The Communist Party of the USA; An Analysis of a Social Movement

In certain sections of the daily press, and even in some scientific writings, one may find expressed fears that the United States faces a period of class struggle and revolutionary violence in which the Communist party will pay a prominent rôle. This is somewhat surprising in view of the fact that the Communist party of the USA has not engaged in revolutionary propaganda for the past eight years, and indeed abandoned the last slight remnant of revolutionary ideology in January, 1944. Nor does a Marxist revolution appear likely to arise from other sources. The only leftist groups that might with some accuracy be termed revolutionary, the two leading Trotskyite factions and the Revolutionary Workers League, the Socialist Labor party, the Proletarian party, and the Industrial Workers of the World, do little more today than engage in obscure polemics with one another. Their very names are unknown except to specialists. The Socialist party and its right wing splinter, the Social Democratic Federation, have long since abandoned revolutionary propaganda and confined themselves to reform within the present social structure. Thus at present no group that shows signs of growth is openly propagandizing for a Marxist revolution, and hence no promising focal point exists for an organized revolutionary movement based on the Marxist theory of the class struggle.The reasons for the disappearance of Marxist revolutionary ideology, and the probabilities of its future recurrence in the United States, present a scientific problem that has received relatively little non-partisan investigation. As it is impossible to discuss in brief compass all of the factors that might lead to revolutionary disturbances, in this paper the analysis will be limited to the Communist party of the USA, as the most significant proponent of this point of view in recent times.