Finnish-American Henry Puro (John Witta) as head of the Communist Party’s Agrarian Department surveys the growth of militancy and organization among U.S. farmers and rural workers decimated in Great Depression. Out of these struggles was born the Farm Holiday Association, giving the Party its first opportunity for mass work among farmers.

‘The Class Struggle in the American Countryside’ by Henry Puro from The Communist. Vol. 12 No. 6. June, 1933.

WIDE-SPREAD struggles have taken place in the American farm communities during the past eight months. The program of action formulated at the Farmers National Relief Conference in Washington, D.C., held last December, has been crystallized and concretized in tremendous mass struggles against foreclosures and for immediate relief under the leadership of the Communist Party and militant farmers’ organizations. These struggles have swept the country from one end to the other, from Eastern Pennsylvania to the Pacific Coast, and have echoed in the remotest farm communities of Texas and New Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of toiling farmers have participated in these struggles and achieved many partial victories through their organized mass actions.

SOLIDARITY BETWEEN CITY WORKERS AND FARMERS

During the course of these struggles, solidarity between the farmers and city workers, especially unemployed, has grown tremendously. The need of unity was strongly expressed by the farmers’ delegates in the Washington Conference and has received practical application in many sections of the country. In conservative Eastern Pennsylvania, it was expressed by the invitation of the Unemployed Councils of Philadelphia and Allentown for representatives of the farmers’ organization to address meetings of the unemployed. More than 500 unemployed paid admission to hear farmers’ representatives and gave them a tremendous ovation and pledge of solidarity. This pledge they carried out in concrete action by going in large numbers to assist their farmer comrades to prevent the sheriff sales. Later in Allentown, farmers’ delegates, some of whom were deeply religious (Mennonite church members) fought for the seating of Communist delegates in the United Front Conference, when the Socialist leaders wanted to exclude the Communists.

Numerous local and State, joint, hunger marches and presentation of joint demands of workers and farmers, have been carried out during the past months. By these joint actions and struggles, workers and farmers have cemented a strong fighting alliance against their common exploiters and oppressors. 

ORGANIZATIONAL CONSOLIDATION

In the course of these mass struggles, the toiling farmers have made great headway in the organizational consolidation of their power. Numerous local organizations of the left-wing farmers’ mass organizations have been established and at the same time many conservative farmers’ organizations have been deeply penetrated and united front action committees organized around the joint struggle of all impoverished farmers. These local organizations and their program have been crystallized in State United Front conferences and State-wide actions.

State conferences of farmers on a broad united front basis have been held during the months of February and March in Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota; and a regional conference has taken place in Iowa. The State conference in Nebraska was prepared and led by the Nebraska Farmers’ Holiday Association (Madison County Plan), the left wing offspring of the National Holiday Association. All the efforts of Milo Reno and his lieutenants (Parmenter and Crocker) to split the movement by raising the “Red scare” were defeated. A fitting answer to these splitters was given by Jesse Green, until lately a conservative-minded farmer. who said, “If calling for aid from my neighbor and giving aid to my neighbor; if saving people from being thrown out of their homes and saving children from going hungry and ragged is Communism—then they can call me a Communist.”

Six thousand farmers marched to the Nebraska State capital, where they were joined by two thousand unemployed workers. A mass meeting was held on the steps of the State Capitol building. The farmers and workers occupied the Senate Chamber, presenting their demands from the speakers’ rostrum.

State conferences held in both South and North Dakota were similarly successful and on even a higher level. The following quotation from the report of the District Organizer pictures the success of the conference:

“About 120 regularly elected delegates and 80 registered fraternal delegates, besides about 100 individual farmers and representatives of the unemployed workers, were present. The conference was under the direct leadership of Communists. Our program was put over unanimously. On the third day of the conference we marched down to the State House. We marched right in on the floor and up on the speakers’ stand waving our banners and singing ‘Solidarity.’ Our representatives told the Senators and Representatives that we have crawled on our knees and begged long enough. Now we have come together and formulated our own program and we expect you to act. If you fail to act in accordance with our demands, we will take action ourselves.”

Successful united front State conferences have been held in Wisconsin, Ohio and Eastern Pennsylvania (milk conference).

