American Communism – Gus Hall

The history of the CPUSA's greatest leader

Gus Hall, born Arvo Kustaa Halberg on the 8th of October, 1910, was a Marxist-Leninist and the General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1959 until his death on 13th of October, 2000 (Tanenhaus). Hall’s parents were Finnish immigrants involved with the IWW and early members of the CPUSA in 1919 (Matthews). Hall worked in lumber and grain industries in his youth under terrible working conditions which originally radicalized him towards socialism: “Once I was asked what made me radical. So I said, the big lumber companies and the rich grain farms in North Dakota and South Dakota. In both of those industries in those days, you worked from sun-up to sundown, for a dollar a day. And I said, that’ll make anybody radical” (Studio One interview). He dropped out of school after eighth grade to help provide for his ten-child impoverished working-class family. At the age of sixteen he was a national committee member of the Young Communist League, the youth division of the CPUSA, winning him admission into the Lenin Institute in Moscow where he studied Marxism-Leninism from Soviets directly–in 1934, he became a member of the national committee of the CPUSA (Oliver).

After his studies in Moscow, he participated in labor marches and union strikes in Minnesota where he was arrested for six months for striking with the Minneapolis Teamsters . He then went to Ohio and worked in a steel mill, going on to organize and found the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. This became the United Steelworkers of America (Barkan 147). Hall led the Little Steel strike against Republic Steel that ultimately failed, leading to Hall’s arrest yet again for allegedly transporting materials for the making of bombs intended to attack the Republic plant in Warren, Ohio. He pled guilty for misdemeanor and was fined $500 (Tanenhaus from archive). After this, Hall shifted his focus from union activities to the party. His first political campaign was in 1935 for city council in Youngstown, Ohio, on a CPUSA ticket–then ran for governor of Ohio in 1940 but lost both times (Tanenhaus). Hiis governor campaign landed him in jail yet again on fraud and forgery charges (Oliver).

The CPUSA had opposed US involvement in World War II because the USSR had signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, being themselves unprepared to fight Hitler. In 1941, Germany violated the pact and invaded Russia, and the CPUSA consequently switched to a pro-war position on that matter in particular. Gus Hall joined the United States Navy himself, working as a machinist stationed in Guam repairing motors. He was honorably discharged in 1946, at a time when factionalism was splitting the party–General Secretary Earl Browder was ousted the year before. This is when Gus was raised to the national executive board of the party by Eugene Dennis, who had replaced Browder (Tanenhaus). As a communist leader in America, Hall was put in the sights of the American state who had turned against the Soviets in the aftermath of World War II. He and eleven other CPUSA officials were indicted under the Alien Registration Act, also known as the Smith Act, for "conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence". However, the charges were based entirely on advocacy of Marxist ideas in reality. His initial sentence was five years. While the verdict was being appealed, Hall was elected national secretary of the Communist Party, the second-in-command position. He was released on bail and made an attempt to Moscow with three others but was caught in Mexico by Mexican Secret Service agents, his sentence lengthened to eight years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He was in the cell adjacent to that of George Kelly, a prohibition-era gangster. While imprisoned he distributed party leaflets and lifted weights (Tanenhaus). The Internal Security Act threatened him with arrest yet again, but this was avoided thanks to the Supreme Court finding the act unconstitutional, thereby forcing the state to abandon the charges. This was act essentially one of political dissuasion, forcing Communist organizations to register with the government and prohibiting Communist Party members from holding passports and government jobs. New York revoked Hall’s driver’s license because of the Internal Security Act. After this, he was chauffeured between his office and his home in an American-made car (Tanenhaus).

