The CPUSA is a party that for decades, while subordinating itself to the petty-bourgeois bureaucratic caste in the former Soviet Union, has tried to pass itself off as the legitimate bearer of the legacy of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and as an organization that aspires to lead the working class to take power in the United States.

In a series of articles published in the CPUSA's newspaper, the People's Weekly World, its theoretical journal Political Affairs, and on a web site where preconvention articles are posted, leaders of the organization over the past year have stated their decision to alter or set aside basic Marxist conceptions of the class struggle and party building.

These shifts have accelerated swiftly on the heels of the death last October of longtime CPUSA national chairperson Gus Hall. The Hall wing of the CP leadership was deeply imbued for more than a half century with the party's Stalinist course of class collaboration on a national and international scale. Since the party's new officers were announced in the People's Weekly World in the spring of 2000, they have more and more openly repudiated the party's stated adherence to the need to build a party in the United States along Bolshevik lines. Once Hall was out of the way, new CPUSA chairman Sam Webb and others in the leadership organized several meetings that registered the party's decisive weakening and accelerated turn away from even posturing as a Bolshevik organization.  
 
Lenin 'too stiff'
In a March 2000 document titled, "Class, Class Struggle, and Class Consciousness," published in Political Affairs, Webb states that Lenin's concept of the party and the working class was "too stiff." Webb says Lenin was wrong when he wrote in What Is To Be Done? that "the working class by its own efforts could only develop trade union consciousness." What is To Be Done? written in 1902, was one of several works by Lenin that were part of the struggle within the vanguard of the working class in tsarist Russia to forge a disciplined, revolutionary centralist party of worker-bolsheviks capable of leading the fight for political power.

Lenin explained that the "history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc." He adds later, "Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes" (emphasis in the original).

Webb tips his hat to the idea that "industrial concentration"--organizing party members to work and carry out politics in targeted industries-- "remains a cornerstone of our Party's work." During the decade before his death, Hall--who like many of the CP leaders of his generation had experience in industrial union struggles of the 1930s and '40s--had repeatedly pointed to the growing problems the party was having in organizing its members to get industrial union jobs and do political work in the industrial unions.

Webb rejects what he calls the CPUSA's long-standing explanation for industrial concentration: that the aim "is to build the Party among industrial workers" and that "the purpose of our concentration policy is to focus on the struggles of workers in basic industry." He calls "both conceptions of our policy somewhat narrowly constructed."

In a report in July 2000 to the party's National Board, Scott Marshall, vice chair of the CPUSA, said the leadership is "not prepared to lay out a plan of concentration." He adds: "How will we have a concentration policy that not only fits workers in manufacturing but helps to bring around this key sector of the class, the vast explosive numbers of workers in the service and public sectors?"  
 
Class struggle 'not the only causal factor'
In his report, Webb, without stating openly what he is doing, rejects the statement by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels at the opening of the Communist Manifesto that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." According to Webb, the "class struggle is the main thread in historical development, but it is not the only thread, it is not the only causal factor."

"The historical process," the CPUSA national chairman says, "is exceedingly complicated and other struggles leave their imprint on history's record as well." He adds that "only at a high level of theoretical abstraction does the class struggle appear in pure form, does it dance on the stage of history untouched and untainted by the world swirling around it."

A report in Political Affairs on the CP's December 2000 Central Committee meeting quotes Webb: "No one is challenging the revolutionary role of the working class, or the strategic alliance of labor and the racially oppressed or the predatory and parasitic danger of imperialism, or the necessity of socialism. But even these concepts have to undergo some modification in a changing world.... Our concepts are not set in stone."

CPUSA organization secretary Elena Mora, in a report on the May National Committee meeting reported in the People's Weekly World, added a "few words about socialism" to her remarks. "We have not changed our minds in any way about the need for socialism," she reminded the meeting. "But the world has changed greatly, and even if it hadn't, I think our Party needs to greatly refresh and strengthen how we see socialism, how we advocate it, how we understand the path to it, and most of all how we see its connection with present-day struggles." For CP members "It is still an uphill battle to portray socialism as American," Mora adds, "as democratic, as an option to our class and people."  
 
