First Published: Frontline, Vol. 4, No. 27, May 25, 1987.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is now in the midst of preparations for its 24th national convention, to be held August 13-16 in Chicago. Its preconvention discussion, begun at a March central committee meeting, is based on draft resolutions which were published in the April issue of the CPUSA theoretical journal, Political Affairs.
The resolutions present the CPUSA leadership’s broad political line and offer an assessment of the impact of the Iran/Contragate scandal on the contours of the class struggle from now through the 1988 elections. On the positive side, the CPUSA reasserts its partisanship with the U.S. and international working class on the main battlefronts against imperialism – the fight for world peace, solidarity with existing socialism and with national liberation movements, the battle for trade union rights, the fight against racism and for full equality for women. These are rated in the context of a world balance of forces steadily shifting toward peace and socialism. The resolutions also correctly stress the need for vigorous ideological struggle against anti-communist and anti-working class notions in order to effectively combat the continuing danger from monopoly capital and the ultra-right.
On the other hand, the resolutions’ concrete assessment of the exact balance of forces in the U.S. – both between the working class and the capitalist class and within each of these classes – is imprecise and skewed. The current documents continue the CPUSA’s longstanding pattern of exaggerating positive trends and downplaying the obstacles that still remain to building a powerful working class movement and putting an end to Reaganism. Although there is some attempt to qualify the party’s usual “official optimism,” overall the resolutions still display the rose-colored approach to politics which has become the CPUSA leadership’s trademark. As a result, the documents provide flawed guidance for a progressive movement that does have new opportunities but needs the utmost analytic precision and political resoluteness to take advantage of them.
Aiming at a “precise assessment of mass thought patterns,” the CPUSA asserts that “The era of crises is dispelling illusions about capitalism. The threat of nuclear war, now seen by millions as emanating from the Reagan administration and the military monopolies, is resulting in the explosive spontaneous growth of a multiclass people’s peace majority. The daily exposures on Iran/Contragate and the speed of the disintegration of the Reagan presidency likewise enable masses rapidly to draw basic conclusions about the anti-people, anti-democratic nature of Reagan and the ultra-right forces.” Later, the resolutions go even further to argue that an entire constellation of policies, not just this administration, has been demolished, offering the extremely dubious formulation that we have witnessed the “resulting disintegration of Reaganism.”
The analysis of the fightback against Reaganism continues the CPUSA’s tendency to assess all of organized labor as pretty much a uniformly positive force, obscuring the sharp political contention between the trade union movement’s backward and progressive wings:
The trade union movement has now taken the lead in the struggle against the reactionary policies of Reaganism, It has become the strongest and best organized politically independent force in the electoral arena .... The trade union movement has become the most consistent anti-monopoly, anti-ultra-right, anti-fascist force. The trade union movement is an active contingent in the struggle against U. S. imperialist policies of working with and supporting the reactionary, fascist, racist regimes in South Africa and Chile. The trade union movement has a good position against the U.S. policies of aggression in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The April 25 national demonstration, initiated by labor and clergy, is solid proof of this fact.
The problem with this, of course, is that the trade union movement as a whole does not have a good position on Central America. The AFL-CIO is officially neutral on contra aid and denounces the Sandinistas as “Marxist-Leninist commandantes who rule the country” and suppress democratic trade unionism. The federation’s formal position is that “El Salvador consolidated its democracy with the election of Napoleon Duarte as president,” and it supports military aid to the Duarte regime in El Salvador “ contingent upon demonstrated progress in ensuring trade union rights,” a condition which federation President Lane Kirkland declares has been met. What is certainly true is that there is a growing anti-intervention wing within the labor movement; but if the sharp contention over this wing’s participation in April 25 proved anything, it was that this wing still has considerable work to do to reverse the AFL-CIO’s longstanding pro-imperialist foreign policy positions and truly make the trade unions the progressive movement’s leading force.
On the pivotal question of stopping the nuclear arms race, the CPUSA says: “While there is confusion about whether Star Wars is a ’defensive shield’ or a massive research project seeking new nuclear weapons systems for use in outer space, the great majority are against Star Wars. People see Star Wars as a threat and a major obstacle to a new disarmament agreement with the Soviet Union.”
Once again, much too sweeping. While it is certainly true that there is a rise in peace activism and sentiment as well as a welcome new openness to Soviet disarmament initiatives, it is unfortunately not yet the case that a majority of the U. S. people oppose Star’ Wars. Stating that they do understates the task before us. For the CPUSA, the task becomes principally an organizational one – mobilizing the “peace majority” – when the real challenge is still to win the masses to understand and reject the underlying premises of Star Wars and nuclear weapons in general.
On the electoral front, the resolutions argue that “the most significant change ... has been the growth of the forces of political independence. This is a meaningful qualitative shift in the balance of political forces.” In the CPUSA’s framework, the “forces of political independence” refers mainly to the labor movement; the Afro-American community is listed as one of labor’s “allies.” In fact, the main Political Resolution omits completely any mention of the Rainbow Coalition or a potential presidential bid by Jesse Jackson. (The Rainbow is mentioned only once in the four resolutions which make up the CPUSA package; in the separate Resolution on Afro-American Equality it is listed along with the Alabama New South Coalition and the “networks organized by the Black Leadership Roundtable” as one of many grassroots political organizations. springing up in the Black community.)
In contrast to the preparatory materials for the last few CPUSA conventions, a number of qualifications on the CUPSA’s rose-colored assessments are scattered throughout the current. drafts. For example, in his introduction to the resolutions, party General Secretary Gus Hall wraps up his presentation by commenting: “Another word about the shift in the balance of political forces. As you can see, we do not say the shift has already taken place. We say ’it is taking place’.”
But with all the talk of “explosive” movements and “popular upsurges” that make up the core of the resolutions, this aside is hard to take seriously. Hall’s seemingly incurable tendency to part company with reality can be seen when he follows the reasonable assertion that it is now possible to get Congress to cut off funds for the Nicaraguan contras with the near-fantastic proposition that under the current conditions a cutoff of funds to the Afghan contras can be won and “the people and the working class can get the new Congress to adopt a new labor charter, a Labor Bill of Rights.” These are exactly the kind of unrealistic and tactically misleading assessments that have engendered the lack of confidence in the CPUSA which is currently widespread in broad progressive circles.
The pity of it is that this is a time when a broad spectrum of activists are more open than before to a serious Marxist-Leninist assessment of recent developments and the new possibilities they have produced.
But perhaps there is a glimmer of hope in the CPUSA’s small hedges on its overall evaluations. They suggest that the CPUSA may be aware that its tactical assessments lack credibility among many Progressives – and that continued theoretical and political dialogue with the CPUSA by the many Marxist-Leninists outside its ranks as well as the progressive movement as a whole can have a useful impact on its thinking.
Unfortunately, the CPUSA leadership does not place a similar value on discussion and debate with other forces on the left; in fact, the party does not recognize any organized left forces as legitimate except itself. This view, concentrated in the CPUSA’s category of the “phony left,” will be the topic of the second and concluding article in this series.