draft program the last week in February as part of a national turn it is taking toward more open activity. This move is a meaningful sign of the times on the American ‘political scene. _
.For -the past fifteen years the CP has had to function in a semilegal manner because of official prosecutions and unofficial. victimizations. These objective difficulties, which have confronted the entire radical movement throughout the cold-war period, were compounded by the tactical errors of its leadership followed by the effects of the erosion of Stalinist monolithisn.
At the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 the political committee of. the Communist party estimated that fascism and the third world war were imminent in the United States and proceeded to. revamp the. party: accordingly. Part of the leadership, including its. present spokesman Gus Hall, who were indicted by the governnent under the Smith Act, skipped bail and. went underground in conjunction with the constitution of a nationwide iilegal apparatus involving scores. of functionsries.
The membership was recklessly purged of "unreliable" individuals which reduced its effective. forces one quarter to one half in several states. Conspiratorial fear and suspicion spread like a contagion through the disturbed, confused and decimated ranks. ©
The main political resolution adopted at its sixteenth national convention in February 1957 acknowledged that "the errors made by the Party in estimating various phases of the struggle against the war danger also influenced its judgments of the fascist menace, particularly in relation to attempts to outlaw the Party. This took the form of overestimating the scope, level and tempo of the process of fascization under way generally. Our evaluation also tended to equate the * abbempted outlawing of the Party with fascism.
"This led to wrong. organizational decisions in 1950, including © conscious efforts to reduce the size of the Party membership. ..This led to the introduction of a system of leadership which virtually | gave up the fight for legality, tended to accept a status of illegality and abandoned many Larder eines for. the public functioning of the Party... As a result...the Party needlessly lost thousands of members. - = .
The efforts made by the CP at that juncture to stanch the hemmorhage were nullified by the convulsions arising from the Khrush-. chev revelations and the Hungarian revolt which split the leadership and shook the party from stem to stern. The mounting disillusionment, demoralization and disintegration: were reinforced by the. prolonged prosperity, the intense political reaction and the subsidence of social struggles during the 1950's. Many more thousands quit the
discredited party.
At the height of its influence in the early 1940's the American CP could boast of 100,000’ members. Although Hall claims 12,000 for the- party today, it’ is: well under 5,000 with not too Many . activ~ ists among ‘then.
The rebel liousness issuing from the insurgent youth on the campuses, the Negro struggle and the antiwar movement has infused new hopes in the tired, harassed and aging CP as it has reanimated the whole American Left. The CP has now unfurled its sails to take advantage of these fresh breezes.
Its new turn is facilitated by the general relaxation of: repression over the past few years and more specifically by the November 15 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court that:individuals could invoke constitutional guarantees against self-incrimination and refuse to register their membership. At the meeting in New York where Gus Hall announced the new program he stated that this decision made it legal to be a member and Communists need no longer fear arrest and heavy fines for belonging to the party. TE
Hall said that the party planned to enter more candiates for office under its own banner and that its foremost theoretician, - Herbert Aptheker, may run for:-Congress in Brooklyn this Years
Since November, CP members in various ‘parts of the country have been identifying themselves for the first time in years and party units have been. canvassing for recruits. For. example, at Berkeley, California, Aptheker's daughter Bettina, prominent in the student: free-speech: and antiwar activities there, has proclaimed her membership and others have. been following suit.
The resistance to red-baiting and the policy of nonexclusion for political views characteristic of the more militant protest movements has also encouraged the CP to operate more boldly in its own name. Thus the National Coordinating Committee on Vietnam, head~ quartered in Madison, Wisconsin, includes Arnold Johnson as official CP representative.
It may seem anoialous to an observer abroad that the CP should decide, or be permitted, to take such a step in the midst.of a shooting war which finds U.S. imperialism arrayed against. the. Communist world. Why tolerate any freer play for the. CP.in its own domain while administration statesmen declare that the expansion of Communism must everywhere be contained at all costs?
It happens that Johnson's regime is not well situated to unleash a witch-hunt at home along with its escalation of military operations in Southeast Asia. The war is, as one senator remarked, as "unpopular as a rattlesnake." Critics of administration policy are to be’ found all the way from the national capital to the small towns. Not a few are in the top circles of his own party, as the recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings disclosed. Where will the administration start -- or stop --- if it should resolve to
cast a dragnet for dissenters?
This broad and diversified disagreement on foreign policy is a partial shield for the more radical opponents of the war. Washington knows it would be ill-advised to undertake a ferocious, large-. scale, indiscriminate witch-hunt while its propagandists are striving so hard to justify its military aggression on the ground that the U.S. is bringing freedom and democracy to Vietnam. Not only its already skeptical. allies but a sizeable segment. of the American pub— lic would not swallow this contradiction.
This explains why Johnson felt constrained to give a personal pledge that there would be no revival of witch-hunting now, despite the flood of criticism against his policies in Vietnam. He stated this February 23 in New York in a speech accepting an unearned award as a "defender of freedom" while 5,000 antiwar demonstrators picketed the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel chanting: "Bring the boys home now" and "Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids. did you kill today?"
