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En cours de traduction, l'article passe en anglais au milieu, la limite avançant avec la traduction.
Le Parti Communiste des États-Unis d'Amérique (Communist Party of the United States of America, CPUSA) est un des groupes marxistes-léninistes des États-Unis d'Amérique.
Pendant de nombreuses années (1959-2000), il fut dirigé par Gus Hall. L'ex-membre la plus connue du CPUSA est sans doute Angela Davis. Le dirigeant actuel du parti est Sam Webb.
| Sommaire |
En janvier 1919, Lénine invita la mouvance de gauche du Parti Socialiste d'Amérique à rejoindre l'Internationale communiste. Durant le printemps 1919, cette même mouvance du Parti Socialiste, grossie d'une large affluence de nouveaux membres venant de pays engagés dans la Révolution russe, se préparait à usurper le contrôle du parti à la plus petite mais non moins gouvernante mouvance de socialistes modérés. Un référendum pour la jonction avec le Komintern fut approuvé avec 90% de oui mais les résultats furent étouffés par la direction en place. Des élections internes pour le Comité national exécutif se soldèrent par l'élection de 12 représentants issus de la mouvance de gauche sur 15. Des demandes furent formulées pour metre à pied les modérés du parti. Les modérés en place ripostèrent en éliminant plusieurs organisations à l'échelle d'États, une demi douzaine de fédérations de langues, et beaucoup de sections locales, en tout les deux tiers des membres. Ils convoquèrent alors une assemblée générale extraordinaire qui se tint à Chicago le 30 août 1919.
Des plans furent conçus par la mouvance de gauche pour achever de prendre le contrôle du parti lors d'une assemblée en juin,
l'Assemblée générale de la mouvance de gauche, mais les fédérations de langues, des organisations socialistes
indépendantes de zones engagées dans la Révolution Russe, qui furent rejointes par Charles Ruthenberg et
Louis Fraina, se détachèrent de
cette idée et choisirent de former leur propre parti, fondant le Parti Communiste d'Amérique, le 2 septembre
1919 dans une assemblée séparée à Chicago.
Pendant ce temps, les plans conçus par JohnReed et Benjamin Gitlow pour anéantir l'assemblée du Parti Socialiste avancèrent. Il était prévu que des
délégations venant de parties du parti qui avaient été renvoyées arriveraient en avance et exigeraient leur leur participation.
Ayant eu vent du tuyau, les modérés prirent soin de cette maneuvre en appellant la police qui évacua obligemment les partisants
de la Mouvance de Gauche du bâtiment. Ce qui restait des délégués de la Mouvance de Gauche quitta l'assemblée et, se joignant aux
délégués expulsés, forma le Parti Travailleur Communiste le 1er
septembre 1919. Sous pressions de Internationale communiste, ces deux partis communistes fusionnèrent officiellement à une AG qui
se teint à Woodstock, New York en mai 1921. Seulement 10% des membres
du parti nouvellement créé parlaient couramment anglais.
Depuis le début, le CPUSA fut attaqué par les gouvernements d'états et fédéraux, et plus tard par le FBI. Initiallement, il y avait une réaction forte des États-Unis par rapport à la Révolution russe et les évènements associés en Allemagne et en Hongrie. Cela conduisit aux raids de Palmer ou Peur Rouge fin 1919 et en janvier 1920, quand A. Mitchell Palmer, Procureur Général, sous la juritiction du , fit arrêter des miliers de membres du Parti. Même si certains furent relachés, beaucoup furent expulsés vers leurs pays d'origine qui étaient alors mêlés aux suites de la Révolution Russe.
Par conséquent, le Parti Communiste fut forcé à se cacher et subit des changements de noms pour éviter les arrestations. Après l'englobement du Conseil des Travailleurs — un autre groupe issu du parti socialiste — la couverture officielle pour le Parti Communiste, illégal, remplaça peu à peu le Parti Caché. Malgré un effort désespéré de certains membres du parti pour garder une activité illégale sur le principe, la Couverture et le Parti Caché furent complètement fusionnés, le nouveau parti étant appellé officiellement le Parti des Travailleurs Communistes. Chose notable, le parti engloba aussi une organisations de socialistes Afro-Américains appellée la Confrérie de Sang Africain, dont certain membres deviendraient importants au travail communiste parmi les Afro-Américains.
