Communist Party USA

From Metapedia

The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States. For approximately the first half of the 20th Century it was the largest and most widely influential communist party in the country, and played a defining role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, originating or helping to originate most of the country's major industrial unions (which would later cleanse themselves of communists with the Smith Act) and pursuing intense anti-racist activity in workplaces and city communities throughout this first part of its existence. Simultaneously the CPUSA survived the Palmer Raids, the first Red Scare, and many similar attempts at suppression of communist activity by the Government of the United States through the end of World War II.

By the 1950s, however, the combined effects of the second Red Scare, McCarthyism, the Secret Speech, and the Cold War began to break apart the party's internal structure and confidence. Revelations that the CPUSA had become heavily involved in recruitment and espionage activities for the Soviet KGB and GRU also contributed heavily to government prosecution efforts, because it cast the Party not only as subversive, but also as a "foreign" agent. Members who did not end up in prison for party activities tended either to disappear quietly from its ranks or to adopt more moderate political positions that were at odds with the CPUSA's party line.

This pattern meant that the CPUSA had, by the end of that decade, effectively been eliminated as a revolutionary opposition force; it had transformed its militant revolutionary line into a more evolutionary one, partly as self-defense from persecution but also echoing "peaceful coexistence". By the early 1960s this conciliatory shift led to dozens of angry breakaways by more militant CP members who, as the New Left, continued to follow the idea of armed class war and generally turned to Mao Zedong for inspiration. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 led to further disillusionment and defections.

Although still proclaiming themselves advocates of a socialist revolution, the party today continues to call for a "peaceful transition to socialism" in the U.S. "wherever possible." The party's constitution makes "advocacy of… force and violence or terrorism" a reason for expulsion from the party.^[1]

The major leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement were very careful to keep communists at arm's length for fear of also being branded communist, and the peace movement and the New Left also continued their rejections of the CPUSA for what they saw as the party's bureaucratic rigidity and for its steadfastly close association with the Soviet Union.

With continued erosion of what little mass support remained, in the late 1980s the party finally became estranged even from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself. Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika was unpopular with the CPUSA, leading to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union cutting off its support of the CPUSA in 1989. The CPUSA's 1991 convention was consumed by whether the collapse of the Soviet Union should mean that the Party reject Leninism, and after the Party majority reasserted its classic Marxist-Leninist line, the faction urging social democracy left and established itself as the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

The CPUSA has never regained the influence it wielded before the McCarthy period and no longer espouses the ideology of its earlier days. However, it continues to exist as an organization under the leadership of Sam Webb, who asserts that the number of registered members is over 15,000.[1] The CPUSA is based in New York City, its newspaper is the People's Weekly World, and its monthly magazine is Political Affairs Magazine. The Party's stated goal is to achieve a free, prosperous, and peaceful society free of racism, sexism, homophobia, and exploitation, in which all people have the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential. Members from Gus Hall's period still remain within the party's ranks.