis. There ought to have been several labor members in a joint cabinet, instead of none at all. But Roosevelt naturally was opposed to such a project, and so, too, were the top leaders of organized labor, who wanted to do nothing that could even remotely threaten their beloved two (bourgeois) party system.
In the Communist Party demands were raised that organized labor fight for a coalition status and for members in the Roosevelt Cabinet, but Browder defeated this proposition. He tailed right along with Roosevelt, Lewis, Murray, and Green, taking the two-party system for granted and discarding for good the perspective for a third, or labor party. Said he, "We have rejected as impractical for the war period any general readjustment or regrouping of the party structure in our national political life."14 The result of labor's refusal to demand its rights was that the workers were denied the greatly enhanced political power which they could have gained through a coalition status. Browder's idea was not that labor should "co-operate" with Roosevelt in the war, but that it must simply "support" him. The workers went through the war with insignificant, third-line representation in the many national war committees and agencies. One of Roosevelt's most marked efforts was to prevent independent working class political action, and during the war period, with Browder's blessing, he carried out this labor-crippling line very effectively.
To appease the widespread demand for more worker leadership in the war, Roosevelt finally set up the Combined Labor Victory Committee, consisting of three representatives each from the C.I.O. and A.F. of L. and one from the Railroad Brotherhoods. This Committee, which occasionally met with the president, had no real power of decision. Browder, in chorus with the labor bureaucrats, hailed this makeshift formation as adequate labor representation and a big accomplishment for organized labor.
Browder's false conception of national unity deeply cut down the leading political role of the Communist Party. It would have been of great advantage to our Party, as well as to the labor movement in general, had the Communists more clearly exposed the imperialist policy of big capital during the war, in contrast to the democratic line of the workers, and also had the Party made a real fight for effective political recognition of the workers in the conduct of the war. Browder's opportunism denied the Party both of these vital war-time issues.
BROWDER'S PLAN FOR ORGANIZED CAPITALISM
Many right-wing Social-Democrats and pseudo-Communists—Bernstein, Kautsky, Bukharin, and others—following the lead of "progressive" bourgeois economists, have from time to time developed theories of "organized capitalism"; that is, of a capitalist system which, overcoming its inner contradictions and inescapable chaos, would carry on production in a planned and systematic way, nationally and internationally. Browder tried his hand at this opportunist game, as a wartime policy, in 1942. He got the idea from Congressman Tolan who, in a report to Congress, proposed that "every phase" of the national economy must be "planned, must be guided, must be brought under administration control." This was a futile bourgeois attempt to parody the planned, Socialist production of the U.S.S.R. Browder called his own scheme of organized capitalism a "centralized war economy." There was opposition in the Party to Browder's scheme, but not enough to prevent its being at least formally adopted.
According to Browder, "Maximum war production requires a central administration which will plan, direct, guide, and control the entire economy of the nation."15 The whole economic machine would be operated by the government, with labor (also according to Browder's policies) occupying only third-line advisory posts. How far-reaching Browder considered his project is evidenced by a few further quotations from his book Victory—And After. "In a centralized war economy, prices lose their former significance as a registration of market relationships and become a convenience of bookkeeping and accounting" . , . "profits lose their former significance as a source of unlimited personal consumption" and . . . "although private ownership remains intact, private capital loses its significance as the pre-condition to production" . . . "wages tend to lose their significance as a market relationship" . . . and "there is no necessity for the government to 'take over' the plants except to the degree that Congress had already provided for in the federal statute authorizing plant seizures when such steps are made necessary, by resistance to public policy by the present individual owners."16 Browder saw the virtual disappearance of the wages system altogether under his "organized capitalism." He says, "Wages expressed in money no longer represent a standard of life; wages must now, therefore, be expressed in a guaranteed supply of the workers' needs as a producer."17
As Lenin and Stalin have repeatedly pointed out, capitalism cannot carry on planned production either in war or in peace. This conclusion applies not only to Bukharin's brand of organized capitalism, but also to Browder's "centralized war economy" and the Truman "managed economy" scheme. The capitalist system's domination by monopoly capital, its violent competition between hundreds of thousands of capitalist firms producing blindly for the market, its bitter struggle between the ruling and exploited classes over the question of wages, etc., its ruthless fight among the imperialist powers over the markets of the world, its sharp collision of the capitalist world against the socialist world—all make the world capitalist system hopelessly chaotic and un-organizable.
Lenin, in his famous Introduction in 1915 to Bukharin's book, Imperialism and World Economy, had the following to say on this general question: "There is no doubt that the development is going in the direction of a single world trust that will swallow up all enterprises and all states without exception. But the development in this direction is proceeding under such stress, with such a tempo, with such contradictions, conflicts and convulsions—not only economic, but also political, national, etc., etc.—that before a single world trust will be reached, before the respective national finance capitalists will have formed a world union of 'ultra-imperialism,' imperialism will inevitably explode, capitalism will turn into its opposite."
