page_title: Lovestoneites
section_title: Confrontation with the official Communist Party
hierarchical_section_title: Lovestoneites / Organizational history / Confrontation with the official Communist Party
caption_attribution_description: English: Close up image of weekly dues stamps issued by the Communist Party (Majority Group) in 1931 and 1932.
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: In the summer of 1932 the Communist Party (Majority Group) 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 (Majority Group), of the Trotsky group [the Communist League of America], 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."
caption: While the weekly dues stamps of the CPMG included the slogan "For Communist Unity", the reality faced by the group's members was sometimes quite different.
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