Communist Party USA fractures and retrenches

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Hall wing of CPUSA is placing their bets on another Soviet coup attempt.

(Second of a series)

The Feb. 9, 1992, disaffiliation vote of the 325-member Northern California district from the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is symptomatic of events to come.

The previous CP leadership norm for dealing with dissenting groups over the past 60 years has been expulsion and public slander. Those who dared to utter even the most muted criticism were pilloried as "anti-Soviet, anti-leaderhip factionalists," and "harborers of alien class ideas," if not "outright capitulators to imperialism."

Similar slanders were routinely hurled at all those outside the CPUSA, especially those in the Trotskyist movement who expressed the very same criticisms of American Stalinism that are voiced today from every quarter of the still-existing world Stalinist movement and from its most recent splitoffs.

The Northern California district conference charged the Gus Hall-led faction of the CPUSA with a political policy of "cultlike exposition of dogma." The district chair, Kendra Alexander, and other central leaders, are among the many dissident CPers working nationally in a loose association of current and former members called the Committees of Correspondence. This group plans a San Francisco Bay Area conference in June.

Central leaders and rank-and-file majorities of party districts in New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, Wisconsin and elsewhere are in the process of similarly breaking relations with the rapidly disintegrating CPUSA.

The Jan. 23, 1992, issue of the New York State CP newsletter, The New York Party Mobilizer, reports, "The crux of the internal debate and division up to the 25th National Convention was whether these different trends would be allowed legitimacy in the Party. The National Convention, by its actions, sealed this debate, made it irreversible and proceeded purging party members, [and], in the name of 'factionalism'... lock[ed]-out all those who refused National Convention as having "reaffirmed Marxism-Leninism as our guiding science, [and] democratic centralism as our principle of organization. It recognized the class struggle as the motor force of society and the working class objectively as the revolutionary class in today's world."

This reversion to traditional socialist concepts is limited exclusively to the realm of rhetoric. In practice, the CPUSA, like its co-thinkers in the reforming and reuniting Stalinist grouplets in the former USSR, maintains its 60-year commitment to a partnership with the liberal wing of the capitalist Democratic Party in the United States.

In the same issue of the PWW in which the new California leadership proclaims its allegience to Marxism-Leninism, lifelong CP functionary and PWW staffwriter Simon Gerson reported on the recent New Hampshire primary election:

"Democrats, with the exception of Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, offered no bold challenge to the Bush administration and no far-reaching program for the change urgently demanded by the voters."

Gerson described Harkin, who has called for a five percent cut in the military budget, as the candidate with "substantial support in the labor movement." Turning to the upcoming primary elections in the South, Gerson predicts that Harkin's support in labor, combined with Jessie Jackson's support in the African American community, could derail the influence of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in the South.

Gerson explains: "The Rev. Jessie Jackson, with great influence in these states, could affect developments. This alliance, if effective, can make of the Harkin campaign a genuinely strong force and can possibly bring him to the Democratic nomination."

Both wings of the CPUSA have not budged on this key question of class independence. The minority wing refers in the majority in the PWW to the "anti-monopoly coalition." In both cases, the politics are the same. The lesser-evil Democrat will be sought at the expense of building an independent working-class party. with support to this or that liberal Democrat, a most instructive editorial appeared in the Feb. 22 issue.

Under the headline of "An unholy plot," the moder day Stalinist jouralists write: "On June 7, 1982, President Reagan met with Pope John Paul II to plot 'the demise of Communism' in Eastern Europe, starting with Poland... Reagan signed a secret directive authorizing economic, diplomatic and covert measures to destabilize the socialist countries.

The editorial concludes ominously: "The war continues today, seeking to block any attempt by the Polish or Soviet people to restore governments that will defend socialism."

Look to Soviet Stalinists The key word here is restore. By "defending socialism," the American Stalinists mean a return to power of the same bureaucracy that for the past six decades not only suppressed all genuine socialists, but physically annihilated the core leadership and rarks of the original Bolshevik Party. a party that, under Lenin and Trotskychampioned working class rule and real socialist democracy in the USSR.

The CPUSA looks to a resurgence of Soviet Stalinism in the former USSR, including another coup attempt, albeit, this time better planned and with a populist flaVOI.

The PWW approvingly described the Feb. 9 Manezh Square demonstration in Moscow organized by a combination of Stalinist ex-functionaries, military officers, anti-semites, and other currently dispossessed careerists.

This demonstration of an estimated 120,000, was a highpoint of the campaign of the old-line Stalinists against the equally pro-capitalist Yeltsin government. It was designed to take advantage of the generalized anger at the Yeltsin price hikes and the rapid decline in the standard of living.

The rally platform featured speakers combining social demagogy and Great Russian chauvinism with neo-Bolshevik rhetoric. It foretold a future alliance of political and military reactionaries with anti-semites and neofascists of the Pamyat type.

The Hall wing of the CPUSA sees its future directly tied to the success of these still-powerful Stalinist elements in the former USSR.

Hall, in a taped speech just days' after the August coup, declared his support for the coup, albeit with some criticism of the "narrow" nature of the combination of CP leaders behind the effort. Hall opined:

"The setting up of the crisis committee

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New York Mobilizer to building an, "all- people's front against reaction" and the