By the time of the April 1956 National Committee meeting, the Party was in the throes of its most serious crisis since 1944. The meeting itself was historic in that it was the first time that the top Party leadership had met together since 1951. With the exception of Gil Green and Henry Winston who were underground and Bob Thompson and Gus Hall who were still in jail, the National Committee was up from underground and out of prison. Right opportunism, which had been thriving and undergoing continuous growth in the fifties, erupted into a full fledged liquidationist line whose only logical conclusion would be the complete destruction of the Party as a revolutionary force.
Fresh out of the Atlanta Penitentiary, Eugene Dennis gave the main political report at this meeting. This one-sided, thoroughly negative report placed all the blame for the Party’s mistakes and isolation upon dogmatism and “left sectarianism.” He called for a “new look” at our past errors and the development of a mass party of socialism.
The effect of this report was to open the floodgates to the blatantly liquidationist faction led by John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker. Gates and his cronies on the Daily Worker and in the New York State Committee attacked the CP from all sides with the express purpose of dissolving the CP as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. Gates pushed for the abandonment of the Party’s leading role and the development of pressure group politics whose organizational form would be a political action association—very much like Browder’s CPA of 1944.
Gates called for a “critical réévaluation” of Marxism-Leninism. “If anyone asks me whether I base myself on the principles of Marx and Lenin, I want to be able to answer which of those principles I believe in and which I do not.”1
This open liquidationist faction made skillful use of the confusion that resulted from Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin “revelations.” The secret revelations stunned the American Party and in effect deprived the anti-revisionist forces of an ally we had relied on in the past.2 The international communist movement had historically lent the weight of its influence and prestige to the left in the American Party. For example: the Third International’s assistance in bringing together the two principle organizations— the Communist Party and the United Communist Party to form the Communist Party USA in 1921; Comintern leadership in the struggle against the factionalism of the twenties and Lovestone’s American exceptionalism; and the Duclos letter which helped initiate the struggle against Browderism.
Rather than finding a source of support in the Soviet Union, we on the left were thrown completely off balance by the new “revelations.” At first we couldn’t believe Khrushchev made such a speech, thinking it must be some imperialist propaganda stunt. When this initial reaction passed we tended to give the new Soviet leadership the benefit of the doubt and failed to grasp the full implications of this attack on Stalin.
The liquidationist right used this as an excuse to attack proletarian internationalism in general, calling for a sweeping réévaluation of our line. They bitterly denounced our past history as one of slavishly clinging to imported doctrines, the bankruptcy of which was now being proven. Under the guise of “fighting dogmatism” inherited from the era of the “cult of personality,” the Gates crowd concluded that Leninism was nothing more than Marxism applied to the peculiar, backward condition of Russia— a purely “Russian social phenomenon”—and therefore not applicable in the U.S. They found Lenin’s theories of the bourgeois state as an instrument of class rule to be particularly outmoded under U.S. conditions. It was in this spirit of “reexamination,” that the entire National Committee—with the exception of Foster and Ed Strong—voted to condemn the use of Soviet troops against the reactionary CIA-inspired counter-revolution in Hungary in October 1956.
Personally, I was most interested in the role that Ben Davis played at the April board meeting. We had met earlier in the year, not long after Davis got out of jail. We had had some friendly discussions. He said he wanted to get my ideas on the developments in the Afro-American question in order to help him prepare for the report he was going to make at the meeting. Despite the sharp disagreements we had had in the past, I felt then that we were largely in agreement. I thought that perhaps his years in jail had changed him, given him cause to reevaluate our past differences. We concluded this series of meetings on a friendly basis.
In May, however, I learned it was the same old Ben—the same sly, ruthless politician, who used his authority and that of Foster to further his own personal power and influence. In his report, Davis strongly attacked our revolutionary position, dropping completely the right of self-determination. At the National Committee meeting in June he restated this position: “It would seem that the slogan of self-determination should be abandoned and our position otherwise modified and brought up to date.”3 This sharp attack took me by surprise because he had given no indication whatsoever in our earlier discussions of any major differences.
Plans for the Sixteenth Party Convention to be held the following February were being made at this meeting. A draft resolution was to be prepared as soon as possible and preconvention discussion and debate begun. But the draft resolution was not published until September 1956, providing little time for adequate discussion and rebuttal from the opposing points of view. Dennis, who had come under attack from the Gates faction, had made some amendments to his April report. But the draft resolution was still more or less a restatement of his position at the April meeting, characterizing “left sectarianism” as the main danger in the Party.
