Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America, is a far-left communist party in the United States. It was established in 1919 in the wake of the Russian Revolution, emerging from the left wing of the Socialist Party of America. The CPUSA sought to establish socialism in the United States via the principles of Marxism–Leninism, aligning itself with the Communist International, which was controlled by the Soviet Union. It is considered to be the most important left-wing organization in the United States.
The CPUSA's early years were marked by factional struggles and clandestine activities. The U.S. government viewed the party as a subversive threat, leading to mass arrests and deportations in the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920. Despite this, the CPUSA expanded its influence, particularly among industrial workers, immigrants, and African Americans. In the 1920s, the party remained a small but militant force. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the CPUSA grew in prominence under the leadership of William Z. Foster and later Earl Browder as it played a key role in labor organizing and anti-fascist movements. The party's involvement in strikes helped establish it as a formidable force within the American labor movement, particularly through the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In the mid-1930s, the CPUSA followed the Comintern's "popular front" line, which emphasized alliances with progressives and liberals. The party softened its revolutionary rhetoric, and supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies. This shift allowed the CPUSA to gain broader acceptance, and its membership surged, reaching an estimated 70,000 members by the late 1930s. On the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the CPUSA initially opposed U.S. involvement, but reversed its stance after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, fervently supporting the war effort. The Popular Front era of CPUSA lasted until 1945, when Earl Browder was ousted from the party and replaced by William Z. Foster.
As the CPUSA's role in Soviet Espionage activities became more widely known, the Party suffered dramatically at onset of the Cold War. The Second Red Scare saw the party prosecuted under the Smith Act, which criminalized advocacy of violent revolution and led to high-profile trials of its leaders. This decimated the CPUSA, reducing its membership to under 10,000 by the mid-1950s. The Khrushchev Thaw and revelations of Joseph Stalin's crimes also led to internal divisions, with many members leaving the party in disillusionment. The CPUSA struggled to maintain relevance during the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. While it supported civil rights, labor activism, and anti-Vietnam War efforts, it faced competition from New Left organizations, which rejected the party's rigid adherence to Soviet communism. The Sino-Soviet split further fractured the communist movement, with some former CPUSA members defecting to Maoist or Trotskyist groups. Under the leadership of Gus Hall, the CPUSA remained loyal to the Soviet Union even as other communist parties distanced themselves from Moscow's policies, which marginalized it within the American left. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 dealt a devastating blow to the party, leading to financial difficulties and a further decline in membership.
In the 21st century, the CPUSA has focused on labor rights, racial justice, environmental activism, and opposition to corporate capitalism. The CPUSA publishes the newspaper People's World and continues to engage in leftist activism.
Modern membership
In 2011, CPUSA claimed 2,000 members. In 2017 and 2018, CPUSA claimed 5,000 members. In 2019, former Party member Daniel Rosenberg claimed that "nearly half" of new joiners since 2000 had "paid no dues" and merely signed up for the mailing list. In 2023, CPUSA claimed 15,000 members. In 2024, CPUSA claimed 20,000 members on its mailing list.History
During the first half of the 20th century, the Communist Party was influential in various struggles. Historian Ellen Schrecker concludes that decades of recent scholarship offer "a more nuanced portrayal of the party as both a Stalinist sect tied to a vicious regime and the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and '40s." It was also the first political party in the United States to be racially integrated.By August 1919, only months after its founding, the Communist Party claimed to have 50,000 to 60,000 members. Its members also included anarchists and other radical leftists. At the time, the older and more moderate Socialist Party of America, suffering from criminal prosecutions for its antiwar stance during World War I, had declined to 40,000 members. The sections of the Communist Party's International Workers Order organized for communism around linguistic and ethnic lines, providing mutual aid and tailoring cultural activities to an IWO membership that peaked at 200,000 at its height.
During the Great Depression, some Americans were attracted by the visible activism of Communists on behalf of a wide range of social and economic causes, including the rights of African Americans, workers, and the unemployed. The Communist Party played a significant role in the resurgence of organized labor in the 1930s. Others, alarmed by the rise of the Falangists in Spain and the Nazis in Germany, admired the Soviet Union's early and staunch opposition to fascism. Party membership swelled from 7,500 at the start of the decade to 55,000 by its end.
Party members also rallied to the defense of the Spanish Republic during this period after a nationalist military uprising moved to overthrow it, resulting in the Spanish Civil War. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, along with leftists throughout the world, raised funds for medical relief while many of its members made their way to Spain with the aid of the party to join the Lincoln Brigade, one of the International Brigades.
File:People Demand Peace.jpeg|thumb|left|upright=1.2|The Washington Commonwealth Federation newspaper after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact
The Communist Party was adamantly opposed to fascism during the Popular Front period. Although membership in the party rose to about 66,000 by 1939, nearly 20,000 members left the party by 1943. While general secretary Browder at first attacked Germany for its September 1, 1939 invasion of western Poland, on September 11 the Communist Party received a communique from Moscow denouncing the Polish government. Between September 14–16, party leaders bickered about the direction to take.
