An important moment in the history of the U.S. Communist Party. Here, Earl Browder emerges as a top Party leader at the first Central Committee meeting of the Party since the expulsion of the ‘Cannonites’ and ‘Lovestoneites’ that formally introduced the ‘Third Period’ left turn to the U.S. Already at its low ebb, the Party had lost many of its historic leaders and 1/3 of its membership in the previous 18 months. At just over 6,000 members, it was the smallest and most isolated it be in its first twenty years. Events in the Soviet Union had their impact. Less than a year after the defeat and expulsion of Trotsky and the United Opposition in November 1927, Stalin’s alliance with Bukharin broke down in late 1928 over collectivization plans and the pace of industrialization. Bukharin was relieved of his senior Party posts and editorship of Pravda in April, 1929 and in August of that year was removed from his leadership of the Comintern, with many of his international supporters expelled. In the U.S. that meant the expulsion of the majority leadership in power since 1925, including Jay Lovestone, Party General Secretary, and other important figures of like Ben Gitlow, Betram D. Wolfe, J.O. Bentall, Ellen Dawson, Will Herberg, Jack Rubinstein, Herbert Zam, Charles S. Zimmerman, Alex Bail, William F. Kruse, Bert Miller, and Harry Winitsky along with an important layer of East Coast labor activists. Browder had brought William Z. Foster into the Party, was long a co-worker of Foster’s in T.U.E.L., and a partisan of the Cannon-Foster Faction in the 1920s, leaving the U.S. after their loss in 1925 to work overseas as a Comintern and Profintern functionary. He had just returned to the U.S. to re-assume leadership roles in time for the October, 1929 Plenum he writes about below. The nominal Party Secretary at the time was recalcitrant Lovestone supporter Max Bedacht, with Foster by far the most prominent Party figure and a natural to be Party Secretary, however his past conflicts with the Comintern made that difficult. Rather, it would fall to a ‘triumvirate’ of Browder, Foster, and William Weinstone with Browder becoming General Secretary the following year, a position he would hold until 1945.

‘The October Plenum of the Central Committee, C.P.U.S.A.’ by Earl Browder from The Communist. Vol. 8 No. 10. November, 1929.

REGISTERING the definite entrance of the American Party upon the path determined by the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, and the Tenth Plenum of E.C.C.I., the October Plenum of our Central Committee was one of the most fruitful and constructive gatherings in the history of the Party. With a unanimity which was only accented by the two notes of dissent uttered, more than 100 leading Party members, including Central Committee, Central Control Commission, District Organizers, and leading Party workers in the mass organizations, debated for three days the concretization of the Comintern line for America, and adopted a detailed thesis embodying this line; whole-heartedly endorsed the struggle against the Right danger and the expulsion of the Lovestone group of opportunist disrupters; registered the growing upward movement of working-class activities, and prepared the Party for more effective leadership of these actions; reviewed the experiences the past year in Trade Union work, criticized its shortcomings, and affirmed the correctness of the main line carried out; gave serious and detailed attention to the problems of the work among the Negroes, and formulated a more concrete program; and finally, registered one of the most important achievements—one which every Party member will appreciate—the liquidation of the old factional situation and the basic unification of the Party, with the restoration of normal relationships with our World Party, the Communist International. Now it is the first task in the inner-Party life, to make the achievements of this Plenum the property of the whole Party membership.

APPLYING THE COMINTERN LINE TO AMERICA.

In no other important section of the Comintern has it taken so prolonged a struggle to secure the application of the Sixth World Congress line, as in America. This is not because the American Party is, or has been, opposed to this line; on the contrary, the American Party has always been keenly responsive to Comintern leadership. But the period just before and at the Sixth World Congress has witnessed the crystallization of a group of opportunist leaders (Lovestone, Gitlow, Wolfe & Co.), holding powerful positions in the very heart of the Party’s leadership, working in close co-ordination with the international right-wing elements within the Comintern, who stood between our Party and the Comintern and fought by all possible means against the application of the Sixth Congress line and whose position was strengthened by the mistakes of the former minority. It was only with the defeat of this group, their expulsion from the Party, that the Party could resume its proper position as a living, functioning section of the World Party.

