BOOK REVIEW.

THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY.

A History of the Communist Party of the United States Since 1945.

By David A. Shannon.

 

Reviewed by T. Clark.

This book of 425 pages by David A. Shannon traces the decline of the Communist Party of the United States from 1945 up to 1959.

 

The American Communist Party, which was formed in 1919, was mainly a split from Eugene Debs Socialist Party. In 1945, the leadership of the Communist Party was in the hands of the Browderites.

Earl Browder was born in Wichita, Kansas, the son of a teacher. Before coming to prominence in the party Browder had served the Comintern in China, and is said to have been proud of his Friendship with Dimitrov. Browder, notes Shannon, has been described as sensitive to the wishes of the Soviet Union, although he remained something of an American nationalist.

Earl Browder had led the party in the period leading up to the Second World War. This was the period that included the Popular Front against Fascism. When German Fascism attacked the Soviet Union on the June 22, 1941, the war, which officially had began in 1939, changed its character from being purely an imperialist war to one that was simultaneously a war of national liberation. The dual character of the war enabled communists to side with those who had become allies of the Soviet Union.

In the United States, this policy was pursued with gusto by the Browderite leadership. Such a policy, correct though it was, created the danger of a right-opportunist degeneration in sections of the world communist movement. Browder came to express this right danger in the American Communist Party.

Shannon’s work is an account of the party from the end of the Second World War in 1945 up to 1959.

At the end of the war, the US Communist Party had a membership of around 85,000; it was solvent and was even able to financially assist communist parties abroad.

Shannon also shows that the party had strong influence in the American trade unions and enjoyed some influence with the electorate. For instance, in November 1945 they succeeded in getting two members elected to the New York City Council on their own tickets. Two other councillors elected on the American Labour Party ticket had worked ‘hand-in-glove with the Communists’.

However, Shannon, who writes from the viewpoint of liberal anti-communism, tells us that all this was about to change. From being relatively popular in the war years, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) dwindled down into a marginal sect. Dues paying membership fell drastically; the party became almost bankrupt, and gradually, with the rise of post-war anti-communism and the cold war, lost its influence with the trade unions and electorate.

Shannon remarks that ‘In 1945 the outlook for the American Communists had never been brighter; by 1959 it had never been darker’ (P.4).

Shannon devotes his efforts in trying to explain how this change of fortune for American Communism came about. He identifies one of the main causes, in fact, the most important. This was the gradual post-war recovery of capitalism, a development that affected all the communist parties in the advanced capitalist countries.

The conclusion of the Second World War meant a new line for the world communist movement. The period of wartime alliance between the big three, i.e. America, the Soviet Union and Britain, or respectively Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, was ending.

This meant a winding up of the alliance with the anti-fascist sections of the bourgeoisie. Now Stalin wanted communist parties to return to their previous militant line. According to Shannon, this return to ‘the class struggle’ meant that imperialism in general was to become the main enemy, particularly American imperialism.

Browder himself was unable to adjust to this new general line anti-imperialist line. He had implemented the anti-fascist popular front in America, but his right-opportunism had led him into revisionism. In fact, following this right-opportunist trajectory Browder had dissolved the CPUSA in 1944. The American Communist Party was renamed the Communist Political Association, which under Browder had become an increasingly revisionist grouping.

With the new line in the communist movement, those who wanted to oust Browder from the leadership of the American Communist Party saw their opportunity arrive. This came in the form of a letter from the prominent French Communist, Jacques Duclos, which criticised Browder’s decision to dissolve the CPUSA in 1944, replacing it with the Communist Political Association.

Browder’s rivals for the party leadership knew that the letter coming from such a prominent source as Jacques Duclos must have had Soviet backing. Therefore, Browder could be denounced as a revisionist with the full authority of Stalin.

This should come as no surprise. Shannon writes of the party in the Browder period that

‘They submerged their traditional criticism of American capitalism until they were, on many issues, to the right of many non-communist liberals’. (P.5).

