Vol. 72/No. 43      November 3, 2008

80 Years of Communist Continuity in the United States

In the United States, the largest political tendencies in the workers movement diverted militant workers from a class-struggle course. The Socialist Party gave full support to the imperialist war. The Stalinized Communist Party zigzagged as the war progressed, based on the shifting diplomatic needs of the privileged bureaucracy in Moscow. It supported the U.S. imperialist government leading up to the war, then denounced President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration following the August 1939 Stalin-Hitler pact. After German imperialism invaded the Soviet Union, the U.S. Stalinists became rabid warmongers, backing the “Allied” imperialists as “antifascist” and defenders of democracy.

The Socialist Workers Party, on the other hand, maintained the Marxist view that in the modern epoch there is no progressive wing of the capitalist class. The major industrialized capitalist rivals, dominated by finance capital—what Marxists term imperialism—are constantly driven to wars of conquest in which they try to redivide the world’s territories. The working-class vanguard, the party held, needs to explain the imperialist character of the war and why workers and farmers must oppose it, fighting instead for their own class interests worldwide.

Vanguard workers in the United States came under increasing attack as Washington sought to drum up a patriotic campaign in support of its war drive. The Smith “Gag” Act was passed in 1940, prohibiting the advocacy of “overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States.” Under this thought-control law, 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and Teamsters Local 544 in Minneapolis were railroaded to prison for their class-struggle course in the labor movement, including opposition to the imperialist war. They spent between 12 and 16 months behind bars.

The Communist Party backed the Smith Act frame-ups, arguing that the SWP was “interfering with the war effort.” Just a few years later, in 1949, the same law would be used to victimize many leaders of the CP, an antilabor attack the Socialist Workers Party energetically campaigned to oppose.

The government also suppressed distribution of the Militant. In November 1942 three issues of the paper were held up by postal authorities because of its “editorial policies and criticisms of the administration,” the Militant noted. In March 1943 the postmaster general revoked the Militant’s second-class mailing rights on the grounds that its articles included “stimulation of race issues” in wartime.

The labor bureaucracy parroted the bosses’ patriotic rhetoric. They accepted the wartime wage freeze imposed by the Roosevelt administration and called for a “no-strike pledge” in the name of not interfering with the war effort.

The class-collaborationist course of the labor bureaucrats was not accepted by all workers. In 1943 half a million coal miners went on strike and, despite government threats to break the strike with troops, won demands for pay increases. A number of other “unauthorized” strikes took place in 1944-45. The Socialist Workers Party championed these battles.

As hundreds of thousands of workers, including many young militants, were dragged into mandatory conscription, the SWP carried out a proletarian military policy. Rather than separate themselves from the masses of workers, if drafted they went into the imperialist army and carried out political work among the ranks, working to win over as many as possible to the communist movement.

The Socialist Workers Party was actively involved in advancing the Black struggle, which was on the rise as the war unfolded. Blacks resisted discrimination and segregation, both in the military and throughout the country. In contrast, the CP told Blacks they should subordinate their struggle to the war effort.

The worldwide slaughter of workers and farmers by the imperialist powers came to a brutal climax as atomic warfare was unleashed on the people of Japan. The CP and other labor misleaders hailed the nuclear annihilation of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In contrast, the Socialist Workers Party maintained its uncompromising opposition to the imperialist war to the end.

“There is no peace!” declared a statement by the party in the Aug. 18, 1945, issue of the Militant. It explained that no matter which imperialist powers came out on the top of the heap at the end of the war, there would be no peace until working people took power out of the hands of the imperialist war makers and established a workers and farmers government.

That course put the Socialist Workers Party in a strong position as the postwar labor upsurge erupted in the United States.
 
 
Related articles:
Effort needed to get on schedule with SWP Party-building Fund
$90,000 Socialist Workers Party Fall 2008 Party-Building Fund Week 2  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home