In clarifying the political issues for our Party, the intervention of the Comintern was of paramount importance. The Comintern Open Letter to our Sixth Convention, and the Address to the Membership in May, produced the most profound effects within our Party. The process of clarification thereby begun, was deepened by the series of class struggles (Gastonia, Elizabethtown, New Orleans, New England, New York, Detroit, etc.) which underlined the correctness of the Comintern decisions which had forecast these developments, as well as by the success of the Trade Union Unity Convention, the demonstrations on Red Day, and the growing response of the masses to the work of our Party generally.

THE IMMEDIATE PERSPECTIVE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM.

Analyzing the present economic situation in the United States in the light of world developments, the Plenum declared that it “shows the clear features of an oncoming economic crisis.” The accentuation of the unevenness of development within American economy (accelerated concentration and centralization of capital, continued growth of Southern industries at the expense of the North, continued agrarian crisis) which had been hailed by our opportunists as signs of the overcoming by capitalism of its inner contradictions, were shown in its true light as evidence of the unprecedented sharpening of these inner contradictions, expressed in another form by the growth of production and the shrinking markets simultaneously brought about by capitalist rationalization, and to remedy which capitalism knows but two remedies–a bigger dose of the same rationalization, or war for the reapportionment of the world’s markets. The first “remedy” for American capitalism’s inner contradictions has been so thoroughly applied, that we are now faced with a tremendous accumulation of “social-explosives.” Already the tendency of development of the issue of new capital, and export of capital, is sharply downward; as it is in the building industry, which has been one of the main props of American “prosperity.” The overproduction in the automobile and oil industries is already openly discussed among bourgeois economists as a threatening factor for the whole economic system. The unsettled conditions in the money market, as well as the wild fluctuations in the stock exchange, are further evidences of the same unstable, shaking foundation of American capitalism’s dreams of world domination.

Upon the basis of the facts of the situation in America and the whole world, the Plenum rejected the opportunist conception of capitalist stabilization as reaching a “new high level,” as well as its twin, the conception that while world capitalism may be shaken, yet American capitalism is an “exception.” The theses declare: “All the main features of the third period of the post-war crisis of capitalism as revealed in the analysis of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, are manifesting themselves…in the United States.”

WHAT IS RATIONALIZATION?

In dealing with the problems arising from rationalization (as with every problem, theoretical and practical, the Plenum found it necessary to sharply combat the conceptions put forth by the renegade opportunists. Against the right-wing conception of capitalist rationalization as primarily a process of “heightened productivity of labor due to technical advance” (Lovestone), the Plenum pointed out the essential nature of rationalization as an intensification of labor (the speed-up in all its forms), which increased the exploitation of the workers, drains their physical resources without corresponding compensation, increases unemployment which takes on a permanent mass character; robs vast numbers of skilled workers of the value of their skill which is transferred to the machines, and reduces them to the ranks of the semi-skilled and unskilled; and by all these means, creates the objective prerequisites for the capitalist offensive against wages and living conditions, creating that insecurity of life and worsening of conditions which rouses the working masses to struggle, at the same time in which it sharpens the economic contradictions within capitalism. Rationalization, which is a sharply accentuated form of “normal” capitalist development, is by no means, therefore, smoothing over any of the fundamental antagonisms as our opportunists maintain, but on the contrary hasten the objective and subjective conditions for revolutionary developments—the economic crisis and a roused and militant working class.

