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Early American Marxism

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1934

JUNE

“C.P. Proposes Joint Actions on Daily Issues: Statement of the Central Committe, CPUSA to the National Executive Committee, Socialist Party, June 19, 1934.” In the aftermath of HItler’s attainment of power in Germany and in mortal fear of the perceived “fascist” tendencies of the new Roosevelt administration, the Communist Party made an appeal for a “United Front of Action” with the Socialist Party, delivered as a letter to the SP’s 1934 National Convention in Detroit. This commuique was not answered, motivating the CP to make the concrete pitch more publicly—publishing the text in the June 26 edition of the Daily Worker. Noting that the majority of the newly-elected NEC of the Socialist Party had previously announced themselves in favor of united front action with the Communists but had been blocked by “Hillquit, Oneal, Waldman & Co.,” the SP leadership was directly challenged: “Today, the National Executive Committee, which claims that its policies represent a repudiation of that group, and which poses as a leftward group, can no longer offer the old excuse for an inability to establish the united front with the Communist Party on issues which concern the most immediate and vital interests of all the toilers.”.

DECEMBER

“As to ’Red Terror,” by Will Herberg [Dec. 15, 1934] Rather snotty editorial from the pages of the offical organ of the Communist Party (Opposition) attacking Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party for their protests against the mass repression which swept the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the assassination of Sergei Kirov. “To get aroused to white-heat over the instant meting out of full and irrevocable justice to the White Guard assassins and to the imperialist spies would mean to get aroused over the enemies of the Socialist Soviet Republic. That’s why silence in the case of Kirov and raucous anger in the case of Soviet justice,” the editorial declares. The “bogus democratic justice” of the “Social Democratic tear-shedders” is condemned and Soviet mass reprisals defended: “Thomas and his colleagues are to be condemned in the most unmistakable terms by all honest socialists for their attempt to cover up the trail of the imperialist right and its hired assassins banded against the Soviet regime. Every class-conscious worker can only hail the swift and complete justice accorded the culprits in the Soviet Union.”