JUNE 1934
"C.P. Proposes Joint Actions on Daily Issues: Statement of the Central Committee, CPUSA to the National Executive Committee, Socialist Party, June 19, 1934." In the aftermath of HItler's attainment of power in Germany and in mortal fear of the perceived "fascist" tendencies of the new Roosevelt administration, the Communist Party made an appeal for a "United Front of Action" with the Socialist Party, delivered as a letter to the SP's 1934 National Convention in Detroit. This communique was not answered, motivating the CP to make the concrete pitch more publicly -- publishing the text in the June 26 edition of the Daily Worker. Noting that the majority of the newly-elected NEC of the Socialist Party had previously announced themselves in favor of united front action with the Communists but had been blocked by "Hillquit, Oneal, Waldman & Co.," the SP leadership was directly challenged: "Today, the National Executive Committee, which claims that its policies represent a repudiation of that group, and which poses as a leftward group, can no longer offer the old excuse for an inability to establish the united front with the Communist Party on issues which concern the most immediate and vital interests of all the toilers."
SEPTEMBER 1934
"Notes of A Marxist," by Haim Kantorovitch [circa September 1934] Owing to his premature death from tuberculosis in 1936 at the age of 45, the place of Jewish-American Marxist Haim Kantorovich as an intellectual leader of the Socialist Party of America is little remembered. This piece from the quarterly theoretical journal of the SPA, American Socialist Quarterly, stands as part of Kantorovich's English-language legacy. Kantorovich argues in defense of an evolving and multi-tendency Marxism rather than a dogmatic closed system, declaring that "people who speak about pure Marxism, undiluted Marxism, unrevised Marxism, know very little of the history of Marxism. Marxism has been revised constantly, from the left as well as from the right." Kantorovich charges the Communist movement with elevating Lenin's ideas into some approximation of sacred doctrine. "After Lenin had convinced himself that Marx was wrong on certain points, he had a right to replace them with his own theories which he believed to be true," Kantorovich asserts, "When his disciples however demand that we believe Lenin’s innovations are part of Marxism which one must accept if he is really a Marxist, they are wrong." Kantorovich defends the notion of a fundamental revolutionary continuity in the ideas of Karl Marx. In this he holds himself in opposition to Karl Kautsky, who in the years after World War I began to argue that Marx had discarded the revolutionism of his youth in favor of an evolutionary orientation. In Kantorovich's view: "One cannot remain a dialectical materialist and discard the idea of revolution. Both stand or fall together. Marxism is revolutionary through and through; neither Marx nor Engels ever discarded the idea of social revolution, nor could they have done so without discarding their belief in the dialectical nature of the social process. Nature as well as history, they argued against the evolutionist-gradualists, proceeds by 'jumps,' by sudden cataclysms."
DECEMBER 1934
"The United Front," by Haim Kantorovitch [December 1934] Assessment of the tactic of the United Front by an ideological leader of the Socialist Party of America's "Militant" faction, Haim Kantorovich. Kantorovich excuses the Socialist International's decision to neither sanction nor ban united front actions between member Socialist Parties and Communist Parties in those same countries, declaring that a firm decision on either side of this question would have prompted an organizational split. Kantorovich notes that the Communist movement had put an enormous amount of money and effort into circulating united front literature, which had only recently shifted in orientation. "We do not hear so often from Communists now that every non-Communist is a traitor, a lackey of the bourgeoisie, a fighter for capitalism and fascism, or just a plain faker.... The tenor of the newest literature is the falsification of the history of the Socialist as well as of the Communist movement. The aim of this literature is, above all, to place the guilt for the original split in the Socialist and labor movement on the Socialists.... In order 'to prove' these falsifications the literature is filled with misquotations, perversions of truths, and downright lies." Kantorovich notes that since its inception in 1921 the united front had been transparently intended as "a new method of destroying the Socialist movement" through subtle splitting pressure. Kantorovich maintains that the current effort to forge an alliance between the CPUSA and the SPA is not a true united front of the working class in that it excludes other organizations and moreover continues the CPUSA's ongoing goal of wrecking rather than aiding the existing trade union movement. To the question of whether the SP is ready for a united front, Kantorovich answers: "As soon as you liquidate the theory of social fascism, agree to a united front inclusive of all proletarian parties and groups, and give up your harmful and suicidal (for you) trade union tactics, there will be a real united front. The Socialists are ready and waiting. It is up to you to make the united front possible. Will you?"
"Launch Workers Party of US: CLA and AWP in Fusion Convention of US Revolutionaries." (The Militant) [event of Dec. 2, 1934] Official published account of the formation of the Workers Party of the United States, created via a merger of the Trotskyist Communist League of America headed by Jim Cannon and Max Shachtman and the American Workers Party led by A.J. Muste. Muste was to be Secretary of the new organization and Cannon the editor of the official organ, to be called The New Militant. The New York City gathering was addressed by Muste to open the proceedings, while former CLA member Vincent Dunne, a leader of the Minneapolis Teamsters' strike, delivered the keynote speech. A 22 member national executive committee was elected, 11 from each group, from which a Political Bureau of 10 was to be elected. A constitution, agreed upon in the pre-merger negotiations, was passed with minor amendments from the floor.
"As to 'Red Terror,'"by Will Herberg [Dec. 15, 1934] Rather snotty editorial from the pages of the official organ of the Communist Party (Opposition) attacking Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party for their protests against the mass repression which swept the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the assassination of Sergei Kirov. "To get aroused to white-heat over the instant meting out of full and irrevocable justice to the White Guard assassins and to the imperialist spies would mean to get aroused over the enemies of the Socialist Soviet Republic. That's why silence in the case of Kirov and raucous anger in the case of Soviet justice," the editorial declares. The "bogus democratic justice" of the "Social Democratic tear-shedders" is condemned and Soviet mass reprisals defended: "Thomas and his colleagues are to be condemned in the most unmistakable terms by all honest socialists for their attempt to cover up the trail of the imperialist right and its hired assassins banded against the Soviet regime. Every class-conscious worker can only hail the swift and complete justice accorded the culprits in the Soviet Union."
