AT the end of World War I, there was great dissatisfaction with the two big political parties in the United States. The Republican and Democratic Parties suffered the first great challenge since the days of Populism. No less than a million voters moved away from the capitalist parties and voted for the Socialist Party. Their candidate, Eugene Victor Debs, was in jail at the time for his anti-war views. In the main, it was a working class vote, but among this million there were also sections of the middle class, especially the intellectuals and the youth who had moved away from an old set of values, and were searching for a new philosophy, a new way of life.
Today Russian Communism is the greatest barbarism on earth. But in 1917 Russian Communism was the greatest liberating force in the world. It overthrew the hated Tsarist autocracy, brought peace to the nation, and established the first workers' state in history. Debs hailed the Russian Revolution as "the greatest, most luminous and far-reaching achievement in the entire sweep of human history". And yet it was his party that was undergoing the deepest split in its history precisely over that question and precisely at the very time when a substantial section of the American working class had broken with the capitalist parties and voted socialist.
Debs was a revered name, not alone to American Socialists, but to the entire American working class. This railroad worker had led some of the great class struggles that rocked American society at the turn of the century, like the Pullman strike. He became a socialist when the Federal troops came out, at the bidding of the companies, to put down that strike for elementary workers' rights. "In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed ... The capitalist class. The working class. The class struggle".
Debs fought this capitalist class not only in peacetime, but during the war also. But he did not grasp the world character of the first world war, and he did not grasp the world character of the Russian Revolution. Although he hailed it as the greatest achievement in human history, he did not separate himself from those socialists who opposed it.
Yet a great dividing line was being drawn throughout the world socialist movement over the central event of the world we live in. It split socialism into two warring camps: those who were for and those who were against soviets.
Today when we hear or read the word, soviet, it is usually in connection with the idea of government. Soviet means the Soviet Government, with its huge bureaucracy, its huge army, its millions of secret police, its factories which are prisons, its prisons which are factories, its ambassadors and representatives in the United Nations, telling lie for lie with the ambassadors and representatives of the old capitalist nations. But in 1917, the word, soviet, did not mean this. It meant the opposite of all this. It meant the destruction of the bureaucracy, the abolition of professional armies, the abolition of police. It meant elections based on factories, regiments, and groups of peasants. There was one delegate to every 500 workers, a delegate to every regiment, and a delegate to every few thousand peasants. The workers, soldiers and peasants formed these soviets. It was not bureaucrats, officials, army, police or parliament but these soviets which held all power. Workers' rule - that was what "soviet" meant.
The sad fact is that Debs lent his great prestige to those who were socialists in words, but who in action fought this soviet power. He remained part of the Socialist International and attacked the Communist International. The Communist International drew a class division against those who betrayed the interests of the workers through their support of the imperialist war. Debs refused to see it as a question of class. He interpreted it as a question of "dictatorship". He wrote: "When they (the Communist International) proposed to dictate to the socialist parties of other countries as to how they should conduct themselves, then it seems to me to be the time to back up".
The word "dictate" was for purpose of covering the real reason for the split; whether to fight only for workers' "rights" or for workers' power; whether to do so only on a national scale or on an international one.
Those who opposed Debs split away to form the new Communist Party of the United States. It was not an easy thing to do, for Debs was the most revered name in the American socialist movement. The majority who formed the new party were immigrants, old and new, whose revolutionary fibre was steeled in the struggle against Tsarism first in 1905, and then in 1917.
Precisely because they were immigrants they appreciated the Americanism of Debs. Debs, it is true, was no William Lloyd Garrison. That great abolitionist was a true Bolshevik in the fullest meaning of the term - uncompromising, unflinching, total in his devotion to the cause. Like the Bolsheviks, he opposed both the slave power itself and also those who opposed the slave power in words, but worried about what means to use, or sought high office in the interim, or even compromised with those who sought office. Garrison's famous phrase, "There is some roguery here", was definitely not a part of Debs' make-up. The latter saw nothing fatal in "independence" even where it meant betrayal of the interests of the workers.
Nevertheless Debs was American from head to toe. And the immigrants who fought for the defence of the Russian Revolution knew there would never be an American revolution so long as they were the dominant group in the newly-born Communist Party.
Why, then, did the immigrants break with Debs?
First, because they recognized that here a class division is involved. This is not easy to see since, as far as Debs was concerned, it was only a theoretical division; in reality he was a man whose whole history was one of class struggle. Nevertheless, it could not be an accident that a man who had gone to jail for his anti-war views should be in the same international with the German Social Democracy that not only jailed, but murdered Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg for opposing the Kaiser's war and struggling to achieve workers' power. They were murdered not by the capitalists but by the socialists who saved capitalism. This was no personal aberration. It represented a political tendency.
