861.00 Congress, Communist International, VII/46: Telegram
The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Bullitt) to the Secretary of State
[Received 12:22 p.m.]
350. Pravda of August 15, 1935, reports the following speech by the American delegate Browder at the morning session of August 11, of the Congress of the Communist International.
“The speech of Comrade Dimitrov gives a clear answer to all of the principal questions which stand before the working class and the toiling masses. Our line is winning over wide support of the masses and will serve to join together the working class, will hasten the creation of a wide popular front against reaction and Fascism. Our Party has already laid the foundations for this policy leaning on those traditions of the mass movement which have existed among the American workers since 1920.
Considering that in the period from 1929 to 1934 there was no mass departure from the two principal capitalist parties, we did not pose the question of the foundation of a wide workers party. We developed mass work on the basis of special questions, wages, the working day, the rights of the workers and unemployment insurance.
But in 1934 particularly in the period of the elections it became clear to us that it was necessary to reexamine this question. The wide masses—hundreds of thousands and even millions—began to move. They began to break away from the old bourgeois leaders and programs.
After the elections we posed the question of the creation of a workers party. In January of this year we began a wide campaign for the creation of such a party. However in our politics there soon were disclosed errors—the result of sectarian remnants and prejudices. The thing was that we understood the workers party only as a proletarian party although this was a contradiction to our practical proposition to include in it the farmers and all toilers. This served to obscure the character of this kind of party of the united front as an extended coalition of workers, farmers and the middle classes of the city.
A too narrow understanding of the party of the united front led to the fact that we categorically renounced the name of the ‘farm labor party’, although this name was already an established tradition particularly in the agrarian northwest. Moreover the movement of the poor and middle [groups of] farmers masses, their struggle against [Page 240] poverty which had overwhelmed them as a result of the crisis, their hatred of the general enemy—Wall Street and the monopolists—all these were factors assisting in the creation of a party of the united front. We have no foundation for refusing the name ‘Farm Labor Party’, a name which will help to create a union of the working class with the farmers movement.
We do not deceive ourselves with illusions; we know that before us in the immediate future there stands a severe struggle for the creation of a party of the united front. We know that the bourgeoisie, the crest of the bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor, the Right Socialists, many liberal bourgeois politicians, not to speak of Hearst, Coughlin and Long, are doing everything possible to separate the Communists from the movement of the masses toward the united front. However the growing wave of strikes, the more and more pronounced political character of these battles, the growing tendency toward solidarity, the breakup of illusions connected with the ‘New Deal’ et cetera—all this shows that the millions of workers who are working are already ripe for such a movement. In the United States there are ripening the conditions for a wide anti-Fascist popular movement, the central nucleus of which will be the party of the united front.
A favorable attitude toward the Communists and a growing hatred toward Fascism is also noticeable among the farmers organizations. This caused one of the principal reformist leaders, Milo Reno, on the 25th of July [June] to make the following significant declaration: ‘I say frankly that if I will be obliged to make a choice between the Fascist dictatorship or the Communist idea, that is the idea of the destruction of the old system for the purpose of building the new, I will lean to the latter.’
For the success of the party of the united front as a solid coalition of workers, farmers and the middle strata of the city, of the party carrying on the struggle against the threatening economic catastrophe, political reaction, Fascism and the danger of war, it is necessary all the more energetically to fight for the unity of the working class. The central problem of the unity of the working class is the creation of a powerful united labor union movement. I would like to emphasize [that] the decisive question for the creation of such a party of the united front is the support of the party of the organized workers.
The development of the movement for unity of the labor unions became possible thanks to the powerful impetus of the workers movement, to the significant changes in the composition of the members of the American Federation of Labor, the worsening of the situation of the workers under the blows of the crisis, and thanks to the growing radicalization of the native American workers.
As a result a significant number of lower and middle labor union functionaries, who formerly constituted the backbone of the labor union bureacracy now reflecting the radicalization of the working class, are beginning to turn toward the masses of semi-skilled and unskilled workers. They are beginning to move toward unity and solidarity of the workers. We know a number of facts, when the lower and middle labor union workers who not long ago demanded the exclusion of Communists from the labor unions, are now becoming our open adherents [Page 241] in the serious struggles with the top bureaucracy and the entrepreneurs.
As a result of the improvement in the work in the labor unions the Communists have moved forward not only as the leading fighters for unity but as the most energetic recruiters of the unorganized workers in the American Federation of Labor.
It is necessary to pose the question concerning the organizational union into one party of all partisans of Socialism. It is necessary to consider with the Socialist workers the conditions of such unity and the means with which it will be able to achieve this.
In all our differences of opinion in connection with the road to Socialism we will pronounce the slogan of unity of action of all adherents of Socialism, unity of struggle for the immediate interests of the toiling masses, for the defense of democratic rights and the means of stopping the growing Fascism. We place this slogan in opposition to the slogan of those Socialist leaders who call for a united front with the obvious adherents of capitalism.
We will explain to the members of the Socialist Party that, without renouncing our principal position in the question of the road to be taken toward power or the construction of Socialism, we at the present moment do not stipulate that the united front is the absolute recognition by the Socialists of the principle of the proletarian dictatorship and the Soviet power.
We propose to create a coalition of all anti-Fascist forces in order to prevent the advance to power of the more reactionary, more predatory circles of monopolist capital in order not to permit the extension to America of the wave of Fascist reaction, in order to deliver the American laboring masses from a repetition of those horrors and atrocities, from53 the victim of which has been the masses of the population of Germany”.
- According to the original printed in Pravda, August 15, 1935, the word “from” should be omitted from the text.↩