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The history of the Communist Party USA is deeply rooted in the history of the American labor movement. Communists played critical roles in the earliest struggles to organize American workers into unions, as well as the later civil rights movements and anti-war movements. However, many Communists were forced to work covertly due to the high level of political repression in the United States against Communists, whom were targeted for legal retaliation and in some areas state-supported terrorism and lynchings. According to Gus Hall, who served as the General Secretary of the party for most of the later 20th Century, Communists' scientific understanding of the nature of class struggle enables them to be the most effective organizers, a benefit he called the "Communist plus". When Communists were expelled from the AFL-CIO in 1948, organized labor's influence on economic and political development stagnated and later plummeted. The Communist Party greatly suffered under the ensuing period of McCarthyism, in which the US government openly carried out mass repression against Communists and simultaneously ran a nationalist propaganda campaign fueling the Cold War against the Soviet Union which would dominate US foreign policy for the rest of the century. After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the US government ended its espionage and police violence against the party but the party went through another split over differences in adapting to the post-Soviet period. The party began to recover its influence in the anti-war efforts against the invasion of Iraq and has continued to grow through the Occupy movement. ==Formation and early history (1919–1921)== The first U.S. socialist political party was the Socialist Labor Party, formed in 1876 and for many years a viable force in the international socialist movement. By the mid-1890s, however, the SLP came under the influence of Daniel De Leon, and his radical views led to widespread discontent amongst the members, leading to the formation of the reformist-oriented Socialist Party of America around the turn of the 20th century. A left wing gradually emerged within the SP, much to the consternation of many Party leaders. In January 1919, Vladimir Lenin invited the left wing of the Socialist Party of America to join Comintern. During the spring of 1919 the Left Wing Caucus of the Socialist Party, buoyed by a large influx of new members from countries involved in the Russian Revolution, prepared to wrest control from the smaller controlling faction of moderate socialists. A referendum to join Comintern passed with 90% support, but the incumbent leadership suppressed the results. Elections for the party's National Executive Committee resulted in 12 leftists being elected out of a total of 15. Calls were made to expel moderates from the party. The moderate incumbents struck back by expelling several state organizations, half a dozen language federations, and many locals, in all two-thirds of the membership. The Socialist Party then called an emergency convention on August 30, 1919. The party's Left Wing Caucus made plans at a June conference of its own to regain control of the party, by sending delegations from the sections of the party that had been expelled to the convention to demand that they be seated. However, the language federations, eventually joined by C. E. Ruthenberg and Louis C. Fraina, turned away from that effort and formed their own party, the Communist Party of America, at a separate convention on September 1, 1919. Meanwhile, plans led by John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow to crash the Socialist Party convention went ahead. Tipped off, the incumbents called the police, who obligingly expelled the leftists from the hall. The remaining leftist delegates walked out and, meeting with the expelled delegates, formed the Communist Labor Party on August 30, 1919.〔 The Comintern was not happy with two communist parties and in January 1920 dispatched an order that the two parties, which consisted of about 12,000 members, merge under the name United Communist Party, and to follow the party line established in Moscow. Part of the Communist Party of America under the leadership of Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone did this but a faction under the leadership of Nicholas I. Hourwich and Alexander Bittelman continued to operate independently as the Communist Party of America. A more strongly worded directive from the Comintern eventually did the trick and the parties were merged in May 1921. Only five percent of the members of the newly formed party were native English-speakers. Many of the members came from the ranks of the Industrial Workers of the World.〔Buhle, ''Marxism in the USA: From 1870 to the Present Day'' (1987)〕〔Fraser M. Ottanelli, ''The Communist party of the United States: from the depression to World War II'' (1991) p. 10〕 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「History of the Communist Party USA」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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