Après avoir fusionné dans la légalité, le parti développa nombre de petits groupes plus ou moins stables à l'intérieur de sa hiérarchie. Il y avait en premier la faction autour du membre du bureau fédéral Charles Ruthenberg, qui était largement organisé par son partisan, Jay Lovestone. Contre cette faction se dressait la réunion Foster-Cannon, dirigée par le spécialiste des relations avec le Syndicat du Commerce, William Z. Foster, et Japes.P Cannon, dirigeant de l'Union Syndicale du Commerce. La base de la première faction était composée des fédérations de langues étrangères du Parti, tandis que la seconde trouvait ses partisans parmi les travailleurs américain d'origines.
In 1925 Charles Ruthenberg and William Z. Foster led mutually hostile factions within the party. Comintern representative Sergei Gusev ordered the majority Foster faction to surrender control to Ruthenberg's faction.; Foster complied.
Ruthenberg died in 1927 and his ally, Jay Lovestone, succeeded him as party secretary. The party's status as a section of the Comintern ensured that factional struggles in the leading party of the Comintern, the ruling Russian section, would impact on the Communist Party in America. Therefore the attendance of party members at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928 was certain to have repercussions. Repercussions which would surprise especially those who sought to utilise their connections to leading circles in the Comintern to their advantage in the American party such as Cannon and Lovestone.
Following the disputes described above a new party leadership was installed headed by Earl Browder formerly a subordinate of William Foster. It has been speculated that Foster himself was passed over for various reasons but his ill health in this period undoubtedly played a role. The first part of Browder's leadership coincided with the so called Third Period of renewed revolutionary offensive as the period after 1928 was described by the Comintern. This Third Period meant that other left wingers were described by the communists as being social-fascists and any alliance with them was therefore rejected.
In the depths of the Great Depression, which the Third Period ran in parallel with, this led the CP to attempt to launch new unions unconnected to the older unions affiliated to the American Federation of Labor. This policy of dual unions had however previously been decisively opposed by the CP as adventurist and ultra-left. Although the new unions were grouped in the Foster led Trade Union Education League now renamed the Trade Union Unity League, Foster himself was ill through most of this period and took little part in the work. None of the unions formed amounted to very much numerically although many helped to form cadre who were later to take part in the great upsurge of the 1930s.
By 1932 the worst excesses of the Third Period and the Great Depression were somewhat lessened and with the election of Roosevelt union organising began an upsurge. Initially this saw new union members drafted into 'federal' union locals by the AFL, which soon proved to be a failure. Therefore the strategy of the United Mine Workers, led by John L. Lewis, to unionise those basic industries related to their own received great support both from rank and file unionists and the new Committee of Industrial Organizations. Many of these new unions such as the Steel Workers Organising Committee and, most importantly, the United Auto Workers hired communists as local organisers largely due to the work they had been doing for years previously. In addition the CP dissolved its own small dual unions into the new CIO affiliated unions thus the Auto Workers Union was wound up with its members joing the UAW.
In addition to the industries and unions named above communists were important to union organising drives in rubber, longshore and among garment workers. Even farm workers were organised by party members and the membership of the party grew considerably. Communists organized the unemployed and fought successfully for unemployment insurance and what eventually became social security. They fought against evictions and housing repossessions. The CPUSA was the only political party at that time that explicitly denounced racism and fought for reforms in that area of US social life.
Key to this turn was the rejection by the Comintern of the Third Period and the adoption of the Popular Front policy which in America meant that the party sought unity with forces to its right. Earl Browder offered to run as Norman Thomas' running mate on a joint Socialist Party-Communist Party ticket in the 1936 presidential election but Thomas rejected this overture.
The Popular Front policy not only meant attempts to cooperate with the Socialists, who had previously been fiercely denounced as « social fascists', but also with liberals and even the Democratic Party. Indeed while standing its own candidates for office the CPUSA pursued a policy of representing the Democratic Party as the lesser evil in elections. Intellectually the Popular Front period saw the development of a strong communist influence in intellectual and artistic life. This was often through various party influenced or controlled organisations or, as they were pejoratively known, »fronts."