In the given war circumstances, Browder's "organized capitalism" dreams served to sow illusions among the workers about the ability of capitalism to carry on planned production, and they also tended to cut down the political initiative of the proletariat and to subordinate it to the leadership of the bourgeoisie. In an immediate sense Browder's Utopian scheme weakened the fight for President Roosevelt's more practical seven-point program (taxes, price controls, materials allocation, profits limitations, etc.), which was designed to establish some faint traces of order in the inevitable jungle of capitalist productive and distributive relationships.
BROWDER'S OPPORTUNISM AND THE CHINESE REVOLUTION
Wall Street imperialism has a long record of aggression and exploitation in China.18 The Communist Party, usually under the slogan of "Hands Off China," almost from its inception fought against this imperialist penetration of China and gave the Chinese Revolution such help as it could. In particular, it vigorously opposed the Roosevelt policy of shipping scrap iron and other war munitions to Japan during the thirties when that country was invading and overrunning China. In appreciation of this support, in 1937, Mao' Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and Chu Teh, the chief Chinese Communist leaders, sent separate letters of thanks to the Communist Party of the United States.19
During World War II, however, as part of his developing revisionism, Browder departed fundamentally from the Party's correct line toward the Chinese Revolution. His opportunism became marked after his interview with Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles in October 1942. Browder had previously made a statement criticizing sharply the anti-Communist policy of the Roosevelt Administration in China. Welles summoned Browder to Washington for this and gave him a statement, denying Browder's allegations and asserting that the United States aimed at unifying the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists in China. This "unity" policy amounted to no more than a wartime effort to turn all Chinese guns against the Japanese, but Browder interpreted it as a genuine, long-term desire to establish a democratic Chinese national unity. He swallowed Welles's proposition whole, apologized publicly for his previous statement attacking the State Department's China policy, 20 and thenceforth became a supporter of the reactionary line of American imperialism in China.
Thus, typically, in a speech on March 13, 1945, Browder stated that "The United States finds the Yenan [Communist] policies closer to our understanding of the two nations than are the policies of Chungking [Chiang Kai-shek]"; that "The economic policies of the Communist-led area are much more closely related to the American 'free enterprise' methods than are those of Chungking"; and that "The Chinese Communists trust America."21 He climaxed his endorsement of Wall Street policy in China by declaring at the Party's emergency convention, in July 1945, that "Official American policy, whatever temporary vacillations may appear, is pressing toward the unity and democratization of China."22 Browder even tried to create the false impression that the State Department was backing the Communists against Chiang.
How completely wrong Browder was in his sizing up of the Chinese situation is demonstrated by present State Department policy in China, with its seizure of Taiwan (Formosa), attempted conquest of Korea, proposed A-bombing of Chinese cities, economic boycott against China, armed support of Chiang Kai-shek against People's China, and blocking of the seating of the Chinese People's Republic in the United Nations. This is the logical fruition of the traditional aggressive policy of American imperialism toward China. As Marxist-Leninists, the Chinese Communists followed a totally different line from Browder's, a line of anti-imperialist struggle which was foreseen 25 years ago by the great Marxist, Stalin, and it brought them to complete victory.
THE PARTY AND THE MASSES
The combination of lefts and progressives, which had built the C.I.O. and made it the leading section of the trade union movement on questions of the war, the organization of the unorganized, the Negro people, the women, the youth, and so on, continued right on through the war years. This was due chiefly to a general agreement on the aims and tasks of the war, and also partly to Philip Murray's acute need for Communist help in his struggles against John L. Lewis and the Green clique in the A.F. of L. The effectiveness of the left-center bloc during this period was lessened greatly, however, by the various Browder mistakes which we have indicated—especially by his tailing after Murray on such questions as those of organized capitalism and of no working class independent political action.
The several broad united front movements of left and progressive elements that had played such a prominent role in the immediate prewar years, mostly either died out or became skeletonized with the development of the war. This was basically because the new situation changed the issues confronting these organizations and rendered them largely obsolete. Quarrels between right and left over such questions as the Soviet-German pact, the Finnish War, and the "phony" war generally, hastened their disintegration. The American League for Peace and Democracy was dissolved in 1940, and the American Peace Mobilization in 1941. The American Youth Congress died out in 1942, and the League of American Writers dissolved in 1941. The Workers Alliance, with unemployment no longer an issue, also perished as the war began. The National Negro Congress, Southern Negro Youth Congress, and Southern Conference for Human Welfare went on into the post-war period, but in skeleton form. The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, with a continuing vital task, lived on. So did the united front defense organizations, in the shape of the Civil Rights Congress.
During the war period the Party membership grew only slowly. At the beginning of 1944 it reached its maximum of some 80,000 members, including the 15,000 whose membership had been discontinued while they were in the armed services. This was only 5,000 more than the Party reported at its 1938 convention. Large numbers of workers joined the Party; the recruiting campaign of early 1944, for example, brought in 24,000 new members, about 30 percent of whom were Negroes; but the membership turnover was very heavy. At that time 33,000 members had been in the Party less than one year.23 About 14 percent of the Party members in 1944 were Negroes, 46 percent industrial workers, 46 percent women, and 25 percent professional and white collar workers.