Browder had led the American version of the popular front, which was known as ‘the democratic anti-fascist coalition’ in the war years. This anti-fascist coalition, a correct policy in itself, had exposed Browder to right-opportunist, revisionist degeneration. Browder began to preach that America and the Soviet Union should maintain the wartime alliance. If he was simply repeating Stalin’s policy, with an American accent, as some critics of Stalin claim, why had Stalin sanctioned his removal from the leadership?

As Shannon writes, the Communist Political Association ‘… called for a continuation of the wartime line’. Browder had interpreted peaceful coexistence to mean renunciation of the class struggle. After Browder’s revisionism was made clear events were set in motion to remove him from the leadership with Stalin’s blessings; but who would take up the challenge?

The need to remove Browder from the leadership of the American Communist Party was signalled by the Duclos letter. William Z. Foster had been a critic of the Browder leadership. Foster had opposed Browder’s line that ‘The problem is no longer how to combat the whole bourgeoisie but how to strengthen the progressive against the reactionary’.

After the defeat of fascism, Foster was, therefore, the ideal man to take on Browder if there was to be any chance of implementing the new line and return the CPUSA to Marxism-Leninism.

William Z. Foster was born in Taunton, Massachusetts in March 1881. He had joined the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs in 1901 and was expelled in 1909. Thereafter he devoted himself to trade union work, and in 1919 rose to national prominence during his leadership of a national steel strike as an American Federation of labour leader. Foster soon became involved in the Profintern and attended its first conference held in Moscow in July 1921.

After returning to the United States, Foster joined the American Communist Party and became one of its leaders. In 1928 and 1932 he was the communist candidate for the US Presidency. Shannon writes that Foster’s heart had not been in the party’s wartime line and ‘he opposed the idea of communist co-operation with sections of the bourgeoisie’. (P.11)

However, Foster, who comes over as somewhat dogmatic, managed to restrain his opposition to the Browder leadership, that is until the Duclos letter in May 1945. Following the letter condemning Browder, Foster was confident that in openly challenging Browder he had the backing of Moscow.

Foster had two close allies: Eugene Dennis and Robert Thompson. The foster faction set itself the task of eliminating the influence of Browderism on the American party.

At a special convention called July 26-28 1945 the Communist Political Association (CPA) was dissolved, and the CPUSA was re-established. This meeting refused to re-elect Browder to the National Committee, and he became a rank-and-file party member. In February 1946, he was expelled from the party for his revisionism.

Shannon writes that the fundamental differences between the wartime Browder line and the Foster post-war line was that the latter represented a denial of progressive tendencies in capitalism. William Z. Foster was no doubt correct on this point. Capitalism had plunged the world into two world wars in which millions had been slaughtered, signalling that its progressive role in history was now over.

Browder had wanted to turn the Soviet Union’s tactical alliance with the United States and Britain, directed against Nazism, into a principle. Thus, Browder gave expression in the immediate post-war period to unadulterated revisionism.

Browder’s line had been a complete rejection of Marxism-Leninism and the class struggle.

In fact, Browderism can justifiably be regarded as the forerunner of what later became known on the other side of the Atlantic as Euro communism, a tendency that ideologically represented liberal capitalism within the ranks of the European communist movement.

The Italian revisionists did not invent the policy of the ‘historic compromise’; the American revisionist, Browder, had beaten them to it. Thus in a certain sense, the birthplace of modern revisionism, the revisionism which developed in the communist movement after the second world war, was the united States.

However, Browder’s line of cuddling up to the more liberal wing of the bourgeoisie was now rejected, to Shannon’s dismay, by the American Communists.

Opposing Browder’s revisionist line, the Foster line asserted that

‘… American capitalism was inherently reactionary and imperialist; those who defend it or the policies of the Government, in their eyes are only the instrument of reactionary imperialists, were retrograde’.

