"What Socialists Think," by Charles H. Kerr [July 1905] A concise exposition of pre-Bolshevik American Marxist political philosophy. Kerr briefly outlines the concepts of historical materialism and the labor theory of value and makes note of the change iof the capitalist class from actual participants in the production process to idle holders of stocks and bonds. Kerr states that "when the battle lines are drawn for the final contest between the capitalist and the laborer," the capitalists will count "only those whole live by owning and those who can be fooled, or bribed, into voting against the interests of the class to which they really belong." Kerr estimates the true correlation of forces to be "less than 10% of the people" as true members of the capitalist class vs. "more than 90% of the people" being of the working class. Small shopkeepers are unhesitatingly counted by Kerr among the working class, their "profits" being "nothing more or less than wages, and usually very low wages, for the labor [expended] in taking care of his shop and selling goods." We see in Kerr's analysis a final objective NOT of a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" but rather of the establishment of the "Cooperative Commonwealth," which Kerr defines as "a society in which the good things of life shall not be produced for the profit of a part of the people, but for the use of all the people, and where on one who is able to work shall have the privilege of living on the labor of others." Kerr states that "reform" may be bloody and "revolution" bloodless, and reduces the true difference between the two concepts to the simple question of whether a new class comes to political power to implement societal change. He states the Socialist Party, as the political agent of the rising working class, thus represents an agency of revolutionary change rather than social reform. Tactically, he notes the vast mechanized military force in the hands of the capitalist state and the availability of the ballot box as a mechanism to alter control of the command structure. Armed struggle and civil war are not seen by Kerr as an essential or inevitable part of revolutionary change -- again, a marked difference with the ideology of American Communism that would emerge after 1917. Kerr finally states that the Socialists "do not want to do away with the freedom of the individual. On the contrary, they realize that today it is only a few here and there who have nay freedom worth speaking of. What they mean to do is make individual freedom a real thing for all." Equality of opportunity through expanded education, and allocation of labor through differential pay rates between tasks are part of Kerr's programatic vision.

 

"The Open Communist Party -- The Task of the Hour." Unsigned appeal by The Workers' Council. [Oct. 15, 1921] While there was stiff opposition to liquidation of the underground party inside the unified CPA itself, there was a countervailing tendency standing outside of the ranks of the party pushing in exactly the opposite direction -- for the elimination of the underground apparatus and for commitment to a fully legalized communist movement. This tendency's organizational expression was "The Workers' Council" -- formerly the "Committee for the Third International of the Socialist Party," which departed that organization after the June 1921 Detroit Convention of the SPA. This appeal of the Workers' Council states that the "infantile radicalism" of the newborn communist movement was contemptuous of mass movements and "called for small, intensely class-conscious organizations that should take upon themselves the leadership in the approaching struggle against world capitalism." This perspective had been denounced by Lenin and was refuted by the Comintern at its recently concluded Third Congress. Instead, the Comintern now called for participation in the actually existing conservative unions and "openly condemns the agitation for armed insurrection and open rebellion in countries where the revolution is still in the distant future and insists that the communist movement, in every country, must proceed at once to the creation of an open, aboveboard mass movement." The secret movement had been intellectually stultifying for the American party, the Workers' Council declared, and its secrets were no secret to authorities, who had inevitably made use of espionage to penetrate the underground organization. The underground form had become an end in itself. It was a form unable to adapt to crisis and dominated by a handful of romanticist underground leaders. Instead, the Workers' Council called for an open organization, a form able to do effective work. "There could be no better time. Raise your voices, Comrades. Come out of your cellars into the open. Go to your brothers in the mills, the mines, and the factories, and talk to them openly, fearlessly."

 

"Membership Series by District for the (unified) Communist Party of America, June to October 1921." Here's another one that serious historians of early American Communism would be advised to print out and save -- the definitive membership series for the first phase of the (unified) Communist Party of America, bounded on one side by the May 1921 Unity Convention at which the party was formed and on the other by the "Central Caucus" split of Nov.-Dec. 1921, which severely disrupted the organization. This snapshot reveals substantial organizational strength in the Midwest (the Chicago district bigger than New York!) and a general growth of the total average paid membership from about 7,200 in Q-III for the old CPA to about 8,750 for Q-III for the unified organization (the math of the merger between the old CPA/UCP seems to be of the "2+2=3" variety...) Included are Q-III Federation average memberships which show a membership crisis in the Lithuanian, Russian, and Ukrainian Federations which ANTEDATES the purported cause of the Central Caucus split, the October 1921 decision to rapidly establish a Legal Political Party. Includes copious commentary by Tim Davenport.