Besides these farmers’ State conferences, joint hunger marches and relief conferences have been held in the States of Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana, Minnesota; in addition to these in other States a considerable number of farmers have participated in hunger marches with the workers, raising their own demands.

PENETRATION OF THE SOUTH

Already before the Washington Conference a good beginning had been made in the work among Southern Negro share croppers, especially in the heart of the Alabama Black Belt but also in Florida among share croppers, tenants and poor farmers and farm laborers. Both of these States were represented in the Washington Conference. Since then intensive work has been done among the Alabama share croppers, where over two thousand Negro share croppers have been organized into the Share Croppers Union, in spite of conditions of extreme terror. In Arkansas we have a good example of what can be done. There a few comrades who came to the Washington Conference in spite of many hardships, have shown a great devotion by creating a State organization among the poor Negro and white farmers and tenants. In Mississippi, New Mexico, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, many spontaneous local struggles have taken place and the poor tenants and farmers in these States have shown a great desire for organization and leadership. We have not yet been able to start systematic work in many of these Southern states. However, they must become the most important objective of our agrarian work in the immediate future.

Faced with constant ruin and ever deeper misery, the farmers have plunged into mass struggles as never before in American history. So rapid and swift has been the spreading of the farmers’ militant movement, and so deeply have hitherto conservative American farmers been radicalized, that this has taken the bourgeoisie by complete surprise. The first effort of the bourgeoisie to halt this movement was to resort to all kinds of demagogic promises. In this respect Roosevelt, both during and after his election campaign, was especially skillful. He promised relief to the farmers on their mortgages and debt loads. He promised them better prices. He promised to lead them back to prosperity.

And it would be wrong to deny that Roosevelt was able to create strong illusions among the farmers that he would really have something to offer which would relieve their burden and misery. But the hundreds of thousands of farmers were already suffering so much that they could not wait any longer. Pressed on all sides by mass struggles for relief and against foreclosures, the bourgeoisie has been compelled to make many concessions in the form of relief. Finally, the bourgeoisie evidently thought that a fake moratorium would be able to halt the mass struggles in the countryside. A moratorium was declared by the leading insurance companies, who own 22 per cent of the farm mortgages, during the month of March. This was followed by passing a moratorium law in several agricultural States. Moratorium laws were passed, for instance, in the States of Iowa and Nebraska. But there were loopholes in these laws. Instead of granting the farmer a two or three year stay on his debts, as provided in Iowa for instance, the granting of foreclosure proceedings was left to the discretion of the judges. In Nebraska it was left in the hands of a State Arbitration Board appointed by the Governor. These officials did not want to stop foreclosures, unless a farmer was able to give a guarantee of his ability to pay. The intention of the bourgeoisie in passing these laws was to make the driving of the farmers from their homes more “orderly,” to halt the mass struggle of the toiling farmers.

Our Party pointed out then that this “moratorium” will not help the toiling farmers, and that foreclosures will be carried out by the capitalist State officials more ruthlessly than ever. The correctness of this prophesy has now been clearly demonstrated. Judges and Arbitration Boards, while they have shown leniency towards the big farmers, have under the moratorium laws proceeded to carry out foreclosures against the poor farmers more ruthlessly than ever. Finally, Justice William Darmon Black of the New York State Supreme Court has just ruled that the granting of a moratorium on payment mortgage bonds violates both the Federal and State constitutions and creates “a precedent paralyzing normal business functions.”

BOURGEOISIE RESORTS TO BARE FORCE

Seeing that this militant farmers’ movement cannot be halted by false promises nor be dispersed by the reformist misleaders of old line farm organizations, the American bourgeoisie has resorted to naked force. Since the revolutionary movement always creates its counterpart, so this militant mass movement of American farmers has aroused the class instincts of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie have become busy developing and organizing a counter-revolutionary movement in the countryside to oppose and fight against the mass movement of farmers. The armed forces of the capitalist State apparatus have been brought out more brazenly as the mass struggles of the farmers have spread. Tear gas bombs and machine guns have been used to disperse the farmers’ picket lines, and to carry through sheriff sales. The militant leaders of farmers have been arrested and in many cases given long prison sentences— the Tallapoosa share-croppers case in the South, Cockrane case in Iowa, Markham farm strikers in Minnesota, Smith and Casper in Michigan, Harry Lux’ case in Nebraska.