The Communists, however, pointed out that this did not rule out alliances with non-communists. To rule out such alliances would itself be a caricature of sectarianism, but they placed emphasis on the united-front from below to ‘woo the masses from their misleaders’.

In the period of the democratic anti-fascist coalition, the Communists never attacked popular leaders. This was all to change after the Fosterites took over the leadership of American communism.

Walter Reuther now became an object of communist scorn and vilification. Another prominent figure, Walter White, the African American who represented the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was denounced as a hateful betrayer of his people for supporting American foreign policy.

Once the Fosterites took over the leadership of American Communism there was a sea change. Both the black, pro-imperialist elements in the leadership of the NAACP and the right-wing pro-imperialist elements in the leadership of the American trade union movement now became subject to vitriolic denunciations from the Fosterites. In the case of the latter, this included Phillip Murray, President of the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) and Eric Johnson, the President of the American Federation of Labor.

Browder had taken over the party leadership in the 1930s when the Communist Party had faced twin dangers. Jay Lovestone represented the right danger and was expelled. The left danger was represented by J. P. Cannon, who had fallen for Trotskyism. However, now, in 1945, Browder became the new right danger, while the new left danger was castigated for left-deviationism.

After Browder was expelled by his local party branch with the approval of the National Committee, the latter issued a statement which said that the party ‘must root out all vestiges of revisionism and all rotten liberal attitudes toward Browder and conciliators of Browderism’. (P.15)

For the American Communist Party, Browder was now a complete outcast, a pariah, who had nothing to do with communism.

Shannon tells us that the new Foster leadership having ousted Browder still kept a close eye on him.

Browder had tried to retrieve the situation for himself by paying Moscow a visit in May 1946. The American Communist Party denounced Browder’s Moscow visit as a provocation by ‘a social-imperialist…an enemy of the working class…a renegade and apologist for American imperialism’.

If Browder had imaged that he could get Soviet or Stalin’s support in the struggle against Foster he was mistaken. He had made the trip to Moscow to outline his views on Soviet-American post-war co-operation. He criticised Foster’s leadership of the American party when he met Molotov; describing the type of party he thought was necessary for the United States.

Shannon informs us that ‘According to Browder, Molotov listened intently but did not indicate by word or facial expression what he thought of Browder’s position’. Molotov finally ended the interview. All Browder came away with was to be appointed as the American representative of a Soviet book publishing enterprise. However, even this small concession to Browder outraged the Fosterites, who immediately announced their intention to step up the anti-Browder campaign.

In spite of this, in July 1948 ‘Browder humiliated himself by asking his enemies to reinstate his party membership’. (P.19)

Browder’s argument was that Tito’s defection from the Soviet camp was a serious threat to communism. This was a time for communist unity because the enemy would use Browder’s expulsion from the party in their own interest.

The Fosterites refused to fall for this argument and Browder was denounced at the party’s National Convention in August 1948. We are told that ‘The delegates unanimously rejected Browder’s application for membership’. (P.19)

The campaign against the right-danger in the American Communist Party soon gave birth to a left-danger. ‘Super-leftists’ arose and the Foster leadership was itself attacked by the new ultra-leftists as revisionists. This brings to mind how the Soviet ultra-left had attacked the Stalinist leadership as revisionist. In the fall of 1946, the Fosterites initiated a series of purges against the ultra-left elements. These expelled communists formed various small sects, which fought each other before folding up.

Shannon writes that by 1948, the Fosterites had freed themselves from all opposition, but this was to no avail because when the crisis came within world communism following the death of Stalin, this set off a new round of opposition.

In the meantime, the Fosterites, although having a correct theory of American imperialism, had an incorrect perspective regarding its development in the immediate post-war years. The party had argued that ‘The United States is an imperialist country…the most aggressive empire in the world, this country displays all the features characteristic of imperialist capitalism as analysed by Lenin’. (P.23)

This theory was linked to the perspective that in the post-war years the American ruling class was heading in the direction of fascism. If this was the case, the Fosterites argued, what was need was a broad coalition of all democratic, anti-fascist peoples, against the post-war fascist programme of Wall Street.