THE WAR DANGER, AND INNER AND OUTER CONTRADICTIONS

With the opportunistic appreciation of capitalist stabilization, and of rationalization as a progressive factor strengthening stabilization, it was inevitable that the international Right Wing (including the American Lovestone brand) should develop the view that the inner contradictions of capitalism are being softened or altogether eliminated. With Comrade Bucharin this orientation has produced the theories of “organized capitalism” which has eliminated its inner problems of markets, prices, and crises, transferring all these contradictions to the field of “the world market,” to the relations between the different nations, to the “outer contradictions.” With our American brand of opportunists, the Lovsetone renegades, this theory takes on a much cruder form; instead of seeing the inner contradictions disappear by transference to the field of outer contradictions, they boldly deny that the danger of Imperialist war arises out of the very process of capitalist economy, standing the whole question on its head in the most vulgar fashion, admitting the existence and development of inner contradictions, but explaining them as effects of the outer contradictions. In the “classical” formulation given by Lovestone to this fundamental question, may he seen the full measure of his abandonment of Leninism, he says:

“The key in the present situation is to be found in the external contradictions. These, of course, are interwined with the inner contradictions which grow out of the outer contradictions.” (In the Communist, November, 1928)

The October Plenum rejected all forms of this opportunist evaluation of the war danger, which lead straight into the camp of social-democracy and social-fascism. Starting from such a basis a revolutionary struggle against imperialist war is impossible; it can lead only, at best, to passivity and pessimism, and in its most logical results to complete capitulation to the bourgeoisie.

Against the opportunists, the Plenum gave to the Party an understanding of the War Danger as arising inevitably from the capitalist system, intensified by rationalization which sharpens all the contradictions of capitalism; while the same factors simultaneously bring forth the forces for the struggle against war—an aroused, radicalized working class, a discontented agrarian population, and rebellious populations in the colonies and semi-colonies. The struggle against war is first of all the mobilization and organization of the developing class struggle, and the leading of this struggle onto a higher plane of political mass actions.

LIQUIDATION OF THE RIGHT WING.

In the question of inner-party development, the October Plenum marked the liquidation of the organized right wing in the Party leadership, and the opening of a new period of Party life. The renegade group of Lovestone, Pepper, Wolfe, Gitlow & Co., have swiftly completed their evolution into full fledged enemies of the Party and the Comintern, and the Plenum unanimously declared that “the Party has grown stronger since and because of their expulsion”. In place of the handful of followers that they have taken with them, who are almost entirely petty-bourgeois elements or corrupted by pessimism, cynicism, and lack of faith in the possibilities of development of the working class struggle, the Party is already beginning to feel fresh currents of vitality flowing into it, and to recruit new and healthy proletarian elements, coming directly from the struggles and joining the Party because they see in it the militant leader and organizer of their struggles against capitalism, elements full of energy and fighting spirit whose very presence drives out the remnants of the poison-gas of pessimism and futility generated in the Party by the opportunists.

The Plenum subjected the activities and platform of this right wing to a most detailed examination and condemned them at every point. The wealth of facts and arguments brought to the Plenum on this subject by the dozens of comrades who participated in the deliberations will be brought to the Party in a whole series of articles dealing with every phase. The Plenum set the task of the complete elimination from the Party, not only of the right-wing leaders, but all remnants of their anti-communist views.

In this regard, it was found necessary to give serious attention to a few comrades who occupy the position of conciliators; that is, who formally dissociate themselves from Lovestone & Co., but who refuse to join in the struggle against them, and who even attempt to hinder this struggle, and call for a reconciliation with the right wing. This conciliatory position sometimes conceals a real solidarity with the right wing, and sometimes expresses confusion, muddle-headedness and lack of understanding, but in any case it becomes objective assistance to the right wing in its struggle against the Party and Comintern. The Plenum declared that “a vigorous struggle must be conducted against conciliators and where they fail to fulfill the conditions laid down by the Tenth Plenum they must be unhesitatingly expelled from the ranks of the Party”.

