MAKING THE REVOLUTION--MAYBE...DERADICALIZATION AND STALINISM IN THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY, 1928-1938.
Item
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Title
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MAKING THE REVOLUTION--MAYBE...DERADICALIZATION AND STALINISM IN THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY, 1928-1938.
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Identifier
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AAI8401938
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identifier
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8401938
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Creator
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KLING, JOSEPH MILTON.
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Contributor
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Robert Engler
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Date
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1983
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Political Science, General | History, United States
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Abstract
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The specific aim of this dissertation is to resolve the question of whether the American Communist party, at some point during the nineteen-thirties, became a reformist, or 'deradicalized' political movement. The method of the study will be to develop and systematically apply a model of radicalism to the behavior of the Party from 1928 to 1938. My conclusion is that, by the criteria of the suggested model, the Party, after the re-election of Roosevelt in 1936, did, indeed, become deradicalized.;The methodology is two-fold. First, working within the Marxist tradition, a model is proposed of a set of ideas which might reasonably be said to govern the behavior of a contemporary radical movement. The sources of the paradigm are seminal analysts and critics of the concept of radicalism, ranging from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Gramsci on the one hand, to Eduard Bernstein and Roberto Michels on the other.;The basic premise of the analysis is that radicalism is defined by the extent to which an oppositionist movement explicitly projects a class-conflict theory of society and politics as background to its day-to-day activities. Such open and conscious projection of radical ideas I refer to as 'ideological struggle'. On the simplest level, what I mean by ideological struggle is the public expression and open statement of radical assumptions and values as the context of immediate political choice. It follows that a radical movement may limit its immediate practice to support for programs of reform. It may not, however, withdraw from public view the concepts which place it into opposition to capitalism in the first place.;The second part of the methodology involves applying the suggested definition of radical practice to the American Communists in the 1930's. I will argue that if the Party became deradicalized, this was not because it gave support to legislative reform, or postponed the demand for socialism. It was because the Communists refused to ground their immediate strategies in a larger program of ideological articulation outside the formal New Deal coalition.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Political Science
