State, Community and Individual after the Revolution

All-Union Congress of Soviets, II Congress (14 April 1934 – 28 March 1936)

1881 members

Workers’ Communist Party: 985 seats
Democratic Farmer Labor Party: 525 seats
Democratic-Republican Party: 170 seats
”True” Democrats: 120 seats
Independents: 81 seats

Central Executive Council of the Congress of Soviets, II Congress

231 + 48 members (Initial composition)

WCP: 171 seats
DFLP: 68 seats
DRP: 40 seats

I Presidium of the Congress of Soviets (2 August 1933 – 31 October 1937)

Secretary-General of the Presidium: Upton Sinclair
Deputies : Harold L. Ickes, Aubrey Willis Williams, Hubert Harrison, Sam DeWitt, Haim Kantorovitch, Rosa Pastor Stokes

Central Committee (Foster I)

Premier: William Z. Foster (WCP)
Deputy Premier: Robert LaFollette Jr. (DFLP)
People’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs: John Reed (WCP)
Attorney General : Crystal Eastman (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Defense : Martin Abern (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Labor : Emma Goldman (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Finance : Clarence Edwin Ayres (DFLP)
People’s Secretary for Foreign Trade : Walter Lippman (DFLP)
People’s Secretary for Agriculture : Henry A. Wallace (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Education : John Dewey (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Public Safety : J. Edgar Hoover (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Railways : Robert Taft (DRP)
People’s Secretary for Communication : Max Eastman (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Maritime Transport : Joseph Ryan (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Energy : Burton K. Wheeler (DFLP)
People’s Secretary for Manufacturing : John Pepper (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Light Industry : Theodore Roosevelt III (DRP)
People’s Secretary for Construction : John Fitzpatrick (DFLP)
People’s Secretary for Culture : Louise Bryant (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Welfare : Vito Marcantonio (WCP)
Chairman, State Planning Commission : L.E. Katterfield (WCP)
Chairman, Academy of Arts and Sciences : Eugene O’Neill (Nonpartisan)
Chairman, Union Bank : Robert A. Brady (WCP)
Speaker of the CEC : Benjamin Gitlow (WCP)
Chief Whip, CEC : Jay Lovestone (WCP)

Membership of Key Organs in the Workers’ Communist Party

Central Committee

75 members, elected by biannual Party Congress.

Secretariat of the Workers’ Communist Party

Secretary-General: Earl Browder
Communications Secretary: Alfred Wagenknecht
Nationalities Secretary: Langston Hughes
Other Senior Secretaries: Alice Paul, Louis Fraina, Benjamin Gitlow, John Brophy, Jacob Panken

Politburo

Earl Browder, Abraham Cahan, James Rorty, Morris Rapheal Cohen, William Z. Foster, A. Phillip Randolph, John Dewey, L.E. Katterfield

Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of the UASR

Chief Justice: Louis Brandeis
Associate Judges: Roger Nash Baldwin*, Samuel Leibowitz*, James Clark McReynolds, Roscoe Pound, Harlan F. Stone, Owen Roberts, Benjamin Cardozo, John J. Parker,

*appointed post-revolution

Excerpts from Politics of the UASR , 5th Edition (Glasgow, UK: Progress Publishers, 2005)

Progress Publishers is a self-styled left-wing independent publishing house. Originally an arm of the Comintern’s Education International, the pressure of the Cold War has led to a parting of ways in the 60s. It primarily publishes academic textbooks, both domestic and international focus, as well as providing local editions of American and Soviet books of historic import.

Political historians generally refer to the period from 1933 to 1948 as the “First Period” of American party politics. As noted by the eminent political historian V.O. Key, the First Period’s political alignment grew from three defining factors (1955). The first, often ignored in discourse on the subject, was the long and painful development of the Workers’ Communist Party in the terminal period of the United States. From its founding in 1876 as the Socialist Labor Party, the Party would play a critical role as the crossroads of left-wing and revolutionary politics in the Second Republic period, the period extending from the resolution of the first Civil War until the beginning of the second.

