Small Mass Party

SMALL MASS PARTY. The weakness and the often fragmentary nature of the US Left prompted some tightly-knit groups to remain insular rather than joining a larger left entity with the aim of either taking over the organization or splitting it to the benefit of themselves. These groups believed that a small Marxist organization can effect major social change.

The three-word phrase “Small Mass Party” gained usage during the 1940s as leaders of the Workers Party or “Third Camp” faction of Trotskyism sought to formulate principles for their movement, never more than a few hundred members. The small mass party, seemingly a contradiction in terms, could nevertheless act like a large political organization, at least in its political outlook and self-confidence. A later breakthrough would vindicate this strategy.

Before the rise of the Communist Party, such groups had been unusual and short-lived, limited geographically or demographically. The wild factionalism of the later 1890s found former members of the Socialist Labor Party seeking out other socialists and achieving unity when the Socialist Party formed in 1901. Small groups, like the Syndicalist League of North America led by William Z. Foster during the 1910s, functioned essentially as propagandists. The furious factionalism of 1919-1922, with a handful of contenders for the official Communist Party position, ended with Moscow’s recognition of a (forced) unification.

The splits in the Communist Party, beginning with the expulsion of Jay Lovestone’s followers, disallowed some expellees returning to the mother Party, but instead finding a different road to their own destiny. The Lovestone group, inclined toward the Socialist Party after a decade of isolation, instead dissolved. Fragments of the Socialist Labor Party continued propagandistic activity into the second half of the twentieth century.

Trotskyism produced a trove of smaller movements. Aiming at an improved, transformed Trotskyist movement, these groups mostly dissolved within a few years, with a few marked exceptions. Several of these groups played parts in local labor movements for decades, often through the power of individual personalities. The Workers World Party, more than any other fragment, persisted around its faith in world revolution and intermittently gained wide influence, mainly through the mobilization of antiwar demonstrations.

Maoism or anti-revisionism spawned much larger and more influential groups than at any time in US Left history. Indeed, by the close of the 1970s, the sheer number of participants, up to ten thousand, overwhelmed the total number of small Marxists groups hitherto. Most of the groups dissolved within a decade, even the few reaching 500 or 1,000 members, either from disappointment with China, internal disputes, or frustration and weariness. Some held on despite a decline in members and influence, and for this reason the modern history of the Small Mass Party, if not a phrase actually employed by the Maoist groups, had begun.

The explosion of racial and immigrant struggles from the late 1960s onward accounted for the distinctiveness and influence of this phenomenon. The Communist Party, at its 1920s-1940s peak, had been able to draw various groups into itself and in turn helped assist Puerto Ricans, Filipinos and a variety of others, mirroring the role of the Soviet Union toward national minorities and world struggle. The discrediting of CP leadership on ideological grounds, but just as much the incapacity of the CPUSA to provide sufficient services, taken with the absence of any significant alternative, determined yet another phase of Left activity.

The survivors of the continuing fragmentation and ideological warfare between the erstwhile Maoist groups could also look back upon serious and sustained engagement in nonwhite communities across the country. Real reform victories had been won, especially in community services. Other achievements could be registered through participation in global solidarity movements. Well-organized groups could also, on occasion, have a large if indirect influence on emerging mass movements. The role of “anti-revisionist” Asian Americans and African Americans within the Jesse Jackson/Rainbow Coalition demonstrated this possibility, even as the small groups dissolved into circles of activists bonded to each other.

By 1990, many continuing activists had “made the turn” similar to that of Communists who had shifted from the early to late 1930s, from staging rent strikes to participating in government-run housing boards. Unlike the earlier Communists, they had no sizable Party or idealized foreign power to cling to.

By the early years of the twenty-first century, small and self-disciplined groups seemed useful to sectors of the Left. Changes in immigration laws showed long-run effects as immigrant communities previously oriented toward their home-country struggles increasingly settled into their new lives and identities. Often hard-pressed, working class communities with jobs in mainly low-paying service occupations had begun to vote and move closer to the Democratic Party. Losing much of its white working-class base, the Democratic Party became more permeable, for instance, to Dominicans, Haitians, and even South Koreans. The Democratic Party also drew in talented activists with leftwing backgrounds. Their Influence might be enhanced, once more, by working as a disciplined circle, disclosing as little of older shared ideology as possible.

Marxist-Leninist groups based within or around African American communities found new crises and opportunities in Black Lives Matters, crises similar in some ways to to the struggles against incarceration or discrimination. The surge of membership in the overwhelmingly white and mostly middle-class Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) did not include many people of color and for good reasons: DSA thus lacked sufficient political experience among their communities. Erstwhile Maoists, not quite openly socialist let alone Marxist-Leninist, worked with activists unembarrassed by past and current associations. In the 2019 elections, the earlier wave led by Jesse Jackson found successors to the Rainbow Coalition in progressive Democratic Party campaigns from Georgia to California.

Since the late 1960s, the “small mass party” achieved few singular victories and instead became tightly linked to extreme sectarianism and an inability to respond realistically its limited size and influence. But it was no longer mysterious that veteran long-time members should choose to remain within familiar small circles more than fifty years later, recruiting younger people to join their efforts in influencing mass movements.

Buhle, Paul. ed. The Legacy of the Workers Party, 1940-1949: Recollections and Reflections. New York: Tamiment Library, 1985.

Buhle, Paul. Marxism in the United States. New York: Verso, 2013 edition.

Elbaum, Max. Revolution Is In the Air. New York: Verso, 2018 edition.