The Party's growing strength among the masses was evidenced in the New York municipal elections of 1943, when Peter V. Cacchione (first elected in 1941) was re-elected to the City Council as a Communist by the biggest first-choice vote of any candidate in the city. Of historical importance was the election, at the same time, of the first Negro Communist to public office, Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. Both Cacchione and Davis made excellent records in the City Council.
Opportunities for Party building were exceptionally good during the war, and the Party should have come into the post-war period with at least 150,000 solidly organized members. If it failed to do so, it was principally due to the opportunist Browder policies, which, by blunting the Party's initiative and distorting its program, made the Party far less attractive to the workers. In the Party there was considerable opposition to Browder's errors, his twisted use of American democratic traditions, his compromising Latin American policy, his "incentive wage" theory, his opportunist concept of national unity, and his theory of a centralized war economy. But this opposition was neither clear nor strong enough as yet to expose thoroughly and to defeat the revisionist system that Browder was rapidly building up. This was to come later.
29. The Communists in the War (1941-1945)
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| Women leaders of the Party, like Mother Bloor (photo taken in 1937), stepped up to National leadership of the Party while male Party members were fighting in World War Two. |
When Hitler, on June 22, 1941, attacked the Soviet Union, however, the Party realized that all possibility of limiting the war had vanished and that now there was a world people's war. The Party therefore shifted its political position to one of military participation in what had now become a full-fledged people's anti-fascist war. In its statement of June 22nd, condemning the Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R., the Party called for "full support and co-operation with the Soviet Union in its struggle against Hitlerism."1 Six days later the National Committee elaborated its position to "Defend America by giving full aid to the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and all nations who fight against Hitler," and "For full and unlimited collaboration of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union to bring about the military defeat of Hitler."2
The Party called upon the workers at home to be especially alert to defend their living standards, to protect the rights of the Negro people, to fight against anti-Semitism, and to establish national and international trade union unity. It especially warned against the danger of a new Munich, aimed at transforming the war into a struggle of the capitalist world against the Soviet Union. For the reactionaries felt that at last, in the struggle between Germany and Russia, they had the "right war." Another Munich sell-out was the aim of Hess's fantastic flight to England at this time, even as it was that of Hoover in his N.B.C. radio broadcast of June 29, 1941, when he declared that there would be "no possibility of bringing the war to conclusion except by a compromise peace" with Hitler against the U.S.S.R. Calling for an organized fight against reaction abroad and at home, the Communist Party conducted an active struggle during the next six critical months in the midst of a rising war spirit among the American people.
The Japanese attack upon the United States forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, radically changed the sentiment of the American people. Their hopes of staying out of the war, which had persisted even after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, now disappeared overnight. The American masses girded themselves for war.
The Communist Party, on the day of the attack, denounced the attack on Pearl Harbor as "the culminating outrage of Axis aggression aimed at the domination of the entire world. The fate of every nation and every people has been thrown into the arena for determination by military means." The Party declared, "The Communist Party pledges its loyalty, its devoted labor and the last drop of its blood in support of our country in this greatest of all crises that ever threatened its existence." The Party called for "Everything for National Unity!" "Everything for victory over world-wide fascist slavery!"3
During the ensuing years of hard-fought war the Communists loyally lived up to these patriotic pledges. No organization in the country made a better record in the people's war than did the Communist Party and the Young Communist League. They gave 15,000 of their men and women members to the armed services. On the battle fronts the fighters conducted themselves with characteristic Communist courage and devotion. Many became officers and many others were decorated for personal bravery, notable among these being Robert Thompson, Alexander Suer, and Herman Boettcher, all of whom received the Distinguished Service Cross.4 Suer and Boettcher, both captains, were killed in action. There were many others, too, who never returned, among the numerous Communist casualties being Hank Forbes, district secretary in Pittsburgh.
On the home front the Communists were in the forefront of all work calculated to strengthen the national war effort. They were outstanding fighters for a strong anti-fascist war policy by the government; they stood second to nobody in rallying the workers for all-out production; they were militant participants in all phases of civilian defense work; and they carried on a ceaseless battle against all "isolationists" and other reactionary compromisers and saboteurs of the war effort.
Through the war the women comrades in the Party especially distinguished themselves; during the absence of so many men leaders at the front, they came forward and took over a very large share of leadership in the Party. Four women were members of the National Committee —Mother Bloor, Anita Whitney, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Alice Burke. Five were members on the editorial staff of the Daily Worker. Hundreds of women comrades fulfilled leading functions in state, county, and branch organizations all over the country. Similarly the left and progressive unions drew heavily upon their women members to fill leading posts during the war.
