The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1933-09-23


struggle aaginst NRA, of making
concessions to it, of letting up in
our struggle against opportunism
and social-fascism. Others hide the
same tendency behind cleft" pro-
posals to ''boycott" the struggles
around the codes of the MIRA, to
avoid the sharp conformation of
our position against the oppor-
tunists before the masses, in the
name of preserving our "revolu-
tionary purity" proposals which,
if adopted, would have the same
result as the open surrender to the
NRA.
OUR party has developed and
" grown strong in constant fight
against both forms of deviation,
a fight on two fronts, against open
right deviations and against 'left'
distortions. Only our inner strength
in overcoming deyiations gives our
Party and the revolutionary move
ment it's outer strength, as the
firm and courageous leader of the
movement of the masses. Any
inner looseness, laxness, or toler-
ance of deviations, would imme-
diately reflect itself among the
masses in the loss of our influence,
of our position of leader and edu-
Gator of the mass movement.
That is the chief lesson of the
history of fourteen years of our
Party.
When, Immediately after its
formation, our Party was driven
underground by the Palmer raids
and wholesale deportation and i'm
prisonments, its whole history for
several years was dominated by
this inner struggle on two irons:
First, the fight against those ten
denotes to surrender our revo'u-
tionary program in order to come
out into the open as a illegal"
Party which would be tolerated
because it abandoned the revolu-
ton; second, the fight against the
tendency to refuse to come into
the open at all, to make the under
grund existence of our Party into
principle" to condemn the Party
to the miserable existence of g
secret sect. We fought against and
defeated both tendencies; unless
we had done so, our Party would
have been destroyed.
THE relative sterilization of
world capitalism which followed
the temporary decline of the post
war revolutionary wave, was the
basis of the rise of bourgeois il
lusions and prejudices among GER
tain opportunist elements in our
Party. One of the expressions of
this influence was the platform,
draped in concealing phrases, of
turning the Communist Party (then
the Workers Party) from leader of
the American working class into
the tail-end of the Liberal-bour-
geois labor movement of the Anal
gamated Clothing Workers stamp.
The exponent of this tendency was
Salutsky (now J. B. S. Hardman).
Salutsky was expelled from our
Party in 1922. Another example
that arose shortly after that was
the effort of Ludwig Lore to raise
the banner of Trotskyism as the
rallying center for all opportunist
elements to control the Party and
break it away from the Communist
International. Instead of follow
ing the line of the Party toward
Americanization through sinking :,
its roots among the basic AM
erican workers in the key indus
tries, by organizing and leading
their struggles, this opportunist at
tempted to establish a patriotic,
Monroe-doctrine American Party
political counterpart of the re-
dictionary American Federation of
Labor. The Party Convention of
1924 Unanimously expelled this
renegade from the ranks of the
revolutionary Party.
IN the period before the outbreak
4 of the world economic crisis and
the consequent SCATTERING of cap
italism's partial sterilization, our
Party went through another period
of inner crisis. Preparing for the
great class battles to come, our
Party, together with the whole In
ternational, found forces within
itself resisting these preparations.
Inner struggles ensued, around the
decisions of the Sixth World Con-
gress of the Comintern. In the
United States we had the arising Of
Trotskyist faction in the Party,
led by Cannon, which tried by
'left" phrases to lead the Party
into the swamps of opportunism.
The Lovestone faction carried the
open banner of capitalism to the
Second International and the trade
union bureaucracy. Both factions
had the same practical program
behind their differences in abstract
phrases. Only by defeating and
driving out both, was our Party
able to emerge as the organizer
and leader of the masses on the
issucs of struggles arising from the
crisis, and prepare the masses for
the revolutionary way out of the
crisis.
Today our Party is again going
through critical period of testing.
Today it is no longer a struggle
over the programmatic problems of
determining the direction in which
we want to go. But it is the hun
dred-fold more difficult struggle
to find the concrete steps along
the path which we unanimously
adopted. 1t is the struggle to trans
late our resolutions into mass ac-
tons actions in which tha PARTY