The legalized CP has considerably widened its influence. Some of its middlecadres believed in the leadership's professions of faith about the so-called first step of the "democratic revolution". The inclusion of the CP in the ANC apparatus and its lack of an independent policy can only increase the number of the disappointed. The world crisis of Stalinism has profoundly split the leadership
The break-up can now only be a matter of months away, with one part looking for wholesale integration into Mandela's project and an abandonment of any specifipossibility, even modest or local, of an internal resistance might represent potential first line of defence against the compromises of the leading bureaucracy.
Then there is the whole problem of the socialist left, and first of all of what is meant by this. If it means coherent political groups leading a conscious fight for a break with the existing system then the organization is the Workers Organization for Socialist Action (WOSA). This is still a small political movement, which cannot directly compete with the big forces like the ANC, the CP or the PAC.
However the socialist left in the larger sense goes beyond WOSA. Without self-deception, one can include here a part of AZAPO, perhaps some sections of the PAC, certainly some trade union militants from COSATU and NACTU and finally dispersed fringes of the ANC and CP, amounting in all to some thousands of militants. This left needs to find themes 16 faractivity that alow it se put up a resistance to the present course of events. The central battle for a constituent assembly could have a very important educational role. Unfortunately there is now a real risk that some weeks from now, when the matthe referendum will occupy the forefront of the political scene, this slogan will lose its agitational qualities. Furthermore to restrict oneself to this institutional issue could trap the left in a framework which makes it all the more difficult to mobilize at rank-and-file level.
The present challenge is to formulate as rapidly as possible an alternative, transisubversive response to the accommodations now being
Questions such as: What agricultural and rural reform? What sort of reform of housing, education and health? alternative to layoffs in the mining industry? What reply to the current military and police system, into which the ANCis only looking to be coopted? What forms of control and democratic selforganization for the township communities? need to be taken up.
Such a programme would give coherence to all those who do not want to give way. On this basis it would then be possible to better mobilize around more immediate demands, for example against layoffs or the lowering of wages, which immediate importance for the masses. The campaign for electricity is already underway; in a country where only 20% of the Black population has access to electricity one can imagine the mobilizing capacity of such a campaign as well as its
Can an organization such as WOSA assume such responsibilities? Will there be a sudden addition of support from the crisis of the CP or the union movement? Today, nobody can give firm answers to these questions. But the day of reckoning is approaching.
In a short while the social battle and the battles over the elections and the referendum will have to be joined. The situation is changing very fast. All militants will find themselves working under conditions that they have never known before and cannot predict. They have known clandestinity, and in the 1980s huge mass mobili-
Today the parameters have suddenly changed. Reference points need to be rebuilt, and priorities and forms of
At a time when the great wave of international anti-apartheid solidarity is slowly fading away owing to the official negotiations, we will continue in these underline the fact that the oppressed masses of South Africa have no less a need for solidarity. And that country's revolutionaries have no less a need for internationalist support. There are battles of resistance that we must try to win, in South Africa as elsewhere, to ensure that the "new world order" is not finally defined by people like de Klerk. *
T HE CPUSA has been among the
most monolithic Stalinist parties anywhere in the world. For virtually its entire existence, the party has parroted whatever the Soviet bureaucracy said. It obediently adapted to all the twists and turns of the Kremlin line - defending, justifying and praising that line, no matter what it was.
Following Khrushchev's report to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's 20th Congress and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the CPUSA experienced a split. A wing of the party, led by the Daily World editor John Gates, became disenchanted with the Soviet "model", and urged the CP to pursue a more indepen-
But Gates and his followers were soundly trounced by the "orthodox" William Z. Foster wing of the party. They left it — for social democracy, for liberal causes, or for private lives devoid of political activity.
The party, much reduced in size, reconstituted itself under the leadership of Gus Hall. For the next three decades it functioned pretty much as it had before, with due allowance made for denouncing the "cult of the individual", the Soviet bureaucracy's explanation for what went wrong during the Stalin period. The "Eurocommunism" phenomenon found little support in the ranks of the CPUSA, although one longtime leader (Gil Green) disagreed with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and said so publicly without getting
Gorbachev enthusiastically endorsed
When Gorbachev first announced his program of perestroika and glasnost, the CPUSA enthusiastically endorsed it. But as the economic crisis in the Soviet Union deepened and the country was wracked with ethnic and national conflict, the CP's central leadership — led by national chair Gus Hall - became increasingly critical of Gorbachev's policies.
Hall's contention was that Gorbachev had abandoned the Soviet Union's system of centralized control (Hall, of course, does not refer to it as being bureaucratic without having a system in place to substi-
The predictable result, Hall says, was chaos. In an earlier period, Hall had targeted Yeltsin as leading the drive for capitalist restoration. But now Gorbachev is portrayed as having laid the basis for these
Carl Boice, an African American leader of the party and associate editor of its publication, the People's Weekly World, had served during the last few years as the paper's correspondent to
Bloice in his weekly articles was an apologist for Gorbachev and his policies, and remained so virtually to the end. But Bloice also began to search for a deeper
CPUSA: towards a
USA party's shores like political and ideological shock waves. The setbacks and defeats in the Eastern European socialist countries and the road to ruin that the Soviet Union split?