Under late capitalist society, the Socialist Labor Party represented a diverse and often seemingly contradictory constituency. Motley syndicalist miners mingled with prairie socialists among yeoman farmers. Immigrant radicals in the cities often came into fierce conflict with native workers in the Party. The party’s intellectual constituency was conflicted as well. The hardline Marxists intellectuals among the immigrants and radical youth clashed with the moderate visions of the radicalized Progressive reformers (Kahn 1964). Nevertheless, the trials caused by the Party’s opposition to the imperial adventures in the First World War unified the party under a genuinely radical, revolutionary platform while maintaining the critical ideological diversity necessary to avoid slipping into autocracy after the revolution.

The second key event in the development of the First Period was the dramatic upheaval caused by the Great Depression and subsequent Revolution and Second Civil War. The Depression would provide the key stimulus to dispelling false consciousness among sections of the American populace that had previous remained indifferent or even hostile to the aims of socialism, and realigning vast sectors of the American electorate for the 1932 general election (Chambers & Burnham 1972).

The third key event was the split of the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the First World War. The ascendancy of the populist faction in the 1918 midterm elections, and their subsequent losing battle over control of the party machinery gave birth to the revolution’s second force, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Southern Populists, trade unionists, Christian Socialists and, admittedly, more than a few labor skates among the Southern plantation elite had created a new centre of power in the Democratic Party that was willing to adapt to changing political winds (Bensel 1984). During the February Crisis, the previously reformist DFLP were progressively won over to the revolutionary position by Upton Sinclair’s persuasive idealism less than William Z. Foster’s pragmatic insistence (Trotsky 1948).

The existence of genuine multiparty competition following the Revolution provides a clear contrast between the Soviet and American experiences. This was an intentional feature agreed upon by the revolutionary leadership. Earl Browder encouraged continuing alliance with the DFLP in the form of the United Democratic Front, and even the admittedly minimal participation of the Democratic-Republicans, formed by the anti-putsch members of the bourgeois parties.

The legitimacy of the revolution depended on the preservation of pluralism. While seditious counterrevolution was ruthlessly suppressed by the Red Terror, there remained limited channels for legal parliamentary opposition and protest. Ideological diversity, both within and outside of the party, was the key factor in distinguishing the relative success of the American socialist experiment from the blunders and atrocities of the Soviet experiment (Hartz 1955).

The defining characteristic of the First Period of party politics is the overwhelming hegemony of the Workers’ Communist Party on the political, social and ideological fronts. The Party routinely polled above 60 percent in national elections during this period. The Party was a coalition partner in every state, and in only a few occasions did they play the junior party to the DFLP.

In the final days of the Second Republic, the Workers’ Communist Party had been a state-within-a-state, running parallel civic organizations, a paramilitary army, an intelligence apparatus, and many free associations such as the local soviets which existed in a dual power position against the bourgeois state. Post-revolution, the governing, judicial and economic apparatuses were subsumed into the framework created by the Party (Draper 1961).

Before the revolution, while the federal government had assumed a commanding role in a few spheres, the dominant political actors were the states. Post-revolution saw immense transfers of power to the local and all-union spheres at the expense of the states. Localities achieved increase autonomy, especially cities, which became coherent political-economic units. Metropolitan areas were rationalized under a single government. The localities, whether the cities or the rural counties, developed institutions of participatory democracy in the local soviets and the popular assemblies. The local institutions, supported by block grants from the states and all-union government, became the primary allocators of housing, health care, and social aid.

The professional police forces were replaced by the paramilitary police militias, subject to discipline under the new Uniform Code of Military Justice. Professionalization was discouraged. Instead, it became prevalent to “serve the revolution” by spending a stint in the police militia, like one might serve their country in the military and then move onto a different career.

The American tradition of secularism was strengthened into a general policy of state atheism. Education sought to discourage superstition. Religion was regarded, politically, as a private affair, and the state took a very dim view on religious exemptions to generally applicable law.