This policy echoed the anti-fascist alliance of the 1930s people’s front period. The party aimed to woo the middle strata away from monopoly capital. However, for the Fosterites, this new coalition with the middle class social groups should not lead to the toning down of Marxism-Leninism.

On the other hand, socialism was not to be immediately on the agenda. The task was to win over millions of Americans to a socialist view.

Shannon writes that the communists knew that this was no easy task, but they had expected a post-war economic depression that would facilitate this process. But the depression, predicted by the communists did not come. What eventually did come was the long post-war boom, and Shannon argues that even as early as 1946 the mood of America was changing. ‘Anti-Communism was growing rapidly, a product of the cold war’. (P.46)

The communists saw how big business was corrupting the labour movement, ‘and the devil’s imps were the Social Democrats; big business used Social Democrats to do its dirty work in labour circles’.

The American Communist Party pointed out that ‘It is a noteworthy fact that Wall Street imperialism finds it useful and necessary to build-up Social Democratic labor leaders…for its reactionary purposes…Social Democrats pose as progressives…They are, in fact, masked reactionaries who perform their disruptive role in their own distinctive way’. (P.51)

The Fosterites were right to uphold the Marxist-Leninist view that the Social Democratic leaders were a caste, which formed the pro-imperialist leadership of the labour movement under capitalism. Working with the Social Democrats, said the Fosterites, were the Trotskyists. Soon the party was to rediscover ‘a forgotten enemy, the Vatican’. (P.51)

For the communists the last of these formed a particularly difficult problem for the party because the Roman Catholics formed a very large segment of the American working class. Nevertheless, the Communists declared that the Church of Rome was a tool of Wall street imperialism, which, like Social Democracy, aimed to divert the masses from revolution and socialism and lead them to the side of imperialism.

No Marxist would doubt that Social Democracy aims to win over the masses to the side of bourgeois rule. However, this assertion did not solve the problem of how to approach that large section of the American working class who nominally followed the Catholic faith, or indeed, any other religion.

In this respect what Shannon suggests is that the Fosterites failed to make a distinction between the leaders of the church and those who had a religious outlook.

However, Foster wrote a book titled ‘The Twilight of World Capitalism’, in which he argued that ‘The Catholic church…is a most militant champion of capitalist reaction; it is a major force in the present attempt of Wall Street imperialism to preserve the capitalist system by setting up a fascist world under American domination’.

This would suggest that Foster made some attempts to distinguish between the church and those people with religious feelings. In fact, the American Communist Party had attracted some religious people, including Black churchmen. Shannon points out that religious communists had never been important leaders in the party.

After the revisionist Browder was removed from the leadership of the American Communist Party, the new leadership around Foster began to warm to its central theme, which was that ‘The capitalists are plotting an American fascism as a prelude to an American conquest of the world’.

This view was the foundation of the Fosterite leadership. It was a thesis which found many supporters, including in Hollywood, where the party had a following. However, this thesis was not borne out by the experience of the immediate post-war years. This is not to say that a section of the American ruling class thought along such lines after the war. Today few would disagree with William Z. Foster that American monopoly capitalism is indeed making a drive for world domination.

The party’s relationship with Hollywood was an uneasy one, and this became more so when the party launched the ‘art is a weapon’ campaign, which came into conflict with the ‘art for art sake’ school, the supporters of which opposed any straight-jacketing of artistic production along party lines.

American culture in the post war years was going in a direction in which, if the communists failed to adapt, they would become increasing marginalized, a prospect which became more inevitable since it is not the role of communists to adapt to bourgeois produced culture, especially in its more commercial forms of expression.