A DEEPLY divided Communist Party USA held Its 25th convention in Cleveland, Ohio on December 6-8, 1991. Within days alter the convention adjourned, the deep fissures tearing the party apart had erupted into a public brawl. SAMUEL ADAMS* explanation of the deteriorating situation in the Soviet Union than Hall's simplistic analysis, which attributed it all to poor planning.
Bloice concluded that there was something systemically wrong with how the Soviet Union functioned and he began raising questions about the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy itself. At the same time, Bloice and others criticized bureaucratic and undemocratic tendencies within the CPUSA.
Hall argued that while the crisis of the capitalist system was systemic, it was incorrect to say the same about the "socialist" system in the USSR. Its problems, he insisted, simply flowed from "human error". Hall also discounted all talk of undemocratic procedures in the CPUSA.
There the differences lay until the attempted August coup in the Soviet Union. Hall took a position "to neither condemn nor condone" the coup. This provoked an explosion of protests by many in the CP's ranks. A meeting of the CP's National Committee, held on September 8, by a vote of 33-30, passed a resolution condemning the coup. That was a sharp setback for Hall.
Internal debate heats up
Internal debate - conducted with an almost unprecedented freedom of expression for the CP — heated up as the party moved towards its December convention. "An Initiative to Unite and Renew the Party" drafted by 18 leading CPers, was circulated and reportedly signed by over 800 party members, about a third of the entire membership.
The "Initiative" notes the tremors shaking Communist Parties around the world, warns of the CP's "stagnation in theoretical concepts", "isolation from progressive developments in our country" and "attempts to stifle debate [that] threaten our party's very existence". It says participation in mass struggles should be "our primary task and yardstick" and emphasizes the "need to update our concept of socialism" and "make our party much more democratic"
It asserts that "the style of leadership of our party in the past period has appeared much more concerned with fending off any admission of error than in coming to grips with the challenges of the moment".
This kind of talk gave Hall and his camp the excuse to denounce the Initiative signers as a "right opportunist fac-
Hall appealed to CP trade unionists to rescue the party from those he stamped as reformers and revisionists. By the time of the convention, the Hall grouping had consolidated a sizeable majority.
The minority who signed the Initiative included many of the best-known party
Angela Davis was unable to attend the convention but she sent a message which said in part: "I was one of the original signers of the Initiative because I believe that the Communist Party will become ever more rapidly obsolescent — more fossilized evidence of past strug gles won and lost, past theoretical stances effective and not, past modes of practice with their limitations as well as strengths — if it is afraid to engage in rigorous self-evaluation, radical restructuring and
The sharpest discussion at the convention centred around the challenges the party's central leadership had previously made to various state delegations. The minority charged that many of its representatives were denied seats at the congrounds by a leadership in control of the party appara-
Hall deplores setbacks
Gus Hall's report to the convention focused on the need for the CP to involve itself in the survival issues facing the working class and the oppressed.
He deplored the devastating setbacks suffered by the Communist Party of the and said: "The socialist world as a coherent world entity, with influence and power, is just about nonex-
With regard to the party's internal situation, he said: "Starting about two years ago, the developments in the Soviet Union and the catastrophic developments in the Eastern European countries hit our has been travelling is having a profound impact on the ideological and political trend towards right opportunism in our party.
"The factional fire has been greatly fueled by the right shift in world socialism. The factional center has used the situation to raise basic ideological questions about the class struggle, Marxism-Leninism, the role of the Communist Party
The convention was structured to preclude genuine debate on the major issues. Minority spokespersons had little opportunity to speak. There were no minority or dissenting reports. Delegates asked for the floor; some got it and some didn't.
One who did was venerable party acaand theoretical leader Aptheker. Countering Hall's failure to identify the bureaucratic rule of a dictatorial clique — rather than just poor planning — as the Soviet Union's fundamental problem, Aptheker said: "the main source of the collapse that describes — not only in the USSR but in every part of Eastern Europe — lies not in socialism, but rather in the distortions and vitiation of the essential nature of the party as conceived by Marx and Engels and Lenin into an organization eaten up by bureaucracy, tyranny, authoritarianism, repression and finally human annihila-
Meeting in Room 211
The CP convention was closed to party members who were not delegates. It was also closed to representatives of the foreign Communist parties and to the media. But 200 rank and file CP members, part of the minority tendency, came to Cleveland anyway and met in a room directly across the street from where the convention was held. Delegates shuffled back and forth between the convention and this "Room
The Hall majority totally dominated the convention and won approval for all of its reports and resolutions. Signers of the Initiative were purged from the new National Committee (they constituted about 40% of
Following the convention, the staff of the People's Weekly World prepared the next issue of the paper, which contained a section on the convention proceedings. It quoted generously from Gus Hall's report, but it also reflected some of what the minority had to say.
When the issue was printed, however, much of this had been deleted. Without knowledge of the People's Daily World staff, the party's central leadership had *This article is an abridged version of one that first appeared in the Bulletin In Defense of Marism, the 1 7 journal of the US Fourth Internationalist Tendency.
The PT debates external adversaries, [the revolution] suf- the left and adopted at the local PT con-
International Viewpoint #222 • February 17, 1992
USA / BRAZIL substituted its statement of what happened at the convention, omitting all reference to the minority viewpoint. Subsequently, the paper's editor and other staff members were Initiative supporters were who removed.
Those supporters of the Initiative who met in Room 211 have decided to launch a