The Communist Party and Me

Earlier this year, I began writing about a blog local to my hometown, as well as a seemingly unhinged city council member, who, as I correctly predicted, is about to be “former,” his fate decided in municipal elections. In retaliation, the blog and councilmember Googled my name. Uncovering a non-secret, they found that I was at one time a member of the Communist Party USA, as well as the leader of its New York District and a member of its national leadership. Perhaps I was being petty, and perhaps my silence made my innocent past seem sinister, but I simply didn’t want to dignify these comically ridiculous people with a response, so I only wrote that they were right, and that the membership was in the past. Now that the council member is, for all intents and purposes, gone, and the blog is no longer relevant, I do think it’s useful to step back and reflect on what kept me in the CPUSA all that time. For those of you who’ve asked (and for those of you who asked why I left), you might be interested in reading. This blog was, after all, originally meant in part as a place for me to reflect on and process that past – the mistakes and lessons.

Below are some of the most important aspects of my time in “the Party.”

Socialism

I can’t say that I was attracted to the CPUSA by its vision of socialism – there wasn’t one. Or rather, there wasn’t just one. The majority of members had thankfully rejected the idea that the Soviet Union had been a positive example of socialism after its 1991 collapse, and everyone seemed to have their own understanding of what a future society would look like: a few still clung to the belief that a command economy was the way to go; some took inspiration from Chinese and Vietnamese reforms and their market economies, which at the time seemed to be leading to more openness to human rights; others saw Venezuela as inspirational; and still others thought America’s better future would be unique.

While it didn’t draw me into the party, I did of course take inspiration from the idea that America and the world are progressing in a more humane, more democratic direction (democracy did matter: those members I was closest with recognized the appalling absence of democracy and human rights in the USSR and other socialist countries), and that we could eventually have a society where big corporations didn’t have the power to challenge, and sometimes even direct the course of, the federal government. My friend Sam Webb, the party’s national leader for ten years or so (he resigned his membership as well just after stepping down from the leadership), put forward some of the most compelling ideas. Of all those I talked about the idea of socialism with, I found his to be the most infused with the American democratic ideal, and most aligned with our history. Like me, he saw socialism as something that had to naturally spring out of the American revolutionary tradition of 1776, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King

Jr., and so on, and came to see the election of Barack Obama as an important marker of that progressive movement. Just over a decade ago, he published his “reflections” on what socialism might look like (available on his site here). They were controversial, as they were cautiously more critical of Soviet socialism than anyone had previously been, but they were inspiring to me at the time.

Anti-Americanism?

I grew up in a New England Republican household, and was taught to love the country as a beacon of freedom. In 1991, in ninth grade, I was putting yellow ribbons everywhere, along with American flags, supporting, respectively, American troops sent to liberate Kuwait and the country that was leading the world against Iraq’s illegal invasion and annexation of Kuwait. I was always appalled by those who wanted to burn the flag, and, when I first ran into left-wing groups in college, I was surprised that there were those who actually espoused their support for a revolution – and actual overthrow – in the United States. I also was surprised by those who thought that America was, somehow, the root of all evil in the world. Yes, we have certainly made huge foreign policy blunders, but they were not always crimes of commission. Perhaps our greatest crime in the 1990s was one of omission: we, along with the rest of the world, failed to prevent a genocide in Rwanda. At least, though, Clinton broke that precedent in Yugoslavia.

In my initial conversations with members of the CPUSA, I found that the leadership condemned anti-Americanism, and that what the rest of the socialist left criticized “the Party” for was correct: they weren’t seeking any kind of revolutionary overthrow. Transformation would come through non-violent measures, utilizing the ballot box, based on the overwhelming support of the American people. A liberal democracy was different than tsarist Russia; the CPUSA was more interested in following a path like that of the French Communist Party, which had actually been part of that country’s governing coalition in the 1980s, or the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), which had broken with the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s, publishing its Manifesto of Freedom and Democracy as a foundational document.

Oddly enough, at the big demonstrations I went to with the CPUSA, we were sometimes the only group that carried the American flag. Others, from groups with less “extreme” sounding names but far more extremist ideas, jeered at us as some sort of “apologists for imperialism.”

Israel, Zionism, and Anti-Zionism

As I was growing up, my father especially had imbued in me the value of supporting Israel as the world’s only home for the Jewish people. I was rebellious, and we argued about if Israel did this or that correctly, but it never crossed my mind that there shouldn’t be an Israel; those debates had long been settled by the experiences of the Shoah and the Farhud.

