On the CP’s Democratic Party Betrayal

(Letters)

19 May 2019

Dear comrades,

I quite liked the article on the ISO in WV No. 1154 [“ISO: Rest in Pieces,” 3 May]. The following comments are not intended as a criticism of the article. In general, I think we should not add substantive and complicated points compressed into a paragraph or two that are tangential to the main theme of an article.

In considering support to the Democratic Party by leftist organizations, including those that profess to be “Marxist-Leninist,” the Moscow-line Stalinists of the American Communist Party were historically much more important than the Shachtmanites. It’s true that underlying the Shachtmanites’ support for the Democratic Party in the late 1950s via official American social democracy was the belief that American “democratic” imperialism was preferable to Soviet Stalinist “totalitarianism.” However, the Moscow-line Stalinists also worked in the Democratic Party over a longer time span and with greater effect, although, of course, with a different subjective motivation. Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s the CP was much more effective in tying politically advanced workers to Roosevelt’s Democratic Party than were the social democrats, who were organizationally amorphous and politically disparate. In good part the CP was effective in this regard because it appealed to pro-Communist and pro-Soviet sympathies among leftist workers in the U.S. in this period.

The political influence and organizational capacity of the CP was greatly diminished by Cold War repression followed by massive defections in 1956-57 in response to Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes and to the Hungarian Revolution. Nonetheless, the diminished organization continued to work in the Democratic Party as a major sphere of its activity. In the late 1950s-early ’60s, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party was an arena of competition (as well as collaboration) between the remaining Moscow-line Stalinists and anti-Communist social democrats, some of whom had direct ties to the CIA.

For a few months in 1963 I was in the Progressive Labor youth group shortly after the organization was formed as a left split from the CP. The PL leaders rejected working in the Democratic Party, but I don’t remember whether they also opposed voting for Democratic candidates. I do remember an older PLer recounting how the CP fraction (or whatever it was called) had effectively organized the campaign of a liberal Democratic newcomer in Brooklyn who won a seat in the U.S. Congress.

Comradely, Seymour