About this point, Shannon writes that the party misread the aspirations of African Americans. ‘The party wrongly predicted the direction American Negroes were to take in their fight for the elimination of racial discrimination and pursued policies that tended to isolate it from the mainstream of the Negro movement. (PP. 58-9)

Shannon writes that the struggle for equal rights waged by African Americans after 1945 ‘has been a most significant part of social history’. (P.59)

But according to Shannon, the American Communist Party ‘has contributed almost nothing to the winning of these achievements’. Shannon argued that in 1956 the Communist Party admitted as much.

The loss of influence by the party in the black movement for equal rights surprises Shannon. Communists could always point, he says, to the outrage against democracy and decency and say to African Americans, look what white capitalists are doing to you, join us and end your degradation.

Shannon attributes African Americans’ ignoring the appeals of the communists to their good sense, as a liberal of course would. He admits that what attraction the Communist Party had for blacks was a result of practical ‘Negro work’. This meant coming to the aid of those blacks who were at the sharp end of capitalist oppression, the victim of some kind of injustice. Shannon agrees that both non-communists and anti-communists gave the communists due credit for this type of work.

Shannon’s claim that the American communist movement hardly made any contribution to the black movement struggle for equal rights is contradicted when he confesses that ‘The communists dramatised the Negro issue, whatever their purpose, and brought cases to attention that otherwise might never have been noticed beyond a few restricted circles’. (P.16)

For Shannon, the way the American communist leadership dealt with the ‘Negro issue’ contributed to alienating the party from most African American people. In the party, the question of black self-determination soon became a divisive issue. Did African Americans form a separate nation? This issue polarised the party with some arguing that the ‘southern black belt area was a separate black nation’. This gave rise to discussions about a Negro republic.

The American communists tried to adapt Stalin’s theory of the national question to American blacks. However, most African Americans ignored the communist debate around this issue. They were fighting for equal rights in American society not for a separate republic, a dubious proposition anyway, which made it hard to see how anyone could use Stalin’s writings on the nationality question to justify it.

One leading advocate of the Black Republic idea was Claudia Jones, a New Yorker, who had moved over from the West Indies. Subsequently deported, she had joined the Communist Party of the United States and argued that the Negro people in the southern black belt constituted a nation. This position, she argued, was derived from Stalin’s work: Marxism and the National and Colonial question. Stalin had defended the view that the criteria for a nation included a common language, a common history and culture, economic life and common territory. Somehow Jones had managed to make African Americans fit into these categories.

But such ideas only served to marginalize the American Communist Party even more from the black equal rights movement, especially the influential National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’, which as Shannon remarks, ‘speaks for American Negroes with more authority than any other group’. (P.66)

In 1945, the Fosterite leadership of the American Communist Party endeavouring to overcome its lack of influence with American blacks started a new campaign against what the leadership called ‘white chauvinism’ in the ranks of the party. Shannon claims that this campaign served to alienate blacks from American communism even more. They would have thought, if such a campaign was necessary then the party must indeed be full of racist white people.

Nevertheless, the Fosterites pressed forward. ‘White Chauvinism’ was the American communist term for prejudice against blacks. The leadership produced a document called ‘The Present Situation and the Next Task’, which called for ‘a vigorous struggle to root out every manifestation of open or concealed white chauvinism in our ranks’.

Shannon writes that the campaign to stamp out ‘white chauvinism’ within the American Communist Party became a fully-fledged witch-hunt, a purge with disastrous results. However, apart from indicating that this campaign made most black people wary of the party, he does not explain in any detail what these disastrous results consisted of.

In the 1940s, America was a very racist society. For most black people it was probably closer to a racist form of fascism than to democracy. The American bourgeoisie did nothing to discourage racism. Racism was useful, since it divided the slaves of capital. Since America is a racist society, the Fosterites were right to make the question of racism an issue in the party, even if they went over the top in combating what the leadership referred to as ‘white chauvinism’.

1947 was the highpoint of communist strength. After this period, the party began to decline in influence. The party had tried to increase its working class membership. Shannon informs us that a significant proportion of the membership was Jewish. The party also had supporters in the CIO national office, although this was soon to change when the cold war got under way.

