The political dilemma faced by ex-Communist Party members

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have still not come to terms with the CPUSA's criticism of Castro because he 8 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1992 Cuban Revolution in 1960. Ex-CP overturned capitalism.

This is the third part of a series of articles on the current split in the Communist Party USA.

Mike Myerson, is a recently-resigned 30-year U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) veteran and free-lance journalist. He concludes his "Inside the CPUSA Explosion" article-in the February 1992 issue of Crossroads magazine-with some friendly suggestions to departing party members who have reorganized into "Committees of Correspondence" in the past few months.

"The first thing to learn," Myerson aptly explains, "is that there is much to learn. The communists have been grievously wrong on some matters that others have been right on. Traumatic as it is for many, it will likely be far easier to make a political and organizational break with the past than a psychological break with past methods."

Myerson's article reveals, perhaps contrary to his intentions, that both he and the Committees of Correspondence, now organizing in some 28 cities in 24 states across the country, have a long way to go before they can claim to have made "a political break with the past."

Thirty years ago, Myerson and this writer boarded a plane to Helsinki, Finland, to attend the Eighth World Youth Festival for Peace and Friendship for Youth and Students, an international gathering largely sponsored by Communist Parties throughout the world.

We were new friends who grew up in the civil rights and free speech movements and in the struggle against nuclear war. We were also two of the five youthful initiators of the 500-member American delegation, many of whom, with great enthusiasm, followed up their Helsinki visit with a first-time tour of the Soviet "Red-diaper baby"

As the "red-diaper baby" son of a lifelong CP member/supporter, I began my first associations in politics, as had Myerson, with a number of youth organizations adhering to the views of the CPUSA. From my then naive point of view, there were but two sides in the world class struggle.

On the one hand, there was U.S. imperialism, which I had come to know much about from my family experience with the McCarthy witch hunt. I hated the witchhunters and the government behind them, which framed up and executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

I was repulsed by a racist government that maintained Jim Crow segregation, intervened militarily across the globe to protect the interests of the ruling rich, and used every tool at its disposal to defend the bosses' profits and attack the trade unions when they fought for workers' elementary rights. This was the capitalism Myerson and I learned about first hand and came to despise with a passion.

On the other hand, there was, according to what I been taught, the opposite of capitalism-socialism. Its soul resided in the USSR!

After 10 days in Moscow and Leningrad, as the leader of the U.S. delegation, and the person with greatest access to Soviet spokespersons on many key subjects, I was convinced that I had been mistaken.

There were no soviets in the Soviet Union, no institutions of the working class where the real decisions in society were made by the people themselves. There were no working-class bodies that were democratically planning the economy.

I asked my tour guide about this. I was told that I would be given an answer shortly. There was no answer.

There was no one to answer the many additional questions I had come to ask. Why had the Cuban Communist Party refused to back Fidel Castro and the July 26th Movement in their struggle for power against the repressive regime of Fulgencio Batista? Why did the Soviet Union make the "mistake" of invading Hungary in 1956 when the Hungarian workers had set up real worker's councils to defend their interests? Why didn't Soviet workers have the right to strike? Why was access to the special stores I had been taken to restricted to members of the Communist Party?

"Peaceful Coexistence"

Upon my return, I had a final question for my Communist Party friends in the United States. "If it is true," I asked, "that the Democratic Party is a capitalist party, why does the Communist Party always support it?"

When I was told that my question was "ultraleft," that the Republicans were the party of big business and of the far right danger-even the "fascist" right-and that there were many "progressive Democrats,, and "anti-monopoly" Democrats, I decided that my other friends, those whom the Communist Party referred to as "Trotskyite fascists," had been right all along.

I became a revolutionary socialist and joined what was then the best expression of this viewpoint in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Mike Myerson, however, became a Stalinist—an adherent to a school of political thought that subordinated the truth to unconditional support to whatever regime was in power in the USSR. Myerson became the head of the U.S. Peace Council, the U.S. associate of the Stalinist-sponsored World Peace Council. These bodies were designed to promote Stalinist style "peaceful coexistence" the world over.

"Peaceful coexistence" was the practice initiated by Stalin after the original Soviet Communist Party led by Lenin and Trotsky was decimated by mass purges, imprisonment, and then literally-mass murder. "Peaceful coexistence," can best be understood by radicalizing youth today by its analogy to the events over the past half decade or so in relation to Soviet foreign policy.