Simultaneously with using the class forces of the capitalist State, the bourgeoisie has begun to organize kulak elements in the countryside—“Green Tags” in Nebraska, “Law and Order” groups in other prairie States, Ku Klux Klans in the South, etc.

All these phenomena signify very clearly the rapid tempo of the developing class struggles in the countryside. The deepening of the economic crisis both in the industrial and agrarian sphere, bringing great misery to the farms, and growth of the danger of imperialist war, will make more acute the forms of the class struggle in the farm communities.

CLASS BATTLES IN IOWA AND WISCONSIN

The recent extremely sharp struggle in Iowa represents this new state of accelerated struggles in the countryside.

The State of Iowa has again become the scene of a battle between ruined farmers and the bankers and insurance companies, who are ruthlessly foreclosing their farms. This is the fourth time that this richest agricultural State has seen the mass indignation of the farmers rise up against the Wall Street robbers and their agents. In the fall of 1931 the farmers of Iowa took for the first time to militant action against the meat trust, which under the pretense of “tuberculosis test,” was slaughtering their cattle wholesale. In this struggle the farmers defied the armed National Guard of the State and forced State officials to modify their fake tuberculin test. Last September the Iowa farmers started a strike against the marketing trusts, who with miserably low prices were robbing these farmers and their families. This strike spread throughout the Middle West and Northwest into twenty-one States, popularizing the strike as a new weapon for the exploited farmers.

From the beginning of the strike, the Communist Party gave it full support, at the same time pointing out that the farmers in Iowa as well as in other States in the United States, were facing foreclosures, and that they must be prepared to organize themselves to wage mass fights against these forced sales.

The program of the Washington Conference emphasized the struggle against foreclosures as a main task. Inspired by the Washington Conference the Iowa farmers began to engage in extremely militant struggles against foreclosures. In Le Mars, for instance, the farmers threatened to hang the agent of the insurance company if he did not agree to postpone a mortgage sale. These mass struggles compelled the State legislature of Iowa to declare a three year moratorium on farm mortgages. Farmers thought that this law made all foreclosures illegal.

But it happened, as our Party pointed out then, that the purpose of these “moratoriums” was to halt the mass struggles of the farmers—not to save the farmers, but to save the investments of the bankers and insurance companies from the “penny” auctions carried through by the farmers’ mass actions.

Very soon the farmers of Iowa found out that a moratorium law passed by the legislature did not mean anything. Instead of enforcing the moratorium law, the Iowa courts, sheriffs and State agents were still conducting forced sales. Realizing this, the farmers became so aroused that in the very same place (Le Mars), where a couple of months ago they threatened to hang an agent of the insurance company, they now dragged the judge who had granted foreclosures, out of his court, and smeared his face. These farmers maintained that foreclosure sales were unconstitutional and they made some of the deputies kiss an American flag. The farmers around Le Mars are mostly poor tenants and agricultural laborers— another reason for their militancy.

Finding that the civil courts, Sheriffs, State agents and Deputy Sheriffs were no longer able to cope with the situation, the Governor of Iowa, Mr. Herring, brought the National Guard in with martial law and machine guns to collect the debts of the Wall Street bankers and insurance companies. Over a hundred farmers have been arrested by the military officers and dragged to the bull pens and brought up before the military court martials.

Immediately on the heels of the Iowa struggles, 15,000 Wisconsin dairy farmers commenced to wage a most militant strike against the dairy trust. This strike materialized in spite of Milo Reno’s betrayal of the farmers’ national strike. In Wisconsin we saw on one side the most ruthless utilization of the armed forces of the State against the farmers by a Democratic Governor, and on the other side the most courageous and determined struggle of the farmers—assisted by the workers who came to aid their brothers in the countryside—against thousands of National Guardsmen and deputy sheriffs, armed with machine guns, airplanes and tear gas bombs. Hundreds of striking farmers were arrested and one young farmer was shot by the armed thugs of the National Guard.

The betrayal of the Wisconsin strike by Walter Singlair, President of the Wisconsin Milk Pool, and the role played by the Socialist city administration of Milwaukee, which sent its police against the striking farmers, and on the other hand the fact that the Communist Party and Unemployed Council fought in the first lines with the farmers, has helped the farmers to see who are their enemies and who are their friends.