Within the Plenum itself two examples of conciliation to the right wing showed themselves. One was Comrade Koppel, who voted for the Theses, but who spoke against the expulsions of the renegades and called for the cessation of the ideological struggle within the Party; he was shown that this line will inevitably, if persisted in, lead him out of the Party and into the camp of Lovestone & Co. A more serious case was that of Comrade Weisbord, who, proclaiming his 100 percent adherence to all decisions of the Comintern, interpreted this to mean struggle against the Party leadership at all points. Comrade Weisbord thought that his duty, at this Plenum whose task was above all to establish the line of the Sixth Congress and Tenth Plenum in the life of the American Party, was rather to abstain from voting upon the Theses and to propose a motion of “no confidence” in the Central Committee which has carried this line into effect. If the renegade Lovestone had sent a conscious agent into the Plenum, undoubtedly it would have been for the purpose of proposing exactly such a motion, and Weisbord, whether consciously or not, played the role of such an agent. This fact, combined with his whole development in the past few months (resignation from his post at a moment of danger, attempt to build a faction, breaches of discipline, etc., as well as opportunistic mistakes in the trade union work) moved the Plenum to remove Comrade Weisbord from the Central Committee and give him the most serious warning against any continuation of his line. The only vote against this measure was that of Comrade Weisbord himself.

“It would be an error,” the Plenum declared, “to think that with the fight against Lovestone and the conciliators, the struggle against the right danger is exhausted. The right danger is so deeply rooted in the Party that it would be a perilous illusion to maintain such an idea.” The right danger has lost its organized leadership within the Party, its head has been cut off, but its roots are deep in the old customs, habits of thought, and the inertia of the Party membership, as well as in the constant pressure of bourgeois ideology upon the working class and the Party. The right danger is ever present, and requires from the Party the most constant vigilance to combat and overcome it, wherever it shows itself. The Plenum gave the Party in its Theses the necessary guidance for making this struggle effectively.

STRUGGLE AGAINST REFORMISM AND SOCIAL-FASCISM

Re-examining the problems of the struggle against reformism within the working class, the Plenum was forced to register the facts of the rapid development of the principal reformist organizations in the direction of social-fascism. Both the A.F. of L. and the Socialist Party are entering into relations with the bourgeoisie and the State apparatus, and more and more functioning in the class struggle as direct instruments in that partnership for the suppression of the militant workers and the Communist Party.

The reformists are an organic part of the combination of forces which are carrying through the present campaign of violence and terrorism against the militant sections of the working class. Especially dangerous, therefore, is the role of the self-styled “progressives” (Muste & Co.), whose function is to create the illusion among the leftward-moving workers that there is still hope of “reforming” the reformist bureaucracy, and transforming the reformist organizations into organs of the class struggle. Their role is to mask the developing fascist features of reformism, and to halt the leftward development of the workers, to head their movements in order to behead them.

It is significant that on this question, the Plenum had to take note that all the opportunist renegades from communism, both the right-wing Lovestonites and the “left” Trotskyists, have approximately the same position. Both deny the fascisation tendencies in reformism, both reject the necessity of sharpened struggle against the “left reformists”, both base their trade union programs upon alliance with the Muste group, both reject the program of the independent revolutionary leadership of the rising wave of mass struggles of the workers. Both are moving in the direction of fusion with the reformist organizations, with their only alternative an equally degenerate development into isolated opportunist sects.

WINNING THE MAJORITY OF THE WORKING CLASS.

All questions before the October Plenum were considered from the viewpoint of winning the majority of the working class to the leadership of the Communist Party.

The Plenum declared that the fundamental tactic in this struggle for the majority of the working class is the united front from below, on the basis of the immediate needs of the workers particularly in connection with the struggle against rationalization, in all its forms. The Plenum declared:

“The new period demands the development of new forms of struggle of the new revolutionary trade unions with the participation of broad unorganized masses, strike committees, workers’ defense committees, especially in the South, organization of the unemployed, shop committees. This includes the intensification of our work for the organization of revolutionary trade unions and the strengthening of the revolutionary opposition in the old unions coordinated and led by the T.U.U.L.”

In the light of such tasks, the problem of turning the Party towards the factories, rooting it securely there by a solidly organized system of shop nuclei, by concentrating upon the basic key industries and those connected with war, by recruiting Negroes and the native-born workers, and by special attention to the rapidly increasing numbers of women and youth being drawn into industry—all these questions become matters determining success or failure in our work. All passivity and indifference toward such questions must be rooted out of the Party, and the Party’s energies applied to their solution in a resolute manner.

