Radical Politics and Soviet Sociology

chapter 5 Radical Politics and Soviet Sociology

Communism in the United States

Before Israeli statehood and before Auschwitz, some American Jews main- tained an interest in, and even supported, communism. As Alexander argues,

…it is impossible to deny that a full-blown romance between American Jews and leftist political-economics did indeed exist. Even the slightest perusal of the historical record of the first half of the twentieth century reveals that socialism and related ideas once stood as a foundation of American Jewish identity. Perhaps for a while it was even the foundation.1 2010: vii

Some of this early history has been repressed, for example, in Irving Howe’s (1976) reflections on his own activities among the “New York intellectuals” beginning in the 1930s (Horwitz 1995). Although in that 1976 retrospective Howe was more inclined to deal with socialist intellectuals rather than Jewish involvement in American communism, in an earlier book co-authored with Lewis Coser he did indeed cover some of this ground. Summarizing from Howe and Coser (1962), the Communist Party of the United States (cpusa) was first formed in 1919. An earlier Socialist Party was formed in 1901, with original membership of approximately 10,000. By 1912 Socialist party membership had reached 150,000, an astonishingly rapid increase. This was the era of muckraking, its major goal being to expose the greed, avarice, and barbarism of the business class. In many ways it was consistent with the criticisms of the business and industrial classes made by Saint-Simon in the 1820s (Gouldner 1958a). Differences of opinions and factionalism within the Socialist party became apparent by 1912. One of the more critical fissures was that which devel- oped between defenders of compensation versus confiscation, representing a

1 This observation is corroborated by Srebrnik (2010: 1), who stated “For much of the 20th century, Jews comprised a disproportionate component of the American left. Before World War I, the Jewish Socialist Federation, claiming 14,000 members, was a significant segment of the Socialist Party.”

90 chapter 5 left-right ideological split (e.g., Debs vs. Steffens). A new, distinctively Marxist left appeared by 1915, and it went international with the pending outbreak of World War I. At this point American Marxists were very much anti-war and anti-imperialist above and beyond any factionalist disagreements. The Bolshevik uprising in Russia gave rise to more strident and confident movements within the left wing of the cpusa, as its members believed such a proletarian revolt could happen in the United States. This coincided as well with more rabblerousing and labor strikes. By the early 1930s the Great Depression ushered in an era of ultra-leftism (Buhle 1980). A pressing concern among the far-left was marshalling organizational energies to confront the spread of European fascism, and Stalin in Russia served this purpose well. Intellectuals started turning leftward as well during this period. A brief but deeply committed turn to Stalinism ensued between 1930 and 1936. As much as anything this movement documented the hardships and struggles of the peo- ple as a lived conviction. Misery and injustice in any form were the points of focus and contention for these intellectuals. The zeitgeist of the Great Depression and left-ideological reactions to it led to the formation in 1932 of the League of Professional Groups for William Z. Foster (as president). Luminaries such as Dos Passos, Sidney Hook, Granville Hicks, Langston Hughes, and Leonie Adams were among its members. Left-wing politics and ideology were dominant among literary magazines, theater groups, dance troupes, and other parts of the American cultural apparatus (Howe and Coser 1962: 282). Indeed, it was here that the fusing of literary criticism with Marxism began, and it has continued pretty much to this day (Gouldner 1976a). But as Stalinism turned more into totalitarianism, literary critics had to confront this stain in the otherwise lofty ideals of expanding human emancipation under communism. It was not an easy thing to pretend to overlook. This got even more com- plicated when the pact between Hitler and Stalin was announced in 1939. Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 threw the commitments of intellectuals to communism into further disarray. Some sided with Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism, fascism, and totalitarianism, while others remained loyal to Stalin.

The Decline of American Communism

By the end of World War II in 1945, the membership of the American Communist Party stood at between 75,000 and 85,000 members. It had gained some mea- sure of respectability since the 1930s, and indeed upwards of one-fourth of American labor union workers were members of the Communist party. But in