The struggles in Iowa and Wisconsin are the clearest expression of the acute class conflict that is taking place throughout the country between the ruined farmers and their exploiters.

The utilization of armed forces in these two regions of the country, which until a few years ago were considered the most well-to-do farm regions, and where farmers were the most solid bulwark of capitalist society, shows that capitalism is fast losing its support in the countryside. These farmers, who until now have been deeply patriotic and law-abiding, are now learning the class nature of the capitalist State. They are losing their faith in capitalist laws, judges, courts and in the promises of capitalist politicians.

THE SHATTERING OF ILLUSIONS REGARDING ROOSEVELT’S “NEW DEAL”

The arrest and conviction of the militant rank and file leaders of the farmers all over the country, the utilization of National Guardsmen and State Troopers and their machine guns against the farmers to collect the debts of the Wall Street bankers and insurance companies, and the driving of the farmers and their families from their homes under Roosevelt’s administration, gives a picture of what the “New Deal” really means to the farmers.

And it is to be expected that just as the militant strike of the Iowa farmers last September was eagerly taken up by the exploited farmers in more than two score of States, as a new weapon in the battle against their exploiters, that these latest struggles in Iowa and Wisconsin which represent a new and higher level of farm struggles, will find a sympathetic echo throughout the country, taking concrete forms in the unqualified support of the fight for the defense of those arrested in Iowa and Wisconsin, and in a new wave of determined struggles.

WHAT HAS MADE FARMERS MILITANT?

There is a concrete economic background for the present militancy of the farmers. Let us take Iowa. The mortgages that darken the future of Iowa farmers today can be traced back to the flush years of 1920 and 1921. After the war period’s feverishly expanding markets for food, farm land values soared to high levels. Corn hills in the Iowa prairie sold as high as $500 an acre. Prices of farm products being high, the farmer wanted to utilize this opportunity to expand. He was offered plenty of credit. So he bought an extra forty acres of land, built a new house, and new farm buildings. He thought that with the prevailing prices he could pay off his mortgage within a few years. And in fact, with one thousand bushels of corn, he was able to pay off $1,436 of mortgage or interest in 1920. But times have changed. In 1932 one thousand bushels of corn was able to pay off only $120, and a thousand bushels of wheat has fallen in value from $2,443 to $330. A thousand pounds of hogs which in 1920 were worth $133.60, now bring only $29.

Mortgages incurred in the years of 1920-21 began to fall due 1925-26. However, there being plenty of money, the farmers were able to renew these mortgages with somewhat higher interest.

The annual income of the farmers since 1921 has been falling constantly. By 1928 he was beginning to be awakened from his dreams. At the apex of “Coolidge prosperity” he began to clamor for redress and relief, because interest payments and increasing taxation were beginning to break his back. In 1928 thousands of prairie farmers marched to the Republican Party Nomination Convention hall in Kansas City, demanding a hearing. A year or two later, hundreds of thousands of mortgage loans incurred in the fat days of 1920-21 and renewed in 1925-26 began to fall due.

Of the 6,300,000 farms in the country, at least 40 per cent are mortgaged. Foreclosures have been increasing at an estimated rate of 3 1/2% a year. Each year 220,500 more farmers are being reduced from the status of landed proprietors to that of tenantry, a large number of them being reduced to the peasant level or to actual serfdom.

At the same time as the prices of farm products and of land values have dropped catastrophically, the farmers’ income has been reduced from $17,000,000,000 in 1919 to $5,000,000,000 in 1932; while taxes have increased 260 per cent.

In the meantime the bankers, insurance companies, and other mortgage holders, are continuing ruthless foreclosures in order to collect their huge debt of $12,000,000,000 and accrued interest. The state officials are doing the same to collect unpaid taxes.

These are the conditions that have made out of the conservative American farmer, the militant fighter, of which the Iowa farmer is a typical example. It has happened, as Marx said regarding the French peasants during the 1848-50 revolutionary period, that:

“This revolutionizing of the most stationary class comes to the fore most strikingly.”

GIVING A REVOLUTIONARY ORIENTATION TO THE FARMER’S MILITANCY

There is plenty of militant fighting spirit amongst the American farmers today. They are ready to fight, and are fighting. It is the task of the revolutionary proletariat to convert this militancy of the American farmer into the conscious realization of the necessity of a strong alliance with the revolutionary, proletariat. This can be achieved by revolutionary political education of the farmers by our Party, as the Party of the revolutionary proletariat and the leader of all the toilers.