THE BATTLE FOR PRODUCTION
The most important contribution of the United States toward winning the war was in the field of producing war munitions. Production in general went up almost 100 percent over pre-war times.5 This production included 297,000 military planes, 86,388 tanks, 16,438 armored cars, 2,434,535 trucks, 123,707 tractors, 2,700,000 machine guns, 17, 400,000 rifles, 315,000 pieces of field artillery, 71,060 naval vessels, 45 million tons of merchant shipping, etc.6 This tremendous output was achieved by lengthening the work-day, speeding up the workers, and expanding American industrial capacity to the extent of $25 billion in new plants. To accomplish all this a veritable battle for production was organized.
The Communist Party, recognizing the immense importance of production in winning the war, threw its whole force into this phase of the struggle. With its characteristic vigor, it activated all its members in the unions, in its press, and elsewhere to speed the wheels of industry. None served with better results in this general sphere than did the Communists.
The workers, who had displayed little or no interest in increasing munitions production during the imperialist World War I, made big efforts to turn out the maximum output during the anti-fascist World War II. Nearly all the trade unions shared in this effort, with the C.I.O. in the lead, under the heavy influence of the left. Among the more important means used to increase production were the union-management production committees, of which by 1945 there were 5,000 in leading industrial plants. Another vital production factor was labor's no-strike pledge. It was adopted by both C.I.O. and A.F. of L. at their 1941 conventions. This action cut the number of strikers in 1942 to one-third of what it had been in 1941. Organized labor in the main lived up to this pledge, and during die war there were no authorized strikes. John L. Lewis managed, however, to conduct several big mine strikes, and the
Walter Reuther faction in the United Auto Workers, while publicly proclaiming support for the no-strike pledge, surreptitiously promoted many local walkouts in the plants. As for the Communist Party and the left-led unions, they insistently enforced the pledge—even too rigidly where shop grievance stoppages were concerned. They also actively supported the plant production committees.
During the war years, although prices were supposedly frozen, there was a steady rise in the cost of living. The employers, as always, put their profits before the national interest and wrung out of the lush war production all possible financial benefits for themselves. They reaped even greater profits than they did in World War I, and monopoly domination of the country was enormously strengthened during the war. At the outset of the war the capitalists conducted their notorious "sit-down strike of capital" until they secured from the government such profit rates as they demanded.7 Besides, seeing that the workers had their wages frozen and that the unions had pledged themselves not to strike, the employers maneuvered on all government levels to keep wage rates down. This necessitated an energetic fight by the unions to have wages at least keep pace with soaring prices. In this broad fight to maintain living standards, the Communists were naturally in the front line.
Late in 1942, however, Earl Browder introduced into the Party a proposition that threatened to compromise the Party's struggle to protect the workers' living standards. This was his so-called "incentive wage." Browder proposed, in substance, that henceforth wages should be tied to production. That is, the workers would be paid in accordance with their output. It was correct that the workers, in the war against fascism, should turn out maximum production; it was correct also that, because of their greater productivity, they should get higher wages; but Browder applied all this wrongly in both theory and practice. He drew fantastic pictures of the beneficial results to be achieved by his payment-by-results system, declaring that "we could have a general increase in productivity that would give us in the course of six months or a year twice as much war production as we have today. For the workers that would mean, under this principle, at least twice as much wages."8 Browder's plan, supposedly able to reap such great advances for the workers, placed no stress, however, upon the improvement of existing hourly, daily, and weekly wage rates, which he considered an obsolete system. This was an error. The scheme, which had been adopted by the Party after considerable opposition, was not widely advocated in the unions.
THE FIGHT FOR THE SECOND FRONT
The struggle to induce, or rather to compel, the United States and British governments to open up the western front in France, occupied the center of attention of the Communist Party during the 1941-44 period. The Red Army was bearing the whole burden of the war against the main fascist fortress, Nazi Germany, and its two big "allies" in the West were calmly standing aside allowing it to do so, under the obviously false pretext that they as yet lacked sufficient forces to carry through a successful invasion of France. It was imperatively in the interest of the whole allied forces, including the United States, that the second front be opened as soon as possible. The Communist Party utilized all of its strength and influence in a prolonged and persistent agitational struggle to bring about the long and deliberately delayed attack upon Hitler from the West. The Party stood out in the whole country, for its clarity and militancy on this decisive question.
The American people, in general, were full of admiration for the Red Army's magnificent struggle and undoubtedly favored the opening of the second front at the very earliest opportunity, even though they realized what the cost would be to them in casualties. But they were constantly deluged by the flood of propaganda from the let-Germany-and-Russia-fight-it-out reactionaries, in the government and outside, to the effect that we were "not yet ready." The A.F. of L. top leaders—Soviet-haters and reactionaries—also displayed no haste about the second front, and they were willing to leave the matter to the anti-Soviet military experts to decide. Large numbers of their international, state, city, and local affiliates, however, joined in the popular demand for the early invasion of France. The C.I.O., with its then characteristic left orientation, took a forthright position for the second front. Thus, at its 1943 convention it declared that "coalition warfare of the United Nations is the key to our victory," and that "the issue before the United Nations is the decisive, full-scale invasion of Europe."