 

"We Want an Open Communist Party." Unsigned appeal by The Workers' Council. [Nov. 15, 1921] This unsigned statement from the pages of The Workers' Council is a pointed attack on the plan of some inside the underground CPA to maintain a parallel secret organization in conjunction with the open Communist Party designed "to act in the capacity of a controlling organ, directing the activities of the public party, representing it internationally, determining its tactics and its principles.They insist on a system of parallel underground groups whose membership shall, in all important questions, act as a determined unit in the open organization." This amounts to perpetuation of the fundamental error, the WC statement contends, since "the underground form of organization places a premium on mediocrity. That part of the membership that has the destinies of the movement most at heart, and feels its individual responsibility most keenly, that can think for itself and see the mistakes that are being made, must struggle against almost impossible odds to make itself heard and to make its influence felt." At the same time, "Executive offices will be filled with men and women who will take dictation, who can be relied upon to carry out every order that is handed down to them." The purity of a sect is what is sought by the advocates of a directing underground structure. "But there is ever present the danger that discipline becomes tyranny." Examples of the imposition of party discipline for dubious objectives are cited for the German and American Socialist movements. This excessive discipline is dangerous and needless, the Workers' Council statement argues, since "the movement whose membership understands so little of its ideals and purposes as to need the watchful eye of a secret caucus, is a menace to the world revolution and should be abandoned."

 

"Who Are the Traitors?" by Leon Trotsky [May 16, 1922] This Trotsky article was first published in the pages of Pravda and reprinted in New York in the magazine of the Friends of Soviet Russia. In it the Soviet People's Commissar of Defense attempts to review "the strange fate of the Socialist Revolutionary Party" in light of the forthcoming show trial of the leadership of that organization. Trotsky states that "in the struggle against Tsarism and feudalism the party played a revolutionary role. It aroused the peasants, it stirred large groups of young students to political activity, it assembled around its standards considerable groups" of workers with ties to the villages. The PSR activists were self-sacrificing and inspirational, fighting in conjunction with the Social Democrats in opposition to the Tsarist police apparatus. However, with the coming of war and revolution there was a "complete political and moral decay of the upper sections" of the party. The rank of the file remained "subjectively revolutionary," Trotsky stated, but they had been lead down the path of counterrevolution by the "stultified upper circles" of the party. The political leadership of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, a "corrupt clique" has profited by the heroism of the "honest and self-sacriificing" members of the rank and file, which had been placed "at the disposal of Noulens and Lockhart," Trotsky stated.

 

"Political Prisoners in Russia," by "James A. Marshall" [Max Bedacht] [June 17, 1922] The mentality of Communist Party loyalists of the 1930s and later faithfully defending unsavory actions of the regime in Soviet Russia had clear origins in the 1920s. The "Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries" of 1922 was the first controversial show trial of the post-Civil War period, putting leading members of the PSR on trial for their lives as alleged participants in a terrorist conspiracy against the regime. This article by Max Bedacht appeared in the English weekly The Worker. Bedacht is harshly critical of the Socialist Party of America, the Workmen's Circle, and the ILGWU for defending the Socialist Revolutionaries and other political prisoners in Russia. Bedacht has no doubt about the veracity of the charges against them: "Whoever demands the release of such bandits and murderers identifies himself with them and their acts." Bedacht charges the Mensheviks organized the counterrevolutionary government of Arkhangelsk, fanned labor discontent and led strikes against the regime, "The Mensheviks, these enemies of terror, organized the White terror the first days of the revolution," Bedacht charges. As for the PSR, this group attempted to sabotage the peace agreement with Germany by assassinating Count Mirbach in 1918, kindled local uprisings, and "until the final defeat of foreign intervention, the SR called for and supported foreign intervention." SR's inspired the Antonov revolt, were responsible for the assassination of Uritsky and Volodarsky, and bombed Bolshevik Party headquarters in Moscow. "And the leaders of that party who were caught in the meshes of the Cheka as murderers and would-be murderers, as organizers of the counterrevolution, as agents of Petliura and Pilsudski, as tools of capitalism and the capitalist class, are to be released as 'politicals' from Russian prisons," Bedacht scornfully remarks.