In 1959, Gus Hall was elected General Secretary of the CPUSA after gaining nationwide support against Dennis following his release from prison. He found Dennis to be a coward who had violated party discipline for not going underground with him earlier in the decade and accused him of embezzling funds reserved for these underground activities. Dennis backed down to the challenge rather than beginning another factionalist split in the party (Tanenhaus). Hall received the Order of Lenin award, the highest civilian medal in the USSR, after his election victory (Matthews). This was a time when the CPUSA was demoralized by the Red Scare they had just endured and Nikita Kruschev’s accusations against former Soviet premier Joseph Stalin of crimes against humanity. Additionally, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 drove some out of the CPUSA. Membership had dwindled to 3,000 as opposed to its peak at 66,000 in 1939, and it would never increase to such a high level since (Tanenhaus). Hall said that the political persecution of communists in the United States at the time, which ranged from FBI surveillance in the Manhattan headquarters of the party to his own inability to get a credit card under the Internal Security Act, was chiefly responsible for the Communist Party’s sharp decrease in membership (Matthews).

Hall sought to build counter-hegemony in America as Communist Party leader; his quest was to build a broad people’s movement by allying with radical student groups, anti-Vietnam War activists, civil rights movement activists, the Black Panthers, and new trade unionists. There was a split between Communists and the New Left, although Hall changed his language from revolutionary to peaceful protest and both shared positions in common: opposition to the Vietnam War, sympathies with the Cuban Revolution and Castro, and opposition to the Cold War (Tanenhaus). Through all this, Hall remained solidly loyal to the Soviet Union, even appearing on Soviet television. He denounced Eurocommunism as a liberalizing trend due to his unwavering loyalty to the Soviet project (Barkan). Hall was also a critic of the Maoist project in China. There was a conflict between Maoists and Hall’s Stalinist line, leading to Maoists being expelled from the party in the early ‘60s and called opportunists by Hall himself (MarxistHeathen). The Sino-Soviet Split, a division that emerged between the USSR and Mao’s China chiefly over the issue of the Soviet Union’s peaceful coexistence with capitalist powers at the time, had divided the worldwide communist movement. The CPUSA had chosen the USSR as their center, in spite of the fact that Kruschev had levied heavy allegations against Stalin and “de-Stalinized” the country. Hall defended the USSR’s invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, which Mao and Maoists criticized as social imperialism. From the Maoist perspective, the push of the CPUSA to electoralism was a part of the Kruschevite move against revolutionary change and a form of revisionism, making the working class movement impotent (EROL). Hall remained critical of Mao and Chinese Communism throughout his career. Hall was a staunch defender of the policies and political line of the Soviet Union during his time as General Secretary, making trips to Moscow each year and meeting with Leonid Brezhnev, for example. This is perhaps in part due to the fact that, in spite of Hall’s insistence that the CPUSA was entirely self-made, the Moscow daily Izvestia reported that Hall had receive forty million dollars in assistance from the Soviet state between 1971 and 1990 in 1992 (Tanenhaus).

Hall’s CPUSA supported Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 on the grounds that Barry Goldwater could not be allowed a victory (Kneffel). However, in 1972 the CPUSA withdrew support for the Democratic Party and ran Hall in the general election alongside Jarvis Tyner. He would run with Tyner again in 1976, then with Angela Davis in 1980 and 1984 against Reagan. He gained the most votes in 1976, partially because of many voters casting protest votes due to the Watergate scandal. He never gained even 1% of the vote, peaking then at 0.07% (Leip). The CPUSA stopped running in general elections after Hall’s failures without renewing support of the Democratic Party until much later. In 1980, Morris Childs, Hall’s deputy head of the CPUSA, was revealed to have been an FBI informant. The FBI called him and his brother, Jack, the “most fruitful CPUSA informants” they had ever recruited. This was part of a program called TOPLEV that began in the 1950s in which agents secretly gathered information from mid-rank and high-rank members of the CPUSA (Klehr and Haynes).

Gus Hall severed ties with Russia upon the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, denouncing Yeltsin and Gorbachev as a “wrecking crew” who had demolished the basis of socialism (Matthews). He endorsed North Korea at this point instead, as it was a last bastion of Stalinist socialism in one country: “The world should see what North Korea has done. In some ways, it’s a miracle… If you want to take a nice vacation, take it in North Korea” (Tanenhaus). Angela Davis, Hall’s former running mate, was purged from the party along with other critics of the direction in which Hall was leading things, going on to begin a new group called Committees for Correspondence of Democracy and Socialism with these fellow purged members (National Archives).