The Cultural Revolution, a complex amalgamation of grassroots action from below and the dictata of the Party, dominated domestic politics. The workers’ republic, secure in its New World fortress, adopted Trotsky’s permanent revolution as a guide for domestic life. “Forward, always forward,” was Workers’ Party Culture Secretary James P. Cannon’s motto. The guns of the Civil War had not even been silenced when the revolution against reactionary culture began.

It began with assaults on the symbols of reactionary culture. Mobs of poor Southern whites had worked together with poor blacks at arm’s length in the revolutionary struggle against the planter class and their Putschist allies. This alliance continued through the process of de-Planterization. Monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy were torn down. Cities, streets and schools were renamed. School teachers exhorted their students to rip out the “reactionary propaganda” from the old history textbooks when new ones were not available. This process occurred in tandem with the collectivization of agriculture and industry (Kennan 1971).

The New South was not a picture of racial harmony. Only the larger political project of revolution and economic development maintained the alliance. The establishment of the African National Federal Republic, an autonomous socialist republic created in the Black Belt by land ceded from the territorial dismemberment of the Deep South states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, encouraged a trend towards self-segregation. Within the ANFR, the black political majority pursued economic development and cultural rebirth with the patronage of the national government (Macnair 2002). The white minority, approximately 35 percent of the population, didn’t suddenly abandon generations of racialism. By and large, the racial malcontents simply left. Those more amenable to the new order remained, and some whites, both from the North and South, emigrated in pursuit of economic opportunity.

Within the ANFR, the black population were quite poor, but no longer lived in constant terror of White terrorism. But much of the country’s black population remained living outside the ANFR. The Party sought to give both sides their due in pursuit of peace, resulting in compromises that were acceptable to neither side. The cause of racial justice was harmed by Communist moderation. An endemic low-level conflict occurred across the South until the start of the Second World War. White reactionaries terrorized blacks. The African National Congress faction of the Workers’ Party fought back, establishing multi-racial militias to secure the peace. Barely tolerated under the auspices of the Red Terror, men like Harry Haywood waged a guerilla war against KKK remnants with propaganda, strikes, armed confrontation and firing squads (Zinn 1984).

The violence of the South sorely tested Langston Hughes’ “Nation of Nations” strategy. Elsewhere, it bore more peaceful fruit. The Sequoyah Autonomous Socialist Republic was established from land ceded in eastern Oklahoma. The solidarity politics of the pre-revolution era were more peaceful in the former Indian Territory. And while Sequoyah would not be Indian majority, its new constitution strengthened Indian cultural expression, and established the first framework for polities not defined strictly by geographic location. The 1934 Law of Nationalities repealed blood quanta for determining racial identification. The Indian tribal republics were empowered to establish their own generally applicable standards of tribal membership. In the Sequoyah ASR, and the Seminole, Black Hills, Navojo ASRs established later in the 30s, the bonds among the people would be determined by oath and way of life, not by blood. Whether by adoption or intermarriage, many modern Indian tribes have substantial European membership.

Beyond taking the first concrete steps in ending the legacy of White supremacy in America, the Cultural Revolution would deeply change the balance of power between men and women, and the domestic sphere. In a mix of revolution from below and from above, the personal and the political became intertwined. The revolutionaries cast off laws defining and punishing obscenities, rejecting this control of bodies as reactionary feudal holdovers now uncritically accepted as bourgeois public morality. The Metropolis Autonomous Socialist Republic became the leader in this libertine crusade. When peace returned in early 1934, and the factories and shops shifted from supporting the revolutionary war effort back to domestic economy, it became clear that the artists, bohemians, and the workers who looked up to their example were the new political power in the great city-state.

They repealed laws against public indecency. Bourgeois body-shame became a new snarl word. Sections of the population embraced naturism and the free expression of the body’s natural beauty. All censorious injunctions against the press had been rejected. The all-Union government repealed laws prohibiting the use of the mail system for the distribution of “obscene materials”. Condoms, family planning, marital aids, and erotica were all legalized.

