What Went Wrong? The Communist Party, the US, and the Comintern

Abstract

The Bolshevik Revolution marked an enormous expansion of possibilities welcomed not only by revolutionaries in the United States and around the world, but also by millions of common people who saw it as a chance to create a better world. Given what happened in the years since the Revolution, however, and particularly the effects of Soviet influence on the prospects for radicalism in the United States, it is vital to consider what went wrong in the relationship between the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) and the international movement. For all of the problems caused by the particular nature of the relationship between the American and the Soviet parties, being part of an international socialist movement was not necessarily a liability. I note some cases where directions from the Communist International (Comintern) actually worked to the advantage of the CPUSA. More importantly, with the increasingly transnational character of capitalism and the spread of fascism from the 1920s through the period of World War II, some form of international organizing was essential. The problem had to do with the particularmodel followed by the Comintern and the decisive influence of the Soviet party in that organization. Often considered a historical basket case, the CPUSA had considerable potential at various points in its history. Its failure was not inevitable and so it is important for both political and scholarly reasons to understand its ultimate failure. To fully explain this, we would need to consider far more factors than I can develop here.Whether one considers the Communist Party a vast conspiracy or a legitimate movement, there is no doubt that government and employer repression greatly weakened the organization in the post–World War I and post–World War II Red Scares. By the end of the 1920s, for example, 38,000 immigrants, including many radicals, had been deported. The significance of this loss was vital in amovement populated largely by immigrants. Offices were raided, newspapers seized, activists imprisoned, thousands of union members expelled. Again, in the period from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, close surveillance, a series of political trials, and numerous deportations of immigrant members hobbled the party’s efforts. Likewise, very