The Communist Party of the USA’s long-delayed convention has been scheduled for June 7-9 of this year. The party has swollen in size over the past few years as class consciousness continues to rise among the working people of the U.S. Empire. The previous convention, held in 2019, should have triggered a convention in 2023 according to the CPUSA constitution. It didn’t. The leadership of the party wasn’t ready to admit so many new voices to the table.
If you read the newest article by CPUSA officer C.J. Atkins (managing editor of the party organ People’s World, and Executive Director of the pro-Canadian government NGO, ProudPolitics), How does the Communist Party elect its leadership, it’s clear that they still aren’t ready to admit new voices. We will address the hypocrisy that is the CPUSA constitution and the anti-democratic structure it enshrines to protect its opportunistic and careerist leadership below, but first we must deal with something that is purposefully hidden from new recruits in the CPUSA: the party’s own history.
For this reason, we urge the widest possible circulation of this pamphlet among the new recruits of the CPUSA, so they can make their choices clearly, and have their voices heard despite the pressure from the “national” organization. Only through real struggle — not the tame, leashed thing present at CPUSA conventions of the past century — can the party be vigorously purged of its opportunists and careerists and fit to participate in the revolutionary milieu of North American Communism.
A History of Opportunism
It’s not easy to learn the history of the CPUSA; comprehensive studies haven’t been compiled, and the publicly available information online is all tinged with bias one way or the other. Fatally for the CPUSA, the party’s own accounts of its history that are publicly available (for instance, Five misconceptions about the CP’s stance on Black liberation, written by a CPUSA employee who is paid through one of its shell corporations) are outright lies. We know this because other party members and even earlier party historians disagree. The Five misconceptions can be easily debunked by looking at the party records!
We can divide the history of the CPUSA into several major periods based on the predominant forces at work. The party’s roots can be traced back to the Pre-Party Period (roughly 1876-1919). The founding of the party (1919-1923) was followed almost immediately by fierce factional fighting between different types of political opportunists. We can call this entire period the Lovestone War (1919-1928). The party’s Third Period (1928-1935) coincides with the so-called Third Period of the Comintern. These three periods can collectively be termed the “early party” in which the membership was grappling with imperialist opportunism. The Early Party was followed by the disastrous Browder Period (1935-1958), during which open class-collaborationism ruled the day. The intervening Hall Period (1958-2000) was followed by the most recent period of open liquidation (2000-2019) and the Sims/Cambron Co-Chair Period (2019-present).
The Early Party
The party was initially created out of several social democratic organizations that had long subordinated internationalist concerns to mere economism — the narrow concerns of direct economic gains. A coalition of “leftists” brought together non-reformist elements of the Socialist Party of America. This group was known as the Left Wing Section, a formal faction within the party. This faction was not only praised by Lenin, but was even used by the Communist International (Comintern) to help form the Communist Party of the USA. So much for the ban on factions!
The early party was actually unable to cohere; immediately following the election of the Left Wing Section to most of the executive positions in the SPA in 1919, the moderates in the SPA expelled them. The non-English speaking “language sections” of the SPA broke off and founded the Communist Party of America. The SPA called an emergency convention in August of 1919 and the remaining left delegates formed the Communist Labor Party. These were both ordered by the Comintern to join into the single Communist Party of the United States of America and the CPUSA as we know it was born.
But it was not born without strife. The following ten years would be typified by a power struggle between two cliques represented more or less by two forces of opportunism within the party: the Ruthenberg-led former CPA and the Lovestonites. There’s a reason you’ve never heard of Lovestone: he was responsible for the thesis of “American exceptionalism.” This is the line that the CPUSA, openly or not, still materially follows. They can’t afford to educate you about Lovestone because you might see through their program.
His clique put forth the so-called analysis that capitalism was stronger in the U.S. than anywhere else on earth or in history, and that it could not be overcome by revolutionary might until it began to decay. He presented this thesis to the Comintern and helped lead the early CPUSA toward a position of capitulationism. He proposed that the party should just attempt to “hang on” until the revolution was possible, retrenching and defending itself from the capitalists but taking no moves to advance toward overthrowing the capitalist class. This basic thesis has informed top leadership in the CPUSA since.
The Comintern blasted Lovestone, as did Comrade Stalin himself. They ordered the CPUSA to cease factional fighting between Ruthenberg and Lovestone and chastised Lovestone as being a defeatist. This was not the end of Lovestone. By the 1960s, Lovestone would be an active CIA contact inside the AFL-CIO, funneling money from the counter-revolutionary forces of the Central Intelligence Agency into the labor movement.