As remarked earlier, it was only when the Anglo-American reactionaries could no longer delay the opening of the western front without imperiling their imperialist interests, that they finally agreed with the Russians upon the long-delayed date for the beginning of the invasion. This was done at the famous conference of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Teheran, Iran, in December 1943.
Browder made two grossly opportunist errors on the general question of the second front. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, in view of the fact that Great Britain and the United States had agreed to help the U.S.S.R., Browder hopped to the conclusion that henceforth they would be trustworthy allies. "They have crossed the Rubicon," he sent word from the Atlanta jail to the National Committee. "Munich-ism is now at an end. We have nothing further to fear on that score." This belief, that there had been a solid merger of the war effort simply because the U.S.S.R. and the western powers were in the war together on the same side, contained the embryo of Browder's later Teheran revisionism. The Party rejected Browder's opportunist estimate of the type of the war alliance, and the correctness of its action was evidenced by the fact that almost immediately afterward the Party had to begin the two-and-a-half-year struggle against the reluctant British and American governments to have the second front established. Browder's second error on the western front question came at the very conclusion of that historic struggle, after he had been released from jail. It was based on an enormous overestimation of the significance of the Teheran agreement to open the second front. It was a great irony that the Party should conclude its otherwise splendid struggle for the second front by making in this connection, upon Browder's initiative, by far the most serious political mistake in its career. This error will be discussed in full in the next chapter.
THE FAIR EMPLOYMENT PRACTICES COMMISSION
During the war the employers put a halt to Roosevelt's social security program on the basis of economy, although they themselves were making two to three times as much profit as they had immediately before the war. One of the major casualties in this respect was the Wagner-Dingell Bill for compulsory health insurance. In the same vein, Congress passed the notorious Smith-Connally Act in 1943, which outlawed strikes in defense plants and restricted the political activities of trade unions. Nevertheless, the workers in the democratic spirit of the people's war, did manage to secure some concessions, following the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), and buttressed the 40-hour week. Also in 1944 Roosevelt enunciated the Economic Bill of Rights.9 But the most important advance was the setting up of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, devised to break down some of the discrimination against Negro workers in industry.
On June 25, 1941, the president, in his Executive Order 8802, declared that it shall be the "policy of the United States that there shall be 414 no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin." On July 18th Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce this directive.
Previously the president, although assuming a friendly attitude toward the Negro people, had done practically nothing to mitigate the outrageous discrimination practiced against them. With his heavy support in the South, he had never made a real attack upon Jim Crow there. Also throughout the war the 920,000 Negro men and women in the armed forces suffered the indignities of segregation, when Roosevelt by a word could have abolished it. Nor did the president actively support the anti-poll tax. and anti-lynching bills, so valorously championed for years by Vito Marcantonio, House member from the 18th Congressional District of New York City, and which almost became law. If the F.E.P.C. was set up it was due primarily to the need for workers in the war emergency, to the pressure of the mass of Negro trade unionists, to the fighting spirit of the Negro people, and to the growing unity in struggle between Negro and white progressives. The Communist Party, by its never-ending fight for and with the Negro people, also deserved no little of the credit for the measure.10
The F.E.P.C, while relieving somewhat the conditions of Negro workers during the war and establishing in principle their rights in industry, never became federal law. Roosevelt did not support the Marcantonio bill, H.R. 173a, designed to put teeth into his Executive Order. When the reactionary Truman became president he managed to slough off the F.E.P.C. altogether, under cover of his usual cloud of demagogy, as we shall see later. The A.F. of L. and Railroad Brotherhoods, with the aim of preserving their Jim Crow restrictions, also opposed the F.E.P.C. practices and legislation as "an infringement upon the trade unions' right to regulate their own internal affairs."
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL
On June 10, 1943, the Communist International was dissolved by the unanimous action of all its affiliated parties. On May 15th a motion to this effect had been submitted to the various parties.11 Thus came to a conclusion the great world organization of Communists founded by Lenin in March 1919.
This serious action was taken as a war measure, as a means to further strengthen the unity of the peoples fighting against fascist aggression. Stalin, in an interview with Harold King, Reuters correspondent, stated that "The dissolution of the Communist International . . . facilitates the organization of the common onslaught of all freedom-loving nations against the common enemy—Hitlerism. It exposes the lie of the Hitlerites to the effect that 'Moscow' allegedly intends to intervene in the life of other nations and to 'Bolshevize' them." Stalin also showed concretely that the action would aid in organizing the progressive forces in the various countries, and would also help to "unite all the freedom-loving peoples into a single international camp for the fight against the menace of world domination by Hitlerism."12
The dissolution of the Comintern was a heavy sacrifice by the Communists for the common cause of victory. From the days of its foundation the C.I. was the indomitable leader of the world forces for freedom, national independence, and socialism. It was an invaluable body, where working class leaders of all countries could discuss the situation facing the workers everywhere, thus helping in the formation of programs for advancing the welfare of the working people of each country, based on their real needs and their real situation. It was also the means of educating, in the fire of actual struggle, tens of thousands of militant Communist fighters, many of whom are now the leaders of the governments of their respective countries. The Communist International represented the world Socialist movement at a vastly higher level than was the case with either the First or Second International.