CP's new orientation
The reports and pre-convention discussion articles point the party in the direction of deepening an orientation toward bourgeois trade unionists, and social democratic and centrist political forces. Webb says in his report that the party is still shaped "by the sectarian policies of the Communist movement in its formative period." Today, "the impact of globalization and the assault of the extreme right" are having an effect on "social democratic-minded leaders" such as the John Sweeney leadership of the AFL-CIO. Webb adds that this "section of the labor movement is shedding not all at once, but shedding nonetheless, concepts that held them back from mass struggle" opening up "possibilities for broad unity and radical change."

Webb points to examples of mobilizations he sees at the forefront of struggles today, such as the protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, which the top layers of the trade union officialdom participated in and used, along with other organizations, to press their American nationalist perspectives; the pro-gun control "Million Mom March"; and what he calls other "anticorporate" and "anti-far-right" actions.

The CP's nationalist perspective was featured in the People's Weekly World in March, in an article on the crisis of the steel industry. The CP urged the government to "Rebuild with American steel," backing the protectionist campaign waged by the steel industry and top officials of the United Steelworkers of America. The paper is also promoting the Rebuilding America's Infrastructure Act, sponsored by Congressman Dennis Kucinich. The measure claims "illegal steel dumping" is responsible for "the recent string of bankruptcies and mill closings of steel companies." It advocates no federal monies be allocated for infrastructure projects unless they meet requirements of the Buy America Act.

Referring to the Seattle demonstrations, Webb said, "Perhaps no one appreciates the diverse nature of this movement more than the new leadership of the AFL-CIO. Since their watch began in 1995, this leadership has shown unusual understanding of the entangled nature of class and social struggles."  
 
Decline of book publishing
In the many pages of reports and preconvention discussion articles, it is hard to find mention of publishing and distributing books by communist leaders such as Marx, Engels, and Lenin, or producing Marxist analysis of current political developments to be broadly available for working people. The CPUSA had, through its relations with Progress Publishers in Moscow before the fall of the Soviet Union, distributed basic works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin through International Publishers in the United States. The publishing house also produced a wide range of books and pamphlets. Supporting such a publishing effort now is not among the priorities discussed in the documents leading up to the convention. In fact, International Publishers has published only a handful of new titles recently--none dealing with pressing questions of the class struggle in the United States or the world today.

The decline of book publishing and distribution efforts has been going on for a number of years. In a report published in the December 1996 Political Affairs, party chairman Hall, in discussing the financial challenges the party faced, complained that "notwithstanding the importance and benefits of having a Party publishing house, the fact is the Party does not get any financial benefits" from International Publishers.

Webb says that the CPUSA has for too long stood aside from the struggles for women, for gay rights, and other developments, "labeling them middle class, petit bourgeois, or social democratic." Nonetheless, several recent articles by CP leaders continue the party's reactionary glorification of the family and political support to bourgeois forces in the women's rights struggle.

In a piece published in Political Affairs responding to letters from party members, Webb says it is "hard to envision, for example, a successful challenge to the political ascendancy of the ultra right in our nation without the full measure of involvement of women as child bearers, care givers for the young and elderly, community activists, workers, trade unionists, and women."

In March the party held a conference in Chicago on Women's Equality and the Struggle for Democracy. In a report to the meeting, CPUSA leader Dee Myles said in regard to abortion that the "most advanced position on this question is that which says the right of choice is a health-care issue."

In contrast, in arguing that the right to abortion is in the interests of all working people, communists champion this struggle--as do tens of thousands of other fighters for women's rights--as the right of women to control their own bodies: a precondition to women's full integration into economic, social, and political life.  
 
Original Communist Party
The original Communist Party in the United States was founded in 1919 by working-class revolutionists who were inspired by and determined to emulate on U.S. soil the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia. But by the latter 1920s a rising bureaucratic layer in the state and party apparatus in the Soviet Union, whose chief spokesperson became Joseph Stalin, began to systematically defend its own privileged, middle-class existence against the interests of workers and peasants in Russia and internationally.

This petty-bourgeois social caste gained political dominance as a result of the international isolation stemming from the defeat of other revolutionary struggles for power such as in Germany; a three-year civil war organized by the landlords, capitalists, and remnants of the tsarist regime; the devastation caused by the imperialist armies that invaded the country in a drive to overthrow the world's first socialist revolution; the economic backwardness of Russia at the time; and the fact that tens of thousands of the most advanced workers and peasants gave their lives in these battles to defend their revolutionary conquests.

