Communist Party USA

Communist Party USA (American Communist Party). A communist party in the United States which was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revolution.

The history of the CPUSA is closely related to the history of the American labor movement and the history of communist parties worldwide. Initially operating underground due to the Palmer Raids, which started during the First Red Scare, the party was influential in American politics in the first half of the 20th century.

It also played a prominent role in the history of the labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, playing a key role in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The party was unique among labor activist groups of the time in being outspokenly anti-racist and opposed to racial segregation after sponsoring the defense for the Scottsboro Boys in 1931.

The party reached the apex of its influence in U.S. politics during the Great Depression, playing a prominent role in the political landscape as a militant grassroots network capable of effectively organizing and mobilizing workers and the unemployed in support of cornerstone New Deal programs, principally Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the Works Progress Administration.

The transformative changes of the New Deal era combined with the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II created an atmosphere in which the CPUSA wielded considerable influence with about 70,000 vetted party members.

Under the leadership of Earl Browder, the party was critically supportive of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and branded communism as “20th Century Americanism.” Envisioning itself as becoming engrained within the established political structure in the post-war era, the party was dissolved in 1944 to become the ‘Communist Political Association.’

However, as Cold War hostility ensued, the party was restored but struggled to maintain its influence amidst the prevalence of McCarthyism (also known as the Second Red Scare).

Its opposition to the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine failed to gain traction, and its endorsed candidate Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party under-performed in the 1948 presidential election. The party itself imploded following the public condemnation of Stalin by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, with membership sinking to a few thousand who were increasingly alienated from the rest of the American Left for their support of the Soviet Union.

The CPUSA received significant funding from the Soviet Union and crafted its public positions to match those of Moscow. The CPUSA also used a covert apparatus to assist the Soviets with their intelligence activities in the U.S. and utilized a network of front organizations to shape public opinion. The CPUSA opposed Mikhail Gorbachev‘s glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union. As a result, major funding from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ended in 1991.

In 1919, only months after its founding, the Communist Party claimed to have 50,000 to 60,000 members. Its members also included anarchists and other radical leftists. At the time, the older and more moderate Socialist Party of America, suffering from criminal prosecutions for its antiwar stance during World War I, had declined to 40,000 members.

The sections of the Communist Party’s International Workers Order (IWO) organized for communism around linguistic and ethnic lines, providing mutual aid and tailoring cultural activities to an IWO membership that peaked at 200,000 at its height.

During the Great Depression, some Americans were attracted by the visible activism of Communists on behalf of a wide range of social and economic causes, including the rights of African Americans, workers, and the unemployed. The Communist Party played a significant role in the resurgence of organized labor in the 1930s.

Others, alarmed by the rise of the Falangists in Spain and the Nazis in Germany, admired the Soviet Union’s early and staunch opposition to fascism. Party membership swelled from 7,500 at the start of the decade to 55,000 by its end.

Party members also rallied to the defense of the Spanish Republic during this period after a nationalist military uprising moved to overthrow it, resulting in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, along with leftists throughout the world, raised funds for medical relief while many of its members made their way to Spain with the aid of the party to join the Lincoln Brigade, one of the International Brigades.

The party was active in the isolationist America First Committee.

In August 1940, after NKVD agent Ramón Mercader killed Trotsky with an ice axe, Browder perpetuated Moscow‘s line that the killer, who had been dating one of Trotsky‘s secretaries, was a disillusioned follower.

The party attempted to recover with its opposition to the Vietnam War during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but its continued uncritical support for an increasingly stultified and militaristic Soviet Union further alienated it from the rest of the left-wing in the U.S., which saw this supportive role as outdated and even dangerous. At the same time, the party’s aging membership demographics distanced it from the New Left.

With the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and his effort to radically alter the Soviet economic and political system from the mid-1980s, the Communist Party finally became estranged from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself.

In 1989, the Soviet Communist Party cut off major funding to the Communist Party USA due to its opposition to glasnost and perestroika.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party held its convention and attempted to resolve the issue of whether the party should reject Marxism–Leninism. The majority reasserted the party’s now purely Marxist outlook, prompting a minority faction which urged social democrats to exit the now reduced party. The party has since adopted Marxism–Leninism within its program. In 2014, the new draft of the party constitution declared: “We apply the scientific outlook developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others in the context of our American history, culture, and traditions.”

The 30th National Convention was held in Chicago in 2014

The Communist Party is based in New York City. From 1922 to 1988, it published Morgen Freiheit, a daily newspaper written in Yiddish. For decades, its West Coast newspaper was the People’s World and its East Coast newspaper was The Daily World. The two newspapers merged in 1986 into the People’s Weekly World.

The People’s Weekly World has since become an online only publication called People’s World. It has since ceased being an official Communist Party publication as the party does not fund its publication.The party’s former theoretical journal Political Affairs is now also published exclusively online, but the party still maintains International Publishers as its publishing house.

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In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev publicly condemned of Stalin.

Notable Members After Stalin Condemnation:

Notable Members Before Stalin Condemnation: David Luce, Betty Millard