The Communist Party of the United States, as we have seen in the course of this history, owes a great debt to the Comintern for its own Marxist-Leninist development. In meeting the difficult post-war problems it has seriously felt the loss of its one-time direct contact with the world's best Marxists through that organization.
OPPORTUNIST CONCEPTION OF NATIONAL UNITY
Above we have dealt in passing with some of Browder's developing deviations. But these were only the beginning of a veritable system of distorting Marxism-Leninism. While Browder was in prison, the Communist Party correctly called for national unity of the anti-Hitler forces to prosecute the war. But Browder later proceeded to give this sound policy a highly opportunistic orientation. He interpreted national unity as "uniting the entire nation, including the biggest capitalists, for a complete and all-out drive for victory."13 This all-inclusive conception of national unity attempted to ignore the basic fact that the "biggest capitalists," following a course dictated by their own imperialist interests, had nothing politically in common with the masses of the American people, who were fighting to destroy Hitlerism. Instead of uniting with such reactionaries in order to have a sound war policy, it was necessary for the great masses of the people to organize and fight against them.
Browder's conception of national unity, which was essentially of a Social-Democratic character, also subordinated the political role of the working class to bourgeois dictation. During the war situation organized labor, with a membership which advanced from 11 million to 14 million in the war years, should have united its forces politically, however loosely. Inasmuch as labor was fully supporting the war, it should also have demanded that its relation to the Roosevelt government be placed on a coalition basis. There ought to have been several labor members in a joint cabinet, instead of none at all. But Roosevelt naturally was opposed to such a project, and so, too, were the top leaders of organized labor, who wanted to do nothing that could even remotely threaten their beloved two (bourgeois) party system.
In the Communist Party demands were raised that organized labor fight for a coalition status and for members in the Roosevelt Cabinet, but Browder defeated this proposition. He tailed right along with Roosevelt, Lewis, Murray, and Green, taking the two-party system for granted and discarding for good the perspective for a third, or labor party. Said he, "We have rejected as impractical for the war period any general readjustment or regrouping of the party structure in our national political life."14 The result of labor's refusal to demand its rights was that the workers were denied the greatly enhanced political power which they could have gained through a coalition status. Browder's idea was not that labor should "co-operate" with Roosevelt in the war, but that it must simply "support" him. The workers went through the war with insignificant, third-line representation in the many national war committees and agencies. One of Roosevelt's most marked efforts was to prevent independent working class political action, and during the war period, with Browder's blessing, he carried out this labor-crippling line very effectively.
To appease the widespread demand for more worker leadership in the war, Roosevelt finally set up the Combined Labor Victory Committee, consisting of three representatives each from the C.I.O. and A.F. of L. and one from the Railroad Brotherhoods. This Committee, which occasionally met with the president, had no real power of decision. Browder, in chorus with the labor bureaucrats, hailed this makeshift formation as adequate labor representation and a big accomplishment for organized labor.
Browder's false conception of national unity deeply cut down the leading political role of the Communist Party. It would have been of great advantage to our Party, as well as to the labor movement in general, had the Communists more clearly exposed the imperialist policy of big capital during the war, in contrast to the democratic line of the workers, and also had the Party made a real fight for effective political recognition of the workers in the conduct of the war. Browder's opportunism denied the Party both of these vital war-time issues.
BROWDER'S PLAN FOR ORGANIZED CAPITALISM
Many right-wing Social-Democrats and pseudo-Communists—Bernstein, Kautsky, Bukharin, and others—following the lead of "progressive" bourgeois economists, have from time to time developed theories of "organized capitalism"; that is, of a capitalist system which, overcoming its inner contradictions and inescapable chaos, would carry on production in a planned and systematic way, nationally and internationally. Browder tried his hand at this opportunist game, as a wartime policy, in 1942. He got the idea from Congressman Tolan who, in a report to Congress, proposed that "every phase" of the national economy must be "planned, must be guided, must be brought under administration control." This was a futile bourgeois attempt to parody the planned, Socialist production of the U.S.S.R. Browder called his own scheme of organized capitalism a "centralized war economy." There was opposition in the Party to Browder's scheme, but not enough to prevent its being at least formally adopted.
