Comradeship // Freechat

Yeah. It all started with Popular Front strategy of the Communist Party USA (1936). During the 1930s, the CPUSA did have a visible presence in unions, black freedom struggles, and anti-fascist coalitions, but this did not come about due to the popular front strategy, but in spite of it. The major successes of the CPUSA in organizing workers occurred before the popular front was implemented when the party experimented with militant united front tactics and still maintained its revolutionary identity. After adopting the popular front strategy, the CPUSA retreated from all that and, in the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, the Communists ceased all their criticism of the labor bureaucracy, the Roosevelt administration, and liberal organizations. Over the course of the 1930s, the class character of the CPUSA changed as its members took up positions within the labor bureaucracy and clamped down on working class militancy.

As a result of the popular front, the CPUSA retreated from its advocacy of communist revolution and ended up as the “left-wing” of the Democrats and the New Deal. The “hidden secret” of why the anticommunist Michael Harrington (the founder of DSA) idealized the popular front was not because it was proof that socialism had mass influence or spoke the language of ordinary people. Rather, he liked the popular front because it was when the communists ceased to be revolutionary and gave up on militant action, self-organization of the working class, and “sectarian” political independence in order to become loyal allies of the labor bureaucracy and liberals. In other words, it was when communists acted like Michael Harrington's ideal of a democratic socialist.