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The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a communist political party in the United States. It is the largest communist party in the country. Established in 1919, it has a long, complex history that is closely related to the U.S. labor movement and the histories of similar communist parties worldwide. For the first half of the 20th century, the Communist Party was a highly influential force in various struggles for democratic rights. It played a 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 use the McCarran Internal Security Act to expel their Communist members) 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〔She mentions James Barrett, Maurice Isserman, Robin D. G. Kelley, Randi Storch, and Kate Weigand〕 offer "a more 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".〔Ellen Schrecker, "Soviet Espionage in America: An Oft-Told tale", ''Reviews in American History'', Volume 38, Number 2, June 2010 p. 359. Schrecker goes on to explore ''why'' the Left dared to spy.〕 By August 1919, only months after its founding, the Communist Party claimed 50,000 to 60,000 members. Members also included anarchists and other radical leftists. At the time, the older and more moderate Socialist Party of America, suffering from criminal prosecutions for its antiwar stance during World War I, had declined to 40,000 members. The sections of the Communist Party's International Workers Order 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. But the Communist Party's early labor and organizing successes did not last. As the decades progressed, the combined effects of the second Red Scare, McCarthyism, Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech denouncing the previous decades of Joseph Stalin's rule, and the adversities of the continued Cold War mentality, steadily weakened the Party's internal structure and confidence. The Party's membership in the Comintern and its close adherence to the political positions of the Soviet Union made the party appear to most Americans as not only a threatening, subversive domestic entity, but also as a foreign agent fundamentally alien to the American way of life. Internal and external crises swirled together, to the point where members who did not end up in prison for party activities tended either to disappear quietly from its ranks or to adopt more moderate political positions at odds with the Communists' party line. By 1957, membership had dwindled to less than 10,000, of whom some 1,500 were informants for the FBI.〔Gentry, Kurt, ''J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets''. W. W. Norton & Company 1991. P. 442. ISBN 0-393-02404-0.〕 The party attempted to recover with its opposition to the Vietnam War during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but its continued uncritical support for an increasingly stultified and militaristic Soviet Union increasingly alienated them from the rest of left-wing America, which saw this supportive role as outdated and even dangerous. At the same time, the party's aging membership demographics and noticeably hollow calls for "peaceful coexistence" failed to speak to a new Left in the United States. With the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and his effort to radically alter the Soviet economic and political system from the mid-1980s, the Communist Party finally became estranged from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself. In 1989, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union cut off major funding to the CPUSA due to its opposition to glasnost and perestroika. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party held its convention and attempted to resolve the issue of whether the Party should reject Marxism-Leninism. The majority reasserted the party's now purely Marxist outlook, prompting a minority faction which urged social democrats to exit the now reduced party. The party has since adopted Marxism-Leninism within its program,〔 In 2014, the new draft of the party constitution declared: "We apply the scientific outlook developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others in the context of our American history, culture and traditions."〔(New CPUSA Constitution (final draft) )〕 The Communist Party USA is based in New York City. For decades, its West Coast newspaper was the ''People's World'', and its East Coast newspaper was ''The Daily World.''〔''Yates v. United States'', 354 U.S. 298 (1957) http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0354_0298_ZD.html〕 The two newspapers merged in 1986 into the ''People's Weekly World''. The PWW has since become an online only publication, called People's World. The party's former theoretical journal, Political Affairs Magazine, is now also published exclusively online, but the party still maintains International Publishers as its publishing house. In June 2014, the Party held its 30th National Convention in Chicago.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://peoplesworld.org/opening-of-the-communist-party-s-30th-national-convention/ )〕 ==History== 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Communist Party USA」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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