Johnson's promises do not signify an end to legal harassments or victimizations either for the Communists or other nonconformist groups. Hall himself is presently under indictment for failure as an officer to register the party as a Soviet agency under the 1950 Internal Security Act. And the party ‘is appealing its own November 19 conviction for nonregistration in a series of suits stretching over the past thirteen years.
On March 4 the U.S. Attorney - General petitioned the Subversive Activities vontrol Board to order the DuBois Clubs to register asa "Marxist youth organization created and controlled" by the Communist party. These two-year-old clubs are the center of the CP following among the radical youth, although many members are simply rebels against the Establishment.
Two days after the government charges, the national headquarters of the DuBois Clubs in San Francisco .was wrecked by a bomb explosion attributed to the right-wing conspirators. Hoodlums also attacked DuBois Club members in New York.
This first move by the administration against an organization opposing the war is meeting resistance from the antiwar forces. Yale ' Professor Staughton Lynd, who went to Hanoi last December on a threeman "peace mission," applied for membership in the DuBois Clubs "in sign of solidarity with the first peace group that the Government attacked." The Young Socialist Alliance, meeting in convention in Chicago at the time of the registration move, offered its full support in defense of the DuBois Clubs.
The previous 22 attempts by the government to produce registrations of other organizations have all bogged down in prolonged court | ‘proceedings. Although its provisions are extremely harsh, the registration move is primarily design to harass and discourage recruitment. .
The March 9 New York. Times pointed. out that. “the: move is ; likely
to have the opposite effect. "In the present mood of. rebellion: onmany campuses the surest way to stimulate recruitment is to:give theclubs ammunition for charges of repression or thought control. Many undergraduates will share the.view of the.American Civil Liberties Union that the action is intended to intimidate the organization in | its protest against the Vietnamese conflict. The result will. only..be more’ members and more protests."
The one ‘humorous aspect of the affair has been the. ‘widespread: confusion between the DuBois (pronounced "DooBOYS") Clubs and the Boys Club headed by former Republican presidential.candidate Richard Nixon., That notorious witch-hunter had to decry the identification of his- reputable youth organization with the one cited by the Justice. Department.
Despite these acts of repression, neither official policy nor. American public opinion are presently directed toward. a restoration. of the relentless and multiplying persecutions at the crest of McCarthyism in the 1950's. In the current military terminology, the witch-hunting is a limited rather than an "open-ended" enterprise.
This is indicated by the State Department's granting of a. passport: to Gus Hall for a "world tour of inspection" in which he hopes to visit the Soviet Union, Cuba, north Vietnam and China, among other places. It did this after revoking Aptheker's passport for going. on the.unauthorized trip with Lynd to.north Vietnam.
These two actions neatly reflect the ambivalent attitude of. official Washington toward the CP. It is inclined to be somewhat more lenient toward a pro-Moscow party like the American CP than with a Ilaoist group like the tiny Progressive Labor Movement because of its feelers for an eventual détente with: the Kremlin.
The new program of the CP, in its own, way and for its .own ends, also looks forward to and prepares the way for such an eventuality. It presents an "American road to Socialism" symmetrical with the English and Italian Communist versions of their own national path.
Despite a sprinkling of radical rhetoric, the document is thoroughly Khrushchevist in spirit and reformist in substance and outlook. It points to the doctrine of peaceful coexistence as the polestar for international and domestic politics. It proceeds from the proposition that the fight. for world peace can be won and; the. threat of nuclear war averted without the prior conquest of power by the workers in the imperialist centers and while the monopoly; capitalists retain their economic, political and military erip on the United States.
To implement the strategy of peaceful coexistence at home,,. the CP proposes to back up the moderate faction in the monopolist, ruling class against the aggressive right-wing militarists..This: is supposed to tip the scales decisively in favor of a peaceful attitude toward the "socialist camp" and the colonial liberation movements. Such a line of accommodation with the "accommodationists," known as
"coalition politics" in radical circles, led the CP to support such "lesser evil" Democrats as Kennedy in 1960 and Johnson in 1964.
_Since Johnson "took over Goldwater's program" (which really was his own inasmuch as it has been revealed that the president and Pentagon had decided to bomb north Vietnam and escalate the war before the November 1964 elections), the most favored representative of the "peace-loving elements" in the eyes of the CP seems to be Senator Robert Kennedy.
Peking should pounce upon the draft program as a prize specimen of "revisionism." It envisages a peaceful, gradual, constitutional road to socialism and calls for the eventual establishment of a "new people's party" of an indiscriminate class nature, with an antimonopolist but not necessarily socialist program. leanwhile, almost all the political activity of the CP takes place within the liberal precincts of the Democratic party with the conspicuously unsuccessful aim of rendering the policies of the governing party more "progressive" and "peaceful.'
The American CP is not only one of the weakest in the West but one of the most subservient to Moscow. The Worker made a much milder protest against the trials of the Soviet writers Daniel and Sinyavsky than the French CP; it apologized in effect for the Kremlin prosecution. Gus Hall told a critical questioner at the New York meeting that he thought the erring writers should have been dealt with ideologically rather than criminally and then went on to say that every country has its own way of doing things and the severe sentences was "the Russian way."
Indeed, for the CP leaders there may be many "roads to socialism." But support for Stalinist thought- -control trials in the Soviet Union and for capitalist politicians in the United States surely leads away from it.
NO LOVE FOR THE BOMB IN