While the nationalized property relations and fundamental social conquests of the 1917 revolution were not overturned, the bureaucratic stratum carried out a political counterrevolution. It reversed the internationalist perspective of the Bolsheviks under Lenin's leadership and pursued a class-collaborationist, national socialist course at home and abroad. Thousands of communist workers who sought to continue Lenin's course inside the Soviet Union were imprisoned, murdered, or died in work camps.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Communist parties around the world had been turned into a foreign policy instrument of the counterrevolutionary regime in Moscow. In the United States, many communists were expelled from the party as they came to oppose the devastating consequences of Stalin's course. Among those were revolutionists who, expelled in 1928, formed a new organization--which later became the Socialist Workers Party--to continue the fight to build a Bolshevik party.

For decades, the CPUSA and parties like it around the world acted under the political direction of the Kremlin. What they passed off as Marxism before working people was simply the ideological rationalizations for the reactionary course of the bureaucratic regime. It was a counterfeit. While carrying out a negation of the communist course of the Bolsheviks, the Stalinist parties continued to claim the mantle of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. As the dominant current in the workers movement, backed by a state power in Moscow, the Stalinists won the best working class, farmer, and other fighters and destroyed them as revolutionists.

Moscow and its international apparatus did everything in their power to block the development of revolutionary and communist organizations around the world. From the mid- to late 1920s, its policies were a disaster for revolutionary struggles in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, leading to historic defeats.

In Germany, for example, the fascists took power without mass resistance because of the CP's refusal to form a united front with the Social Democratic Party. Their course subverted revolutionary opportunities for socialist revolution in France, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere prior to and following World War II. Those who sought to chart a revolutionary course--or simply refused to subordinate the struggle to Moscow's dictates--were attacked as opponents of Marxism and socialism and often killed by the international Stalinist murder machine.  
 
Decline of CPUSA
The decline of the Stalinized Communist Party in the United States has been going on for some decades. In The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, SWP leader Jack Barnes wrote that at the end of World War II--during which the CPUSA had actively campaigned for and supported the U.S. capitalist rulers' intervention in the interimperialist slaughter--"the Communist Party claimed 100,000 members. They dominated several major industrial unions and had a periphery of hundreds of thousands of fellow travelers, intellectuals, Black sympathizers, and so on.

"American Stalinism began losing its leading position in the American left from that point on. Their wartime line of speedup and a no-strike pledge, their postwar line of support for the perspective of American-Soviet maintenance of the status quo and of class peace, yielded its first fruits when the ruling class turned against their wartime servitors in the Cold War witch-hunt. The Stalinists looked around for popular support and found they had none. The only permanent factor in their policies--subordination of the class struggle in the United States to the diplomatic needs of Moscow--won a bitter reward from the workers they had misled," Barnes wrote. "The crushing of the [1956] Hungarian revolution and Khrushchev's admission of some of Stalin's crimes further weakened the CP."

By the early 1990s, shaken by the collapse of the Stalinist regime in Moscow, the CPUSA underwent a split. A current that included central leaders left the party and "announced the formation of a 'network' called the Committees of Correspondence," Barnes writes in Capitalism's World Disorder. "Yes, a 'network,' not even a party-in-becoming. They honestly disclaim any such effort. They have retained most of the CPUSA's politics, but none of its weight as an organization. They bring with them their political tutelage in corruption, but not any firepower. The prognosis for the organization is shaky." By the end of the decade the Committees of Correspondence remained a few scattered chapters lacking any national or political cohesion.

Now the CP is going the same way. At the party's May National Committee meeting, Joe Sims, editor of Political Affairs, "gave a report on unity and building the left, which updated the NC on different meetings held with left activists and organizations, including former CPUSA leaders," the People's Weekly World reported.

In the February issue of the party's preconvention discussion bulletin posted on the Internet, one CP member writes the party leadership is "putting in question basic, fundamental principles which represent the bedrock of the Party's existence." The course of the organization, he concludes, "makes one wonder whether the bitter ideological struggle of ten years ago that led to the split in the Party was a necessary one."  
 
 
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