Bureaucracy

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bureaucracy
by Devine, James
04 April 2002 23:47 UTC

I wrote:
>> Applied to the CPUSA, the phrase "democratic centralist" involves an
abuse of the word "democratic."<<

CB: >Are you saying that the majority's votes were ignored in some election
of Gus Hall ? Earl Browder ? John Reed ? Henry Winston ?  Sam Webb ?  on a
provision of the Constitution ?

> Give me specific examples of where the vote of the majority was not
followed in the CPUSA ? <

Actually, that was a typo. I meant to write the "CPSU" -- specifically
referring to the period of the 1920s and after, since I have limited
knowledge of the inner workings of the CPUSA. (That it was a typo makes
sense in the context of the larger message: it was followed by the sentence
"The elections in the old USSR were a sham, while the members of the CP
didn't have real democratic control over the leaders or over the Party
Line.")

But wasn't Earl Browder -- a long-term leader who was quite popular with the
CPUSA's rank and file members -- kicked out of the leadership of the CPUSA
for disagreeing with the Party Line handed down by Moscow?

^^^^^^^^

CB: On Browder, I was going to use him as an example of the ability to remove the very top leader in the CPUSA  . He was General Secretary.

There was a letter from a French, not Moscow, Communist , named DeClou ( sp.) criticizing Browder's proposal that the CP become an educational organization rather than a political party. In general, that was termed liquidationism, liquidating the party

In retrospect, one wonders whether Browder was told that by the US bourgeois powers that be - do that , or we will come after the Party. But that would be a conspiracy explanation. Or maybe he just figured it out: That McCarthyism/CPUSA  purge was coming, and was trying to avoid it.

Anyway, in many ways the CPUSA has been an educational organization and not a real political party since after the jailings of its leaders, so it ended up where Browder projected.