 

Bridgman, Michigan Lakefront postcard. [Relates to CP Conventions of May 1920 & Aug. 1922] ***PDF GRAPHIC FILE This image should erase once and for all the false representation in the literature of the location of the 1920 and 1922 conventions of the Communist Party. The delegates didn't stay at a farm, there was no farm (no matter what Bert Wolfe may have misremembered half a century later), the conventions took place in wooded gullies amidst the sanddunes on the shore of Lake Michigan. Delegates stayed in the cabins of the the Wolfskeel Resort, just up the road. Lakeside was about 1 mile outside of Bridgman's town center. This is a tourist postcard, undated but circa 1915, showing the view of the lakefront as the delegates must have seen it.

 

"Letter to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in Moscow from Abraham Jakira in New York." [December 1922] Yet another document illustrating the inadequacy of "Traditionalist" depiction of the relationship between the Comintern and the American Communist movement during the first half of the 1920s. Instead of a rigid paramilitary command structure in which "orders" flowed down from a handful of arbitrary dictators in Russia and were dutifully "accepted" by American radicals, we see the reality here of a circularity of information and instructions. Executive Secretary of the underground CPA A. Jakira writes on behalf of the underground CEC to Moscow instructing the Comintern to send a letter to the forthcoming 2nd Convention of the Workers Party of America. A very specific rebuke of the so-called "Centrists" in the WPA is detailed at very great length in this document, and ECCI is "begged" to "1. Telegraph us at once whether you have received this letter. 2. Act at once and write the letter immediately. 3. Send the main contents of the letter by cable to the office of the Workers Party, for we fear that your letter will arrive late. The convention is on December 25." The Comintern was emphatically not perceived or utilized in this case as an omniscient oracle on high but rather as a sort of intellectual cudgel -- an external authority to which appeal could made to adjudicate upon domestic factional controversy and a tool for imposing Party unity upon Party members holding minority viewpoint following decision. The tendency of many so-called "Traditionalist" scholars to anachronistically project later and changed power relations between Moscow and New York into the early 1920s milieu is a serious and recurring error in the literature, one that careful study of this and similar documents might help to eliminate.

 

"The Workers Party and the Federated Farmer-Labor Party." by John Pepper [Aug. 1923] The immediate post-convention assessment of the new Federated Farmer-Labor Party written by the chief adherent of the Farmer-Labor Party tactic, John Pepper. Pepper depicts the new organization in the most rosy colors, calling it a "militant revolutionary party" and a "real mass party" to which 616,000 workers and farmers are affiliated through their organizations. Pepper ironically notes the contradictory behavior of Chicago Federation of Labor leader John Fitzpatrick, who split from the Dec. 1922 meeting of the Conference for Progressive Political Action in favor of a labor party, but split from the July Convention establishing the FFLP against formation of a labor party. "It is a pity about Fitzpatrick," Pepper remarks, "He merited much in the labor movement and was a good leader," but "the road to revolution is paved with the poltical corpses of well-intentioned leaders." The Fitzpatrick bloc consisted of "not more than 50 or 60 delegates," Pepper says, noting "the Workers Party was also in the minority" with a representatiion "through various militant unons and other labor organizations" of "not quite 200 delegates." Pepper says the WPA won all four of the "great tactical batttles" which took place at the FFLP Founding Convention -- the seating of every delegate by the credentials committe, the report of the organization committee to establish a labor party immediately, the continuance of the alliance with the farmers in the report of the agrarian committee, and the defeat of an attempt by the old FLP to adjourn and reorganize a new party barring the Communists. In the establishment of the FFLP at convention, the Workers Party had demonstrated itself a "real communist party," Pepper states.

 

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