The draft carried the hallmarks of much of what we knowtoday as the liberal and reformist program of the CPUSA. Central to a peaceful, parliamentary, constitutional transition to socialism would be the development of an anti-monopoly coalition through “labor and popular” forces gaining “decisive influence in key Democratic Party state organizations and even liberal Republican political movements.” Thus would develop the “American Road to Socialism.” The Communist Party would remain on the sidelines to “support and endorse” such progressive campaigns. On the Afro-American question, the right of self-determination was completely omitted and the Party urged wholehearted acceptance of the NAACP slogan of “Free By ’63.” Working class leadership and proletarian revolution were entirely excluded from this document. The National Board voted in favor of the resolution, Foster and Davis voting a qualified “yes.”
In October 1956, Foster, who had been vacillating all along, changed his mind and voted against the resolution. In an article entitled “On the Party Situation,” he outlines the reasons for this change.4 Citing the development of a “new Browderism” and a re-emergence of American exceptionalism in the Party, he attacked the attempts to openly liquidate the Party, to drop Marxism-Leninism from the preamble of the constitution and the failure to see rightism as a cancer to the Party. Foster also attacked Dennis’s support of a “mass party of socialism.”5
The article for the first time indicated to the rank and file the nature of the factional split then going on in the leadership and stimulated much debate over the genuine criticism of rightism that it raised. In the final analysis, however, the article failed to provide a firm basis for a consistent fight against the right because of Foster’s basic unity with the other factions on the question of the main danger. To Foster ultra-leftism was unquestionably the main danger, and as an example he cited the hesitancy with which the Party took up the theory of peaceful transition! He failed totally to understand how this very estimate of the main danger had through the years fostered and nurtured the cancer-like growth of right opportunism and stifled the fight against revisionism in the Party.
Pre-convention discussions around the draft were hot and heavy. The right contended that we had to “seriously” and “creatively” scrutinize our past history, reevaluate our goals. They passed off any criticism of their position as “old” and “dogmatic,” a refusal to consider fresh approaches or make a new start. Anyone who attacked them was immediately labeled a “left sectarian.”
I attended several meetings of the National Negro Commission as part of the pre-convention discussions that fall. The leadership inundated these meetings with articles concerning “new data” on the Black Belt, a réévaluation of the Black Belt theory in light of massive outmigrations from the deep South. I argued against these positions, that the development and existence of an oppressed Black nation in the South was not merely a question of nose-counting. As I later wrote in For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question (1957):
This approach blurs over the main essence of the question.
Even with the outmigrations of the war and post-war period, the old majority Black Belt area contains the greatest concentration of the Negro people in the U.S. Approximately five million Negroes, nearly a third of the entire Negro population in the country (17 million) and nearly one-half of the Negroes in the South are still concentrated in the old Black Belt majority area. The fact is that the Negro population in the Black Belt is larger than the total population of 34 countries who are members of the UN!6
I was heartened to see that I was not alone. A number of Black comrades were opposed to this “réévaluation” by the right and the dropping of our revolutionary position. I remember particularly Ed Strong—a stalwart young Black man who spoke very strongly in defense of our position.
Ed was then a member of the N C and it seemed to me that he had great potential as a leader of the left. As a young seminary student in Chicago, he came into the movement in the early thirties through the National Youth Congress. He became national secretary of that organization and was a founder and first executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. He eventually was elected chairman of the youth committee of the National Negro Congress and, at the time of these discussions, was organizer of the Eastern Pennsylvania District of the Party.
Unfortunately, Strong was never able to attend the Sixteenth Party Convention. By that time, he was hospitalized with terminal cancer and died in April 1957. His death was not only a personal loss, but a blow to the left forces in the Party.
These discussions and the pre-convention meetings in the districts served to begin the consolidation of a genuine Marxist-Leninist left. For a short time, the left forces were able to build a tentative tactical unity with the Foster-Davis faction which made some show of wanting to fight the openly liquidationist Gates faction. This unity, however, was quickly shattered with the Foster-Gates unity deal at the New York State pre-convention meeting.
Foster, who was in danger of not being elected as a delegate to the convention, made the infamous deal on “name and form” of the Party in exchange for the votes of the Gates faction. While rejecting the dissolution of the Party, a resolution was passed with Gates’s support which held that “any and all proposals to change the name, form or policies of the Party can and should be examined and discussed on their merits”—thus leaving the door wide open to future proposals from the Gates bunch.7
Widely separated and lacking central leadership, the left forces nonetheless continued to grow. We began to gain ideological clarity through criticizing the opportunism of the Party line. The pre-convention meetings were the first organized means on a national level of examining the Party’s line since the Fifteenth Party Convention in 1950. Since that time, those who opposed the growing revisionism in the Party remained dispersed and confused, with no regular access to any of the Party machinery through which to air their views. The leadership deliberately kept Marxist-Leninist education to a minimum, as part of their attempt to maintain the status quo.