At the same time, the African Blood Brotherhood was being integrated into the CPUSA and revolutionary action was proceeding in Alabama and the Black Belt. Harry Haywood is the most famous of the revolutionary theorists to come out of the U.S. during this period, and for good reason. Haywood was a proponent and defender of the Black Belt Thesis, the analysis that the Black population of the U.S. Empire was a nation-in-chains in the South, and this serves as a nexus of oppression everywhere until land reform is undertaken. He was a staunch opponent of revisionism and opportunism in the upper ranks of the CPUSA.
Those who opposed Haywood and the Comintern’s position on the Black nation classified racial prejudice as a “moral concern” that needed no special attention. Haywood, the Comintern, and many Black comrades in the U.S. defined Black liberation with regard to specific economic structures. The struggle within the CPUSA against Black liberation came to a head not during the early party period, but in the 1940s, under the villain Earl Browder, as the party tacked toward peaceful coexistence with the U.S. capitalist class, and then finally during the liquidationist period at the end of the 1950s as the party was permanently conquered by petit-bourgeois interests.
Earl Browder: Arch Class-Collaborationist
The never-unified CPUSA’s internal struggles continued to grow more dangerous throughout the middle and late 1930s. It had not been on any firm class footing, despite its membership achieving certain powerful successes in the U.S. class struggle. Earl Browder was appointed by the Comintern to suppress this factionalism and was selected to serve as the party’s head alongside William Z. Foster, the CPUSA’s candidate for president who ran on a Black Belt liberation ticket. Foster suffered from health problems, and Browder took command of the party apparatus.
In the early 1930s, the CPUSA considered president Roosevelt to be a fascist, and opposed joint work with the Democrats. Browder took the lead in convincing the Comintern that a new detente with capitalists in the U.S. was not only possible, but necessary to fight European fascism. He was the champion of the “People’s Front” — a corruption of Georgi Dimitrov’s United Front strategy — and by 1936, Communists were in key positions of the Roosevelt administration. Foster, now sidelined, fought against Browder’s collaborationism with Roosevelt, but Browder controlled the key party positions.
This is how the embarrassment of “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” came to pass. “Patriotic” Communism, as seen today, is a revival of Browder’s efforts at class-collaboration.
It doesn’t stop there.
Browder produced a piece of “theory” known as Teheran, Our Path in War and Peace which was published in 1944. Among other garbage, including a contention that imperialist exploitation of the world by the U.S. was weakening, Browder wrote that “There can be no effective national unity in America… that does not include big capitalists.”
“The Communists,” he wrote, “foresee that the practical political aims they hold will for a long time be in agreement on all essential points with the aims of a much larger body of non-Communists, and that therefore our political actions will be merged in such larger movements. The existence of a separate political party of Communists, therefore, no longer serves a practical purpose but can be, on the contrary, an obstacle to the larger unity.”
The party encouraged no-strike pledges during the war, ostensibly to protect Soviet Communism, but in actuality destroying the revolution at the time when the organization of the working class in the U.S. Empire was at its height, and a time when U.S. imperialism was weakened by fighting foreign enemies.
In 1944, Browder dissolved the party.
This move was nearly successful; throughout 1943 and ‘44, he suppressed all dissent to the buildup of the plan to dissolve the CPUSA as being in violation of party discipline. This toxic and ludicrous understanding of democratic centralism, preclusion of all dissent, persists within the CPUSA and many other “sister” parties to this day. It was only through the intervention of the French C.P. and the circulation of newspapers and letters from France blasting Browder and demanding his removal that the party was reconstituted in 1945.
Although the party was actually dissolved and Browder managed to issue party-wide orders to that effect, it was shortly thereafter put back together under the leadership of William Foster.
It was during this time of Browder’s leadership that the attacks on Haywood and the Black members of the party holding to the line of national self-determination grew stronger and stronger. Browder fought to suppress national self-determination as antagonistic to the new vision of the world he predicted in which the U.S. capitalist class would eventually peacefully hand over power to the working class.
The Traitor’s Convention: 1957
In response to FBI investigations and the prosecution of eleven highly-placed members of the CPUSA, the party took the position that it was not advocating for the overthrow of the capitalist state — a crime under bourgeois law — but for Browder’s “peaceful transition.” The eleven defendants were found guilty and each sentenced to five years in prison. This led to the prosecution of some 100 more party members throughout the early 1950s.