Even 20 years ago, much of the socialist left was anti-Zionist. I wanted to be part of some group working to make the world a better place, but I couldn’t join an organization that was anti-Zionist. I was happy to learn from, among other people, longtime Party activist Danny Rubin, that the CPUSA rejected anti-Zionism. While the CPUSA didn’t label itself Zionist, the Party agreed with the little-known 1991 Pravda article, which was something of a mea culpa: the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign should never have happened, and, the Soviets admitted, it was rooted in anti-Semitism. Despite rejecting the label, the CPUSA was left-wing Zionist in practice: it defended the right of Israel to exist.

At the time, the CPUSA’s stance against anti-Zionism (if not officially in name) was controversial only among the most extreme elements of the left. Unfortunately, the idea is under even more assault now. (I’m not sure where the CPUSA stands on the issue currently.)

2020 update: Now anti-Zionism and the antisemitism it cloaks have become mainstream, with the ascendancy of the people like Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and the BDS-supporting “Democratic” Socialists of America. Its coming out party was, perhaps, the debacle around the Women’s March (more information on that here). Really, I would like to thank all of these groups for causing me to do more research – some particularly recommended readings here and here – that led me from left-Zionist to, simply, Zionist in my thinking around Israel and from liberal Democrat to simply “moderate” in my thinking on other issues.

History

The American Communist Party had for many years two personalities. The popular image of it as a loyal lapdog of the Soviet Union, a propaganda organization that the USSR paid for, wasn’t entirely wrong. Over the years scholarship has shown that even after the dissolution of the Communist International, Moscow was guiding the affairs of most Communist Parties, using them for propaganda and espionage, though this was kept from members. By the time I came around, leaders were deeply critical of the “mistakes” former General Secretary Gus Hall had made in being “too close” to the Soviets. But as evinced by the organization’s continued existence after the implosion of socialism worldwide, connections to the Soviets wasn’t the whole story. Despite acting as a propaganda agent for the Russians, the CPUSA played a role in fighting for much of the progress that occurred in the U.S. across the 20th century, especially in the areas of racial equality and women’s equality.

For a glimpse at the CPUSA’s work in fighting for racial equality, check out Robin Kelly’s Hammer and Hoe, which tells of how the CPUSA worked to oust the KKK from Birmingham, Alabama.

Being a member of the CPUSA meant that I was able to meet people, actual activists, who had participated in this history. Probably this is what kept me involved for as long as I was. Where else could I have met a woman like Grace Bassett, who I got to know well? An extremely humble person, one would have to talk to her for a while before she mentioned that she was, in the 1930s and 1940s, registering Black people to vote in the South and was the New Orleans leader of the famous Southern Negro Youth Congress. I also got to meet and know Dorothy Burnham, a biologist and Brooklyn College graduate (she enrolled in 1932), who in 1940 moved to Birmingham to work for SNYC.

Through membership, I knew people who had helped found the United Steelworkers, who had been there for the founding of the CIO, which eventually merged with the AFL to create the AFL-CIO. I met people who joined the army to fight fascism in World War II. I was honored to have met people who had gone to Spain as part of the “Lincoln Brigade,” a group of Americans who risked their lives to fight against the first fascist government to ever exist, that of Francisco Franco.

I enjoyed a long friendship with Danny Rubin, who J. Edgar Hoover at one point called “the most dangerous man in America” for his work organizing youth. Danny and his wife Dorothy were decades older than me – when I first met him he was probably in his 70s, and I in my early 20s – but he treated me as an equal and we became friends. I’d stay at Danny’s house for hours, questioning him and listening to his stories: he himself had gone to the American South, using what is now called his “white privilege” to go undetected (sometimes), delivering notes between activists, including those who planned the famous lunch counter sit ins. Of course, he eventually became known as a communist to the FBI, and his stories of being followed across the Southern states (and elsewhere) were harrowing. I learned of and from his work organizing people, like Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, to also go down to the South. He told me stories of the threats that any progressive during those days endured, but that he experienced more harshly: he was called to testify before Congress on his membership in the CPUSA, and, when he plead the Fifth Amendment, he was nearly sentenced to prison at Leavenworth. Only a Supreme Court decision saved him from doing time.

I met many other people who were beyond impressive: Estelle Katz, Angie Lebowitz, Gloria Freedman in New York City. I met international guests, including those who helped to lead the struggle against the evil apartheid system in South Africa, people fighting for democracy in Iraq and Iran, Jews and Arabs from the Middle East who were working together to bring peace and a two-state solution, and so on.

