Vol. 71/No. 35      September 24, 2007

Electing a Democrat for president and increasing the Democratic majority in Congress was the axis of a report by CPUSA chairman Sam Webb to the March 24-25 meeting of its National Committee. The report was titled “New Times Require Fresh Politics and Flexible Tactics.”

The report, which is posted on the party’s website, highlights the CPUSA’s continued evolution away from any pretense of building a revolutionary workers party and instead toward a radical political association entrenched in bourgeois politics.

Peter Zerner wrote in the Political Affairs article, “Imagine the level of debate—and consequently action—that would ensue if a real thinker [Gore] sat in the White House.”

The article is preceded by a disclaimer that Zerner’s views do not necessarily reflect those of the editor or publisher. However the story is highlighted on the cover with an illustration of Gore holding a torch in one hand and a tree growing out of a pot in the other—its branches and leaves extending to form a halo behind Gore’s head.

“The main arena of struggle is the 110th Congress,” according to the report by Webb. “It has been a long time since Congress has been an arena of struggle where the labor-led people’s movement not only could bring their legislative demands, but also stood a chance of securing majorities for those demands.”

As a result of last year’s elections, he says, “Political initiative is passing (not completely and fully) into its [the Democratic Party’s] hands and the hands of the labor-led people’s movement of which we are part.”

A section of the report entitled “Labor to the Front” cites “an innovative plan on how labor will participate in the 2008 elections” as probably the most important outcome of a meeting of the AFL-CIO Executive Board in March. Webb describes the joint effort of AFL-CIO and Change to Win labor federation officials to hustle votes for the Democrats as a sign of deepening labor unity.

The role of the CP in the “labor-led people’s movement” at this time, Webb said, is to “assist more than lead”—that is, subordinate itself to “center and progressive forces.”

This direction is not new in the party’s history. At its 1944 convention, as a show of good faith in support of Washington’s efforts in World War II, the convention dissolved the party and constituted a Communist Political Association.

While claiming continued adherence to Marxism, the preamble to the association’s constitution read, “The COMMUNIST POLITICAL ASSOCIATION is a non-party organization of Americans which, basing itself upon the working class, carries forward the traditions of Washington, Jefferson, Paine, Jackson, and Lincoln, under the changed conditions of modern industrial society.”  
 
 
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