Shannon recounts how the communists tried to break the mould of American politics by supporting the campaign for a third party, which would embrace progressives of all sorts, and therefore have a wider appeal than the Communist Party. Eventually the movement fell through.

The struggle between American communism and liberalism was a dominant feature of the post-war years, and as the cold war got under way, the latter became increasingly anti-communist. Facing the communists was a new organisation calling itself Americans for Democratic Action, and the Fosterites seemed to have viewed this organisation as a threat. The ADA was described as a Social Democratic plot instigated by Wall Street to prepare fascism.

This seems to have been the basic orientation of the Foster leadership in the immediate post war period, viewing everything as a preparation for fascism. With hindsight, this looks like paranoia, but even if the post war prediction about the advent of American fascism was wrong, there were reasons for the Fosterites to think in this way. Since the communists had expected a post-war depression, it is easy to show how the Fosterites could convince themselves that a section of the ruling class would turn to fascism to protect privilege and private property.

The communists argued that what was needed was a strong anti-monopoly, anti-war coalition to counter this perceived drive towards fascism, which was the most reactionary form of monopoly capitalist rule. This was part of communist support for the campaign for a third party, i.e., the Progressive Party organised around Henry Wallace, the former Vice President. Wallace was a prominent democrat, who was no communist, not even sympathetic to communist aims, but who had fallen out with the Democratic Party leadership, and could reach a wider audience than the communists, thus the latter gave him their support.

It was not long before Foster had to fight the charges that the communists were trying to take over the Progressive Party. Resentment of increasing communist control led many liberals to leave the Progressive Party. Increasingly the Wallace movement came to be seen by the liberals as a communist front. Shannon remarks that although Wallace was the most prominent non-communist in the Progressive Party he refused to act against the communists. ‘If they want to support me’, said Wallace, ‘I can’t stop them’. Wallace wanted to avoid the charge of red-baiting, although communist support could undermine his candidacy for the President.

Shannon claims that the primary reason for the decline of the Wallace movement was due to communists both at home and abroad. During 1948, the American public became increasingly anti-communist, i.e., they were aroused against communism by the ruling class and its media, so that increasingly the electorate began to identify the Wallace Progressive Party with the communists.

The venture of the communists into Third Party politics, according to Shannon, were mostly on the debit side. However, the communists stuck with the Progressive Party for another four years before they decided to dump the project. In 1949, William Z. Foster outlined what he had expected from such a party in a book dedicated to his grandson, whom Foster declared would live in a communist United States.

Foster claimed that, had the Progressive Party won the Presidential election, it would have opened the road to a People’s Democracy, i.e. a government based on a broad, democratic anti-fascist coalition. Foster argued that such a government, once in power, would either move to the left or die. If it survived it would have to move towards socialism in the same way that the People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe were doing.

Foster wrote that ‘some liberals believed that a united-front coalition would introduce a regime of “progressive capitalism” but this is a naïve and dangerous illusion’.

The Strategy outlined by the communists for the Progressive Party reveals the contradictions within the Fosterite worldview. The Progressive Party strategy was in fact a parliamentary road to socialism theory that conveniently forgot that in Eastern Europe the transition to socialism had the support not only of the working class but also the Red Army.

In 1956, Shannon writes, ‘even the communist leaders would admit publicly that their Third Party venture had been a stupid mistake’.

The American Communist Party now had to face the rise of McCarthyism, while the United States congress passed new anti-communist legislation, such as the Internal Security Act of 1950, which made provisions for the interment of communists in the event of war. All this of course served to reinforce the Fosterite view that America, in the post-war period, was heading towards fascism. However, Shannon explains that the communist campaign against war and fascism was quite ineffective, ‘their worst fears - indeed, their expectations - did not materialise’. (P. 193)

These developments, together with the Korean War in 1950, had began to polarise public opinion.