The party, having been led down the rabbit-hole of opportunism by Browder, who took advantage of the already-existing petit-bourgeois tendency for collaboration and conciliation with Roosevelt and the so-called “progressive” capitalists, was caught unprepared for this onslaught.
Khrushchev’s “secret speech” also rocked the party. John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker, called for dissolving the CP as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and became the center for a new liquidationist faction, intent on removing the revolutionary content of Marxism and making it palatable to the progressive capitalists. Liquidationists sprang out of the CPUSA woodwork. They demanded a “re-examination” of Marxism-Leninism and condemned the theory of the bourgeois state as an instrument of class rule.
The most fateful convention of the CPUSA, that of 1957, was fast approaching. A draft resolution was circulated in September of 1956 to be debated at the convention. The draft argued for what Haywood recorded as a “peaceful, parliamentary, constitutional transition to socialism.” It would be
…the development of an anti-monopoly coalition through “labor and popular” forces gaining “decisive influence in key Democratic Party state organizations and even liberal Republican movements.” Thus would develop the “American Road to Socialism.” The Communist Party would remain on the sidelines to “support and endorse” such progressive campaigns. On the Afro-American question, the right of self-determination was completely omitted and the Party urged wholehearted acceptance of the NAACP slogan of “Free by ‘63.” Working class leadership and proletarian revolution were entirely excluded from this document. The National Board voted in favor of the resolution, Foster and Davis voting a qualified “yes.”
Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik
Left opposition to this turn grew throughout the end of 1956 and the beginning of 1957. However, they were lacking central guidance; the left opposition was excluded from the National Board. They had no regular access to any of the party machinery to air their views, and leadership deliberately suppressed Marxist-Leninist education to maintain the status quo. All dissent was systematically suppressed, and inner-party democracy was quashed.
Three factions of rightists came to the Sixteenth Convention on February 9, 1957. The Gates faction was openly anti-Soviet and supported the liquidation of the party in its entirety. The center-right faction was led by Eugene Dennis and called for the ideological liquidation of the party’s vanguard position. The left-center was represented by Foster, and were staunchly opposed to any further leftward movement — embracing open calls for revolution, for instance, in the face of FBI repression.
The Sixteenth Convention, in an attempt to quell the disunity that had plagued the party from the beginning, moved to suppress the split. The three right trends, which had captured the National Board, called for a “unity of all trends” during the convention. The left opposition attacked this false unity, and upset many of the “unity slates” — you see the beginning of the hideous slate system here — that were planned to oust left candidates.
As part of this “unity of all trends,” the three right cliques forced through the passage of the treacherous September Resolution, which spelled the death knell of the party as any kind of revolutionary force. Immediately following the convention, the three “unified” trends began to harass the left opposition within the party, driving membership out through bureaucratic gamesmanship. When Haywood attempted to challenge the slogan calling for the party to follow the petit-bourgeois lead of the NAACP, he was attacked by the leadership. The question of self-determination for the Black Belt and the oppressed Black nation was abandoned. The CPUSA had openly determined to follow the petit-bourgeois-dominated NAACP and the petit-bourgeois/bourgeois alliance that formed the central core of the Democratic Party of the 1930s-60s.
The Party Leaves the Struggle — So the Struggle Leaves the Party
The content of the CPUSA program has been, since the Sixteenth Congress, roughly the same for the last 70 years. In some periods it is more openly liquidationist (as we will see below, with the coming of Sam Webb), and in some less (as this current period), but the actual on-the-ground effect of every party program since 1957 has been, on one end of the spectrum, to tail the petit-bourgeois “progressives” or, on the other, to call for the complete abolishment of the party.