The present situation places very great responsibility on our Communist Party. Our Party must give this revolutionary political education to the toiling farmers in the course of struggles. We must convince them that they have no hopes from the Roosevelt government. We must push their demands and struggles constantly to a higher level. We must engage more and more workers and farmers into the joint struggles for the immediate relief, for the cancellation of immense debt loads and taxation burdens and against the class institutions of the capitalist state, that are being used against both workers and farmers.

In the course of these struggles, like those recently waged in Iowa and Wisconsin, we must explain the class nature of the capitalist government and state, pointing out how the state apparatus and state forces are always being used for the protection of the exploiters and against the workers’ and farmers’ interests.

REVOLUTIONARY WAY OUT

Our task is to bring the toiling farmers completely to sever their relations with the capitalist parties, and also with the agents of the capitalists, such as the Socialist Party and Farmer-Labor Party. We must draw them to the side of the Communist Party in the elections. Further, our Party must point out, — only a proletarian revolution supported by the exploited farmers can finally solve the farmers’ problems. We must show that one exploiter is not different from the other, neither is one government of exploiters different from another. And therefore every description of exploitation is to be destroyed. We have to educate the American farmer towards the American “October” revolution.

We must popularize Comrade Stalin’s speech at the recent Congress of Collective Farm Shock Brigaders, wherein he described the preliminary conditions of Collective Farming, with the following words:

“Before this mass movement towards the collective farms began, certain preliminary conditions had to be met, for without them the mass collective farming movement, generally speaking, would be impossible.

“First of all the Soviet power had to exist, the power which has helped the peasants, and continues to help them, to turn towards the collective farm. Secondly, the large landowners and capitalists had to be driven away, the factories and the land taken away from them, and these declared to be the property of the people. Thirdly, the kulak class had to be mastered, the machinery and tractors taken away from them. Fourthly, it had to be made known that machinery and tractors might only be used by the poor and middle peasants joining to form collective farms. And finally, the country had to be industrialized, a new tractor manufacturing industry had to be organized, and new factories erected for building agricultural machinery, in order that the collective farmers might be amply supplied with machines and tractors.

“Had these preliminary conditions not been fulfilled, there could have been no thought of that mass transition to collective farming which has commenced three years ago. Hence, in order to adopt the collective farming system, it was necessary to accomplish the October revolution, to overthrow the capitalists and the large landowners and take the factories and the land away from them, and to establish new industries.”

Our Party must educate the toiling farmers, who have already in the course of big mass struggles learned their own strength and organized mass power, that only by joining with the revolutionary workers under the leadership of the Communist Party, can they wage an effective struggle for their present-day demands and finally overthrow the system of exploitation—which is the only way to release them from mortgages, land rents and from overburdened taxation.

THE BUILDING OF THE PARTY IN THE FARM COMMUNITIES

The present situation among the vast masses of toiling farmers is very favorable for our Party. The militant movement of American farmers, although not yet revolutionary, offers very great revolutionary possibilities. When three million farm families, almost half the American farmers, are being robbed of their bare existence, they begin to lose faith in the capitalist system.

The situation requires, therefore, that our Party must become aware of its opportunity, and also of its responsibility, and make itself the real undisputed leader of this vast mass of allies of the American revolutionary proletariat. Until now, the leadership that the Party has given to the mass struggles of farmers, has been (with few exceptions) rather through individual organizers sent by the Party center, than by the Districts and local Party organizations.

In the theses on “Organizational Tasks of the Communist Parties in the Villages” (published in the International Press Correspondence, No. 11), the Political Secretariat of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, criticizes the Communist Parties, concerning their work in the villages, in the following manner: 

“In spite of the favorable conditions which exist, Communist leadership lags behind the revolutionary upsurge of the working strata of the villages. The Communist Parties are particularly lagging behind in the construction and the work of the village nuclei and also in the matter of the formation and leadership of trade unions of agricultural workers, peasant committees in the villages, etc.”

In spite of recognized achievements of our Party in leading the tremendous wave of mass struggles of the toiling farmers, this criticism is also fully applicable to our Party.

