Proletarian Party

PROLETARIAN PARTY. The direct descendant of the Socialist Party (SP) of Michigan, and especially of the large left-wing group around the Proletarian University in Detroit, the Proletarian Party of America (PP) was headed by shoe-salesman John Keracher and machinist Dennis Batt. One of the most militantly Marxist groups in the national SP, and a vehement supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Michigan party was the first of many left-wing groups expelled (in May 1919) by the SP national leadership. At an emergency meeting of the expelled party in June, a resolution was passed calling for a new revolutionary party to be formed in Chicago on 1 September, and on that date Keracher, Batt, and others from the “Michigan group,” together with supporters from other states, took part in founding the Communist Party (CP).

Fundamental disagreements, however, soon made it impossible for the “Michigan group” to remain in the new party. Keracher, Batt, and their comrades were almost the only founders of American Communism who did not believe that proletarian revolution was imminent in the United States. Active trade-unionists—Batt was a central figure in the Detroit Federation of Labor—they opposed the CP’s “underground” and anti-electoral orientation as well as its dual unionism. They were also critical of the CP’s organization as a loose “federation of federations,” and called for a centralized, disciplined party. In January 1920, after CPers tried unsuccessfully to take over the Proletarian University by force, the CP leadership charged Keracher and the others with “Menshevism” and expelled them. Six months later, in June, the expelled members and several newcomers founded the PP.

Several thousand workers took out cards in the PP over the years (non-wage-earners were prohibited from joining by the party constitution), but its membership seems to have peaked at around five hundred in the late 1920s. Although locals were formed in at least thirty-eight cities, from New York to San Francisco, its stronghold remained the industrial Midwest, especially Detroit, Flint, Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Rochester. In addition to Keracher and Batt, its leading figures included Carl and Sarraine Berreitter, Christ Jelset, Charles M. O’Brien, Al Renner, Anna Tomasek, Mary Ertz Will, Al Wysocki, and cartoonist Harvey Breitmeyer.

The PP sent a delegate to the third congress of the Communist International (CI) in June 1921, and at its next convention declared its total agreement with the CI and resolved to continue the PP “until the CI is represented in America by a real Communist Party.” Despite efforts by CI officials to convince the PP to reenter the “official” CP, the Proletarians stubbornly pursued their own course nationally while uncritically supporting the Third International line on world politics. Not until the mid-1930s, when Keracher and his friends opposed the Popular Front—in the United States as well as in Europe, but above all in Spain during the Revolution—did the PP challenge the authority of the CP of the Soviet Union on international affairs. But then they turned around and endorsed the Hitler-Stalin Pact and supported the Soviet Union position on World War II.

Largest of the Communist opposition groups for some fifteen years, the PP was the perennial prey of other oppositionists. German-born Marxist economist Paul Mattick was expelled for factionalism in 1931, and the following year a small group of his supporters left the PP to help him form the short-lived United Workers Party. Several PPers joined the Trotskyists; a few became Lovestoneites; a very few—notably Oakley C. Johnson, Stanley Nowak, and Harry M. Wicks—joined or became associated with the CP.

Notwithstanding the PP’s vociferous assertions of its Leninist orthodoxy, PP Marxism remained that of the left wing of the SP during World War I—a naturalistic Marxism that owed more to Engels than to Marx, as far from the Neo-Hegelianism of the Frankfurt School as from the “diamat” of Moscow, and deeply influenced by Charles Darwin. Lewis Henry Morgan, and Joseph Dietzgen. Essentially a socialist educational group rather than a revolutionary political party—its activity consisted almost exclusively of study classes, forums, lectures, and soapboxing—the PP proved to be a good caretaker for Charles H. Kerr’s old socialist publishing co-op, which Keracher and other PPers ran from 1928 till the party’s demise in 1971.

For a few years during the Great Depression, the alumni of the Proletarian University enjoyed an activist phase that had a real impact on the broader working-class movement. PPers were active in the Briggs Auto Body strike in Detroit, 1933, and later helped lead sit-downs in Flint and elsewhere. In the early days of the United Auto Workers, PP street speakers expounded the ABC’s of Marxism to larger and more receptive crowds than ever. And for a small group, the PP provided the United Auto Workers with a disproportionately large number of its best organizers, some of whom—such as Emil Mazey and Frank Marquart—became important leaders of the new union. Many other PPers eventually became top officers of other unions—Carl Berreitter of the International Typographical Union, Al Renner of the Restaurant Workers, Samuel Meyers of the Retail Clerks, and many others noted for their militant and often innovative union-organizing strategies.

In all but a few cases, however, the PPers who became union leaders did not remain in the PP. Like all revolutionary sects, the PP suffered a high turnover rate. By 1940 it was no longer a large sect but a small one, and it grew smaller year by year until 1971, when national secretary Al Wysocki, who for some time had taken care of the party’s day-to-day chores, died after a long illness. None of the handful of surviving party stalwarts, all of them in their sixties and seventies, came forward to fill the breach. The PP never merged with any other party, never admitted defeat, never disbanded. Independent to the end, it just faded away.

Keracher, John. “Ten Years of Communism in America.” The Proletarian (Chicago), September 1929, November 1929, February 1930, March–April 1930.

Marquart, Frank. An Auto Worker’s Journal: The UAW from Crusade to One-Party Union. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975.

Ruff, Allen. “A Path Not Taken: The Proletarian Party and the Early History of Communism in the United States.” In Culture, Gender, Race and U.S. Labor History, edited by Ronald C. Kent et al. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Proletarian Party of America (1920-1930). Publications, Officials, Membership. Marxisthistory.org Website. http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/proletarianparty.html