It was during the Popular Front period that party members rallied to the defence of the Spanish Republic after a fascist military uprising tried to overthrow it resulting in the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939). Throughout the world, leftists rallied to the defence of the Spanish Republic, raising funds for medical relief and, in many cases, volunteering to fight for the Republic. The CPUSA was no exception to this phenomenon. 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 consisting of American citizens. Among its other achievements, the Lincoln Brigade was the first American military force to include blacks and whites integrated on an equal basis.
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People_Demand_Peace.jpeg
Washington Commonwealth Federation newspaper
The Washington Commonwealth Federation newspaper after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact
The CPUSA was adamantly opposed to fascism during the Popular Front period. In fact, the Popular Front was motivated by a fear of
fascism, and the possible threat to the Soviet Union that Nazi Germany posed. The signing of a non-aggression pact with Hitler (the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact) in 1939 meant that the CPUSA turned its focus from anti-fascism to advocacy of
peace. The CPUSA even went so far as to accuse Winston Churchill
and Franklin Delano Roosevelt of provoking
aggression against Hitler. The CPUSA went so far as to denounce the Polish government as fascist after the German and Soviet invasion. In loyal, indeed abject, allegiance
to Russia this policy was again changed after the Soviet Union was attacked with the launch of Operation Barbarossa on
June 22,1941. So sudden was this change that CPUSA members of the UAW negotiating on behalf of the union literally changed
their position from being in favour of strike action to opposing it in the same negotiating session.
Throughout World War Two, the CPUSA went from pursuing a policy of militant, if bureaucratic, trade unionism to opposing strike actions at all costs. In fact the leadership of the CPUSA were among the most patriotic elements during these years advocating the No Strike Pledge and social peace. It seems that Earl Browder actually anticipated a prolonged period of social harmony after the war: in order to better integrate the communist movement into American life the party was officially dissolved in 1944 and replaced by a Communist Political Association. After the war, however, the international communist movement swung to the left. Browder found himself isolated when a critical letter from the leader of the French Communist Party received wide circulation. As a result of this, he was retired and replaced by William Z. Foster, who would remain the senior leader of the party until his own retirement in 1958.
With the end of the war, the CPUSA was reformed under Foster's leadership. In line with other communist parties world wide, the CPUSA also swung to the left and as a result of this experienced a brief period in which a number of internal critics argued for a more leftist stance than the leadership was willing to countenance. The result of this was the expulsion of some handfuls of « premature anti-revisionists. » Few of these were recruited to the Trotskyist movement, although this might have seemed the logical destination for them. William Dunne, Foster's former close ally, and brother of three leading members of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, was one of the comrades to urge a more militant policy. Others included a small grouping in New York City who would have some influence on the later anti-revisionist milieu.
More important for the party was the renewal of state persecution of the CPUSA and, crucially, the turning away of allies within the trades unions. Losing allies within the unions and facing McCarthyite attacks, party militants were systematically weeded out of the unions by various ruses, including loyalty pledges. The raiding of CPUSA-influenced unions by other unions reduced their support base, further isolating them. À number of unions were decimated by this offensive, as radicals and progressives unconnected to the party were sacked, including the Trotskyist arch-enemies of the party. In large parts of the country, members of the party were actually forced underground as the party moved back to functioning as a semi-legal organisation.
When the Communist Party was formed in 1919 the United States government was engaged in prosecution of Socialists who had opposed World War I and military service. This persecution was continued in 1919 and January, 1920 in the Palmer Raids or the Red Scare. Many ordinary members of the Party were arrested and deported; leaders were prosecuted and in some cases sentenced to prison terms. In the late 1930s with the authorization of President Franklin Roosevelt the FBI began investigating both domestic Nazis and Communists. The Smith Act which outlawed advocacy of violent overthrow of the government was passed in 1940.
It was during 1940 to 1949 that Herbert Philbrick acting as a citizen volunteer joined the Communist Party while meanwhile transmitting a record of his activities and contacts to the FBI. He surfaced, together with a few others, at the trial under the Smith Act of the leadership of the Communist Party in 1949, United States v. Foster, et. al..