They had systematically suppressed dissent and all forms of inner-Party democracy. Many of the comrades who came together in the left caucus at the Sixteenth Party Convention had locally and individually raised struggles against revisionism in their districts, but were pretty much unaware of how widespread dissent was in the Party as a whole. We were pleasantly surprised to see just how many cadre there were who still had agreement on the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism for the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism, for the right of self-determination in the deep South, in support of proletarian internationalism, and against the theory of peaceful transition to socialism—although there was some confusion on this point as a result of the Khrushchev revelations.
A1 Lannon became the leader of the caucus and one hell of a guy he was too. He was a member of the National Committee and the Party leader on the waterfront. I had always liked and admired A1 as a man with both feet on the ground, and with a keen ability to combine theory and practice. He was an old Lenin School man and had been a seaman for many years before becoming a Party functionary in 1938.
He was a fearless, dauntless fighter and had just recently been released from a stint in prison on a Smith Act conviction when he came to the convention. I could see that he was sore as hell with the revisionism of the leadership, grabbing the microphone at every possible opportunity. Other members of the caucus included Joe Dougher, a leader of the anthracite miners and a member of the NC; James Keller, the D.O. of Chicago; Armando Román, a Puerto Rican leader on the waterfront in New York and a member of the New York State Committee; Ted Allen, a young guy and former D.O. from West Virginia; Angel Torres, another waterfront cadre; Olga, a Venezuelan comrade who had played a leading role in the struggles of Latino people in New Y ork City; my wife Gwen; and many others.
By the time of the convention, February 9-12, 1957, three distinct factions had emerged on the right. Gates led a blatant and vulgar far right group which was openly anti-Soviet and supported
both the ideological and physical liquidation of the Party. Aside from Gates, it included men like Blake Charney, organizational secretary of New York; Joseph Clark, a Daily Worker reporter; and Steve Nelson, the D.O. of Western Pennsylvania.
The center-right faction was led by Eugene Dennis and included James Jackson and Jack Stachel. A more covert and insidious right danger, this faction called for ideological liquidation of the Party’s vanguard role, but favored the maintenance of some sort of social democratic structure from which to wield power. They also supported the Soviet Union.
The left-center faction was represented by Foster and his allies: Ben Davis, Will Weinstone and Bob Thompson, who was at the time still in jail. This group perceived a right danger in the Party— the other two factions—but still conceded that leftism was the main danger. They also had more reservations about openly doing away with the vanguard party.
All three factions had unity on the basic political questions— support for the theory of peaceful, parliamentary and constitutional transition to socialism; a bourgeois assiipilationist position on the Afro-American question; a view of left sectarianism as the main danger historically in the Party; and a wavering stand at best, total abandonment at worst, on the question of proletarian internationalism.
This was particularly blatant in the convention’s refusal to change its position on Hungary, or to acknowledge the various criticisms of the Party’s revisionism as put forward by Jacques Duclos and various Latin American parties. As if to proclaim its independence from Marxism-Leninism, the convention refused to take a stand against U.S. intervention in Latin America and in support of independence for Puerto Rico.
The Sixteenth Party Convention was a fateful turning point in our Party’s history—the point from which the Party turned inevitably and unalterably down the road to revisionism, the point from which the task of building a new anti-revisionist communist party became the primary task of Marxist-Lenini$ts.
In discussing this historic event, I must say something of the despicable role played by James Jackson. Earlier hu had been sent
South by Eugene Dennis and at the time was secretary of the Southern region of the Party. It became obvious at the convention that Dennis had sent him South for the purpose of presiding over the liquidation of the Party in that region. Jackson never did see the need for a vanguard party in the South and openly stated in the pre-convention discussions that the existing reformist-led movement organizes “the maximum political, economic and moral strength of the Black masses and their white allies to bear upon the monopoly ruling circles.”8
Jackson brought several Southern delegates with him to the convention, but in the main, the South was represented by proxies—many of whom had never been further South than Brooklyn. He claimed that it was too dangerous to bring Southern delegates to the convention. I thought this was rather interesting since we had managed to bring such delegates, including Black sharecroppers, in the midst of the worst lynch terror of the thirties.
Jackson actually used these “Southern” proxies to build a cheering section of his supporters on the floor. The main thrust of the line he pushed was to drop the right of self-determination, which, given the strength of the left at the convention, meant avoiding entirely a discussion of it! Jackson contended that we could develop a program of practical action and deal with the political line at some other time. Together with Carl Winter and Doxey Wilkerson (a member of the Gates faction and soon to quit the Party), he wrote the main resolution on the Afro-American question—a thoroughly reformist document that avoided anv fundamental discussion of line or of the right of self-determination.