A recruitment campaign for Party membership was declared to be a special order of the day. Now that the old opportunistic poison is being rapidly eliminated, now that the old factionalism which drove away from our Party so many healthy proletarian elements has been liquidated, now that the workers’ struggles are broadening and deepening so rapidly, the time is more than ripe for a broad influx of new, healthy proletarian members of the Party, thereby preparing the ground for the rehabilitation of the whole work and activity of the Party and its advance to new achievements.

THE TRADE UNION WORK.

The concrete application of the line of winning the masses, in the field of trade union struggle, was given a special report and discussion in the Plenum, and a special resolution was adopted on this question. Here the Plenum, while affirming the correctness of the line being followed and the healthy responses of the workers to this line (the South, the Cleveland Convention), yet wasted no time on self-congratulation. Rather it turned its attention to self-criticism, to the attack upon and elimination of weakness, deviations, and remnants of the old methods of work carried over into the new period.

This question will be made the subject of a series of articles in the press, and discussion in the Party units.

ORGANIZING THE NEGRO MASSES.

The report and discussions on the Negro work, while still showing the unsatisfactory mobilization of the Party forces on this question, marked a distinct advance over all former considerations of the subject in our Party. Not only were the discussions centered about the practical experiences and tasks, in which progress is to be recorded, but the quality of the work and thought given to it was undoubtedly higher than it has ever been before. The Plenum registered an iron resistance of the Party to the poisonous opportunism of white chauvinism, and made the struggle against chauvinism the central point in advancing the work among the Negroes, not only as regards the inner life of the Party (even here remnants of chauvinism remain)but also among the broad masses of white workers. The progress made in the South, in spite of all mistakes and shortcomings, was distinctly noted, and was one of the most important aspects of the Plenum reports.

On the Negro question, also, there must be a wide discussion organized in the Party press and units, and the results of the work of the October Plenum must be diffused throughout the Party.

ORGANIZATIONAL QUESTIONS.

Registering the final liquidation of the old factional situation in the Party, the Plenum adopted the following resolution by all votes except one (Weisbord, who abstained):

“The Plenum states as a very important achievement that the Party and its leadership has succeeded in liquidating factionalism, to smash the old factional divisions within the Party and to unite the Party on the basis of the C.I. line in the struggle against the right danger.

“In order to continue the work and to strengthen the leading Party organs, the Plenum of the C.C. indicates the necessity of bringing into the C.C. and Political Buro as well as into district leadership, new forces and the forces of the former minority who were eliminated or barred from the work in these organs on the grounds of the new liquidated factionalism.”

Further normalization: of the Party life was indicated by the unanimous adoption of the motion: “That the Central Committee approves the proposal of the Secretariat adopted by the Political Buro to reinvigorate the political functioning of the Polburo of the C.C. and that the Secretariat be organized as an administrative secretariat to prepare the work of the Polburo and to carry out its decisions.”

The vacancies in the Central Committee and Polburo created by the cleansing from the Party of the opportunists were filled in accordance with these decisions (the details have been published in the Party press) and one of the leading comrades was elected by the Plenum as the representative of the Party in the Comintern.

TAKING THE PLENUM TO THE PARTY.

The Party has emerged from the deepest crisis of its history, it has made the most decisive turn in its political development—the recognition of the Third Period of the post-war crisis of capitalism, and its nature as the period of the maturing of revolutionary upheavals and imperialist wars, and the adoption of a line in accordance with this period.

The turn has been made. But the reorientation of the entire Party has not been completed. Now the results of the October Plenum, embodying the line of the Sixth World Congress and X Plenum of the E.C.C.I., must be taken to the entire Party and made a most intimate and dominating part of its entire life. This is the central task before us, upon the successful execution of which depends all the work and struggles of the revolutionary working class movement of America. The entire party membership must be mobilized in the spirit of the October Plenum, and the whole Party must move forward in one united whole, to new struggles, new achievements, and new victories.

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/v08n10-nov-1929-communist.pdf