The party wanted to concentrate its attention on these developments. In 1953 Foster called a halt to the campaign against ‘white chauvinism’, declaring ‘The general idea that our Party was unable to fight for Negro rights until it first cleansed itself completely of all traces of white chauvinism…was a dangerous sectarian illusion…’

However, Shannon explains that the communists were slower and more cautious in modifying their Negro line than in changing other aspects of their position.

A new crisis for the party was the Khrushchev speech delivered in February 1956, and directed against Stalin, at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. The American communists seemed to have got details of the speech in March of the same year. Now, Shannon writes, ‘The American communists could not dismiss as capitalist lies the reports about the downgrading of Stalin’. (P. 276)

Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin led to more desertions from the party, although the Foster leadership tried to shift the issue away from the question of Stalin to the question of the party’s own record in recent years. Those who accepted Khrushchev’s line on Stalin sought an entire ‘revamping’ of the American party, while those who, although prepared to make minor concessions on Stalin, wanted no change. John Gates, the Editor of the party paper, Daily Worker, represented the first tendency, while Foster represented the latter.

In other words, there arose a split between the party and the paper. The pro-Khrushchevite group now controlled the party paper and there was not much that Foster could do about it.

Soon, however, the US government, unwittingly, came to the aid of the Foster wing of the Communist Party by raiding the offices of the party paper, claiming tax evasion. Shannon raises the possibility that Foster secretly hoped that the Federal Government would unwittingly remove the Gates thorn from their sides, as many of Gates followers believed. However, the government did not silence the Daily Worker and the failure of the national office to help the paper intensified the hard feelings between the two factions in the party, factions that had arisen as a direct consequence of Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin.

According to Shannon, the Federal Government raid on the party ‘served only to rally a great many anti-communist organisations and individuals to the party’s defence on civil libertarian grounds’. (P. 280) The American Civil Liberties Union defended the Daily Worker, so did the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, in Shannon’s words, ‘a group whose anti-communism was almost unbounded’. (P. 280)

Following the Khrushchevite attack on Stalin, there was an attempt to re-evaluate Browderism. A member of the New York State Party Committee now argued, or rather claimed, that ‘Browder made the first serious effort to apply Marxism to the American scene and to relate it to the American past and future’. (P. 292)

The Fosterites now put forward the view that left-sectarianism had led the party to overestimate the dangers of war and fascism and served to isolate the Communist Party from the labour and black movements. The new line put forward by the leadership was that although left-sectarianism was to be regarded as the main danger, the party must still maintain its vigilance against right-opportunist tendencies.

Foster was sure of Soviet backing in any inner-party struggle; he had supported the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956, following the Western backed uprising. The Soviet invasion of Hungary had cost the party many supporters. But above all these developments, what the Gates wing of the party feared the most was a split in the party, and Shannon claims that the Fosterites were able to play on Gates’ fear of a split to increase their control over the party. ‘This fear of a split gave Foster and his followers a great advantage’. (P. 323)

At the 1957 party convention, the Fosterites beamed with confidence. Not only were they backed by the Soviets, but also Gates and his supporters feared a split. The French Communist Party also stood behind the Fosterites, reaffirming their support with reference to the 1945 Duclos letter, which had denounced Browder’s openly revisionist line.

At the 1957 convention of the party, the sixteenth to be held, the battle lines were clearly drawn. The struggle was seen as one between the Fosterites versus the revisionists, the latter previously represented by Browder and now by the Gateites. Shannon tells us that the hottest debates at the convention concerned the party’s attitude towards Marxism-Leninism, and whether the party should again dissolve itself into a ‘political action association’.

It was clear at this time that the Gates revisionists wanted the dissolution of the Communist Party. Such a position represents the logical development of revisionism, as a tendency in the communist movement that represents bourgeois interests. However, the convention ended on what Shannon refers to as ‘self-conscious unity’. (P. 329) The party, Shannon writes, faded after the 1957 convention even faster than it did in 1956. Although the party maintained a façade of unity, the factional struggle between the Fosterites and the Gates wing of the party continued as before.