The Black Power movement and the New Communist Movement began in the mid-60s as the CPUSA failed in its historical role to lead the working classes. In 1966, the Black Panther Party was formed. Organizations like the essentially anarchist Students for a New Democratic Society and its militant offshoot, the Weather Underground, sprang up. These were organic expressions of working class militant socialism that arose independently because the main outlet for the working class had been stopped up by the revisionist, opportunist, and government-infiltrated CPUSA. Two FBI operations, SOLO and TOPLEV, garnered many CPUSA informants; as early as 1948, the CIA had identified a goal to implement agents at the top levels of the CPUSA, and unredacted reports from the FBI as late as 1984 indicate a large number of government spies within the CPUSA ranks. Operation CHAOS, a CIA domestic spying program begun by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, undoubtedly planted even more spies within the CPUSA ranks.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle thus, having been driven out of the party by its accommodation of U.S. capitalism, manifested in other organizations. Projects were undertaken to re-found the CPUSA or to purge it of its opportunistic elements. None of these produced lasting results. Because the CPUSA had consumed the oxygen for working class organizing on an all-Empire level, because it stood back and did nothing while the Black Power movement was slaughtered in the streets by police both in uniform and in suits, there was no way to challenge it, and all meaningful revolutionary activity drained away. By the late 1980s, party membership had dwindled from a once-proud 300,000 to 25,000.
The Ghost of Sam Webb
The next stage in the CPUSA’s development was the appearance of the treacherous Sam Webb in 2000. Webb became chairman, and kept the party on the same tack as its 1980-incarnation: playing a supporting role to the Democratic Party against the “ultra-right” threat of the GOP.
Webb repeated the Sixteenth Congress throughout his entire tenure. He directly contradicted the tasks set out by the socialists of the 20th century and embraced Bernsteinian revisionism as the order of the day. “While political supremacy of the working class and its allies is imperative, once acquired its task isn’t to smash the state into so many pieces, but rather to transform the class content of state structures,” he wrote in 2009. “[C]ommunists of our generation,” he sang, in the siren song we have seen above, designed to convince the petit-bourgeois, vacillating elements, “would do well to follow the example of our Depression-era comrades.”
He denounced Marxism-Leninism itself, calling it “rigid and formulaic” and said it was time to move “beyond Communist Parties.” At the 2014 convention, the party narrowly avoided removing Marxism-Leninism itself from the constitution and party documents.
Webb was ousted at this convention by John Bachtell — current editor-in-chief of the party organ, People’s World. Bachtell, who worked for the Obama campaigns, had worked extensively as chair on the so-called inside/outside project coordinating “Communists” within the Democratic Party. He was slightly to the left of Webb in that he didn’t call for open liquidation of the CPUSA as an organizational structure, but did hew, in his time as chair, to a tailist strategy to “defeat Trumpism” (as he put it). Class consciousness had begun to rise with the threat of the far-right fascist advancement of the Tea Party and then-metastasizing MAGA elements in the GOP. Webb, who advocated dissolving the party just as Browder had done, had to go. The party couldn’t countenance open liquidation — perhaps because it once again began to serve its purpose as a magnet for young Communists who don’t know any better. This allows the party to draw in potential revolutionaries and neutralize them by subjecting them to Byzantine, opaque, and undemocratic party structures. The rules require them not to get too feisty, and soon they find themselves forced to keep their revolutionary activity at a very low grade. At every opportunity, that energy is redirected into campaigning for the political class of the Democratic Party — to campaigning for our enemy. Sam Webb had to be sacrificed to save Webbism. Growing class consciousness threatened to push the working class into a revolutionary position. John Bachtell helped to negate it. The party had been winnowed down to some 2,500 members in the wake of Webb’s disastrous time as chair. After Webb was ousted, it grew again to roughly 5,000.
In 2019, Bachtell lost the chairship to long-time CPUSA members and Webbites Rossana Cambron and Joe Sims. This followed the even higher pitch of class consciousness during the Trump years; membership in the CPUSA appears to be as high as 8,000 people. The co-chairs immediately began to call for more revolutionary organizing to channel the surge of class consciousness — while maintaining the exact same 1957 line in action.
CPUSA’s Democracy — but For Which Class?
There exists at the top of the CPUSA a group of well-paid labor bureaucrats that make their living off of corporations owned by party members. Party properties and organs — in fact, all CPUSA assets — are owned by shell corporations like the International Publishing Corporation and Long View Publishing. This includes a network of charities and other corporations that pay out salaries, such as Military Voices Speak Out (the charity headed by Arturo Cambron, Rossana’s husband and a District Organizer for the party in California). Individuals are vetted to serve in these positions, then moved up through the CPUSA and the “mass” organizations that are controlled by high-ranking CPUSA members (like Long View, etc.)
To understand how this leadership retains control of the money and resources of the party as a whole, we can step through the sly doublespeak of C.J. Atkins’ article about elections within the CPUSA.