Discoveries of instances of Soviet espionage and Communist infiltration of government and industry resulted in great apprehension during the postwar period about Communist activities [1] . Much of this was justified but particularly in the case of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk there were excesses. Such excessive suspicion and persecution became known as McCarthyism and resulted in a backlash; see Reaction to McCarthyism.
In 1948, Eugene Dennis, William Z. Foster and other CPUSA leaders were arrested under the Alien Registration Act. This law, passed by Congress in 1940, made it illegal for anyone in the United States « to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government ».
The case began in March, 1948. It was difficult for the prosecution to prove that the twelve men had broken the Alien Registration Act, as none of the defendants had ever openly called for violence or had been involved in accumulating weapons for a proposed revolution. The prosecution therefore relied on passages from the work of Karl Marx and other revolutionary figures from the past.
Although the CPUSA vehemently opposed prosecution of its members under the Smith Act in 1948, when Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) became the first to be prosecuted under the Smith Act in 1941, the CPUSA leadership supported the prosecution and convictions. This can be traced to the party's subservience to Moscow and Stalin’s hatred of Léon Trotsky and his followers. The SWP in stark contrast sought to defend the Communists.
Another strategy of the prosecution was to ask the defendants questions about other party members. Unwilling to provide information on others, they were put in prison and charged with contempt of court. The trial dragged on for eleven months and eventually, the judge, Harold Medina, who some say made no attempt to disguise his own feelings about the defendants, sent the party's lawyers to prison for contempt of court.
After a nine month trial the leaders of the Communist Party were found guilty of violating the Alien Registration Act and sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. They appealed to the Supreme Court but on June 4, 1951, the judges ruled, 6-2, that the conviction was legal.
This decision was followed by the arrests of 46 more communists during the summer of 1951. This included Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was also convicted for contempt of court after telling the judge that she would not identify people as Communists as she was unwilling « do degrade or debase myself by becoming an informer ». She was also found guilty of violating the Alien Registration Act and sentenced to two years in prison.
The 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Secret Speech of Nikita Khrushchev to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union criticising Stalin had a cataclysmic effect on the CPUSA [2] . Membership plummeted and the leadership briefly faced a challenge from a loose grouping led by Daily Worker editor John Gates, which wished to democratise the party. Perhaps the greatest single blow dealt to the party in this period was the loss of the Daily Worker, published since 1924, which was suspended in 1958 due to falling circulation. Most of the critics would depart from the party demoralised, but remained active in progressive causes often working harmoniously with party members. This diaspora rapidly came to provide the audience for publications like the National Guardian and Monthly Review, which were to be important in the development of the New Left in the 1960s.
The post-1956 upheavals in the CPUSA also saw the advent of a new leadership around former steel worker Gus Hall. Hall's views were very much those of his mentor Foster, but the younger man was to be more rigorous in ensuring the party was completely orthodox than the older man in his last years. Therefore, while remaining critics who wished to liberalise the party were expelled, so too, in 1961, were other critics who sought to return the party to an even more stringent form of Stalinism. Never a coherent or organised faction, these critics would include elements on both coasts who would come together to form the Progressive Labor Movement in the early 1960's. Through Progressive Labor, which soon adopted the title of party, former CPUSA cadre would come to play a role in many of the numerous Maoist organisations of the 1970s. Jack Shulman, Foster's secretary, who also played a role in these organization, was not expelled but resigned.
In the 1970s, the CPUSA managed to grow in membership to about 25,000 members, despite the exodus of numerous Anti-Revisionist and Maoist groups from its ranks. However, in 1984, seeing the onslaught of Ronald Reagan's anti-Communist administration and decreased CPUSA membership, Gus Hall chose to end the CPUSA's nation-wide electoral campaigns, and the CPUSA has endorsed the Democratic Party in every national election ever since. The CPUSA still runs candidates for local office.
Throughout most of its history the Communist Party has been under pressure from the United States government, especially the FBI, and was heavily infiltrated. Following the McCarthy years, membership and activities of the Communist Party were kept secret with very few visible members, although many community leaders throughout the United States were affiliated with the Party.