The work

Aside from (some of) the people I met, the work I actually did kept me around. This has to be understood in relation to what most of those in the leadership (at the time) of the CPUSA considered to be the way of building socialism. We didn’t see it as something to be imposed from above, or something that we could just talk ourselves to (the way many on the left still do) by convincing people of how good it was. In what was sometimes referred to as a “chauvinistic” way of thinking by foreign parties, we didn’t even think that socialism would be a departure of American ideals, but a fulfillment of them.

[2020 update: Sadly, both the left and the right seem now to think that America isn’t particularly good. Progressives think our “real founding” was in 1619 and that America is irredeemably racist, with the ideals of 1776 being nothing more than a fig leaf; the “national conservative” right things everything went wrong with the Enlightenment and that the 1776 ideals were wrong in the first place. Why is everyone so down on America?]

Building progress meant working to defeat the groups we perceived to be the most anti-democratic sections of society, who were most part of the Republican Party’s coalition. It also meant building up the strength of four key groups: regular working American, people who are “racially and nationally oppressed” (the term that was used), the women’s movement, and the youth. All of these groups were envisioned as a Venn Diagram: they overlapped, but they weren’t the same. There were other “progressives,” but they played a secondary role to these core groups. While what it would look like was unclear, socialism at its most basic meant that these groups, the overwhelming majority of the population, would see their position strengthened. It was our job, then, to fight to help organize and empower these sections of the population against those who would oppress them and keep them from their democratic rights.

While many on the left tend to see their work as saying bad things about the Democratic Party or electing more progressive candidates, we saw it as strengthening the groups mentioned above, who we perceived to be in coalition with others (more liberal sections of big business, etc.) in the Democratic Party. Consequently, I ended up working on many Democratic campaigns during my time in the CPUSA: John Kerry’s, Barack Obama’s, Kirsten Gillibrand’s, Fernando Ferrer’s (he nearly beat Michael Bloomberg to become mayor of NYC), and a host of others known mostly to NYC residents. I wrote the first official document in the CPUSA calling for support of Barack Obama in the primaries: I did that as chair of the party in Brooklyn, in 2007. While he turned out to be far from the country’s best president (e.g. the JCPOA), his election was historic and of talking to our enemies.

[2020 update: Obama’s “Talking to our enemies” was taken to an extreme by current-President Trump, who had a friendly hour-long meeting with Kim Jong-un and even stepped into North Korea; I wonder what the response of progressives would have been if it had been Obama who did this; turns out that this isn’t actually a useful foreign policy strategy.]

I also was able to spend my days working on issue-related work as well: against the Iraq War (which I’ve been rethinking; it’s not at all clear to me that the Middle East would be if we didn’t go in at all), on campaigns defending immigrants’ rights, against ultra-gentrification with Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, with the Kings County (Brooklyn) Democratic Party, and so on. Some of the people I worked with on a routine basis have now gone on to become citywide (in NYC) or even well-known national political figures.

There were of course party-specific activities, including a discussion on “the role of the Communist Party.” Sam Webb, Danny Rubin, I, and other people I agreed with argued that its role wasn’t to try to push the country to the left, but to take the “struggles” that were already happening on the ground, and to try to put forward strategy and tactics that would win. For example, during the fight for Obamacare, we broke with much of the left, who were pushing for Medicare for All and criticizing Obama. Instead, we argued, Obamacare was the most “advanced” demand possible, and it had the support of the vast majority of the above-mentioned “core forces” (at least of organizations claiming to represent these groups; we tended to conflate them), so we needed to fight hard for it and to put forward what we saw as the best strategy for winning it. Thus, the role of the party was to help to ensure unity against the main enemy, the “ultra-right” (now, in the light of Trump’s victory, this seems like a strange term for the Republican Party of Bush, McCain, and Romney!), as well as to build on the ground the organization of the core forces.

International

The Communist Party maintained relationships with communist parties in most countries around the world. While the Soviet Union imposed an ideological rigidity, its collapse left all the parties to come up with their own paths forward. Apparently, the CPUSA was one of the most doctrinaire, pro-Soviet parties in the world before the collapse of the USSR, and its leader Gus Hall (who I never met, but whose ashes I did have briefly on my desk before they were interred in Chicago) was one of the most loyal to the Kremlin. Before my arrival on the scene, there had been, apparently, several battles within the organization. In 1991, a large and influential group – referring to itself as the Committees of Correspondence (COC) – split off. Then, in 2000, a reform-minded section of the leadership, led by Webb, deposed “General Secretary” Hall, who had spent decades in office, and abolished his position altogether. While a too-large section of the membership remained loyal to him (the group I call “the Stalinists”), the new leadership began to build bridges with the COC and recruited back some of the party’s most dedicated and principled members – including Danny Rubin. The Webb leadership properly apologized to the Japanese Communist Party for cravenly slandering it during the Hall years at the behest of the Soviet Union, and the relations between the organizations were “normalized.” In the very early 2000s, the CPUSA also published a statement rebuking Cuba for not having abolished the death penalty.