To begin with, Atkins starts with a canard. “In the Communist Party,” he cautions, “our unity and our collectivity are our most powerful weapons. Our democratic process is all about finding ways to include the voices, thoughts, and experiences of everyone in the party as we decide our policies — and doing so in a fashion that is collective, which safeguards our unity.” This sounds like a touching bit of organizational dogma, but what does Atkins mean when he says this? He admits right away that elections “might even strike [new members] as downright undemocratic when they first see it, totally top-down.”
What is he talking about? The slate system and the National Committee.
Let’s forget that the U.S. Empire isn’t a “nation” but rather a prisonhouse of nations. Set that to one side. What is the National Committee? It is the executive body of the CPUSA, and makes all decisions on all levels. It is the final arbiter of all disputes, and the body to which one would appeal if you disagree with another body. The National Committee is the Politburo and the Executive Committee and the Supreme Soviet rolled into one.
So how are members of this ultra-powerful party-brain elected? Once every four years (or longer, if the National Committee decides to postpone) a convention is held. Once the convention date is set, the existing National Committee creates a subcommittee called the Committee on Leadership. This subcommittee develops what Atkins calls “proposals” for who should staff the National Board and the National Committee, and who should serve as officers of the various subcommittees. How does it do this? Through no formal process. It “casts a broad net across the entire country.” How democratic! Can you submit your name for consideration? Not formally.
“Consultation is the name of the game,” Atkins says. “It’s all about ensuring that the leadership of our party is equipped with the diversity and experience that’s needed.” Ah, but the Committee on Leadership is also “tasked with guaranteeing the party’s continuity, and that means getting the right mix of seasoned party veterans and newly-emerging or young comrades who are growing into leaders.”
Break that down.
The leadership of the party, who have the absolute authority to expel or dismiss members, to select officers, to pick who get the lucrative sinecures of appointment to the party corporations and the payroll of party charities, breaks off a piece of itself (we don’t know, from Atkins’ article, how big the Committee on Leadership is — it might be composed of all the same members as the National Committee) to pick a few people “growing into leaders” (based on the criteria that they share the same political outlook as the current leadership) and “seasoned veterans” (by which they mean, charitably, the same small pool of people on rotation, or uncharitably, just themselves).
Is the floor open for nominations at the convention? Sure, but the vote is presented as a slate. Members are not allowed to campaign — Atkins presents campaigning as some filthy bourgeois tactic, rather than the knowing coalition of groups sharing struggles — so any attempt to campaign prior to the convention is just labeled factionalism and the campaigners are expelled.
But the process doesn’t end there. The National Committee then appoints a Presiding Committee — a credentialing committee and executive committee for the conference. The Presiding Committee makes final rulings on procedural questions, and then presents the slate of candidates selected by the Leadership Committee to the convention. No one that is not approved by the Presiding Committee can appear on the slate. Voting is not yes or no. It is not up or down. Voting proceeds by “choosing a minimum percentage of names from the final list of nominees” — the slate.
Truly, we can take Atkins’ words about process at their face value: the National Committee elects itself.
Debate about political lines and issues is prohibited until the convention begins. Such debate is (wrongfully) called a breach of democratic centralism in the long four-year plus stretches between conventions. Don’t like a party policy? Don’t like a party line? Even bringing up that fact inside a party meeting is grounds for discipline. How can you determine if you agree with people on the slate? How can you tell what you think about any individual candidate? You are left to the whims of the Leadership Committee and the Presiding Committee, both of which are wholly creatures of the National Committee.
Whom does this “democracy” serve?
It serves the clique of interested functionaries who live off of the wages of the rank-and-file party members. It serves John Bachtell, who is paid by Long View and International Publishers. Every few months, the party brass sends out a party-wide warning that People’s World needs more, more, more donations, or else they won’t meet their goal! What is their goal?
Subsidizing the very opportunist serpents that are paralyzing the party with coil after coil and loop after loop of bald-faced lies.
Proletarian Democracy Requires Struggle
It is not possible to achieve a meaningful contribution to the revolution without struggle. Bitter struggle! That means the combat of opposed viewpoints, the dialectic of conflict. Why is the CPUSA averse to conflict? Because its leadership cannot afford to be on the losing end. All struggle must be controlled and subsumed, lest the party be re-captured by the revolutionary element and its resources directed to the destruction of the capitalist state and the very lifestyles of the petit-bourgeois functionaries that now command it.
Do not let them defang the struggle.
Confront the beast in its lair.
Ever onwards, toward revolution!
