File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9710, message 189


Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 13:30:41 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Was Browder "home alone"?


The idea that Browder sneaked around for nearly ten years behind Stalin's
back getting into all sorts of revisionist mischief is a big joke. What are
we talking about here? "Home Alone IV" with Macaulay Culkin in the role of
Earl Browder and Walter Matthau as Joseph Stalin?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[The opening scene finds Stalin (Matthau) at the front door of his suburban
house where he finds Browder (Culkin) smoking crack with three heavily
rouged prostitutes on the living-room carpet. Kate Smith's rendition of
"God Bless America" is blasting away on the stereo.]

Stalin: What is it with you? I go on a vacation for 8 years and you turn
this place into a den of iniquity. If I told you once, I told you a million
times, there will be no Kate Smith played in this house. I'm going to send
you off to military school in Siberia. They'll straighten you out.

Browder: Gee, dad. I didn't think you'd get so upset. After all, I did keep
the lawn mowed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the myth of the "out of control" Browder and it needs to be
de-mythologized.

As the Popular Front deepened, Browder began to become more and more
infatuated with the idea of the CP functioning semi-officially as part of
the New Deal administration. When the Popular Front period started, he
advocated support of the petty-bourgeois Farmer-Labor party. He soon came
to believe that open support for FDR made more sense. There was lingering
support in the CPUSA for the Farmer-Labor party when this overture was
first presented to the party. Daily Worker editor Clarence Hathaway was
calling for an orientation to the Farmer-Labor party as late as 1937.
William Z. Foster was also skeptical about support for FDR.

Browder was for FDR all the way and took his case to Moscow, where it was
presented to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI)
in April, 1937. The delegation included William Z. Foster who argued
against open support for FDR. The Comintern listened to the two arguments
pro-and-con FDR and realized that Browder's plan dove-tailed with the
USSR's foreign policy needs more closely. If war broke out, allies would be
necessary and what better ally could there be than an American president
who depended on Communists for a base of support. The Comintern approved
Browder's proposals.

Foster was not happy. He continued his campaign against Browder. He
appealed once again to the Comintern at the end of the year. Foster argued
that if the CPUSA was going to be taken seriously as a member of a Popular
Front, it should be accepted as a party, like the CP of France had been
accepted into Leon Blum's Popular Front. Foster accused Browder of
"tailing" FDR.

The Comintern considered the Foster-Browder dispute for two weeks before
coming to a conclusion. It sided with Browder and stated that his approach
to major political and tactical questions was correct and "with this
Comrade Foster should also agree." At this point, Foster entered the
Comintern's doghouse. Dmitri Manuilsky, a Soviet Communist leader,
enumerated Foster's shortcomings in public. Eugene Dennis, the American
party's Comintern representative, taunted Foster by reminding him that
Browder's position enjoyed domestic and international support.

And so Browder enjoyed Kremlin backing for the next 8 years until 1946 when
the vicissitudes of the Cold War forced Stalin to shift to the left.
Browder's pro-Democratic Party orientation became an inconvenience at this
point and it was unlikely that someone as deeply committed to bourgeois
politics would be tractable enough to move the American party in the sharp
leftward direction that was under way.

So Browder was dumped.

The way he was dumped will tell you a lot about the unsavory character of
the world Communist movement under Stalin. In April, 1946 the theoretical
journal of the French Communist Party published a scathing attack on
Browder by Jacque Duclos, second in command of the party. It took him
completely by surprise. The article included quotes from numerous internal
documents of the American party that only could have been made available
from Moscow. Put bluntly, the Kremlin broke Communist discipline by
supplying the French hack with these documents behind the back of the
American party.

The crowning irony, of course, is that the French party itself was deeply
compromised by the same sort of politics as Browder's. The French CP
dissolved its armed Resistance detachments, which constituted the true
state power in France in 1945, and threw its support behind DeGaulle as
part of the settlement hammered out by Stalin and the West at Yalta and
Potsdam.

Browder was a remarkable figure. When and if the American people can ever
get it together to build an authentic revolutionary party, the example of
the American CP during the Browder years will be worthy of study. Browder
insisted on the need for American socialists to be able to communicate with
the working class in terms that they could understand. He was dead-set
opposed to jargon and ultra-left sectarianism, god bless him. As I have
stated a million times before, the Popular Front is a period that much good
can be learned from. It was a period of "tailing" FDR; it was also a period
when Communists sank roots in working class communities and fought racism
and injustice.

They were able to make this connection because they had broken through the
rats nest of sectarianism and ultra-leftism characteristic of
"Marxism-Leninism." They spoke the language of the American people and won
over people like Frank Sinatra at the apex of society and the people of
Harlem at the bottom rungs.

When Louis Godena tells us that he enjoys Adolfo Olaechea because he sounds
like Lenin, this shows that he could learn something from this period like
the rest of us. Yes, Adolfo does write in the style of Russia, 1903. That
is the problem, isn't it? His style is filled with jargon and antiquities
like "falling between two sacks of potatoes." It is one thing for Lenin to
use this rather earthy phrase, it is another for people in 1997 to be using
it. The last time I saw a "sack of potatoes" was in my dad's fruit store in
1954. It was one of those 50 pound jobbies that we used to fill the bins
from. They were much more common in the street markets of Russia in 1903.
Unfortunately, that is not the time and place we are in and it is about
time we acted on the basis of reality rather than fantasy.

Louis Proyect

(source: James Ryan, "Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism",
University of Alabama, 1997)



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