File:Cacchione and Davis 1943.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.2|New York City Councilmen Peter V. Cacchione and Benjamin J. Davis Jr., two of the only elected officials of the Communist Party, served during and after World War II
On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland and occupied the Polish territory assigned to it by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, followed by coordination with German forces in Poland. The Communist Party then turned the focus of its public activities from anti-fascism to advocating peace, opposing military preparations. The party criticized British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French leader Édouard Daladier, but it did not at first attack President Roosevelt, reasoning that this could devastate American Communism, blaming instead Roosevelt's advisors. The party spread the slogans "The Yanks Are Not Coming" and "Hands Off," set up a "perpetual peace vigil" across the street from the White House, and announced that Roosevelt was the head of the "war party of the American bourgeoisie." The party was active in the isolationist America First Committee. In October and November, after the Soviets invaded Finland and forced mutual assistance pacts from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Communist Party considered Russian security sufficient justification to support the actions. The Comintern and its leader Georgi Dimitrov demanded that Browder change the party's support for Roosevelt. On October 23, the party began attacking Roosevelt. The party changed this policy again after Hitler broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact by attacking the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
In August 1940, after NKVD agent Ramón Mercader killed Trotsky with an ice axe, Browder perpetuated Moscow's line that the killer, who had been dating one of Trotsky's secretaries, was a disillusioned follower.
File:The New National Committee of the Communist Party 1948.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.2|The National Committee of the Communist Party in 1948, most of whom had been arrested earlier that year under the Smith Act
The Communist Party's early labor and organizing successes did not last long. As the decades progressed, the combined effects of McCarthyism and Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 "Secret Speech" in which he denounced the previous decades of Joseph Stalin's rule and the adversities of the continuing Cold War mentality, steadily weakened the party's internal structure and confidence. Party membership in the Communist International and its close adherence to the political positions of the Soviet Union gave most Americans the impression that the party was not only a threatening, subversive domestic entity, but that it was also a foreign agent that espoused an ideology which was fundamentally alien and threatening to the American way of life. Internal and external crises swirled together, to the point when members who did not end up in prison for party activities either tended to disappear quietly from its ranks, or they tended to adopt more moderate political positions which were at odds with the party line. By 1957, membership had dwindled to less than 10,000, of whom some 1,500 were informants for the FBI. The party was also banned by the Communist Control Act of 1954, although it was never really enforced and Congress later repealed most provisions of the act, also with some declared unconstitutional via the court system.
The party attempted to recover with its opposition to the Vietnam War during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but its continued uncritical support for an increasingly stultified and militaristic Soviet Union further alienated it from the rest of the left-wing in the United States, which saw this supportive role as outdated and even dangerous. At the same time, the party's aging membership demographics distanced it from the New Left in the United States.
With the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and his effort to radically alter the Soviet economic and political system from the mid-1980s, the Communist Party finally became estranged from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself. In 1989, the Soviet Communist Party cut off major funding to the Communist Party USA due to its opposition to glasnost and perestroika. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party held its convention and attempted to resolve the issue of whether the party should reject Marxism–Leninism. The majority reasserted the party's now purely Marxist outlook, prompting a minority faction which urged social democrats to exit the now reduced party. The party has since adopted Marxism–Leninism within its program. In 2014, the new draft of the party constitution declared: "We apply the scientific outlook developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others in the context of our American history, culture, and traditions."
File:Communists' party demonstration in Union Sq. May Day 193?.jpg|thumb|left|Communists march in front of the Freiheit and Daily Worker buildings in New York City during a May Day demonstration 1930s
The Communist Party is based in New York City. From 1922 to 1988, it published Morgen Freiheit, a daily newspaper written in Yiddish. For decades, its West Coast newspaper was the People's World and its East Coast newspaper was The Daily World. The two newspapers merged in 1986 into the People's Weekly World. The People's Weekly World has since become an online only publication called People's World. It has since ceased being an official Communist Party publication as the party does not fund its publication. The party's former theoretical journal Political Affairs is now also published exclusively online, but the party still maintains International Publishers as its publishing house.
In June 2014, the party held its 30th National Convention in Chicago. On April 7, 2021, the party announced that it intended to run candidates in elections again, after a hiatus of over thirty years. Steven Estrada, who ran for city council in Long Beach, was one of the first candidates to run as an open member of the CPUSA again. Estrada received 8.5% of the vote. In 2025 the party increased its electoral activity, fielding candidates for city council in Ithaca and Northampton, with both candidates advancing from the primary. That November, their candidate in Ithaca, Hannah Shvets, was elected with 64% of the vote. Additionally, Communist Party member Daniel Carson was elected to the Bangor city council, coming in second place out of nine candidates in a non-partisan election.
In July 2024, dissenting members of the CPUSA formed their own party, the American Communist Party, citing the CPUSA's support for the Democratic Party and alleged abandonment of Marxism–Leninism, with online political commentators Haz Al-Din as its founding chairman and Jackson Hinkle as a founding Plenary Committee member. The party, Al-Din, and Hinkle have drawn criticism for populist tactics such as MAGA Communism.