From 1959 until 1989, when Gus Hall attacked the initiatives taken by Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the Party received a substantial subsidy from the Soviet Union. (There is at least one receipt signed by Gus Hall in the KGB archives. [3] ) Starting with $75,000 in 1959 this was increased gradually to $3 million in 1987. This substantial amount reflected the Party's subservience to the Moscow line in contrast to the French and Italian Parties whose Eurocommunism deviated from the orthodox line. The cutoff of funds in 1989 resulted in a financial crisis resulting in cutting back publication in 1990 of the Party newspaper, the People's Daily World to weekly publication, the People's Weekly World. [References for this section are provided below.]
Communist party members consider Party membership an honor and often work very hard toward realization of the idealistic goals of communism. Generally the life of a Communist is organized around Party activities with the expectation that they will in a disciplined way advance the goals of the Party.
Like most political parties, Communists have often participated in the organization of independent organizations (front groups) which support some aspect of their platform or serve organizing goals. In addition, Communist Party members, working together within an organization such as a labor union proceeding skillfully, were often able, together with others who supported them (or at least did not actively oppose them), to rise to leadership positions and in some cases to dominate the organization. In some cases, especially in labor organizations such as the Screen Actors Guild this practice resulted in a backlash as more conservative members such as Ronald Reagan [4] competed for control of the organization. Many conservatives opportunistically used red-baiting to attack and force the expulsion of Communists from union leadership and even their jobs.
With the declassification of the FBI's files on the CPUSA, Russian archives holding the records of the Communist International and the CPUSA, and decrypted World War II Soviet messages between KGB offices in the United States and Moscow, also known as the Venona Cables, the extent of the CPUSA's involvement of espionage is now becoming public knowledge. The USSR covertly subsidized the CPUSA from its foundation in 1919 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Releases from the Comintern archives show that all national Communist parties which conformed to the Soviet line were funded in the same fashion. From the Communist point of view this international funding arose from the internationalist nature of communism itself; fraternal assistance was considered the duty of Communists in any one country to give aid to their comrades in other countries.
Documentation released since 1991 from former Soviet states confirms suspicions that Soviet money continued to flow into the United States and buy influence within the CPUSA. Funding paid organizers, published newspapers and other Communist materials, and supported a variety of fraternal, educational and Union activities influenced by the CPUSA. Sometimes these funds were transferred as unspecified subsidies, but often they were earmarked by the Comintern for various uses. While the prominence and activity of the CPUSA was greatly reduced after the 1950s, the recently released documents show some transfers of Soviet money occurring as late as 1987. Gus Hall requested two million dollars for the publication of the Daily Worker and the rental fees for the CPUSA headquarters.
Also, it is now known that on April 10, 1943 KGB agent and New York resident Vassili M. Zarubin met CPUSA official Steve Nelson in Oakland and discussed espionage. Even Robert Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, when pressed on PBS’s Frontline, admitted the possibility that his father may have participated in espionage after reading Venona transcripts which spoke of Julius Rosenberg's meeting with KGB and NKVD agents. However, Meeropol argues in his book, An Execution in the Family (St. Martin's Press, 2003, ISBN 0312306369), that Venona completely exonerated his mother, and that in any event both of his parents were killed for crimes they did not commit. David Greenglass, who is indicated in the Venona transcripts as a greater espionage figure than Julius Rosenberg, was not tried or convicted after he named his sister Ethel and Julius as spies.
Theodore Alvin Hall, a Harvard trained physicist and CPUSA member began passing information on the atomic bomb to the Soviets soon after he was hired at Los Alamos at age 19. Hall, who was known as Mlad by his KGB handlers, escaped prosecution. Hall's wife, aware of his espionage, claims that their KGB handler had advised them to plead innocence, like the Rosenberg’s did, if formally charged. Historian Ronald Radosh questions whether Joseph Stalin would have given Kim Il Sung the green light to start the Korean War had the Soviet Union not possessed atomic weapons thus sparing the millions of lives lost in the conflict. Conversely, historians of the Koren conflict wonder if the US would have backed Douglas MacArthur's plans to drop an atomic bomb on China (thus possibly causing millions of deaths) had the USSR not had nuclear weapons of its own.
The current National Chair is Sam Webb. The newspaper is the People's Weekly World. The monthly journal is Political Affairs.