The Communist Party of the USA would go on to become a capitulating shadow of its former self, evermore minor and impotent against the existing state since Hall’s death of diabetes complications in 2000. Today, the CPUSA endorses the Democratic Party full-throatedly, siding staunchly with Joe Biden against Donald Trump in 2020, for example. They have morphed into a Bernsteinite revisionist party with little aims beyond reformism and taking little action to organize the working class and build counter-hegemony against the American state, or even to run their own candidates anywhere besides small local elections rather rarely. Gus Hall came from a working-class background and lived the class struggle firsthand, which is why the CPUSA respected him so deeply during his tenure as General Secretary. He was in an impossible situation in many ways, however, with federal agents spying on and infiltrating his party, the American government harassing and penalizing he and his activists, and the global communist movement splitting so harshly in the midst of his term, not to mention the challenges that any third party faces in winning an election in the presently existing American system. Hall and the CPUSA under his leadership were in a strange position in the global communist movement at the time, allegedly being directly financially supported by the USSR and thereby posed against Mao’s China. The New Left’s conflicts with the CPUSA ultimately led to a New Left victory; Hall’s views on the fundamentality of class, while remaining anti-racist and anti-imperialist (by extension of class, obviously) were in a sense politically outmoded by a burgeoning new movement that focused primarily on sexuality, gender, and ecology. Even deeper in this split is the ontological views, the New Left essentially taking Western individualism for granted and the Communists remaining loyal to a dialectical materialist view. Ultimately, Gus Hall failed, and the world is worse off for it, in spite of what could be viewed as his mistakes in regards to the Sino-Soviet split.

Hall’s unwavering support of the Soviet Union cannot be reduced to its constituent elements of his own personal love for the country and his party having been reportedly funded by the Soviet state. To delve into the specifics of Hall’s Communist Party USA taking the Soviet side to the end, even at the expense of Mao’s China in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split, we must investigate Hall’s own writings on the topic. In his 1970 paper, “Crisis of Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism”, Hall has inflammatory things to say about communism in China, particularly about the cultural revolution and Mao’s thought itself.

“A special brand of petty-bourgeois radicalism made deep inroads and influenced the policies of the leading cadre of the Communist Party of China. Throughout its history the Maoist influence has been a petty-bourgeois radical influence. In its basic essence the cultural revolution was propelled by a mass petty-bourgeois radical sweep. This is a special brand of petty-bourgeois radicalism because it takes place in a country that is building socialism. It is a special brand because the leading core of the leadership used it as an instrument in the struggle to stay in power. It is a special brand because in China it was woven into a pattern with bourgeois nationalism. Mao’s policies have always been and are today based on mobilizing the non-working class sections. It was the destruction of the organizations and politics based on the working class that were the main objectives of the cultural revolution” (Hall).

Hall makes these claims about Chinese communism without corroborating them at all. They are essentially baseless accusations. Hall did not have the same finger on the pulse, so to speak, when it came to communism in China as he did when it came to the working class movement in America, his own country. To go into further detail on what petit-bourgeois radicalism is, Hall describes it as an attempt to “by-pass reality. They [petit-bourgeois radicals believe they can avoid the necessary and unavoidable consistent and sustained work, the work of organizing, educating, mobilizing and leading people in mass, of leading people on the level of their understanding, of their own self-interest, and in this sense reflecting the objective processes leading to a revolutionary struggle against capitalism” (Hall). However, the cultural revolution was a mass movement, part of the movement of the revolutionary masses in China, not a separation or retreat from it. It was precisely part of the objective process of revolution that Gus Hall purports Marxism-Leninism to be.

Hall was most likely concerned with petit-bourgeois radicalism because he came out of the context of the American working class movement, and America is rife with petit-bourgeois radicalism of all stripes. Those who call themselves Maoists in America today, who reject actually existing socialism in modern China and uphold the already failed cause of Chairman Gonzalo in Peru for example, would accurately be called petit-bourgeois radicals as they have retreated to a position that rests against the real revolutionary worldwide communist movement and essentially pushed themselves away from the masses in their own country. This especially applies to those who consider the majority of Americans to be “settlers” or those who completely give up on the cause of revolution in the first world and thereby cede class struggle to the imperialist state that rules over them. It does not apply to Maoist China, however, who in the end were proven right by history in the Sino-Soviet split.