However, in the post convention period the Fosterites gradually gained total control of the American Communist Party. This did not happen without efforts by the Gatesites to limit the influence of Foster. After the convention, the full National Committee met to elect, by secret ballot, an executive committee of seventeen. When the ballots were eventually counted, it was found that Foster had not been placed among the first seventeen; Gates was among the seventeen. Only by enlarging the executive committee to twenty was it possible to include Foster.

The conflicts between the factions continued, with the Fosterites accusing the Gatesites of ‘white chauvinism’, when they opposed the election of Charles Loman as county organiser, but Loman, a black communist, was himself a Fosterite and even harder than Foster himself. In the uproar over ‘white chauvinism’ about thirty of Gates supporters walked out of the party.

This walking out only served to increase Foster’s control over the party. Foster could be content with the knowledge that foreign communists regarded the sixteenth convention as a victory for Marxism-Leninism over revisionism. Foster declared that the convention had rejected revisionism, and made a strong declaration of ‘proletarian internationalism’.

Revisionists continued to resign from the party in the period following the 1957 convention. A leading member, Joseph Clark, resigned from the party and from the Daily Worker in 1957. Shannon writes that Clark’s resignation created quite a stir. Clark had claimed that after twenty-eight years in the party he could no longer serve the cause of American socialism within the Communist Party. His resignation was regarded as significant because unlike others Clark had not resigned after Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin in 1956, neither did he abandon the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in the same year. Clark explained his reason for not resigning at this time as due to ‘…hopes for the cause of those opposing Stalinism within the party...’

Clark was dismissed as a revisionist, which he was, and the Fosterites were glad to see him go. The attacks against the Gatesites were stepped up and they were asked to turn way from revisionism or get out of the party.

Shannon writes that the battle between the Fosterites and the Gatesites in the American Communist Party came to a head in December 1957, and when the crisis was over the party had ‘turned the corner from one era into another’.

At the February 1958 National Committee of the party the Fosterite control of the party was undisputed, but the down side of this victory was that party membership had declined, according to Shannon, to about slightly under 3,000. In Shannon’s view, the ‘…increasing futility of party action and the events of 1956 in East Europe disillusioned the fellow travellers as well as party members’. (P.362)

In 1959, Shannon could write that the American Communist Party ‘…is almost dead as a political force’. He wrote that the conditions necessary for the party’s growth did not exist. ‘By the early 1950s the American communists had became community outcasts - and nearly outlaws.

Shannon observes that at a time when African Americans made progress in their program for first class citizenship, the communists returned to their old position of ‘self-determination for the Negro people in the southern black belt, a position which Shannon claims attracted few black militants. Basically, the position that he tries to put over is that the American Communist Party was out of step with the new cultural trends in post-war America.

The American communists’ wild estimate of the dangers of total war and domestic fascism in the immediate post-war years was a view shared by other communist parties. Although McCarthyism was in decline after 1954, this did not benefit the American Communist Party. Shannon’s view is that before the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, which saw the denunciation of Stalin, ‘… the American Communist Party was effective; after the twentieth Congress, it was impotent’.

In Shannon’s view, the final crisis of the party was not the result of “error”, or the objective situation. ‘It was precipitated entirely by the Russian denunciation of Stalin and the crushing of the Hungarian revolution’ (P. 371).

These developments affected all communist parties. The Communist Party of the USA was no exception. However, the decline of the CPUSA after the Second World War was a result of several factors, but the most important factor, acting in conjunction with all the others, was the beginning of the long-term economic recovery of post-war capitalism. No matter what the weaknesses of the Fosterite leadership was, no other group of communists were faced with the task of survival in the very heart of world imperialism.

Although written from a liberal anti-communist standpoint, Shannon does strive for a certain degree of objectivity. What results is an interesting, even colourful account of American communist politics in the early post-war years.

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