MIM Notes # 222       Nov 15, 2000

Gus Hall dies, forever enshrined as phony communist leader

Gus Hall was one of us as a young man. By the time of his 
death on October 13th, his life served as a microcosm of what 
is wrong in the imperialist country communist movement. He had 
been the leader of the phony "Communist Party USA" ("CP-USA") 
for over 40 years.

As a lumberjack and steel worker, already by 1926 Gus Hall was 
a worker and a member of the Communist Party. At that time, 
Amerikan workers were yet to reach the unionization and labor 
aristocratic privilege to come after World War II. Yet even in 
1926, there was a serious split in the working-class and it 
was questionable whether there was really any white 
proletariat.

In Hall's early 20s, Joseph Stalin gave him the chance to 
study in the Lenin Institute from 1931 to 1933. From 1942 to 
1946 he served in the U.S. Navy. In 1949, the U.S. Government 
convicted him on McCarthy era charges and he spent the 1950s 
in prison, 8 and a half years.(1)

Had Gus Hall died in prison, MIM would have had to say he was 
a model proletarian. Unfortunately, we can only say that Gus 
Hall's life as a young man was only training for the death of 
Stalin in 1953, and that was a once-in-a-lifetime test that 
Gus Hall failed and continued to fail for the next 47 years of 
his 90 year life. 

History teaches us that the death of proletarian leaders tests 
the communist movement. When Lenin died, Stalin, Kirov, 
Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were able to fill in, at least 
for a while. Yet when Stalin died, in the Soviet Union and the 
United States both there were war-tested comrades with 
extensive experience but no scientific depth necessary for 
proletarian leadership. 

It would seem on the surface that in Gus Hall, we could not 
ask for better material. Here is someone from the productive 
sector of the working-class. He fought fascism in World War II 
and served federal prison time in Leavenworth for his 
struggle. Yet Gus Hall's stints in jail, prison and combat 
only proved more clearly the need for scientific credentials 
in the leadership of the party. It is not enough to appear to 
have commitment. When Stalin died, Hall proved to be useless 
in the struggle, except as a negative example.

Once out of prison, Gus Hall ran for leadership of the whole 
party. After some minor league struggle, the incumbent stepped 
aside and Gus Hall took up leadership, joining in the 
denunciations of Stalin and basking in the approval of the 
state-capitalists in the Soviet Union under Khruschev and 
Brezhnev. A few years after taking power in the phony "CP-
USA," Hall kicked out some Maoists who formed the Progressive 
Labor Party, which itself later abandoned its Maoism, even 
before Mao died. Even so, in a few brief years in the 1960s, 
Progressive Labor Party accomplished more than the phony "CP-
USA" did from 1959 to 2000.

As the 1960s wore on, the millions of revolutionaries already 
perceived Gus Hall as old. His politics were old and with 
little relevance to the revolutionary upsurge best exemplified 
by Mao's rising prestige.

In 1976, Gus Hall received the most votes he ever received for 
U.S. President --  just under 60,000. He ran for president 
four times. Today, however, his party attacks those who 
attempt to run independently from the Democrats.

To the public, the so-called CP-USA represents itself as 
wanting "bill of rights socialism." Ideologically, there are 
few differences between the "CP-USA" and the Democratic 
Socialists of America(DSA) with both working with the 
Democratic Party. The "CP-USA" is pro-Russian in foreign 
policy and slightly more united strategically than the DSA.

Just before he died, Hall was more aligned with Al Gore and 
trying to make the Greens -- various reformist and radical 
petty-bourgeois forces -- look ultraleft. An article by Denise 
Weinbrenner in the most recent phony "CP-USA" newspaper 
attacks Ralph Nader, while the other articles defend Gore and 
attack Bush.(2) The same was the tactic of previous issues of 
the so-called CP-USA paper  -- a fact that shows that the 
phony "CP-USA" has fully joined its social-democratic European 
brethren, where it is possible for so-called "communists" to 
be outflanked on the "left" by social-democrats or watery 
Greens. By this we mean that the phony communists work for the 
mainstream imperialist parties while attacking others with at 
least a pretense of independence from the imperialist parties.

While MIM criticizes the Greens for their militarism and 
chauvinist patriotism, MIM would not criticize them for 
criticizing Al Gore. Patricia Ireland of the National 
Organization of Women is also criticizing Nader on behalf of 
Al Gore.

