Barack Hussein Obamas Real Political Party The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States

The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States. As the chief official communist party in the USA for most of the 20th century, it has a long, complex history that is often inter-layered with the simultaneous histories of similar communist parties worldwide, as well as with the U.S. labor movement generally.




For the first half of the 20th century, the CPUSA was the largest and most influential communist party in its country. It played a very prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in founding most of the country's first industrial unions (which would later expel communists by adopting the Smith Act) while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of U.S. racial segregation. By August 1919, only months after its founding, the CPUSA had 60,000 members, including anarchists and other leftists, while the more moderate Socialist Party of America had only 40,000 members. The sections of the CP's International Workers Order meanwhile organized for communism around linguistic and ethnic lines, providing mutual aid and tailored cultural activities to an IWO membership that peaked at 200,000 at its height.



At that time, the CPUSA also advocated an ultimate aim of armed, insurrectionist communist revolution, bringing it under attack from the more established and influential U.S. anti-communist forces — the Palmer Raids and the first Red Scare were only two of many major anti-communist projects undertaken by the U.S. government. Many persistent attempts at suppression of communist activity by the government continued until the end of the McCarthy era climate of the 1950s; after that, anti-communist suppression activity took more covert forms such as COINTELPRO against the New Left.



But the CP's early labor and organizing successes did not last. As the decades progressed, the combined effects of the second Red Scare, McCarthyism, the 1956 Khrushchev Secret Speech denouncing the previous decades of Josef Stalin's rule, and the adversities of the continued Cold War mentality, steadily weakened of the Communist Party's internal structure and confidence. CPUSA's membership in the Comintern and its close adherence to the political positions of the Soviet Union enabled anti-communist critics to constantly present the party as not only a threatening, subversive domestic entity, but also as a "foreign" agent fundamentally alien to the "American way of life". Internal and external crises swirled together, to the point where members who did not end up in prison for party activities tended either to disappear quietly from its ranks or to adopt more moderate political positions at odds with the CPUSA's party line. By 1957, membership had dwindled to less than 10,000, of whom some 1500 were FBI informants.[1]



As well, despite its self-proclaimed admiration of revolutionary Marxist movements around the world, the party continued its long pursuit of legal reforms and increasingly played down more radical alternatives as it participated with new vigor in the American electoral system and advocated "peaceful coexistence" between the Western world and the Soviet bloc. The course caused dozens of angry breakaways throughout the 1960s by still-militant CP members who saw them as conciliatory "sellout" moves. This New Left proceeded to continue the idea of armed class warfare and generally turned to Mao Zedong, the United States Black Panther Party, the Cuban revolutionaries, or similar figures for inspiration. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 led to further disillusionment and defections from the CPUSA. Meanwhile, the major leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement were very careful to keep communists at arm's length for fear of also being branded communist — tendencies that isolated the CPUSA even further.



Party leader Gus Hall's rejection of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika policies at the end of the 1980s meant that the party had become estranged even from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself, and the organization languished without the state support of such a major entity. The national party convention of 1991 tried to resolve the issue of whether the collapse of the Soviet Union should mean that the Party reject Leninism, but the Party majority reasserted its communist party line, and the faction urging the move towards social democracy left and established itself as the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.



The CPUSA has never regained the influence it wielded before the McCarthy period, and unlike similar groups in most parts of Europe, it has never been able to enter as a group into the national government, nor even to become a notable on-the-ground opposition force. Instead, other, usually smaller (but more ideologically hard-line) communist parties claim to uphold the "true" revolutionary CP tradition. The CPUSA's bedrock ideology has also changed: although still proclaiming itself an advocate of a form of socialist revolution, the party today calls for a "peaceful transition to socialism" in the U.S. "wherever possible" and its constitution actually makes "advocacy of … force and violence or terrorism" a reason for expulsion from the party.[2] The Party's stated goal is to eventually come to establish a free, prosperous, and peaceful society free of racism, sexism, homophobia, and exploitation, in which all people have the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential. But the CPUSA does continue to exist as an organization despite its lack of influence, today under the leadership of Sam Webb. Webb asserts a current figure of around 15,000 in party membership, which has been disputed as an overestimate