[This new study of the Communist Party USA, says, reviewer
Wendland-Liu, "is at its best in its detailed treatment of political
debates and the labor histories of the formative period and the
popular front period."]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE MANY WORLDS OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM  
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Joel Wendland-Liu
October 2, 2023
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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_ This new study of the Communist Party USA, says, reviewer
Wendland-Liu, "is at its best in its detailed treatment of political
debates and the labor histories of the formative period and the
popular front period." _

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The Many Worlds of American Communism
Joshua Morris
Lexington Books
ISBN: 9781793631954

Recent studies of the Communist Party USA have promised a synthesis of
the perpetual binary of historiography that trapped historians between
the traditionalist (anti-Soviet, Cold War) lens and the revisionist
(purely internal and local) school. Entrenched in this synthesis
frame, Joshua Morris’ _The Many Worlds of American Communism_
contends that grasping the grassroots views and actions of party
members requires a broader understanding of national and international
communist politics (xiv). Unlike traditionalists, he avoids moralistic
denunciations and applies a Gramscian principle that emphasizes how
the Communist Party’s history reflects the society’s social,
cultural and material realities, including their international
dimensions.

_The Many Worlds of American Communism_ spans eight substantial
chapters, tracing the Party’s formation from World War I’s end to
1950. Despite the title’s promise of multiple worlds, Morris
primarily focuses on three: the ‘political world’, the ‘labor
world’ and the ‘community world.’

Amidst global revolutionary events and a massive US labor uprising in
1919, the stage was set for change. Dissatisfied leftists in the
Socialist Party, disheartened by its stance on the US role in the war,
its opposition to the USSR and its overall lack of action toward
socialism left to establish the Communist Party. Chapters one and two
explore the formation of the ‘political world’ of the early Party,
detailing Louis Fraina’s ‘mass action’ theories, Charles
Ruthenberg’s third-party organizing and John Reed’s
internationalism. Multiple unifying attempts were thwarted by
organizational differences, ideological and cultural variants, and the
onset of anti-communist machinations deployed by the government and
mainstream labor and political forces. Morris navigates the factional
disputes, the era of illegality and the uneasy encounters between the
‘labor world’ with the ‘political world’ with the arrival of
William Z. Foster in 1921. Foster, who had led the 1919 steel strike,
brought new connections to US labor and a large constituency of
English-speaking US-born radicals. His leadership improved the
party’s legitimacy and practical activity that would ‘signal a new
era in the domestic communist movement’ (49).

Foster immediately set to work organizing the Trade Union Education
League as a vehicle for coordinating a ‘militant minority’ of
Communist trade union organizers (64). He established potent alliances
with other labor radicals and advanced the strategies of
‘amalgamation’, an alternative to the AFL’s narrow craft
unionism, and ‘entryism’, a substitute for the IWW’s dual
unionism. Amalgamation, or industrial unionism, aimed to draw all the
workers in an industry into a single effort. Foster and his allies
also drew attention to craft unionism’s racist exclusion of lack
workers which weakened the struggle and denied African Americans
avenues for securing political power.

Despite this transformative foundation, Foster’s involvement failed
to resolve the Party’s factional disputes. Chapter three documents
how Foster’s presence introduced another dimension, shifting
disputes from cultural, ethnic and ideological divisions to the
question of whether one was a ‘labor communist’ or a ‘political
communist’ (90). Especially compelling is Morris’ account of the
party’s union organizers who led labor struggles in Pennsylvania’s
coal mining districts, the 1926 Passaic, New Jersey textile strike and
the development of the amalgamation movement in New York’s ILGWU.
These leaders’ principled efforts secured significant concessions
from employers (133) and rallied thousands of workers to align with
the party and TUEL (167). Despite anti-communist expulsions, this work
paved the way for future communist leadership and widespread support
for the amalgamation drive.

Chapter four addresses the rough and successful mediation of the labor
and political worlds of the party accomplished through the unfortunate
early death of Charles Ruthenberg and the Comintern’s intervention
in 1927-1928. The Workers Party of America was consolidated as the US
communist movement after it ordered a membership reorganization into
clubs based on workplace and neighborhood rather than ethnic
communities. Initially, the conflict between Foster’s faction,
closely linked to the ‘labor world’, and Ruthenberg’s faction
rooted in the ‘political world’, took center stage. With
Ruthenberg’s death, Jay Lovestone’s attempts to secure US
leadership by jumping into the Russian Party’s internal conflict and
aligning himself with Bukharin in the Comintern ‘exposed [him] as a
political opportunist’ (183). Cannon’s ties to Trotsky emerged
while Morris depicts Foster as loyal to the Comintern’s directives,
to the USSR and to the immediate goals of building unity in the US
party.