If there was anything the immigrants knew well it was the question of political tendencies. Lenin's party, which was the only one in history that had achieved workers' power, had taught them, ever since its beginning in 1903, that it was necessary to fight, not alone Tsarism, but the petty-bourgeois tendencies within the Marxist movement. The working class had achieved victory once in history and its leader, Lenin, could lead it to victory for one reason and one reason only: because he believed that the workers of the world were ready to rule, not after he and some intellectuals and planners had trained them, but then and there in 1917. For him, a socialist revolution meant that the workers and other oppressed classes were to rule.
There you have the fundamental problem of the world in which we live. However different it may be in different countries, in essence it is the same. When the workers overthrow the capitalist government, as they have done so often, who is to rule? Will the workers rule or will the labor bureaucrats, in terror of the revolutionary working class, rush to find a government of liberals, "progressive" police chiefs and such like, all of them aim at nothing else but putting the workers back in their place in the plant and in politics, i.e., restoring the old society. That's what the German socialists did. Ten thousand books and ten million words and a thousand such as Debs cannot explain that away.
That is the modern problem and that's what gave the small band who were ready to strike out on a new path the strength to break with Debs. They were ready to accept the discipline of the Communist International. To them it was not a "dictate" but something self-imposed. Indeed it is only when it is self-imposed that its semi-military aspect is entirely subordinate to the passionate vision of the future called a political perspective.
The political perspective they held was simple and clear. The working class, and only the working class, is to rule. It was the workers' role in production - in the factories, in the mines, in the mills, and in the fields - that defined the class character of society and then the class nature of the state or national government. There can be no true socialism, no serious Marxism, outside of this overwhelming consideration of the role of labor at the point of production. To move one inch from this concept of labor is to betray the working class interests.
The working class is not just the workers fighting for their rights against the steel barons, or the railroad interests, but the whole working class and its future: workers' power. If once a workers' party placed in the center of all its thoughts and actions the aim of workers' power, then sooner or later the American proletarian would produce its own new and indigenous leaders and the band of immigrants need not fear the loss of Debs. Already in fact, looming then on the horizon was a comparable American figure who was joining forces with the Communists, William Z. Foster, the leader of the great steel strike.
The American ruling class was terrified at the new passions and forces stirring on the American scene. Race riots spread as well as strikes. Millions of Negroes, newly arrived from the South to swell the expanding labor force that had heretofore been filled by the immigrants from Eastern Europe, rebelled against intolerable conditions. These new immigrants from the South were in revolt not only against the life in the factories, but life in their neighborhoods, the crowding, the segregation in living quarters, the discrimination and lack of freedom of movement. the conditions were the more intolerable precisely because they were no longer share-croppers in the South but an integral part of the American labor force in basic industry. They organized into a mighty mass movement led by one Marcus Garvey.
The government struck out blindly at all opposition, but especially at "Russian Communists". It whipped the country into a hysteria and continued on a rampage of illegal raids, arrests, break-up of meetings, suppression of books, pamphlets and the paper of the fledgling C.P.. This forced it underground before it ever got a start.
That knock on the door at midnight which was supposed to have had its origin in Hitler's Germany in 1933 had its start in America in the Palmer Raids in the early 1920s. But these government persecutions could in no way dampen the enthusiasm, activism and energy of the young party members, who had their imagination fired by the Russian Revolution, and felt that the revolution in America too was one they would see in their lifetime.
It was this type of perspective that made no task too hard or menial. The party, though only a few thousand, tried to penetrate as deep into the masses as possible. They went, not to unionized shops where conditions were comparatively easy, but to sweatshops so that they could try to organize them. They were on picket lines and before houses where eviction notices were put up. The greater the capitalist magnate, the greater the desire to penetrate into his citadel, whether that be U.S. Steel in Pittburgh or textiles in New England; the International Harvester in Chicago or the shipyards of San Francisco; the mines in West Virginia and Illinois and the sweatshops of Georgia.
That was their life. That did not mean they forgot their theory, for they had learned in their fight with Debs that, just as there are only two basic classes in society, so there are only two modes of thought. Serious theory meant, had to mean, in the final analysis, a class division, and they studied Marx assiduously as they worked in the sweatshops that did not seem to have changed much since the days when he described them.
But there was one field from which the party was cut off, which was clearly a revolutionary arsenal: the Negroes of America. But these Negroes kept far away from any whites. The Garvey Movement was an all-Negro movement. The unions had kept away from radical parties. Yet, as far back as 1913, that is before the war and before they had shown in action what a mighty revolutionary force they were, Lenin had recognized their revolutionary potential. He likened the share-cropper in the South to the peasant in Russia and said their oppression had them seething so that they could actually be the bacilli, or stimulant, to bring the socialist proletariat onto the historical scene.