To speak of his motivations, we must point out that Gus Hall 
received a party stipend. His treasurer responsible for 
connections to the Soviet Union was an FBI agent, according to 
the book titled "The Sword and the Shield," but he received 
money for simply staying the course and not raising a ruckus 
over ideological questions.(3)

In retrospect, Gus Hall decided he did not like Gorbachev. 
That's not surprising, since Gorbachev effectively caused 
Hall's beloved Soviet Union to fall apart and his stipend to 
end. How a bourgeoisie arose in the Soviet Union and seized 
power, Gus Hall has no theoretical explanation. He only whines 
after the fact. He showed no foresight on this issue, but that 
is not surprising, because he came to power on an anti-theory 
platform and opposing Stalin. In contrast, we at MIM were 
distributing literature on the nature of the cyclical 
capitalist crises already engulfing the Soviet Union in the 
1980s and we were promoting Mao's theories on the bourgeoisie 
in the party while Gus Hall was making it as difficult as 
possible for MIM to be heard. Although MIM members cannot say 
they went to Stalin's schools to learn explosives and 
dialectics like Gus Hall did, MIM members showed more 
foresight in the 1980s as soon as MIM formed than Gus Hall 
ever showed once Stalin died. Experience, credentials, 
prestige, seniority, seven-digit annual budgets, even 
commitment  -- none of these are worth a wooden nickel without 
the correct scientific direction. It is completely possible to 
have all the trappings of a communist movement without having 
its substance: Gus Hall wasted the energies of thousands of 
people in the United $tates and abroad in following phony 
Soviet communists. His voice contributed to the detour of the 
international proletariat that added to the blood that will 
have to be spilled to reach communism.

In recent years, Gus Hall was aware that he might be said to 
have made some error on the Soviet Union, but he never made 
thorough self-criticism to return to the road of Lenin, Stalin 
and Mao. We believe he instructed his party to be more 
friendly to Maoists. He definitely instructed his party to 
focus more on productive sector workers, people in 
manufacturing and mining for instance. His senior colleague 
Victor Perlo entertained the scientific substance of MIM's 
third cardinal and proceeded to present his own calculations 
regarding surplus-labor extracted from abroad and surplus-
value present in the U.$. economy. We have to the give the old 
"CP-USA" leaders that much credit, but still on the whole they 
wasted the energies of many activists on fighting for petty-
bourgeois salary increases that only contributed to the 
political stabilization of Amerika.

Hanging over the heads of the senior so-called CP-USA members 
is the problem that officials of the ex-Soviet Union are 
selling their story in biographies and memoirs which can lead 
to prosecution. As the senior members of the so-called CP-USA 
die off, their prosecution for ties to the Soviet Union 
becomes less and less likely. Although various fools and 
conscious liars denied it in the 1980s, the "CP-USA" received 
vast aid from the Soviet Union and was little able to run as 
an organization without it. One estimate says $40 million from 
1971 to 1990.(5) Ever angling for easy sources of support, and 
willing to sacrifice public appearances to do so, perhaps the 
"CP-USA" has some corrupt deal with the Democratic Party to 
support it against Nader. In contrast, MIM would never make a 
temporary alliance of the sort that compromised its ability to 
address basic issues. Our principal task mentions creating 
public opinion, so we are not going to be trading in our 
ability to do that for something else. MIM finds little reason 
to tailor what it is saying. Alliances should form on other 
bases in order to maximize the proletarian consciousness-
raising that the party can do.

We have to say that we wish Gus Hall had died sooner or lived 
longer and conducted thorough self-criticism of the past. We 
still wish the senior "CP-USA" and other former Brezhnev-
lovers would review what they did and focus on that and how 
Gorbachev was possible as well. To the remainder of the "CP-
USA," MIM says, "Hang it up!" The "CP-USA" is profoundly off 
on questions of the labor theory of value, the law of value 
and the bourgeoisie in the party. These are deep questions 
that the "CP-USA" has not dealt with in a proletarian way for 
a long time, and so it is not surprising to find that the "CP-
USA" has no proletarian compass. It's not worth perfuming the 
rotting corpse of the "CP-USA" for historical reasons. The 
good things about Paul Robeson, Foster, DuBois etc. can only 
be saved by jettisoning what the "CP-USA" has become.

Notes:

1. http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/10/16/obit.hall.ap/

2. http://www.cpusa.org/articles/Look%20past%20mudslinging.htm

3. See reviews in MIM Notes 205, 206, and 210.

4. New York Times 16Oct2000 Internet edition,  
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/16/nyregion/17CND-HALL.html 
also, 17Oct2000 
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/17/national/17HALL.html

5. For another article by MIM on a similar topic, see 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/wyl/cpu
sa.txt