Communism

B

3

Other Western European Parties

The strongest Western European parties, other than the Italian and French, have been those of Greece, Finland, Portugal, and Spain. The Greek and Portuguese parties mirrored the intransigence of the French and refused to go the reformist route. The Finnish party generally adopted a neutral line toward the Soviets. The Spanish Communist Party, led by Santiago Carrillo, adopted Eurocommunism in the late 1970s but splintered into pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet factions in the 1980s. Communist parties in Sweden, Norway, Belgium, and Britain have been less influential but have enjoyed, at one time or another, representation in their respective parliaments. The smallest and least significant communist parties have been those of Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, all of which generally supported Moscow. Almost everywhere in Western Europe, the declining electoral popularity of communist parties was accompanied by internal party dissension and, in some places, by splits into rival parties. The Belgian and Dutch parties dissolved in 1991.

C

United States

The communist movement in the United States began to take shape after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Leftists in the Socialist Party of America, buoyed by the revolution, broke from the group in 1919 to form two rival parties: the Communist Party, composed primarily of recent Russian and Eastern European immigrants; and the Communist Labor Party, led by American journalist John Reed. Both parties claimed the communist mantle. They fused under instructions from the Comintern in 1922. The party was known as the Workers (Communist) Party of America and other names before renaming itself the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) in 1929.

The party’s first years were marked by turbulence and internal division. After World War I, fears of foreign sabotage led to the “Red Scare” of 1919 and 1920. Federal and local police forces launched raids on American radicals and arrested thousands of Communists, wrapping the infant party in suspicion. Members clashed over the appropriate degree of subservience to the Comintern and over the desirability of maintaining a secret branch of the party. Jay Lovestone, the party’s general secretary, was purged and expelled in 1929 for opposing underground operations and advocating purely open political activity.

The CPUSA attained its greatest influence on American politics and labor between 1930 and 1945, under the leadership of Earl Browder. Benefiting from the hardships and mass unemployment of the Great Depression and from the rise of fascism in Europe, the party found a ready audience in the expanding industrial trade unions and among academics and intellectual luminaries. The American writers John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser all signed party-inspired petitions and betrayed some degree of approval of its aims. Communist party membership peaked at about 80,000 in 1939. However, many members left the party after the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939, repelled by Soviet cooperation with the Nazi regime. Its reputation recovered in World War II after the United States allied with Stalin’s Russia. In 1944 Browder formally dissolved the party in favor of a new organization, the Communist Political Association. He claimed the new group could more wholeheartedly back the war effort. In 1945 the CPUSA reorganized and replaced Browder with a more hardline leadership.

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The outbreak of the Cold War after World War II dealt the CPUSA a blow from which it never recovered. The deterioration of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union put pressure on sympathizers to choose between the party and American patriotism. Renewed fears over national security, tied to concerns about infiltration of the government by communist subversives, led to intensified scrutiny of the CPUSA and other political groups considered radical. In 1947 President Harry Truman approved a law that permitted authorities to investigate federal employees and fire those found to be disloyal to the government. That same year the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened hearings into communists’ presence in the motion-picture industry; ten Hollywood screenwriters were imprisoned for a year in 1950 for refusing to testify. Other Hollywood artists and writers suspected of being communists were blacklisted and shunned by the industry. In 1949, 11 top leaders of the CPUSA were convicted under the Alien Registration Act (Smith Act) of 1940, which made it illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the American government. The Internal Security Act of 1950 required the registration of communist and communist-front organizations (communist organizations that conceal their true nature).

From 1950 to 1954 Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin used congressional investigations to attack communists, who he claimed had infiltrated the Department of State and other government offices. Most of McCarthy’s charges were never substantiated, and he was ultimately censured by the Senate for his investigative abuses. However, the successful prosecution of Soviet agents such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg, and later revelations from the Soviet archives, leave no doubt that some American communists cooperated in espionage and put ideological convictions ahead of their duty as citizens.

The CPUSA’s membership plummeted from 60,000 in 1948 to 25,000 in 1953 and 10,000 in 1957. It recovered only slightly in subsequent years. Self-styled Marxist-Leninist groups cropped up in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s, but the CPUSA made little impact on events and slipped into ever-greater obscurity. The party might have weathered the adversity of the postwar decades had it been better attuned to core American values, including individualism and capitalism, but its disdain for those beliefs isolated it from grassroots opinion.

D

Canada

The Communist Party of Canada (CPC) was founded in 1921. Its propaganda before World War II emphasized combating “American and British imperialism” and backing up Soviet policy. It had a large following in the trade unions. There was no Canadian analogue to the McCarthy era in the United States, but in the 1950s the party lost much ground after the tarnishing of Stalin’s reputation in the Soviet Union. In addition, the two main branches of the Canadian labor movement merged and affiliated themselves with the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a democratic socialist party, which drew support away from the CPC. By the 1970s the CPC was a minor sect, its influence limited to college campuses and a few old-guard unions.

E

Other Countries

Communist parties have organized in many other countries and regions. In Asia, the most important of the nonruling communist parties were in India, Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines. The Indonesian party, known as the Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI, was banned in 1966, on the heels of an unsuccessful coup attempt by procommunist military officers. The Indian party split in 1964 into two parties; the larger of the two, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), has controlled state governments in West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura. The Japanese Communist Party, dating from 1922, is one of the oldest political parties in the country, and had a half-million members at its peak in the 1960s. In the Philippines, the Philippine Communist Party, acting through its New People’s Army, has fought a protracted guerrilla insurgency against the national government.

In Latin America, the biggest nonruling communist parties have been those in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The Uruguayan Communist Party has had a limited place in governing coalitions. In the Arab countries of the Middle East, communist parties have generally been minuscule clandestine groups, legally barred from participation in open politics. Tudeh, the communist faction in Iran, was banned in 1949; the Israeli party has a largely Arab membership. In Africa, the South African Communist Party has been the most influential of the nonruling parties. Outlawed for most of the apartheid period, it formed an alliance with the African National Congress that has continued to the present.

IX

Features of Communist States

Communist regimes have ruled many countries, so it is not surprising that the practice of communism has varied widely among them. The societies in which communists have exercised control have themselves been diverse, although none has been among the advanced industrial countries where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed the workers’ revolution would catch fire. Some communist officials have been revolutionaries, others reformers, and yet others dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. Some leaders, such as Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot, have been mass murderers; others, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, have eschewed force. Their differences notwithstanding, communist states have shared certain features: a Marxist-Leninist ideology, a centrally planned economy, single-party rule, and restrictions on individual freedom.

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