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Why Every Worker Should Join the Communist Party
I am a tremendous fan of political pamphlets, pamphlets of all kinds, and I’m sure you can see why. If you want to know what people actually thought and did and said in the past, the most contemporaneous records are the best. Not memoirs in which people claim, years later, to recall seeing, for instance, a future general being strong and commanding in the playground, or a future prime minister acting slimy or devious at school.
No matter how much a story like that would fit their characters.
Those claims might be interesting and even true. But they tell us very little about history. Newspapers are best, because they had a sense of disposability and urgency. Tomorrow’s fish and chip paper and all that. But pamphlets come a good second best. Political pamphlets especially. They intended to convince the reader of something. They were the product either of mature consideration or of the party line. And in any case, reading them now, even if they’re loopy, even if they’e bad, they give you context. Precious context, the thing that makes intellectual history better than speculation. Better than conjecture. Better than phoney sociology.
This pamphlet is, instantly and from the first page or so, rooted in its own time, which is either late 1929 or early 1930. How do we know that? Because the stock market has just crashed.
The crash is apt to be the beginning of something big: that’s the comment of the communist author or authors. And in a way, that claim was right. The stock market crash didn’t cause the Great Depression. But at the time, it must have felt as though the wheels were coming off. The final crisis of capitalism (ever-predicted, never arriving) had clearly come. Now was the time for revolution.
One or two things in this pamphlet appear to be understandable misreadings of reality. The first is an example of working backwards. Because hours and wages were being cut and jobs were being lost, the authors of the pamphlet, and people across the world at the time, were looking for a reason. The communist answer to all of this, at least so far as the pamphlet says, was that productivity was growing too fast. Workers were becoming more productive; thus the boss class needed fewer of them. Thus unemployment and poverty.
There is some logic to this, although it isn’t correct. In the United States, at least, quite a lot of rural poverty, for instance, was caused by deflation. Overproduction, so-called, meant that bushels of agricultural products sold for pennies and not dollars. Farmers and workers lost their jobs, lost their homes. It must have seemed too much was being made too easily. But of course, that’s not what was actually happening.
In reality, there were just not enough buyers, or rather not enough apt destinations, for what was being made. If things can actually be sold to enough willing buyers, productivity gains make everyone rich. That’s the story of the last fifty years or so, worldwide. Deflation is bad, but it’s mostly manageable.
And too much productivity growth is hardly a problem facing the rich world today, even in America.
And it’s not only economics: the pamphlet makes many claims about war. It is absolutely certain that war is coming, but not with the countries you might think. The communists predict either a war between the lickspittle nations ruled by the boss class and the Soviet Union (that one’s quite natural: although of course, as it happened, it was the Soviet Union than invaded Poland and not the other way around); or an imperialists’ war, a war fought by the United States against the British Empire.
The latter scenario is treated very seriously. The pamphlet is almost prophetic. When this war happens, it says, it will only happen against the interests and despite the protests of the working classes. The fact that every politician, every union boss, every commentator says war between Britain and America is unthinkable means precisely that they are thinking about it!
It’s only ninety odd years later that we can laugh at all of this. No doubt quite a few people took it seriously enough at the time, including the American military planners who formulated War Plan Red.
Most interesting, I think, are the sections of this pamphlet on the political purposes of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
The Communist Party is a true workers’ party, we are told. It is the only party committed to the equality of all races in America, and possibly it was. And it is the only party that is not filled with saboteurs and paid agents of the bosses. The Democrats and the Republicans (fair enough) and the Socialist Party (surely not!) are all cat’s paws of the wealthy classes. The Socialist Party, like its German equivalent and the British Labour Party, is actually engaged in social-fascism and will soon throw its lot in with the fascist boss class or collapse under the weight of its own absurdities.
As for the Communist Party, it is the only party which has internal party discipline. Where there are regular cleansings of the leadership. (The reader shudders.) Where the party’s emerging right wing and its Trotskyist opportunists are frequently booted out and thrown to the jackals.
And it is only fair, is it not, that in such a democratic party as ours, the leadership that is elected by assemblies and congresses, is given wide powers to set policy; that party discipline is maintained strictly; that every member is either an active member of the party and a fighter for its cause, or they are thrown out, too? For no one is permitted to be an inactive member. A slothful member. A member in poor standing with the party of the people.