Mr. MOULDER. The committee will be in order.
Is Mr. Jerry O’Connell in the hearing room?
(There was no response.)
Mr. MOULDER. Will the officer standing at the door call for
Jerry O’Connell in the corridor.
(There was no response.)
Mr. MOULDER. Proceed, Mr. Tavenner.
TESTIMONY OF EUGENE VICTOR DENNETT, ACCOMPANIED BY HIS COUNSEL, KENNETH
A. MacDONALD--Resumed
Mr. TAVENNER. Mr. Dennett, you were describing to the
committee the formation of the unemployed councils in Bellingham and
the success which the Communist Party had in having its members become
members of that organization. You also described for us in a general
way the extent of influence that the Communist Party had in those
organizations, in those councils, by reason of having its own members
become members of the councils.
I ask you why the Communist Party was interested, and why it made a
fight to get its own members into these unemployed councils. What was
the purpose of it?
Mr. DENNETT. Our purpose was at that time to find some way of
prevailing upon the unemployed organizations to adopt a program we were
advocating.
At that particular time it consisted mainly in fighting for the
adopting of the slogan of demanding unemployment insurance. And I think
that that is a point which must be remembered by everyone.
Many people accept unemployment insurance today as a principle, but
they don’t know that its origin in the United States, at least, came
because the Communists seized upon that as a means of winning the
support of the masses of unemployed people.
And any ordinary person should have known in that period, if you look
back from now, they should have known that that was a necessary step to
be taken. But at that time the resistance to it was terrific.
Mr. TAVENNER. Are you saying it was the desire of the
Communist Party, by these methods, to win support of the masses?
Mr. DENNETT. Correct.
Mr. TAVENNER. To win support in what way?
Mr. DENNETT. To win them to an interest--I should say, first,
an interest in the Communist Party; then to lead them along the path of
struggling against the capitalist system which would ultimately, they
hoped, result in the replacement of the capitalist organization of a
Soviet form of society.
Mr. TAVENNER. Would you say that the Communist Party made that
type of effort in almost every form of our society?
Mr. DENNETT. Well, the leaders were held responsible to see to
it that they did make such an effort. It wasn’t so easy to do so among
the ranks of the members who didn’t hold any official position, but any
person who held an official position, such as a unit organizer or a
section organizer or an agitprop director or a trade-union organizer or
a fraction secretary, in any of those positions a person was expected
to carry the Communist Party line. If he didn’t, he was certainly
subject to discipline.
Mr. TAVENNER. The committee from time to time has heard a
great deal of evidence about the organization of Communist Party cells
or branches or units which have been variously termed neighborhood
groups and street groups. There has been an effort made in some
instances to make it appear that such groups had very little part to
play or very little function in the overall picture and purposes of the
Communist Party, although they testified that in the instances where
Communist Party branches were organized within factories and within
industry generally that they had a more definite purpose.
Will you tell the committee about the formation of neighborhood groups
of the Communist Party, or what we call sometimes street groups, and
explain what part those organizations played in the overall Communist
Party program?
Mr. DENNETT. Well, first of all, it is necessary to understand
one principle of organization that the Communist Party adopted, and
that is, that the form of the organization had to satisfy a need, and
that the form itself was subordinate, the form was not the principal
question.
The principal question was the function that they were to serve.
So the Communist Party adopted a very flexible attitude on this.
In some of the early Communist Party literature it refers almost
exclusively to Communist cells. And cells are generally thought of
as some very small unit that is sort of hidden away. Actually it was
Lenin’s instruction to the party that they should make every factory a
fortress for Communist activity.
And the directives of the Red International of Labor Unions always held
forth that as an objective.
Now they found that in some countries such factory cells were
impractical forms of organization. They just didn’t work out. And it
was particularly true in the United States of America because most
workers in most of the factories had very little opportunity to discuss
political business while they were at work.
In some of the other countries workers did engage in that kind of
effort and activity. So shop units and shop cells were possible of
organization and were effected. In fact, they were openly known.
In the united States the Communist Party adopted the practice
of adapting its basic organization, the elementary part of the
organization, to whatever circumstances they found themselves in.
In the period of great unemployment people weren’t working in
the factories. So we found them in the neighborhoods. And in the
neighborhoods where we could recruit a half dozen Communists we made a
neighborhood branch.
At first we called them units. In later years I understand they were
called branches. But at the time when I was most active we always
referred to them as units. And we would try to get each neighborhood
branch to assume some responsibility for some factory or some industry,
to carry on agitation and propaganda among the workers of a particular
factory or plant for the purpose of trying to recruit those workers
into the party and establish a shop unit or what later became known as
a branch.
So the point that is of importance here, as I see it, is that the party
was flexible in adopting forms of organization, but it was inflexible
as to the purpose of those organizations. And their purpose certainly
was always as far as I knew--and I was one of those who insisted that
it must be kept foremost--to lead the working class to overthrow the
capitalist class in political power.
Now I think that there is a great deal of misconception and
misunderstanding as to just what that may involve.
The Communist Party went to great length to try to draw a distinction,
particularly in the United States, between overthrowing the rule
of a particular class and overthrowing the form of the particular
government. And it was always the party’s claim in the United States
that what they were trying to accomplish was to unseat the robber
barons and the big business interests who had seized the seats of
government in the United States, and the Communist Party always played
down the problem of changing the form of government because nearly all
liberal persons you come across will raise the point that one thing
that America contributed which the rest of the world has never enjoyed
is the right to individual freedom.
The preservation of the constitutional democratic form of organization
in the United States governmental structure has always held a very firm
appeal to any person who has made any study of governmental structures.
The Communist leadership found it virtually impossible to convince
anybody that is acquainted with that fact that this constitutional,
democratic form of representative government should itself be changed.
However, I think that it is a form of self-delusion, and I think that
perhaps I have to admit my own in that connection because, among the
principles that Lenin hammered away on was the necessity, once the
workers seize power, of completely destroying the bourgeois forms of
organization. And there is no question about it; there is plenty of
literature to substantiate that that would include what was referred to
as the constitutional democracies.
You must recall that in the history of the Russian Revolution when
the Bolsheviks seized power they replaced a representative form of
government, which had been completely unable to solve the economic,
financial, and political problems that confronted the people in old
Russia. So it was quite natural that the Bolsheviks should say we must
sweep aside all these forms that are hindrances.
And I fear that the average person who attempts to transplant an
arbitrary form or an idea which is erected in one part of the world
because of a certain historical set of circumstances and arbitrarily
transplant it to another part of the world under entirely different
historical circumstances finds himself trying to solve an impossible
problem. And I think that that is basically the problem which the
Communist Party itself ran into.
There is no question about it: Lenin’s teachings and the teachings of
the Communist Party call for the change of the form of the present
so-called bourgeois democratic governments.
I don’t know how valuable or informative this line of response is
for your committee, but I would just interject this part of my own
thinking, that it is self-delusion on the part of those who think
that it does not involve sweeping aside the present constitutional
government.