According to Browder, "Maximum war production requires a central administration which will plan, direct, guide, and control the entire economy of the nation."15 The whole economic machine would be operated by the government, with labor (also according to Browder's policies) occupying only third-line advisory posts. How far-reaching Browder considered his project is evidenced by a few further quotations from his book Victory—And After. "In a centralized war economy, prices lose their former significance as a registration of market relationships and become a convenience of bookkeeping and accounting" . , . "profits lose their former significance as a source of unlimited personal consumption" and . . . "although private ownership remains intact, private capital loses its significance as the pre-condition to production" . . . "wages tend to lose their significance as a market relationship" . . . and "there is no necessity for the government to 'take over' the plants except to the degree that Congress had already provided for in the federal statute authorizing plant seizures when such steps are made necessary, by resistance to public policy by the present individual owners."16 Browder saw the virtual disappearance of the wages system altogether under his "organized capitalism." He says, "Wages expressed in money no longer represent a standard of life; wages must now, therefore, be expressed in a guaranteed supply of the workers' needs as a producer."17
As Lenin and Stalin have repeatedly pointed out, capitalism cannot carry on planned production either in war or in peace. This conclusion applies not only to Bukharin's brand of organized capitalism, but also to Browder's "centralized war economy" and the Truman "managed economy" scheme. The capitalist system's domination by monopoly capital, its violent competition between hundreds of thousands of capitalist firms producing blindly for the market, its bitter struggle between the ruling and exploited classes over the question of wages, etc., its ruthless fight among the imperialist powers over the markets of the world, its sharp collision of the capitalist world against the socialist world—all make the world capitalist system hopelessly chaotic and un-organizable.
Lenin, in his famous Introduction in 1915 to Bukharin's book, Imperialism and World Economy, had the following to say on this general question: "There is no doubt that the development is going in the direction of a single world trust that will swallow up all enterprises and all states without exception. But the development in this direction is proceeding under such stress, with such a tempo, with such contradictions, conflicts and convulsions—not only economic, but also political, national, etc., etc.—that before a single world trust will be reached, before the respective national finance capitalists will have formed a world union of 'ultra-imperialism,' imperialism will inevitably explode, capitalism will turn into its opposite."
In the given war circumstances, Browder's "organized capitalism" dreams served to sow illusions among the workers about the ability of capitalism to carry on planned production, and they also tended to cut down the political initiative of the proletariat and to subordinate it to the leadership of the bourgeoisie. In an immediate sense Browder's Utopian scheme weakened the fight for President Roosevelt's more practical seven-point program (taxes, price controls, materials allocation, profits limitations, etc.), which was designed to establish some faint traces of order in the inevitable jungle of capitalist productive and distributive relationships.
BROWDER'S OPPORTUNISM AND THE CHINESE REVOLUTION
Wall Street imperialism has a long record of aggression and exploitation in China.18 The Communist Party, usually under the slogan of "Hands Off China," almost from its inception fought against this imperialist penetration of China and gave the Chinese Revolution such help as it could. In particular, it vigorously opposed the Roosevelt policy of shipping scrap iron and other war munitions to Japan during the thirties when that country was invading and overrunning China. In appreciation of this support, in 1937, Mao' Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and Chu Teh, the chief Chinese Communist leaders, sent separate letters of thanks to the Communist Party of the United States.19
During World War II, however, as part of his developing revisionism, Browder departed fundamentally from the Party's correct line toward the Chinese Revolution. His opportunism became marked after his interview with Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles in October 1942. Browder had previously made a statement criticizing sharply the anti-Communist policy of the Roosevelt Administration in China. Welles summoned Browder to Washington for this and gave him a statement, denying Browder's allegations and asserting that the United States aimed at unifying the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists in China. This "unity" policy amounted to no more than a wartime effort to turn all Chinese guns against the Japanese, but Browder interpreted it as a genuine, long-term desire to establish a democratic Chinese national unity. He swallowed Welles's proposition whole, apologized publicly for his previous statement attacking the State Department's China policy, 20 and thenceforth became a supporter of the reactionary line of American imperialism in China.
Thus, typically, in a speech on March 13, 1945, Browder stated that "The United States finds the Yenan [Communist] policies closer to our understanding of the two nations than are the policies of Chungking [Chiang Kai-shek]"; that "The economic policies of the Communist-led area are much more closely related to the American 'free enterprise' methods than are those of Chungking"; and that "The Chinese Communists trust America."21 He climaxed his endorsement of Wall Street policy in China by declaring at the Party's emergency convention, in July 1945, that "Official American policy, whatever temporary vacillations may appear, is pressing toward the unity and democratization of China."22 Browder even tried to create the false impression that the State Department was backing the Communists against Chiang.
How completely wrong Browder was in his sizing up of the Chinese situation is demonstrated by present State Department policy in China, with its seizure of Taiwan (Formosa), attempted conquest of Korea, proposed A-bombing of Chinese cities, economic boycott against China, armed support of Chiang Kai-shek against People's China, and blocking of the seating of the Chinese People's Republic in the United Nations. This is the logical fruition of the traditional aggressive policy of American imperialism toward China. As Marxist-Leninists, the Chinese Communists followed a totally different line from Browder's, a line of anti-imperialist struggle which was foreseen 25 years ago by the great Marxist, Stalin, and it brought them to complete victory.