Jackson’s efforts to forestall discussion were given material support by an arrangement between our caucus and Foster. It was obvious that Gates was then out to liquidate the Party right there on the spot. Foster approached us, seeking to block against Gates, and asked that we support a move to take the question off the convention agenda, postponing discussion and leaving settlement of the matter to a special national conference on Afro-American work to be held within sixty days of the convention.
First things first. The main question before the convention was to “save the Party” from the open liquidationism of Gates. Foster argued that full discussion of the Black national question would have split the conference wide open and played directly into the hands of the Gates faction. At the time, we thought it was the right thing to do and went along with Foster’s deal. But, as we shall see, the promised national conference on Afro-American work was never held.
There was a very widespread rumor about Ben Davis at the convention and I have no doubt that it’s true. The story goes that someone in the Dennis faction asked Davis why he and Foster were going around making deals with the “ultra-lefts.” Davis replied, “We’ve got to deal with Gates first. When we’ve dealt with him, then we can handle the left sectarians.”
The convention proceedings, which strictly followed Roberts’ Rules, were characterized by extreme bureaucratic suppression of the rank and file. Even so, I thought we did pretty well on the floor. Lannon was the fastest on his feet and got the microphone more than the rest of us. The revisionists have chosen to print precious few of his speeches in the official transcript of the convention proceedings, but there were still a few important remarks included. For instance: “On the question of social democracy, I think the effort here is to slur over and obscure the differences that exist between ourselves and social democracy. We are not discussing here what are the possibilities for a united front—that’s one thing, but no united front is possible without a clear understanding of what our differences are. United fronts come about not by slurring over differences and hiding them....I’m for a united front with social democracy, but always making clear that we are not social democrats. We have a different program, and united front is based on certain common needs which both agree to while we disagree.” And: “On the question of a mass party of socialism, I think that’s just...pie in the sky, and will divert, because I think the pre-condition to that is centering all of our work on the rebuilding and reconstituting of a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party.” 9
I was able to speak only once and used the little time I had to attack the Party’s line on the Black national question. While the revisionists thought that the question could be solved peacefully, as more and more Blacks left the South and became part of the industrial working class, I pointed out that these developments— particularly the proletarianization of Blacks—actually sharpened the fundamental contradictions involved.
I further contended that the Party failed completely to understand the tremendous potential of the revolt then gathering in the South. On a world scale, this revolt held particular significance as “a national revolutionary movement in the heartland of U.S. imperialism, the bulwark of world reaction.” Calling on the Party to stop tailing the bourgeois assimilationists, I stated “It is not enough to greet these new, heroic struggles in the South. The embattled Negro people want our help. They cannot win alone. They need our Party, movement, and the international working class movement, to support their struggle.”10
To be sure, such views were drowned in a swamp of revisionism. When all the hoopla was done, the September draft resolution was passed pretty much intact with all three of the right wing factions declaring a great victory, a new “unity of all trends,” and a “defeat against revisionism.” Dennis—the arch conciliationist— came out in the strongest position, indicating throughout the convention the future course he would take in fully conceding to the far right.
Dennis spoke strongly in defense of the rights of minorities, arguing in typical Dennis doublespeak that “there is also a realization that the more truly democratic we become, the more we need to be a cohesive and united organization which guarantees the minority’s right to dissent at all times.” Indicating the extent of his own unity with the line of the Gates faction, he went on to say, “Further, I believe that there is much sober thought being given to what we mean by a new and sounder relationship with other Marxist parties, including those in the socialist countries.”11
It was clear from the start that all the talk of expanded democracy and minority rights would not be extended to the Marxist-Leninist left, which posed the main threat to the other three factions.
Gates, who was unsuccessful in his bid for a political action association, nevertheless came out of the convention fairly strong, with a number of his supporters on the NC and in key positions in state organizations. During the last session of the convention, he was moved to say that “no matter who lost, the Party has won.”12 Foster, who had initially expressed the strongest opposition to the line of the resolution, stated, “I too, want to support this recommendation. I think it is the best we can do under the circumstances,”13 and then informed the delegates that he had voted for every document in the resolution.
This was the last Party convention that Foster, then seventy-seven years old, was able to attend. A New York Times article, which appeared to be based on inside sources, reported that “William Z. Foster suffered a stinging humiliation yesterday....In the voting to elect a seventeen member executive committee out of the sixty-six member National Committee, Mr. Foster was said to have failed of election. He obtained a place only when a motion was adopted to expand the group from seventeen to twenty.”14 Whether or not this report is accurate, Foster’s influence dwindled in the following years until his death in the Soviet Union in September 1961.