Let us take the question of the Party nuclei in the farm communities; we must concede that they are very weak and insufficient. In District No. 9 (Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan) we have the strongest Party organizations in the farm communities. And it is no accident that just there the first mass struggles against the foreclosures and for immediate relief were started, led by our Party and by the United Farmers League. But even in this District, the work of the village nuclei has not been properly guided by the leading Party committees.

PARTY ORGANIZATION VERY THIN

Outside of District No. 9, we must admit, there exists only a very thin net of farm nuclei. Let us take, for instance, the biggest and second most important district, District No. 10. This district comprises seven agricultural states—Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas. The most militant mass struggles have taken place, again and again, in this district (Iowa, Nebraska, Arkansas). And what have we there, as far as the Party is concerned? In this “empire” of many large agrarian states we have hardly a Party organization to speak of. Yet in Nebraska there is an organization—Nebraska Holiday Association (Madison County Plan)—with a left-wing program, and as many as 25,000-30,000 members. In Iowa we hold a strong influence in the Milo Reno-controlled National Holiday Association and in the recently organized United Farmers of Iowa. In Arkansas with the efforts of a few individual comrades, we have lately developed the basis for a mass movement of small farmers, tenants and share croppers.

In the Southern Black Belt, which is the most important section of our agrarian work, because there the winning over of agrarian masses is to be combined with the important struggle for the liberation of the Negro people, there also the Party organization among the share croppers is still weak.

While it is true that practically in all the cases of farmers’ struggles during the recent period, our Party has either led them directly or inspired them; these struggles could have become much more powerful, if the respective Party committees had been up to the level of their tasks. Unfortunately the work in the villages both among the farmers, and much more, among the agricultural workers, is considered even by the District Committee, as not very important. Also, the Party has not sufficiently come out openly as the leader of farmers’ struggles.

Lately, however, as the mass movement of farmers has developed, there has been a marked improvement in the attitude of the Party organizations towards the work in the villages. Organizational steps have also been taken to hasten the building of the Party. For instance, new sections have been built and old ones strengthened in District No. 10 with the aid of the Party Center, and a basis has been laid to divide this “empire” into at least three separate districts. Also in the South, especially in Alabama, the Party organization is growing among the share-croppers. Nearly all of the Districts have recently had their first experiences in the leading of farmers’ struggles, and these experiences have made our District and local Party organizations enthusiastic about this field of work.

But when the militant movement of farmers (with possibilities of even nationwide farmers’ strikes) is growing so fast, and when the struggles are becoming so wide-spread and sharp, it is necessary that all leading Party committees (District and Section) assume full responsibility for the work in the villages, in order to be able to lead these farmers’ movements. The present thin, and in many districts almost non-existing, net of village nuclei must be manifolded and educated for their task.

In the recent theses, referred to in this article, the Polit-Secretariat of the E.C.C.I. thus sums up the task of the Communist Parties in the villages:

“The tasks of the sections of the Comintern are to eliminate the existing passivity in this sphere of work and to increase their activity for the formation of more cordial relations between the proletariat and the peasants, to hold joint demonstrations and sympathetic strikes, to organize support by the proletariat for the demands and the struggles of the farmers and vice versa, to organize material support for the arrested workers and farmers, etc.”

There are a number of journals with this name in the history of the movement. This ‘Communist’ was the main theoretical journal of the Communist Party from 1927 until 1944. Its origins lie with the folding of The Liberator, Soviet Russia Pictorial, and Labor Herald together into Workers Monthly as the new unified Communist Party’s official cultural and discussion magazine in November, 1924. Workers Monthly became The Communist in March, 1927 and was also published monthly. The Communist contains the most thorough archive of the Communist Party’s positions and thinking during its run. The New Masses became the main cultural vehicle for the CP and the Communist, though it began with with more vibrancy and discussion, became increasingly an organ of Comintern and CP program. Over its run the tagline went from “A Theoretical Magazine for the Discussion of Revolutionary Problems” to “A Magazine of the Theory and Practice of Marxism-Leninism” to “A Marxist Magazine Devoted to Advancement of Democratic Thought and Action.” The aesthetic of the journal also changed dramatically over its years. Editors included Earl Browder, Alex Bittelman, Max Bedacht, and Bertram D. Wolfe.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/communist/v12n06-jun-1933-communist.pdf