“It is that the US was ripe for socialist revolution during the depression but the CPUSA misled the working-class then and steered them away from revolution . . .” Would not such an event, occurring in the most industrial advanced capitalist country been registered and recorded in historical documents somewhere on earth and most certainly by the Comintern? What a Trotskyite fable. What the above formulation really means is that the American proletariat had reached a point in the revolutionary crisis where political insurrection was on the agenda but the CPUSA misled the vanguard OF THE PROLERATIAT. The CPUSA was never a “party of a new type” in the first place. Everyone is familiar with Stalin presentation to the American communists on their factionalism, but this is not the point. The politic that says the American working class had entered the revolutionary crisis, of a duration and intensity that the question of political insurrection was posed to the vanguard of the proletariat, but the CPUSA single handedly led the vanguard off the high way of political insurrection, is a political outlook and ideology. Our critique of the CPUSA should be principled without sinking to the level of hearsay and history falsification. The “working class” was not storming the citadel of capital. Then on July 5, 1935 the Wagner Act was passed which unleashed the industrial trade union movement on a mass scale. Here is how Stalin viewed things in 1934, versus the Trotskyist position that political insurrect was on the agenda in the advanced capitalist countries. “The internal situation of the capitalist countries, in view of the operation of these same factors, is becoming still more tense. Four years of industrial crisis have exhausted the working class and reduced it to despair. Four years of agricultural crisis have utterly ruined the poorer strata of the peasantry, page 681 not only in the principal capitalist countries, but also -- and particularly -- in the dependent and colonial countries. It is a fact that, notwithstanding all kinds of statistical trickery designed to minimize unemployment, the number of unemployed, according to the official figures of bourgeois institutions, reaches 3 million in Britain, 5 million in Germany and 10 million in the United States, not to mention the other European countries. Add to this the more than 10 million partially unemployed; add the vast masses of ruined peasants -- and you will get an approximate picture of the poverty and despair of the labouring masses. The masses of the people have not yet reached the stage when they are ready to storm capitalism; but the idea of storming it is maturing in the minds of the masses -- of that there can hardly be any doubt. This is eloquently testified to by such facts as, say, the Spanish revolution which overthrew the fascist regime, and the expansion of the Soviet districts in China, which the united counter-revolution of the Chinese and foreign bourgeoisie is unable to stop. This, indeed, explains why the ruling classes in the capitalist countries are so zealously destroying or nullifying the last vestiges of parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy which might be used by the working class in its struggle against the oppressors, why they are driving the Communist Parties underground and resorting to openly terrorist methods of maintaining their dictatorship. Chauvinism and preparation of war as the main elements of foreign policy; repression of the working class and terrorism in the sphere of home policy as a necessary means for strengthening the rear of future war fronts -- that is what is now particularly engaging the minds of contemporary imperialist politicians.” REPORT TO THE SEVENTEENTH PARTY CONGRESS ON THE WORK OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE C.P.S.U.(B.) Pravda, No. 27, January 28, 1934
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