Lovestoneites


The Lovestoneites, led by former General Secretary of the Communist Party USA Jay Lovestone, were a small American oppositionist communist movement of the 1930s. The organization emerged from a factional fight in the CPUSA in 1929 and unsuccessfully sought to reintegrate with that organization for several years.
Over the course of its existence the organization made use of four names:
  • Communist Party
  • Communist Party of the USA
  • Independent Communist Labor League
  • Independent Labor League of America
The members often referred to their organization as the Communist Party or "CPO."
Activists in the Communist Party played a role in a number of trade union organizations of the 1930s, particularly in the automobile and garment industries. A growing disaffection with the Soviet Union in the years after the Great Purge of 1937–38 ultimately led the group to drop the word "Communist" from its name before its dissolution in the first days of 1941.

Organizational history

Origins

The Communist Party, known commonly as "The Lovestoneites", was one of two primary opposition organizations which split away from the Communist Party USA in the late 1920s and early 1930s, paralleling factional differences within the Soviet leadership. A so-called Left Opposition centered around James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and others, supported Leon Trotsky and were expelled in 1928 to form the Communist League of America. Soon thereafter, another cleavage emerged, this time between the supporters of Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin. When Bukharin was purged from the Soviet leadership, his supporters in various countries, known as the Right Opposition, were also expelled or left the various national parties. In the United States this tendency was led by Jay Lovestone, former General Secretary of the Communist Party.
The group began as the Communist Party, USA in the fall of 1929, following the expulsion of Lovestone and his factional cohorts from the CPUSA.
The new organization made its presence known with the first number of a new newspaper, The Revolutionary Age, subtitled "An Organ of Marxism-Leninism in the United States." The first issue was dated November 1, 1929, and featured "An Appeal to All Party Members and Revolutionary Workers" above the fold, in which the new "Communist Party USA " declared itself the continuer of the "glorious traditions" in fulfilling the "tremendous tasks" set by a previous publication of the same name in establishing the American Communist movement in 1919. The organization declared that:
The officers of the organization named in 1929 included an 11-member Central Committee headed by expelled General Secretary Lovestone and including such former CPUSA stalwarts as Ellen Dawson, Benjamin Gitlow, William Kruse, Bertram D. Wolfe, and Charles S. Zimmerman. The new group also included its own "Young Communist League", headed by an 8-member National Executive Committee, to parallel the official Young Communist League of the CPUSA.
The new "Communist Party " demanded that the official CPUSA turn away from the "opportunist sectarian" perspective of the Third Period and its use of "ultra-left phrases in the leading campaigns of the party", cease with its mass expulsions of dissidents and immediately reinstate those recently expelled, and "examine and take a stand" against the decisions of the 10th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International which represented a revision of the decisions of the 6th World Congress of the Comintern. The remaining members of the regular CPUSA met these demands of its expelled dissidents with indifference or hostility.
During its first years, the CP considered itself a "loyal opposition" to the official Communist Party, a fact reflected by the group's decision to endorse the Congressional and State candidates of the CPUSA in the 1930 elections. An editorial in the party's official organ declared:
...When we call upon the workers to support the Communist Party ticket in the elections we do not do so on the basis of agreement with the Party tactics or the Party's present election platform; we do so because of our agreement with the fundamentals and aims of the Communist Party and the Communist International. We call upon the workers to support the Communist Party ticket as an expression of their agreement with the fundamental aims of Communism but to remember that the dangerous tactics of the official leaders of the Communist Party, which are doing such harm to the cause of Communism, are not the traditional tactics of the world Communist movement.

The Lovestoneites remained loyal to the memory of C. E. Ruthenberg, the former leader of the faction who had died suddenly of acute appendicitis on March 3, 1927, holding public "Ruthenberg Memorial Meetings" in his memory each year and eulogizing him in the party press.
Among those boosted in the pages of The Revolutionary Age and its successor, The Workers Age were the German oppositional communist August Thalheimer, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and the Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy. On April 3, 1932, Rivera lectured under the auspices of the Communist Party on "Trends in Modern Art", with his friend Bert Wolfe handling the task of translation.