It rings with a certain tragic irony that Mao saw what was happening to the Soviet Union before Gus Hall ever did; Hall only saw the problem once it had already culminated in the full dissolution of the first worker’s state in 1991. Hall said that a portion of those radicals whose efforts fail retreat to a position of opportunism (Hall). Mao considered revisionism to be a form of opportunism, and one that Marxism-Leninism must struggle against within the Communist Parties of the world–he saw this struggle as having played out in the Soviet Union, and Kruschev’s revisionist clique, as he called them, having won the struggle. History proves this to be true, as the Soviet Union dissolved thirty years later, and China is still ruled by a Communist Party today. “The revisionist Khrushchov clique abolish the dictatorship of the proletariat behind the camouflage of the "state of the whole people", change the proletarian character of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union behind the camouflage of the "party of the entire people" and pave the way for the restoration of capitalism behind that of "full-scale communist construction"” (Mao). The restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union is precisely what proceeded to happen; Mao saw this occurring in reality and Hall, in his blind reverence of and loyalty to the Soviet state, did not. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the key issue here. Kruschev abolished the dictatorship of the proletariat after denouncing Stalin, announcing a “state of the whole people” in its place; but there can be no “state of the whole people” for a Marxist, as the state is only an organ of class power, and so this is revisionism. Mao said that what actually occurred was the seizure of power by Kruschev and his revisionist clique, who had represented the resurgence of bourgeois interests within Soviet society, both neo-kulaks and bureaucratic elements, which is perfectly plausible as class struggle continues through the process of any revolution into communism (Mao). Communism is not an ideal that communist impose or seek to “move closer to”; such thinking is antithetical to the dialectical materialist understanding of history and change in reality. Communism is the revolutionary process itself. Hall even recognized this himself: “Marxism-Leninism is not in a crisis. It is the growing, the most consistent revolutionary current. It is not in a crisis because it reflects and is changing reality. It is the revolutionary current” (Hall). Rather, he recognized what communism is, but did not recognize where it was occurring–the torch of the revolution movement of Marxism-Leninism had already passed to China by 1970. And so, in siding with the bourgeois elements still existing within Soviet society, ideologically ignoring this still existing class struggle and abandoning the dictatorship of the proletariat position, Kruschev and his revisionist clique represented a more authentic form of petit-bourgeois radicalism than Mao did at the time. “On the pretext of "combating the personality cult", Khrushchov has defamed the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist system and thus in fact paved the way for the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. In completely negating Stalin, he has in fact negated Marxism-Leninism which was upheld by Stalin and opened the floodgates for the revisionist deluge” (Mao). Gus Hall did not see this, in his blind loyalty to the Soviet state, until it was already too late and the state he so loved was dissolved.

Ultimately, the story of Gus Hall is a tragic one, made more so when one zooms in on the context of his tenure as General Secretary of the Communist Party USA in the global communist movement. Kruschev’s revisionist takeover, the Sino-Soviet split, the subsequent divisions, and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union are all world-historical tragedies for communists. For American communists in particular, the fact that Gus Hall, the last leader who represented an authentic Marxism-Leninism in the Communist Party USA did not take the correct position in relation to these world-historical events until they had already occurred is even more tragic, in addition to the fact that he had ultimately failed. Hall’s devotion to the Soviet state may have been blind and led him to be ignorant to its own inner flaws until they had destroyed it entirely, but there is a tragic beauty to it, especially coming from someone so all-American. This kind of love for a state that so many Americans considered to be a dangerous enemy at the time (and even today, when it comes to Russia) has always been rare, even if it was ultimately an overcorrection of perspective. Despite these limits of his understanding, he was an admirable figure in our history as American communists and much can be learned from his failures.

(originally completed on May 4, 2023)

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