U.S. Communist Party in crisis festering debate comes to the surface in the American CP

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Carl Bloice, associate editor of the People's Weekly World (PWW), "American CP leaders had long operated on the principle that it is better to be on the winning side of a faction fight in the Soviet CP "...[But] the events since the failed coup of August 1991 have freed each of the major wings of the debate within the CPUSA to state their (First of a series)

Over the past six decades the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) has been rivaled by few for its craven capacity to support every political twist and turn of the bureaucratic hierarchy in the Soviet But today the CPUSA is in crisis, with nearly one-third of its estimated membership of 2500 on the verge of a political and/or organizational break with the policies of longtime CP National Chair, Gus Hall.

The dispute in the CPUSA came to a head during its December 1991 25th National Convention in Cleveland. But even before the convention began, Hall, in typical bureaucratic fashion, stacked the deck against the dissident faction. Elected delegates of the opposition faction were refused recognition and leading opposition delegates allowed to speak was limited to Herbert Aptheker and a few others.

After the convention, 21 members of the top staff of the People's Weekly World, the CPUSA newspaper, were barred from the party's offices for attempting to produce a "Special Supplement" to their newspaper which contained Aptheker's convention speech, other oppositional material, and critical comments.

[According to the authors of the supplement, "...officials of the CPUSA barred the paper's editor, Barry Cohen, from the building in which the paper is produced on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 1992. In protest against that action, the staff members who produced this supplement decided to have it printed elsewhere and distributed to the paper's readership."] Furthermore, all of the central leaders of the CP who found themselves aligned against the old-guard Hall leadership were excluded from the new 125-member CPUSA National Committee.

Dissidents Angela Davis, James Jackson, Charlene Mitchell, Daniel Rubin, Barry Cohen, Carl Bloice, Kendra Alexaneditor Barry Cohen locked out of PWW offices.

TYNAT TENI YCZ. than to tell the truth.

views more openly." the editor and occasional articies in the pages of the People's Weekly World.

One wing of the CP tended to support Gorbachev; the other, the so-called Soviet hardliners. But each side had to temporize its positions lest the "wrong" side prevail in the increasingly fractious battles within the Soviet CP. American CP leaders had long operated on the principle that it is better to be on the winning side of a faction fight in the Soviet CP than to tell the truth.

The events since the failed coup of August 1991 have freed each of the major wings of the debate within the CPUSA to state their views more openly. With the fall of Gorbachev from power, coupled with his call for the dissolution of his own party and his open alliance for the restoration of capitalism with Russian President Yeltsin, no wing of the CPUSA now feels compelled to prettify his policies and hide their real positions.

The Gus Hall wing of the CP prefers to align itself with the scattered Stalinist hardline CP fragments in the former USSR who still retain significant power and who may one day again challenge for complete power.

'New thinking' or old habits Hall himself was accused by his American party opponents of hailing the August coup attempt. The Hall forces often refer to this August period not as a Stalinist attempt to settle differences by force to assure one wing of the party bureaucracy a greater share of the restorationist booty, but rather as the time of the "Yeltsin countercoup" aimed at dissolving the CP and the USSR itself. Hall implied in his speech at the CPUSA convention that before the August coup attempt he was in a minority.

Hall's address to the delegates was quite revealing:

"The logical extension of Gorbachev's 'new thinking,'" Hall states, "are the actions he took after the attempted coup. He collaborated with Yeltsin in outlawing the CPSU, padlocking party offices and buildings, silenced the several party newspapers, confiscated party property, files and records. He illegally dismissed the Central Committee and Secretariat and ordered confiscation of their offices; then he gave open approval to witchhunts, including the arrests of Communists. He then resigned as general secretary. He succeeded in disbanding the democratically elected government bodies, the Supreme Soviet and Congress of People's Deputies and wrested power