He wrote a number of articles in this period, among them “Thé Party Crisis and the Way Out,”15 which indicated that revisionism had not been defeated at the Sixteenth Party Convention, though “ultra-leftism” still remained the main danger in the Party. Foster suffered a stroke around the time of its publication, but recuperated sufficiently to write several other articles. In collaboration with Ben Davis, he wrote “Notes on the Negro Question,”16 which supported the Party’s assimilationist line.
Perhaps the most controversial was a letter Foster wrote personally to Chairman Mao in which he praised the progress China had made in the struggle to build socialism and discussed the situation in the U.S. and the world.17 He received a warm response from Chairman Mao, who thanked Foster for his letter and said, “Allow me, on behalf of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people, to extend hearty greetings to you, glorious fighter and leader of the American working class, and wish you an early recovery.”18 The letter had been sent in
December 1958, without the approval of the Party’s Secretariat. They would have liked to have overlooked the matter entirely, but were unable to do so when Foster’s letter and Mao’s response were published in the New York Times.19 The Party was finally forced to publish the exchange in the March 1959 Political Affairs.
The so-called “unity of all trends” reached at the Sixteenth Party Convention represented a compromise on fundamental questions and principles, arriving at a formula which legalized the open liquidationist Gates faction within the Party and stifled the necessary ideological struggle against revisionism. Thus, although the Party avoided an open split, it was saddled with a concilia-tionist line in a period when ideological confusion was rampant in the ranks. The Sixteenth Party Convention was characterized by the total abandonment of revolutionary line and principle on all questions in favor of a sham unity of the right wing, with each of the three right factions scrambling for position.
A gallop to the right under the guise of “unity” followed the convention, with Dennis putting into practice the thoroughly revisionist program adopted there. The liquidation of the Party as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard was further intensified as Dennis made repeated concessions to the open liquidators. In an effort to keep peace with the Gates faction, “democracy” and public criticism of the Party was greatly expanded. “Freedom of criticism” in this case meant the freedom to further hasten the conversion of a communist party into a social democratic party of reforms, the freedom to counterpose bourgeois theories to communist theories.
While the leadership cried “unity of all trends,” they actually meant the unprincipled unity of the three right factions in opposition to the Marxist-Leninists. We in the left attacked this phony unity at the reconvened district conventions and played a major role in upsetting the “unity slates” at the New York State, Brooklyn and Manhattan County conventions. However, we were unable to prevent the Davis-Charney unity deal at the New York State Convention. Ben Davis became state chairman, while Charney, a Gates man, became executive secretary.
The tactics of three groups—the open liquidators, the right-center and the “left” conciliators—were very similar. They kept trying to forestall any kind of meaningful discussion. The revisionists continued their effort to separate a program for mass work from any basic, fundamental discussion of line. Ben Davis and others ushered in the demagogic slogan of “let’s get going.” “The party membership is sick and tired of internal strife and bickering over nebulous abstractions,” said Davis in the Party Voice.20
I made a speech at the reconvened convention in Harlem, fighting for restoration of our revolutionary position on the Afro-American question and an end to tailing after the leadership of the NAACP. Davis immediately attacked me. “Left to Harry here, he and me would be left alone fighting it down to the ropes. We can’t afford that, we gotta get to work!”
Following the state conventions, the Lannon forces were strong enough to be elected to a number of posts on the New York State Committee and were well represented on the Manhattan County Committee. Gwen was a section leader in Brooklyn, and we had actual leadership in two vital concentrations—the waterfront and Harlem and lower Harlem. Our strength was considerable when one takes into account the fact that the New York district comprised over half the membership of the Party at that time.
The promised national conference on the Negro question was stalled, postponed and inevitably never held. Many of our Black cadres resigned or were driven out by the revisionist bureaucracy. Dues payments and club attendance dropped, Daily Worker circulation was down to 5,000 daily and 10,000 on Sunday.21
It was becoming more and more evident that the leadership actually had a plan to drive the left out of the Party through bureaucratic suppression and harassment. James Jackson acting as Dennis’s lieutenant personally supervised a campaign to drive militant Blacks out of the Party. It was clear to us that the leadership would never hold a national conference on work among Blacks while there were still cadres left to fight for the revolutionary line.
In the face of growing pressure from below, however, they were forced to sponsor a few local conferences. This was done with the expressed purpose of holding down dissent, while continuing to postpone any fundamental discussion of our line.