The pre-revolution laws criminalizing sex-work were repealed. After a bitter political battle, the “Red Garters” trade union was accepted into the Solidarity union. A trade union composed of sex workers, the Red Garters waged a class war against pimps and exploiters since before the revolution. Now legalized, and with the Metropolitan Red Militia(1) as their ally, they won the battle for liberation. Representing prostitutes, burlesque performers, the workers of public bathhouses, and the support staff, the Red Garters established rules for the industry that would ensure that the work would be safe and fair.

The other red banners of the revolution would follow in Metropolis’ lead. California’s intellectual radicals and artists were the first to adopt the legalization regime pioneered in the East. The revolutionary heartland in the “Steel Belt” followed not long after.

These revolutions came hand in hand with the dramatic changes in the roles women played in the larger economy. Of the close to one million people who served in the Red Army, Red Guards, Spartacus League, Minutemen, Black Brigades and other revolutionary militia during the Civil War, nearly twenty percent were women. A million more had taken up traditionally male professions in the factories and machine shops to support the war effort. Those who had taken up the sword of the revolution would not return to quiet domesticity.

The Cultural Revolution would not only see women continue to penetrate traditional male roles in the military, militia, law, factory and trades, but also see the beginning of a domestic work revolution. The socialization and rationalization of domestic labor would become a new crux of the revolution, which united both feminist firebrands and the world revolutionists in a common cause.

The workers’ republic, they decided, would not squander the labor and genius of half its population in inefficient domestic servitude. The family would not be an organ of domestic production, but an association built on bonds of trust and solidarity. The cities and collective farms would be the battlefronts of this new revolution. Communal living was emphasized. Multiple families or individuals living together could more productively spend their leisure time. Tiresome domestic chores could be performed more efficiently as a professional service. Laundromats, using modern labor saving technology, became another spear of the revolution. Men, both bachelors and married, found less and less shame in the traditionally female domestic labor.

Child care was socialized. The community crèches established safe systems were working men and women could have their children learn and be watched over while they worked or took part in politics. Socially supported by community governments, they have become pillars of the American way of life.

The politics of education dramatically changed during the Cultural Revolution. The old school system, with its class based tiers, regimented classrooms, and parochialism was on its way out. The old boarding schools for the children of the wealthy were reorganized as academies for the best and brightest.

In fits and starts, the old norms of the classroom were replaced by new democratic norms suitable to a revolutionary society. The new Secretariat for Education took a role in guiding this process, ensuring a just outcome across the nation. New resources for training and retraining teachers were offered. The new system emphasized teachers as leaders and collaborators instead of dictators. Students were not tied to assigned seats and desks. They did not have to ask permission to use the bathroom. Critical thinking and learning as doing were the new standards. It would be a necessary ingredient in returning the divided population into feeling like a single country again, especially with regards to the country’s checkered, complicated history.

The battle for history consumed most efforts. The cynicism of the 20s and Great Depression had greatly marred public perception of the canons of America’s past. The educators sought to salvage what was good from the past while remaining in touch with its faults. In this regard it was hoped to soothe the malcontents who felt that the revolution was consumed by hatred of the nation’s history and leaders.

America as a work-in-progress was the new tone. The good done by past leaders and movements was remembered, and their faults were not forgotten. The revolutionaries hoped to continue this trend. As People’s Secretary for Education John Dewey argued, “It is my fondest hope that our children see us for as we are, not as saints or sinners, but as a flawed people seeking to build a more perfect union. Just as we must now mourn the suffering our ancestors had inflicted upon one another over race or class, and yet still commemorate the good work they did in fighting evils like slavery, we must raise our children to carry the flag forward, to forget neither the good nor the evil we do, and commit once again to building a more perfect union.”

