page_title: Lovestoneites
section_title: Factional splits
hierarchical_section_title: Lovestoneites / Organizational history / Factional splits
caption_attribution_description: English: Benjamin Gitlow, 1928 Vice Presidential candidate of the Workers (Communist) Party of America. Official Campaign photo, not copyrighted at the time of use, scanned by me expressly for Wikipedia. Original source in Tim Davenport collection. The above is a 5 cent pamphlet published in 1928 by the Workers (Communist) Party as part of its election campaign. This photograph was published in William Z. Foster and Benjamin Gitlow: Acceptance Speeches. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928, photo plate between pages 6 &amp; 7.
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: The movement suffered three splits during its existence, only one of which produced a new organization. The first was led by Bert Miller who wanted the sect to unite with the Conference for Progressive Labor Action. When he was unable to convince the leadership of the group to do so, he took a small following into the CPLA himself.
  Early in February 1933  former National Secretary Ben Gitlow submitted his resignation from the Lovestone organization, having come to see the general line of  mass collectivization and frenetic industrialization in the USSR as "basically wrong" with the matter a "decisive question of fundamental principle." Gitlow presented his views to the 2nd National Conference of the CPUSA(O), which "decisively rejected" them "by a large margin." Soon thereafter, Gitlow submitted his resignation from the organization. He was joined by Lazar Becker in his defection and the pair formed a tiny new grouplet calling itself the Workers Communist League. Gitlow and Becker's new organization soon merged with a group led by B.J. Field to form the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party.
  Finally, Herbert Zam split with a small following in 1934. They had argued that it was useless to continue as an "opposition" intending to reform the Communist Party, and advocated the group declare itself an independent party. When this perspective was not endorsed by the leadership Zam and his co-thinkers went into the left wing of the Socialist Party of America.
caption: Ben Gitlow, Secretary of the Communist Party Opposition from 1930–32, led a split early in 1933 over the group's unwillingness to criticize forced collectivization and its consequences in the USSR.
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