I remember one conference in New York where the revisionists packed the meeting with white trade union cadres, many of them right wingers and covert white chauvinists, who at a signal from Davis or Jackson would begin chanting, “Get to work, get to work!”
Jackson pulled off an outstanding piece of demagogy as he stood up with Paul Robeson’s book Here I Stand,21 and proclaimed “Program? This is all the program we need.” The book, while an excellent exposition of Robeson’s political views as a militant anti-imperialist and class-conscious fighter, could by no means serve as a fundamental program for the Party’s work in the Black movement, and Jackson knew it!
In late 1957,1 completed work on For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question. A summation of a number of unpublished articles I had written against reformism in the fifties, the struggles at the Sixteenth Party Convention and afterward, it was intended to give ideological clarity to the emerging left in the Party and was later adopted as an official document of the Provisional Organizing Committee (POC). The paper attacked the Party’s right wing line and Jackson’s view that it would be an “unwarranted interference” for the Party to continue its support of the right of self-determination, undermining the correct leadership of the bourgeois assimilationists. My paper attacks the revisionists’ failure to understand the basic orientation on the question, that “without the perspective of Political Power, the Negro peoples’ movement is reduced to an impotent appeal to the conscience or humanitarian instincts of the country and the world.”23
It was essential in this paper to answer James Allen’s latest theories. Abandoning his former support for the right of self-determination, Allen had become the main theoretical gun of the revisionists. His basically economic determinist approach was to describe an inevitable disintegration of the Black Belt nation now in process as a result of the “forces of capitalist development of great expansive power, which has lasted well into the era of monopoly capitalism.”24 According to Allen, this disintegration was heralded by the failure of the elements of nationhood not only to exist in the Black Belt, but to be in afull state ofmaturation. He failed to understand that “imperialist oppression, in stifling the development of nations, creates the conditions for the rise of national revolutionary movements which, in this epoch, are a special phase of the struggle for socialism. This creates the basis for the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed peoples with the international working class in the struggle against the common enemy, imperialism.”25
On November 16, 1957, a declaration was signed in Moscow which had a major effect on the CPUS A. This was the “Declaration of Communist and Workers Parties of Socialist Countries,” referred to as the “Twelve Party Declaration.” (The signatories included the Communist Parties of Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, North Vietnam, East Germany, China, North Korea, Mongolia, Poland, Rumania, USSR and Czechoslovakia.) The declaration held that proletarian internationalism as could be understood through the lessons of history required “support of the Soviet Union and all the Socialist countries who, pursuing a policy of preserving peace throughout the world, are the mainstay of peace and social progress.”26
The Gates forces were adamantly opposed to our officially adopting the statement and resented the arguments of the more pro-Soviet elements in the leadership. The debates surrounding our adoption of the declaration and the threatened liquidation of the Daily Worker, which by this time consistently carried antiparty, anti-Soviet and anti-communist propaganda, brought the resignation of John Gates in January 1958. (The declaration was adopted at the next NC meeting in February 1958.) A stream of his supporters resigned following this. The whole incident brought a factional realignment in the leadership at the February 1958 National Committee meeting, with the Dennis right-center and the Thompson-Davis left-center sharing the leadership, although Dennis was definitely the top man.
Gates’s departure signalled the end of “all trends unity,” the end to the era of “freedom of criticism,” and a new cry in the leadership for centralism. Factionalism was outlawed and Thompson issued an ultimatum to the left at the June 1958 NC meeting. “Our Party...has the capacity to declare war on factionalism...whether from the direction of revisionism or the direction of dogmatism,” said Thompson.27 With the leadership slapping themselves on the back for their so-called “victory against revisionism”—the resignation of Gates and friends—it was obvious that the immediate task was to get rid of the “ultra-lefts.”
Our strength and influence were growing and with Gates’s resignation, conditions were favorable for advancing the struggle against revisionism and conciliationism—for strengthening the leadership and prestige of the consistent Marxist forces. In spite of this situation, however, our left forces under the political leadership of Armando Román fell into a series of ultra-left errors which in the long run led to the dissipation of our prestige and influence and eventually to our isolation from a large number of honest forces who were in agreement with us.
We had gradually become more and more oriented towards the narrow, inflexible tactic of attack and exposure. Under these conditions, the fundamental political questions upon which the caucus was founded became relegated to secondary importance as we largely confined ourselves to attacking the Party’s position. Our purely oppositionist tactics, combined with a refusal to participate in mass work, enabled the Party leadership to portray us as anti-Party and disruptive elements. Some of the most blatant ultra-left errors of this period included a refusal to accept posts on the Manhattan County Staff (particularly Armando’s refusal to accept the key post of education director of the county); the boycott of the Daily Worker, even after the resignation of Gates; and the failure to fight for publication of articles stating our political position through the official channels of the Party.