The question now was: how to translate this theory into action?
The party had a lot to overcome because all oppression had worn a white face, and the Socialists had behaved very shabbily indeed. They had evaded the Negro question by saying that it was "economic" and hence would not really be solved until socialism triumphed. They thereby not only had not faced the question of social inequality, but, what is of even greater importance, they had not sensed the validity of Negroes' independent movement, "nationalistic" as it might have appeared. The Negroes were treated by them as some inert mass "to be given" economic rights because of some abstract principles. That's all. That was at best.
At worst, as was the case in the South, the few Negroes that came to socialism were put in separate branches from their white "comrades". That was life in the Socialist Party.
No wonder the Negroes kept far away from that type of socialism. When they embraced Garveyism by the millions, that put an end once and for all to the myth "you can't organize the Negro". But of all those millions, less than a handful, like A. Phillip Randolph, joined the Socialist Party.
What to do? The answer must be in the life of the Communist Party branches and in the very lives and relations of its white and Negro members. There lay the answer, and they acted on that.
The method of approach was entirely new precisely because the external politics as correct and broke completely with old concepts. The C.P. decided not to limit itself to manifestos and talk, but to make it a part of the life of the branch.
It was the first serious approach to that burning question on the part of the Marxist movement since its origin in the United States. First the right atmosphere was created by the setting down of the political line, in the life of the party, i.e. their own lives, and not limiting this to the world outside. The line held that the new attitude to the Negro must be shown in life rather than in words. To do so required:
Any member could, as a regular part of the agenda, bring up the guilty person on charges of white chauvinism. The branch was the judge. There was no shilly-shallying on the question.
It was the first time the few Negroes who had joined began to speak up. It was the first time that more Negroes joined. It was the first time the white members felt the Negro question instead of merely orating it. It was symbolic of a new approach to human relations externally.
Everyone had a new, more real concept of the forces of the American Revolution. No one who was not ready to go all the way on this could long find refuge in the party.
The party was suddenly thrown into turmoil by a spirit that emanated, or seemed to emanate, from Russia. Since the death of Lenin, the economy, the state, and the party there had been in a continuous state of turmoil, during which Stalin rose to power. Members suddenly found that in America they were being thrown out for "Trotskyism", and the party was disintegrating not through any government persecution - it had long since come out legally and functioned without any interference - but internally. The approach to the Negro Question, so symbolical of what should be the approach to all the most oppressed sections of the population - the mass of workers, the women, the youth - should have meant the realization that the party was not immune to bourgeois influences on the outside and must constantly hack away at them. But there was no time for anything like that.
However it was not "only" a Russian phenomenon. In the American party it emerged in the fight against the appearance of a new group to leadership called the Lovestoneites, after their leader, Jay Lovestone.
The immigrants had been hungry for the American types to join their ranks. Well, there was an American. But he was not the hardy proletarian type. He was a petty-bourgeois intellectual. They surely had not meant to sneer at theory for they knew without theory the Russian Revolution could not have succeeded and maintained itself. But this type of theory seemed a solid departure from Marxism which recognized no country as immune from the general laws of capitalist development.
But here Lovestone said that America was immune. His theory was known as the theory of exceptionalism, and it led him to all sorts of fantastic schemes, such as being drowned almost completely in La Follette's Farmer-Labor Party scheme. But what the rank and filers hated most of all was the "training of the organizers".
Heretofore organizers would go into the sweatshops and learn from the workers their conditions as one of them and with them see whether the shop could be unionized. Now, however, they were told to work, not with the mass of workers so much as with the top leadership of the union. There were all sorts of flirtations with the top bureaucracy, and suddenly the new type of organizer "for" the workers arose. The needle trades swarmed not only with the regular labor bureaucrat, but the the special consultant supplied by the Lovestoneites, and now came the new product: a combination of woman "leader", union organizer, and general debater.
I will take just one type I knew very well. Her name was Minnie Lury. She was a terrific little activist and organizer of the same type that they all were, except she was American. But she became Lovestone's secretary and from him learned to go to the shop not as any worker, but after having been trained to a special skilled job in the shop and then in the union as a "leader". He consciously trained these semi-intellectuals and of course it was beneath them to start as a floor girl. They went directly to be an operator. Minnie would orate to the workers at union meetings, and they "loved" her for just teaching them how to turn the switch off, whether or not you got the workers out from the shop, as if they did not know how to turn the switch. She was the anticipation, and only the anticipation of the Stalinist organizer. She was one of a long line that, first, swarmed the needle trades, and with the depression, then were everywhere.
Last updated on 09 January 2026