Saturday, April 16, 2011

Communist Party USA

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States, established in 1919. As the chief official communist party in the USA for most of the 20th century, it has a long, complex history that is often inter-layered with the simultaneous histories of similar communist parties worldwide, as well as with the U.S. labor movement generally.
For the first half of the 20th century, the CPUSA was the largest and most influential communist party in its country. It played a very prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in founding most of the country's first industrial unions (which would later expel communists by adopting the Smith Act) while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of U.S. racial segregation. Historian Ellen Schrecker concludes that decades of recent scholarship[1] offers a "nuanced portrayal of the party as both a Stalinist sect tied to a vicious regime and the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and '40s".[2] In regards to the former charge, the CPUSA, claiming proletarian internationalism (while the U.S. Government called it espionage), sponsored an elaborate intelligence network on behalf of the Soviet Union, involving over 500 members acting as agents. The most prominent example dealt with the Manhattan Project in which the network was accused in giving the blueprints of the atomic bomb to the Soviets; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were thereafter convicted and jailed as the chief architects of this plan. Later evidence proved that the Rosenbergs did not have the plans but the use of fear of Communism and its spread, helped to render a guilty verdict.{{http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/weekinreview/nation-rosenbergs-50-years-later-yes-they-were-guilty-but-what-exactly.html?ref=juliusrosenberg}
By August 1919, only months after its founding, the CPUSA had 60,000 members, including anarchists and other radical leftists, while the more moderate Socialist Party of America had only 40,000 members. The sections of the CP's International Workers Order meanwhile organized for communism around linguistic and ethnic lines, providing mutual aid and tailored cultural activities to an IWO membership that peaked at 200,000 at its height.

Sumber: Wikipedia

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