Socialism, Webb pointed out, was supposed to be more humane.

Some, like the Communist Party of Greece, chose a “path forward” that embraced a rigid, Stalinist orthodoxy (they hated the CPUSA’s leaders). Others, like  the Iraqi Communist Party, were more realistic/sane. (The JCP had broken its relationship with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union long before). It was always interesting meeting the foreign representatives, though, at conventions and other such meetings. I particularly enjoyed the Vietnamese communists, who were really interested in developing their economy and repairing relations with the United States after the terrible war (and who, it seemed then, were interested in moving away from their country’s human rights abuses). During that war, the CPUSA played a difficult role: it supported Vietnam’s right to free itself, but also argued against those on the left who demonized American soldiers. For the CPUSA, the American soldiers were victims of that war, as were the Vietnamese people.

[2020: This has bothered me for years, so please indulge me in this whole new paragraph.] Let me take a brief moment to insert a side note on Vietnam. One of the chief irritants of writing for a partisan publication is that your writing is constantly subjected to political editing. For example, after meeting a Vietnamese representative and having a few drinks with him, I wrote what I thought was a nice, nuanced article on the war’s effects on two peoples, the American and Vietnamese. Apparently, I was too nuanced, and the article was deemed to portray the sides too equally. Consequently, the italicized words in the following passage were added to the article by the editors: “…35 years after the end of that horrible war, which we all now know was a vicious attack by U.S. imperialism on a nation simply trying to free itself from colonial chains, I escorted Vietnam’s deputy…” My first complaint with this horrific insert is aesthetic; it looks and sounds ugly and out of place. Why would I state something “we all know” in the middle of the sentence? Even worse, why would a single sentence in an article that is entirely written in a somewhat wistful tone shift to 60s-era politi-speak, the phrase “vicious attack by U.S. imperialism” sounding like it was lifted from Godard’s Le Chinoise? My second complaint is that I don’t actually “know” this and never did. The Vietnam War was horrible and there were terrible injustices. But did I ever think that the U.S. just “viciously” attacked the country? I read (and am planning to re-read) Podhoretz’s seminal Why we were in Vietnam and other studies of the war; I’m no historian, but I know that rarely has post-war American foreign policy history ever been simply black-and-white. Alas, political partisanship and nuance never make good bedfellows.

It was fascinating for me to talk with these different representatives from around the world, from both ruling Communist Parties, parties that were elected into office in democratic countries (including the Communist Parties in India, France, and South Africa, of which Nelson Mandela was reportedly a member, and the Democratic Party of Italy), and those who were either small and oppositional or underground, like the Tudeh Party of Iran, which is pushing for democracy in that country. I felt honored to meet members of the Iraqi Communist Party, who after decades in opposition to Saddam’s dictatorship published the first newspaper after he and the Ba’ath Party were overthrown, and who cautioned the anti-war Western left against slipping into anti-Americanism.

Leaving

I began to realize that, sadly, the strategy and type of organization described above had, perhaps, minority support amongst the party membership. While there were some people I call “the Stalinists” – those who still thought the Soviet Union was a model to emulate (even though the Soviet people obviously didn’t) – there was a relatively large grouping of people who were more like much of the regular American left: they always thought we should be pushing everything “to the left,” and believed that to be the role of the party. Many also bristled at our support of Democratic candidates. Even those who supported the strategy generally often argued that I and those I agreed with were part of some sort of “right faction” that was fusing with the Democratic Party.  If you search, you’ll find a list online that some disgruntled member posted, showing the “ten worst communists,” including me and several of the people mentioned here.

I thought for years that, eventually, we could get rid of the communist label – which, to me, dredged up memories of the Soviet Union, East German secret police, and all kinds of things that were antithetical to what the party espoused, at least during my time there. Many of the older generation associated the term with their own fights: against fascism, against racism, and so on. But even as they left the scene, others, people who read Lenin as if he was a religious prophet, were vehemently opposed to changing the name. And unfortunately, the name attracted a certain type of people, those you might imagine: people who hated everything, wanted revolutions, who hated America, and so on. Those members didn’t generally stay – usually they became enraged that we supported Obama – and went off to some other left organization, like Workers World or Socialist Alternative. [2020 update: Now, I guess they’d join the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). For years, the DSA was the only political organization on the left that had a general orientation similar to the CPUSA’s, the only difference being that the DSA viewed themselves as working within the Democratic Party entirely and explicitly condemned the Soviet Union, etc. The CPUSA argued that it was its own party, even though it supported almost exclusively Democrats, and was far more tacit about its thoughts on the USSR. Now, however, the DSA has become – to use the technical term – crazy: it has embraced a whole host of positions the CPUSA would have called “ultra-left.”] 