I must admit self-critically that I tended to overlook these errors, thinking they were just individual mistakes of a tactical nature— not the reflection of an entire ultra-left line. After years of fighting arch right-wingers, many other comrades in the caucus made the same mistake. With Thompson’s ultimatum to the left, many of us began to think that we would very soon be expelled and agreed with Armando’s view that we should openly split with the Party—a decision which I now think was incorrect and played directly into the hands of the revisionists, who were able to isolate us even further from the rank and file. This decision resulted in the formation of the Provisional Organizing Committee for a Communist Party (POC), founded in August 1958.
Some eighty-three delegates, mostly Black and Puerto Rican working class cadres, attended the founding conference in New York. There was much enthusiasm, even euphoria, at the conference—we thought we were really on the way to building a new party. Joe Dougher and myself were elected co-chairmen, Armando became the general secretary. Other members of the executive committee included Admiral Kilpatrick of Cleveland, Ted Allen from West Virginia, Angel Torres and Lucille Bethancourt from Cleveland.
For all our fond hopes, the POC continued under Armando’s leadership in an isolationist line and soon deteriorated into an ultra-left sect. There was an absolute refusal to apply theory to practice and become involved in the day-to-day work among the masses; a rejection on principle of any compromise under any circumstances over any question, even over purely practical matters. Those who opposed such dogmatism were promptly labeled “conciliators.” The POC was rife with inner caucus witchhunts, personal slander and character assassination. Armando set himself up as an infallible demigod who instinctively could sniff out not only the “conciliators” in our ranks, but the “conciliators of the conciliators.” There was, to many of us, the distinct smell of police agentry about all this.
In October 1958, Armando called together a rump conference to have Gwen, myself and a number of other comrades expelled from the POC. This followed a number of splits with leading comrades like Lannon, Jim Keller in Chicago and Pat Lumpkin, all of which had been initiated by Armando. I had unwittingly allowed myself to be a part of some of this. It began to smell a little fishy to me though, and I demanded an investigation and the opening of all files. The result was a slander campaign against me—questioning my motives and charging me with abandoning principle—and
finally my expulsion.
Our hopes for a new party went pretty much down the drain with this and I was at loose ends. I wondered what I would do next. I hadn’t yet been expelled from the CPUS A, though everyone else around me had been. I figured that they wanted to isolate me completely before they expelled me. I was then working as a waiter in a French restaurant in Greenwich Village and was quite happy with my wife and young son, Haywood, born in June 1956. Meanwhile Gwen had lost custody of her son, Leo Yuspeh, and their visits were restricted by the court to a few hours every other week in a public place. She lost meaningful contact with him and found the situation very painful.
With all these problems converging on us at once, we decided to go to Mexico to get a fresh perspective on things, study and write. I didn’t know what else I could do. I flew down to Mexico and Gwen and Haywood Jr. followed me a few weeks later. We settled first in Cuautla, Morelos, and later in Mexico City, where our daughter Becky was born in 1963.
We were able to eke out an existence living off my disability pension from the VA and a little money that Gwen had. I kept in touch with things at home through correspondence with my old friend Cyril Briggs in Los Angeles. Briggs was then about seventy-two and as a leading member of the Party’s local Negro Commission was waging a pretty staunch struggle against the revisionists.28
Only in 1959, with most of the left out of the Party, did the leadership fully expose their political positions in the draft resolution for the Seventeenth Party Convention. The resolution represented the nearly complete victory of the right and an indication to me of just how insidious and dangerous an enemy revisionism is—having point by point, step by step, cut away at all our revolutionary principles in the name of fighting for them. The right wing of the Party were not just less militant fighters, but objectively the agents of the bourgeoisie who had succeeded in gaining control of the Party.
After seeing Jackson’s crude and blatantly reformist program on the Black national question, I decided to write an article for the
PA as part of the pre-convention discussion. By this time, Jackson had developed the Party’s reformist line to its logical conclusion, a full blown melting pot theory, and I lambasted him accordingly. My article was never printed, but Briggs rewrote it in his name and reportedly it was distributed at the Seventeenth Party Convention by the California delegation. Though the paper caused quite a stir, the revisionist line on the Afro-American question was officially adopted at the convention—the right of self-determination formally dropped.
Briggs’s paper was just what Dennis and Jackson needed to get rid of me. Following the convention, Jackson took a trip across country. On his way to Los Angeles, he stopped in Mexico City and met with a number of friends there. My good friend Elizabeth Catlett Mora was among them and asked Jackson about me. “Oh, he’s been expelled,” he said. “He’s a good guy, hut we just had some differences.” And that’s how I found out after thirty-six years that I had been expelled from the Communist Party USA.
