WI: CPUSA Breaks with Stalin

Many modern observers and Cold Warriors cite the rapid switch from Anti-Fascism to Isolationism on the part of the Communist Party U.S.A. as a sign of the American Left being an arm of the USSR. This ignores how many abandoned the CPUSA in disgust over the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

POD: After a number of loud discussions (and occasional fistfights) at the New York headquarters in late August 1939, Earl Browder and several associates were bodily removed from the building and an announcement forswearing any obedience or loyalty to the "Red Cloaked Fascist" Stalin is made. Strictly speaking, this was a split in the party... but it was an embarrassingly uneven split in terms of 'overseas' funding (which Browder and his followers kept) and frankly everything else (membership/properties/etc.).

In substance, the American Communist Party remained a far left movement backing Labor, Racial Equality, Anti-Fascism, Anti-Colonialism, and so forth. However they made a point to lionize Debs more than Lenin and heavily back away from even suggesting the violent overthrow of any government willing to allow honest elections. The rise of Khrushchev resulted in a mild thaw in relations between the Party and Moscow beyond the "we want the same bastard dead for now" attitude from the height of WWII; however requests to assist in 'anti-imperialist' espionage were met with "When are you pulling out of Warsaw/Prague/Budapest/etc," from the head office and "Hand yourself in and we will find a lawyer, otherwise we are calling the FBI and you take your chances," when they find one of their number doing so.
 
The split would be much more in favor of Browder and Co. than of the splitters. As hard as it is to believe now a lot of Western Communists genuinely believed that Stalin was a great leader who had put the USSR on the road to Communism, and if he decided to make peace with Hitler it had to be for the best. In fact the main objectors were the ones who left the party (and generally Communism itself) completely.
 
This is just not possible. The CPUSA was far too dependent on the Soviet Union in many ways--organizationally, financially, and emotionally. The hopelessness of any independent course for the CPUSA was already indicated in 1929. Jay Lovestone and his faction had won an overwhelming victory in the elections for CPUSA leadership. Yet a couple of hostile speeches by Stalin, and the Lovestoneites (except those who abandoned Lovestone and submitted to Stalin) were expelled from the party, and only a handful of Communists followed Lovestone into his new splinter group. As Stalin remarked,

"You declare you have a certain majority in the American Communist Party and that you will retain that majority under all circumstances. That is untrue, comrades of the American delegation, absolutely untrue. You had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporters of the Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as the friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American Communist Party. But what will happen if the American workers learn that you intend to break the unity of the ranks of the Comintern and are thinking of conducting a fight against its executive bodies -- that is the question, dear comrades? Do you think that the American workers will follow your lead against the Comintern, that they will prefer the interests of your factional group to the interests of the Comintern? There have been numerous cases in the history of the Comintern when its most popular leaders, who had greater authority than you, found themselves isolated as soon as they raised the banner against the Comintern. Do you think you will fare better than these leaders? A poor hope, comrades! At present you still have a formal majority. But tomorrow you will have no majority and you will find yourselves completely isolated if you attempt to start a fight against the decisions of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. You may be certain of that dear comrades." https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/cpusa.htm

And of course in 1945, Browder, who had been praised to the skies by American Communists for years, quickly became a "revisionist" and then a "traitor"--all on the basis of one (obviously Moscow-inspired) article in a French Communist magazine: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/1945/04/0400-duclos-ondissolution.pdf (American Communists quickly recognized that the article had to have had its source in the USSR, not France--it quoted from the anti-Browder material William Z. Foster had forwarded to Moscow...)

Anyone who thinks the CPUSA could have defied the CPSU at any time before 1956 IMO completely misunderstands the nature of the CPUSA. And one might note it was not only in the US that opposition to the "down with the imperialist war" line was crushed; in the UK, when Harry Pollitt wrote "To stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases while the fascist beasts ride roughshod over Europe would be a betrayal of everything our forebears have fought to achieve in the course of long years of struggle against capitalism" he was forced to resign as General Secretary of the CPGB (not to regain that position until after the Germans invaded the USSR). http://spartacus-educational.com/TUpollitt.htm
 
This is just not possible. The CPUSA was far too dependent on the Soviet Union in many ways--organizationally, financially, and emotionally.
So your argument is that the people who left the CPUSA in OTL over the 180 sparked by the MRP organizing themselves enough to throw out those beholden to Moscow instead is full Sealion?
 
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So your argument is that the people who left the CPUSA in OTL over the 180 sparked by the MRP organizing themselves enough to throw out those beholden to Moscow instead is full Sealion?