THE PARTY AND THE MASSES
The combination of lefts and progressives, which had built the C.I.O. and made it the leading section of the trade union movement on questions of the war, the organization of the unorganized, the Negro people, the women, the youth, and so on, continued right on through the war years. This was due chiefly to a general agreement on the aims and tasks of the war, and also partly to Philip Murray's acute need for Communist help in his struggles against John L. Lewis and the Green clique in the A.F. of L. The effectiveness of the left-center bloc during this period was lessened greatly, however, by the various Browder mistakes which we have indicated—especially by his tailing after Murray on such questions as those of organized capitalism and of no working class independent political action.
The several broad united front movements of left and progressive elements that had played such a prominent role in the immediate prewar years, mostly either died out or became skeletonized with the development of the war. This was basically because the new situation changed the issues confronting these organizations and rendered them largely obsolete. Quarrels between right and left over such questions as the Soviet-German pact, the Finnish War, and the "phony" war generally, hastened their disintegration. The American League for Peace and Democracy was dissolved in 1940, and the American Peace Mobilization in 1941. The American Youth Congress died out in 1942, and the League of American Writers dissolved in 1941. The Workers Alliance, with unemployment no longer an issue, also perished as the war began. The National Negro Congress, Southern Negro Youth Congress, and Southern Conference for Human Welfare went on into the post-war period, but in skeleton form. The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, with a continuing vital task, lived on. So did the united front defense organizations, in the shape of the Civil Rights Congress.
During the war period the Party membership grew only slowly. At the beginning of 1944 it reached its maximum of some 80,000 members, including the 15,000 whose membership had been discontinued while they were in the armed services. This was only 5,000 more than the Party reported at its 1938 convention. Large numbers of workers joined the Party; the recruiting campaign of early 1944, for example, brought in 24,000 new members, about 30 percent of whom were Negroes; but the membership turnover was very heavy. At that time 33,000 members had been in the Party less than one year.23 About 14 percent of the Party members in 1944 were Negroes, 46 percent industrial workers, 46 percent women, and 25 percent professional and white collar workers.
The Party's growing strength among the masses was evidenced in the New York municipal elections of 1943, when Peter V. Cacchione (first elected in 1941) was re-elected to the City Council as a Communist by the biggest first-choice vote of any candidate in the city. Of historical importance was the election, at the same time, of the first Negro Communist to public office, Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. Both Cacchione and Davis made excellent records in the City Council.
Opportunities for Party building were exceptionally good during the war, and the Party should have come into the post-war period with at least 150,000 solidly organized members. If it failed to do so, it was principally due to the opportunist Browder policies, which, by blunting the Party's initiative and distorting its program, made the Party far less attractive to the workers. In the Party there was considerable opposition to Browder's errors, his twisted use of American democratic traditions, his compromising Latin American policy, his "incentive wage" theory, his opportunist concept of national unity, and his theory of a centralized war economy. But this opposition was neither clear nor strong enough as yet to expose thoroughly and to defeat the revisionist system that Browder was rapidly building up. This was to come later.
1 The Communist, July 1941.
2 The Communist, Aug. 1941.
3 The Communist, Dec. 1941.
4 Among the 414 delegates at a national encampment of Communist veterans in Washington, D. C, held in May 1947, there were holders of the following decorations: 1,019 Battle Stars, 44 Purple Hearts, 21 Bronze Stars, 6 Silver Stars, 107 Air Medals, 9 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 44 Presidential Unit Citations, 2 Legion of Merit, and 1 Distinguished Service Cross.
5 Labor Research Association, Labor Fact Book 7, p. 9, N. Y., 1945.
6 Todd and Curti, America's History, p. 776.
7 The supposedly high wartime wages were a fiction. In 1944, the average weekly wage of all workers in manufacturing industries was $47.45, whereas the generally recognized Heller Cost-o£-Living Budget then called for a weekly wage of ?S4.oo.
8 Earl Browder, Wage Policy in War Production, p. 8, N. Y., 1943.
9 Labor Research Association, Labor Fact Book 7, p. 22.
10 Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., in The Communist, Aug. 1942.
11 The Communist, July 1943.
12 The Communist, Nov. 1943.
13 Browder, Victory—and After, p. 118.
14 Browder, Victory—and After, p. 140.
15 Browder, Victory—and After, p. 228.
16 Browder, Victory-and After, pp. 245-49.
17 Browder, Victory-and After, p. 238.
18 Frederick V. Field in Political Affairs, Jan. 1946.
19 Text in Earl Browder, The People's Front, pp. 316-18, N. Y„ 1938.
20 See Earl Browder, Policy of Victory', pp. 20-22, N. Y., 1943.
21 Earl Browder, Why America Is Interested in the Chinese Communists, N. Y., 1945.
22 Daily Worker, July 28, 1945.
23 John Williamson in Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the Communist Political Association, May 20-22, p. 51, N. Y., 1944.
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