And so the right was ultimately victorious in the Party’s third major crisis. Under the guise of attacking an often elusive and ephemeral “left sectarianism” and “dogmatism,” they destroyed the Party as a vanguard force, irrevocably shoving it down the road to revisionism and counter-revolution. It’s true that there were from time to time ultra-left currents in the Party. These currents mainly developed in response to the rightism of the Party leadership, as a result of the failure to involve the cadres in political education and play a leading role in the mass movernents. But only with a few exceptions could these leftist deviations have been considered the main danger to the Party. Most of what had been labeled by the leadership as “left sectarianism” were actually honest attempts to oppose the rightist bureaucracy, not the purism and isolationism, the running ahead of the masses which characterizes ultra-leftism.29
In basing themselves on the thesis that left sectarianism constituted the main danger and was primarily responsible for the isolation of the Party, the right obscured the whole history of class struggle in this country. It was right opportunism which destroyed the once-powerful Socialist Party. It was as we h£ve seen, right opportunism, expressed in Lovestone’s theory of continued prosperity and American exemption from economic crisis, which provoked the first Party crisis in 1927.
It was the crass opportunism and bourgeois reformism of Browder’s theories of “progressive capitalism” and an extended period of “harmony of interests between capital and labor” which threw the Party into its second major crisis.
And once again, it was right opportunism, this time expressed largely in the slogan of “peaceful, parliamentary and constitutional transition to socialism,” which plunged the Party into its third and fatal crisis. In this crisis, the right successfully threw the Party into a fervor over “left sectarianism,” exaggerating this error in order to obscure the history of the struggle against the right danger and prevent the Party from carefully and thoroughly tracing right opportunism to its systematic maturation during the post-war years.
The proposition that left sectarianism constituted the main historical danger in the CPUSA ignored the constant pressures exerted on the Party by the forces of bourgeois ideology and capitalist development. The particular conditions which American capitalism developed under—a frontier, vast resources and natural wealth, bourgeois democracy, an ability to temporarily mediate economic slump and recession, relative periods of prosperity-all this has tended to act as a force which retards the class consciousness of broad sections of the labor movement, fostering illusions that basic change can take place within the capitalist system and inequities be solved through reform.
The development of capitalism into monopoly capitalism, imperialism and the corresponding plunder of the Caribbean nations, the Philippines and Asia, brought superprofits into the coffers of the ruling class, enabling it to cultivate and encourage— through money, prestige and influence—a labor aristocracy which serves as the lieutenants of capital within the labor movement.
This small elite section of American labor, based among the upper strata of skilled and higher paid workers, has through its leadership in the trade unions, inundated the working class with bourgeois ideology, promoting reformism, narrow self-interest and rampant jingoistic chauvinism. This “labor bureaucracy” is particularly susceptible to the imperialist propaganda of white chauvinism and has served to intensify the antagonisms between white and Black workers, dividing and splitting the working class into hostile groups, retarding the development of revolutionary class consciousness.
These objective conditions combined together to provide fertile soil for the maturing of right opportunist class collaborationism and chauvinist ideas, outlooks and policies which undoubtedly all heavily affected our Party. It was out of these concrete conditions that right opportunism developed as the main danger in the working class movement. My experience in the Party confirmed what the history of the working class struggle has shown, that in order to develop as a revolutionary vanguard, the CP must constantly struggle against the powerful pressures of bourgeois ideology within its own ranks. The Party is not separated by a Chinese wall from the corruptive influences of the bourgeois world. In the postwar period, bourgeois influences within the Party combined in effect with the pressures of imperialist repression upon the Party. As a source of revisionism, illusions about the vitality of American imperialism were reinforced now by the imprisonment and terror employed by the government against the Party.
Under these circumstances, the shallowness of the “correction” of 1945 became apparent. Illusions about the possibility of continued alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie continued to be the center of the political orientation of the Party leadership. Simultaneously, under the pressure of the Smith Act prosecutions, the Party leadership developed the theory of peaceful transition to socialism.
Without a thorough purge of Browderism, the Party preserved and built up a bureaucracy effectively insulated against the operation of the Marxist-Leninist practice of criticism and self-criticism. In this way, not only was the ideological level of our Party forced to remain at a low level, but at the same time, unification, purification and corrective replacements of leadership were made almost impossible. The end result is a party which today acts as a mouthpiece for Soviet social-imperialism, the labor aristocracy and the pro-detente sections of the U.S. ruling class.