However, the Communists themselves were not without their discontents. The dissident factions and affinity groups of the Workers’ Party that would one day split it and form new social movements were already active in the 30s. While groups like the prairie and mountain based Independent Socialist Labor Party, the ethnic solidarity groups like the African National Congress, the American Indian Movement and the Asiatic Council, and the socialist feminist Women’s Revolutionary Union would remain under the umbrella of the Workers’ Party in this period, their activity signaled the internal stress the Party underwent in power. Keeping the many groups within the party, from anarcho-syndicalists aligned with Emma Goldman to the moderates in the vein of Thomas Dewey, was a chore in itself, and certain compromises would inevitably favor some groups over others.

The eminent historian Norman Thomas Washington attributes the birth and growth of the African National Congress to the growing consciousness within the African community, and among intellectuals especially, to the limitations within the Marxist framework. Marxism’s economic reductionism, as many African leftists came to realize immediately after the Revolution, left it ill-equipped to conceptualize and address the uniqueness of social and cultural realities that are, at best, only tangentially related to questions of economics and class (Washington 1989). The ANC’s increasing militancy, and the controversial and outspoken leadership provided by leaders such as Richard Wright was an important step in the development of post-Marxist political theory. The ANC would eventually become home to some of the most poignant critics of the reigning Marxian orthodoxy in the 60s and 70s, including Malcolm Little, John Henrik Clarke and Angela Davis.

The opposition during the First Period remained in a constant state of flux for the most part, adapting and re-adapting to remain relevant in the world turned upside down. Overall, the DFLP collaborated more than it opposed. While the party’s message was confused in the immediate wake of the Revolution, the party quickly adopted the banner of Marxism, world revolution and the future of pure communism. At the pivotal 1936 National Convention in New Orleans, the new party constitution declared the DFLP was a fellow traveler of “Christian Communism and Liberation Theology…” in support of “…the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.” The Party’s New Orleans Program widely lauded many of the fundamental economic policies instituted in the past three years by the Communists. However, the DFLP distanced itself from the more radical libertine and solidarity cultural stances taken by the Communists, thus tapping into discontent over the radical upheavals of the Communist’s radical egalitarian and libertine cultural policies.

The Democratic-Republicans took a more pink stance. Socialism as free association, drawing on the mutualism of Proudhon and shades of the individualist anarchism of the American luminaries of the tradition, they maintained a strong connection to the classical liberal tradition. In this regard they became the party of tepid support for the revolution by nationalists, and those of classical liberal persuasion. “Free trade and free love” declared one banner by college supporters of the DRP.

The so-called True Democrats, by contrast, suffered disaster after disaster in this period. The arrest, imprisonment and even assassination of many of the True Democrats’ prominent leaders during the Red Terror crippled the party. Party offices were routinely raided by the Proletarian Guard, and numerous “black bag” burglaries were conducted by StateSec’s infamous Section 9. Undercover agents infiltrated the party, creating networks of paid informants to disrupt and neutralize the effectiveness of the party (Churchill & Wall 1990).

The climate of paranoia created by the official disruption campaign would develop disastrous rifts within the True Democrats. The above-ground parliamentary party was no longer willing to shield the underground resisters and putschist holdovers in the party. Tensions mounted as party workers accused each other of being informants or undercover agents. The situation at times bordered on farce; one infamous incident involving a Louisiana party local has become an omnipresent joke about government incompetence. A party local in Monroe was staffed and attended by a roll of party “members” consisting entirely of undercover agents and paid informants from StateSec, the Louisiana Red Guards, and the local parish militia.

These tensions came to a head in 1935, when the True Democrats nearly disintegrated as a party. Major sections of the party abandoned legal pretenses and chose to focus solely on underground resistance to the new government. Facing financial ruin, the moderate elements of the party often left politics all-together, or became willing informants to the Public Safety services.

The True Democrats won their right to continued resistance within the traditional halls of government according to several controversial rulings by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, but the continued trend towards sabotage and even terrorism led to several short-term bans of the party for being an “unconstitutional antidemocratic conspiracy.”