The Gorbachev regime's pursuit of "regional agreements" with U.S. imperialism meant, in fact, subordinating all Soviet support to oppressed people struggling for liberation to a deal with the United States. Aid was cut to Nicaragua and El Salvador, and deals were negotiated behind the backs of the liberation movements in Namibia and South Africa. Aid and trade to Cuba was cut to the bone and more.

In every instance, as with "peaceful coexistence" from Stalin's time to today, the goal was to secure imperialist support to the Soviet bureaucracy in retur for Soviet help to contain liberation struggles or to subordinate them to local capitalist forces.

In the United States, beginning in the mid-1930s, that took the form of the CPUSA leading a historic break with the traditions of the American workers movement. American labor and all the progressive social movements influenced or led by the CPUSA were tied to the "liberal" wing of the U.S. ruling class, the Democratic Party.

"Debates" on party policy?

Myerson's article, like many of those written by recently "enlightened" ex-Pers does have the great merit of revealing much about the U.S. Communist Party that has remained hidden. But like his associates in the mushrooming "Committees of Correspondence," Myerson glosses over many reactionary CP positions he still supports.

He retains, for example, the fundamental flaw common to all Stalinist and neo-Stalinist currents in the United States-an unshakable and continuing view that American politics begins and ends in the ball park of the Democratic Party.

I will return to this key issue after assessing some of Myerson's important revelations about the CPUSA.

Myerson begins: "There has not been open questioning and debate about party policy since the 1960s, when a new postMcCarthy-period generation of radicals joined the CPUSA, influenced by the movements of that decade."

This is not accurate. The questioning in the CP stopped with the Stalinization of the party in 1929. Any current offering any opposition to the line of the CPUSA, which mimicked the line of the Soviet CP for six decades, was expelled or driven to silence.

My parents were a case in point. In 1946, in the temporary climate of the postwar euphoria in the CPUSA—resulting from the wartime alliance between the United States and the USSR-Communist Party head Earl Browder actually succeeded in dissolving the party.

Browder insisted that the CP continue its reactionary wartime policy of policing the unions to impose a wage freeze, even after the war was over. He, and the entire party leadership, insisted that only a tiny minority of the American ruling class could be considered enemies. The rest were placed in the category of "progressive capitalists."

The CP was replaced with the Communist Political Association (CPA), and Browder offered to publicly shake the hand of leading capitalist titan J.P. Morgan.

My parents—who had joined the CP in their youth, in the early 1930s—were expelled on one day's notice when they expressed the opinion that U.S. capitalists could not be expected to be labor's allies in the future.

Six months later, word came from Moscow that the U.S.-initiated "cold war" suddenly required a different course in the United States. Stalin picked William Z. Poster to lead the American party. Browder was removed virtually without a whimper from the ranks—who had leared that even a whimper led to expulsion, ridicule, and disgrace.

My parents were given appropriate apologies and asked to rejoin. They declined, although their memories of the CP of their youth-including the working-class struggles they had engaged in-caused them to remain party supporters.

"One-man-one-rule"

Myerson launches a number of personal and political missiles at CPUSA head, Gus Hall. With the death in 1986 of CP National Chair Henry Winston, General Secretary Hall assumed Winston's title, as well as maintaining his own. Myerson comments:

"An African-American, 'Winnie' [Winston] was much beloved throughout the ranks, and his co-leadership with Hall symbolized the Black-white unity at the center of the organization's ideological-political program.

With Hall's combining of his and the deceased Winston's posts, Myerson argues, "One-man-one-rule, specifically one-white -man-rule, was in place."

Myerson continues: "Without Winston's presence to keep him in check, Hall's racism and chauvinism made themselves readily apparent."

This took two forms, according to Myerson. The first was the exclusion of several leading Blacks from the "inner circle" of the CP leadership.

Additionally, Myerson claims: "It wasn't long before the centrality of Black liberation or equality to the class struggle came under question in discussion, and under attack in practice. The Rainbow Coalition was held at arms length, while the party failed to provide any serious support for Jesse Jackson's historic presidential campaigns.

"The South African Communist Party, because of Joe Slovo's critique of Marxism-Leninism as practiced in the USSR and Eastern Europe, became the object of SCOm.

"When Angela Davis and Charlene Mitchell (Mitchell was the head of the CP-led National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression] returned from a visit to South Africa hosted by Nelson Mandela, the ANC, the SACP, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the head of the Ohio party district 'banned' Mitchell (continued on page 9, in “The Patrick Buchanan campaign: Pushing capitalist politics further right”)

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He rails against the right to abortion,