For years, that “communist” label bothered me, and I pinned my hope on the ongoing discussion about changing it. (We also weren’t really a party in the electoral sense, and there was some discussion of changing that part of the moniker as well.) Still, it was to no avail. Eventually, I tired of the ongoing fight, and decided that the organization’s culture wasn’t, as I had been hoping for years, really able to change in such a way as to cast off everything Soviet and backwards. I didn’t see, and I don’t see now, how such an organization could ever lead many people. Many of the people that I respected in leadership left after I did, and some kept trying until they passed on. A few stayed and are still fighting the good fight. I wish them luck, but not with much hope.

Dan – the Neocon?

While the actual neoconservative movement has a respectable bipartisan history, in the early 2000s, the word was perhaps the worst pejorative that could be thrown at someone on the political left, along with “neoliberal” (a term not understood by the vast majority of those who use it). On international issues, the actual neocons were associated with keeping the U.S. military strong and using that military to, where applicable, preserve democracy and human rights. I guess I became something of a neocon in foreign policy issues. That’s fitting: many of the founders of the neoconservative movement were former Communists or Trotskyists who became appalled with American appeasement of the Soviet Union and left-wing justifications for massacres and human rights abuses; I knew the feeling. In 2011, as Libyan forces were bearing down on a besieged people, I argued in the National Board that the CPUSA should support the French and American efforts to intervene and prevent a massacre. While the U.S. intervention in Libya didn’t end well, there was no way of knowing the outcome beforehand. (There’s reason to believe that, had the U.S. not hewn to the UN timetable, the country wouldn’t have spiraled so badly out of control.) Even then, I was the same person who had, years earlier, taken pride in the U.S.-led intervention to end Iraqi butchery in Kuwait.

Instead of calling for something that mattered – U.S. support for the Libyan people – the CPUSA did what it usually does in times of international brutality in which the U.S. is at least marginally involved: it published a milquetoast statement deploring violence, urging authorities not to use the situation as a “pretext” for war (as if Obama, obsessed with making a deal in Iran and unable to respond in Syria, was looking for a war), and calling for negotiations.

Furthermore, everyone disagreed on theoretical terms, based on a Marxist framework of how the world operates, not on the actual specifics of human suffering. Iit was at that point that I realized that I simply didn’t fit into the organization.

What I took away

After I left and began reading more widely, my politics changed. [Update: as of the summer of 2020, they had changed dramatically. I guess watching the damage the socialist left has been doing to the Democratic Party, as well as reading Capitalism and Freedom, several volumes of Francis Fukuyama’s writings, studies on states and state building, and more had their effect, pushing me further along the path all of those ex-Communist neoconservatives found themselves on.] Still, there were things I learned that I’ve kept with me.

Hard work: Some were surprised that I spent as much time as I did on the local Worcester elections, doing as much door-to-door work as I did. But this I learned from people like Danny Rubin: educated as a lawyer, he spent his whole life working for low wages, doing all that he could to make the world a better place. And that meant doing things that weren’t necessarily glamorous: while he did attend huge meetings of world leaders, he thought his most valuable work was on-the-ground organizing. At the end of his life, he was spending hours every day organizing party members and allies to go and work for NYC city council campaigns, or Congressional races, or whatever else needed to be done. His frustration was that he was older, and unable to get out and do these things himself.

Youth: I puzzled at first as to why such a small organization as the CPUSA would have gone to the trouble to set up a separate youth organization, which it did many times over the years (often at the behest of Danny Rubin). The argument was that young people, one of the core forces of progress, interpret the world differently and have to “invent” their own path forward. There are certain material realities they can’t change, but culturally and organizationally, they have to figure things out for themselves. 80-year-old Danny was emphatic that young people have to not only be taught, but also have to be respected and encouraged – and trusted to figure things out the right way.

In conclusion

So there it is: the ballad of Red Danny, as that local blog calls me. It’s maybe more interesting than you thought, or maybe less interesting. I’d appreciate hearing your ideas, so feel free to comment or email.

Image: A portrait of me by artist Yevgeniy Fiks, from his series on the Communist Party USA. Just as I would no longer join the Communist Party, I would no longer wear such an ugly shirt.