On 2010-07-30, at 12:06 PM, SA wrote:
> Also worth noting: The party's vote totals in 1928 and 1932 were 48,000 and 102,000. By comparison, in 1976 the SWP got 90,000.
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The SWP vote in 1976 and the CP vote in 1928 each represented 0.1% of ballots cast in those years, but surely you're not suggesting the two parties had the same influence on the history of the US labour movement and on national politics on the basis of the votes garnered by their presidential candidates in a year when the CPUSA was at its (pre-WWII) nadir and the SWP at the peak of its influence.
Even in 1928, after a period of steady decline in the 20's, the CPUSA, according to the radical historian Paul Buhle, still had 18,000 members and a much larger periphery of sympathizers following its direction. Most of these were working class and, as we've seen, active in the trade unions, unemployed councils, and tenants movements even during the dog days of depression between 1929-32. They were consequently well positioned to play a leading role in the explosion of labour militancy later in the decade. The SWP is estimated to have never numbered more than two thousand members, most of them students, and though they played an important role in the antiwar, womens', and other movements in the late 60's and early 70's, these were ancillary to the main workers' organizations, where the SWP was hardly present and exerted little influence.
Which is neither to indict the SWP nor celebrate the CPUSA. The two organizations, simply put, were products of different historical periods. The CPUSA, along with Norman Thomas' Socialist Party, was an American offshoot of a much larger international labour and socialist movement which had been on the march since the late 19th century. The SWP and other small socialist groupings of the recent past (including the latter day CP) have never been able to outgrow the campus milieu because there is no longer an expanding, militant labour movement to nourish them.
This appears to bring us round full circle. Recall that this extended discussion began with my supposition that there has been so little mass protest against unemployment and foreclosures during the current downturn because "there are no longer any significant left-wing organizations rooted in the working class capable of catalyzing and giving shape to sustained national protest as the CP did in such exemplary fashion in the early years of the Depression."