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Politics, Activism and Marxism of the Lovestone Group

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Politics, Activism and Marxism of the Lovestone Group CHAPTER 2 Politics, Activism and Marxism of the Lovestone Group Paul Le Blanc The subtitle of Jay Lovestone’s biography captures essential elements of his story – Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster.1 Once the central leader of US Communism, Lovestone was deposed when he crossed swords with the new leader of world Communism, Joseph Stalin, in 1929. He then led a dis- sident Communist group whose anti-Stalinism soured into a thoroughgoing anti-Communism by the end of the 1930s, when the group dissolved. The Lovestone group’s most prominent leaders seemed to live up to the epithet pinned on them by their Stalinist opponents – renegade. Lovestone ended up overseeing a Cold War anti-Communist foreign policy of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in the 1950s and 1960s, and he was up to his elbows in operations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). His second-in-command, Bertram D. Wolfe, became an influential anti-Communist ideologue working for the US State Department, helping to head up the Voice of America, among other things. Will Herberg, editor of the group’s paper, Workers Age, abandoned Marxism to become a Jewish theologian and a very active editorial board member of the conservative journal, National Review.2 What the Lovestone group represented, however, as it went through its various organisational and political incarnations from 1929 to 1940, was something much more complex and interesting. The Communist Party USA (Majority Group) essentially claimed to be the ‘true’ Communist Party, an ori- entation maintained with a somewhat more critical edge by its successor, the Communist Party Opposition. By 1937–8, however, it went through two name changes – Independent Communist Labor League, and Independent Labor 1 Morgan 1999. 2 Lovestone, Wolfe and Herberg deserve additional scholarly attention. On Wolfe, see his post- humously edited and incomplete autobiography, Wolfe 1981, and Hessen (ed.) 1990; his best- known work is the classic Three Who Made a Revolution (Wolfe 1948). Herberg is intelligently discussed in Diggins 1975, pp. 118–59, 269–302, 360–9, and Ausmus 1987. His major religious writings can be found in Herberg 1951 and Herberg 1976. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�7��3�_003 40 CHAPTER 2 League of America – which indicated an increasingly dramatic break with its earlier orientation, leading to its dissolution at the end of 1940. In fact, for most of its existence outside the Communist Party, the Lovestone group optimistically anticipated being brought back into a reformed and reuni- fied Communist mainstream – and initially it was able to offer cogent criti- cisms (reflecting the moderate dissent of Nikolai Bukharin within the Soviet leadership) of ultra-left and sectarian policies, initiated by the Communist International under the consolidated leadership of Joseph Stalin – policies that were certainly leading US Communists and others into a dead-end. The problem, however, as Communist veteran Peggy Dennis recalled, was a politi- cal naiveté in which ‘we eloquently echoed Stalin’s published denunciations of Bukharinism and Trotskyism without even objecting to the fact that we were not allowed to read what Bukharin or Trotsky had said or written’.3 Many of those not in the Communist Party, but moving leftward under the radicalising impact of the Great Depression and other developments in the 1930s, went the way of George Blake Charney, who listened to a debate between Lovestoneite Bertram D. Wolfe and Stalinist V.J. Jerome and decided to go with the Stalinists: ‘I was in no position to judge their respective argu- ments on Marxism. Both were learned men’, Charney recalled. ‘In the end I was drawn to the position of the [official Communist] party because it was positive and forward-looking, whereas Wolfe was carping and negative and offered so little hope at a time when we needed so much’.4 Such barriers to the success of their initially optimistic orientation were not the only factors frustrating Lovestoneite perspectives. There were deeper prob- lems that would profoundly challenge their political convictions. Drives and Motivations Among the fundamental reasons for the shifts in the politics of the Lovestone group were the experiences of its members in the ten years of struggle during the Great Depression. There were inspiring struggles of the diverse sectors of the working class against oppression, and of the organised labour movement for elementary social and economic justice, to be sure. But there was also the failure of any sector of the working class to carry out the hoped-for socialist revolution anywhere in the world, coupled with what seemed like the decline and disintegration of the organised working-class movement and almost all 3 Dennis 1977, p. 70. 4 Charney 1968, p. 23..
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