The Communist Party’s efforts to engage the national question became
the catalyst for its eventual unity and the radical shift in how it
operated within the social ‘worlds’. In the early 1920s, party
officials and union organizers had routinely criticized employers, the
mainstream labor movement, the government and other political parties
for racist policies or for failures to fully tackle racism. In
TUEL’s metal trades section struggles in Pennsylvania, for example,
Black inclusion in the union and fair employment practices had been
among its demands. Writers frequently echoed these demands and
criticism in the Party’s newspapers and journals. By 1928, however,
the Party’s internal problems with developing a concentrated focus
on the fight against racism and the low numbers of Black members and
leaders stemmed from the lack of a clear theoretical position on
racism and the Black freedom movement.

Morris touches on the Comintern debates that involved Black communists
such as Otto Huiswoud, Claude McKay, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, Harry
Haywood and James Ford, but other scholars have produced far more
nuanced and detailed accounts (e.g. Minkah Makalani’s _In the Cause
of Freedom_). Indeed, a handful of errors in Morris’ work are
notable. For example, Morris suggests that the Comintern named William
Patterson in 1921 to head its ‘Negro Commission’, when he did not
join the party until 1927 (185). Further, in tracing the Party’s
views of Black experiences, Morris cites a two-part article by ‘John
Bruce’ and ‘J.P. Collins’ in _The Communist_ in 1921, which he
suggests took, for the time, advanced positions on understanding
racism as a semi-autonomous social problem. Morris intimates the
authors were ‘Black writers’, when surely these were pseudonyms
(‘Robt. Bruce’ is listed as the author in the second part), and
James Cannon often used the name ‘J.P. Collins’ (Palmer 2007:
131). Morris notes that Lenin and Stalin repeatedly criticized the
predominantly Euro-American US leadership for its insufficient
engagement with Black communities. According to Morris, Stalin used
the issue not only to shape the self-determination thesis in 1928 to
establish organizational unity, but also to consolidate his leadership
within the Comintern. While the latter claim lacks substantial direct
evidence, the former claim appears credible based on accounts
elsewhere (Horne 2013: 32-33).

The intervention’s practical result depended less on the advocacy of
the self-determination thesis, and more on the opening of a third
‘world’ – the community. The centrality of the ‘community
world’ is the focus of chapters five, six and seven. Addressing
racism required more than ‘third party’ political organizing or
leadership of the labor movement. The Party deepened its concentration
on communities during the Depression as it led campaigns for housing
de-segregation and unemployment relief, against police brutality and
‘lynch law.’ The move into the ‘community world’ significantly
influenced the Party’s approach to labor and politics, especially as
bourgeoning Black migration to northern cities and Southern urban
centers further altered the Black population’s class composition
(ironically giving the self-determination thesis’ premises less
validity). Before 1928, there existed ‘no homogenous or unified
communist political movement’, as it was plagued with factional
struggles. After 1928, the ‘community world’ ‘emerged as the
social expression of American communism’ (225).

The Communist Party’s practical work among African Americans saw it
adopt tactics that called for their equal inclusion into existing
social institutions and political processes, while elevating their
working-class leadership, their issues of concern and rooting out
racist chauvinism within the party (201-202). Indeed, this concerted
entry into the ‘community world’ and the need to create
‘intermediary organizations’ that could build relationships
between the party and Black working-class communities fostered a
homegrown orientation toward the subsequent ‘popular front’ policy
(194). Morris positions the shift to the popular front as primarily an
endogenous political concern due to the infusion of Black members and
the centrality of the anti-racist struggle (rather than Comintern
orders).

The goal of greater practical unity with progressive forces proved
decisive for ‘the evolution and maturation of American communist
politics’ (281). A delicate balance of power persisted between the
‘labor’ and ‘political’ worlds that allowed each to function
semi-autonomously, while both relied on new relations with the
‘community world’ to build mass support for struggles. Morris
argues that the whole period 1928-1945, though marked by major
(sometimes wrong-headed and contradictory) policy changes based on
world events, was marked by strong organizational unity, deep
influence in US society and a high level of political sophistication.
Post-World War II complexities, McCarthyism and the reconstitution of
the Party saw the return of factionalism and what Morris calls
‘diffusion.’ This latter topic is treated in the book’s eighth
chapter.

In sum, _The Many Worlds of American Communism _is at its best in its
detailed treatment of political debates and the labor histories of the
formative period and the popular front period. Occasionally, an
overuse of details obstructs narrative clarity. Excellent accounts of
the various selected exemplars of the Party’s role in the ‘labor
world’ outshine faulty discussions of the Party’s treatment of
racism, though the general thrust of the thesis toward the
‘community world’ and its impact on the Party’s effectiveness is
well met.

_2 October 2023_

References

* Gerald Horne 2013 Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the
Globalization of the African American Struggle (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press).
* Bryan D. Palmer 2007 James P. Cannon and the Origins of the
American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press).

* Communist Party USA
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* Labor History
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* community organizing
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* 20th Century U.S. History
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* 20th Century African American History
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* The World Communist Movement
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