Confrontation with the official Communist Party

In the summer of 1932 the Communist Party made a strong protest about the use of violence by the official Communist Party against its soapbox speakers on the street corners of New York City. The Lovestoneites charged that
Street meetings of the Communist Party, of the Trotsky group , of the IWW, and of the Socialist Party have been smashed by the wild rowdyism and gangsterism of the Communist Party bureaucrats. It seems that the Party leadership intends that every meeting in the coming election campaign which is not an official Communist meeting must not be permitted to take place: either it must be 'turned' into an official Communist meeting or else it must be smashed!

Particular grievous was a street corner meeting held July 8 in Brownsville, New York at the corner of Hopkinson and Pitkin Avenues, which had been attacked by "official 'Communist' hooligans who brandished knives, iron knuckles, and other weapons."
Despite being subjected to such violence, the Lovestoneites nevertheless once again endorsed the electoral ticket of the official Communist Party in the election of 1932, declaring the Republicans and Democrats "stand for this cursed system", while the Socialists "frequently support the conservative union leaders who are doing their best to paralyze the struggles of the workers and to hand them over to the tender mercies of the bosses."

Apartment break-in

On July 17, 1938, Lovestone's Manhattan apartment at London Terrace, 410 West 24th Street was broken into. Extensive collections of his correspondence, his passport and a gold watch were stolen. At the time Lovestone claimed this was a GPU operation, though the FBI came to the conclusion that it was a hoax perpetuated by Lovestone to obtain a new passport. Hoax or not, the expelled board members lawyer, Maurice Sugar reproduced some of the very documents Lovestone claimed had been stolen at the trial. A special Bulletin, published by the expelled members sympathizers also published some of the documents to prove that Lovestone was behind Martin's attempt to purge them.
Years later the FBI found out further information about the incident while conducting another investigation. The employees at the building apparently belonged to a small Communist dominated union and one of the maids was commissioned to keep tabs on Lovestone's mail. Communist Party agents then rented an apartment above Lovestone's and burglarized it when he was out, taking the bags of correspondence to the other apartment so no one would see them.
Finally, in a letter in the Comintern archive in Moscow, dated Oct 19, 1938 Comintern representative Pat Toohey reported that Lovestone's "entire archive" had come into possession of the Party.

International affiliation

After initially lending critical support to the Communist International, in the fall of 1930 preparations began to be made for a new "International Conference of the Communist Opposition." Representatives of the CP collaborated with their comparable others in Germany, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia in a preliminary gathering held in Berlin in March 1930 to organize the event. The call for the founding conference was published over the signature of Heinrich Brandler of the National Council of the "Communist Party of Germany."
The conference was held on December 16 and 17, 1930 in Berlin.

Policies mid-1930s

The Lovestone group reacted with shock and a sense of urgency to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. The organization urged international unity among labor and radical groups against the Nazis' "express-train speed" efforts to "consolidate their grip on the country and wipe out the labor movement without leaving a trace." The organization clearly continued to hold out hope that it would be invited into the official Communist Party once again, declared that "the turn in tactics must be accompanied by a movement for the unification of the Communist movement, now split up and divided."
For all its aspirations of united action and reintegration into the regular CPUSA, the Lovestone oppositionists began to have ever more serious misgivings about the nature of the regime in the Soviet Union as the "Cult of Personality" began to take root in the 1930s. A May 1933 article by Bert Wolfe in Workers Age mocked the ritualistic torrents of adulation being bestowed upon Stalin as part of an organized campaign in the USSR:
Throughout the Soviet Union today and throughout the Communist International there is an organized campaign for the development of a new 'ism' — 'Stalinism.' Stalin's fiftieth birthday was celebrated with incense and flattery. His picture is the favorite cover illustration of every periodical from Kino, the movie review, to Krokodil, the humorous magazine. His photograph appears as often and as universally on the Russian magazine covers as the 'Gibson Girl' or Greta Garbo on the covers of American magazines. Towns and factories and clubs and streets are named after him. His speech on the Five-Year Plan was set to music! * * * pparently Stalin insists upon being embalmed and worshipped while still alive!