The main (behind the scenes) argument in the CPUSA in the autumn of 1939 was between Browder and those--like William Z. Foster and Alexander Bittelman--who felt that Browder hadn't gone *far enough* in adapting himself to the new "it's an imperialist war on both sides" line which had replaced the "Democratic Front" and "anti-fascist" line of the late 1930's. For a while Browder hoped that the new line could be reconciled with continued support for FDR. But Moscow set him straight: "The War is the most acute manifestation of imperialist atrocities and reaction. During the war, the bourgeoisie of "democratic" lands is trying to reach the level of fascism (see France outlawing CP), adopting attitude to USSR more hostile than that of fascist states. The bourgeoisie of all states equally guilty, equally dictatorial. Consequently "democracy against fascism" disappears. Thereby is undermined the "democratic front". USA will not be an exception. Even remaining neutral, USA with powerful financial oligarchy, will inevitably take the path of intensifying reaction, if only because it knows that war raises the issue of its overthrow...We would be pedantic, not revolutionaries, if we should cling to old slogans of peoples front, democratic front, when the foundations of capitalism are being undermined. Top leaders of Social Democracy will all more rapidly cross over to reaction, the more powerfully the idea of storming capitalism matures in the masses. Tasks now are: bringing united militant action of working class, strengthening alliance with farmers by independently mobilizing against reaction and exploitation. Must cease to trail in wake of FDR, adopt independent position on all fundamental questions..." https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/jaffedocs.html

There were some rank-and-file defections over the Pact, but there was more a loss of fellow travelers than of actual Party members. And in any event, even if there had been more Party members opposed to the pact, there was no way they could impose their will on the Party, whcih was a centralized, Leninist organization.

Finally, one more thing to remember: The change from an "anti-fascist" to "anti-war" orientation was not a pure loss to the Party. One has to remember that the US was not yet in the war and that most Americans wanted to keep it out, that isolationism was a legitimate national tradition--on the Left as well as elsewhere--and that if the CP lost some allies by the pact and the turn against FDR, it also made gains. Labor was in a militant mood; many workers were understandably wary of "national defense" being used as an excuse for anti-strike legislation, etc. and the militance of Communist trade unionists in that era (whether or not it deliberately was designed to obstruct the war effort, as the CP's opponents claimed) struck a responsive chord with much of labor's rank-and-file. Congressman Vito Marcantonio--not a CP member but a close ally--won re-election in 1940 partly because his slogan "Overalls--Not Uniforms!" made a lot of sense to his mostly impoverished East Harlem constituents.
 
IMHO, Browder did what he did on orders from Moscow for both flip and flop. That Foster was in rivalry with him was simply two well-trained dogs growling over the same bone.
 
So I am to assume the consensus is that, unless Lovestone hangs tight and keeps the bulk of the party, an independent CPUSA is not that likely?
 
So I am to assume the consensus is that, unless Lovestone hangs tight and keeps the bulk of the party, an independent CPUSA is not that likely?


Lovestone did hold firm, he resisted all pressure to capitulate, and he somehow managed to get out of the Soviet Union. But there was never any question of his taking the bulk of the Party with him. When he returned to America, he found that hardly any of his old followers would stay with him. "In the end, the official party lost barely two hundred members to the pro-Lovestone group, which adopted the name of 'Communist Party (Majority Group)' in memory of its former position in the party. The 90 percent had dwindled to 2 percent in two months." Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, p. 430. https://books.google.com/books?id=SlRc3KqcDygC&pg=PA430

Stalin had predicted it: "Who do you think you are? Trotsky defied me. Where is he? Zinoviev defied me. Where is he? Bukharin defied me. Where is he? And you? When you get back to America, nobody will stay with you except your wives." http://spartacus-educational.com/USAlovestoneJ.htm
 
Okay. Fine.

AHC: What would it take for the CPUSA to break with Moscow outright, or at least split in half, before the second Red Scare (bonus for at or before Molotov-Ribbentrop); and more to the point what would be the ramifications?
 
The CPUSA was ever a creature of Moscow, specifically of Stalin. After his death, and that of Foster, the Party floundered under Gus Hall until it's final disintegration. It was just too committed, via running off all the "deviationists", i.e. those who refused to toe the Party Line, to subservience to Moscow to survive. As witness it's pathetic attempts to be relevant in the anti-war movement of the late 1960s.
Anyone whose mental default was not to subservience went into the other Marxist/Socialist organizations that sprung up like weeds in the '20's and '30's.
 
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