Towards a New Patriotism: A Critique of Browder’s “Americanism”
Americanism has meant many things: liberation for some, devastation for others. A truly progressive patriotism must chart a course between nationalism and nihilism.
by A. Rocha
Credit: Susie J.
America was founded in revolt of British aristocracy. The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time. It was the organizing of black Americans that turned America into a full[er] democracy. It’s actually the most American thing in the world for us to be fighting for the working-class. It’s actually patently un-American to transform our country into a place of kings and landed gentry.
Section 1: The Role of Proletarian Patriotism
As the progressive movement gains newfound energy in the fight against fascism and a new Popular Front is being built, it is vital for the success of today’s efforts to reflect upon a similar point in US history. Specifically, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), at the height of its powers in the 1930s. At that time, the CPUSA was a growing force and encountered similar problems to the ones we face in the modern political arena. Ultimately, however, it was liquidated into a restructured organization that was no longer legally a “party”: the Communist Political Association (CPA).
The CPA was an educational and advocacy organization focused on participating within the coalition formed around the New Deal. The leader of the CPUSA and CPA at the time, Earl Browder, believed that the wartime alliance formed between the USSR and the USA in the famous Tehran Conference, where the United States agreed with Britain to open another front against Nazi Germany, could continue onwards after the end of World War II; that capitalism and socialism could coexist without coming into conflict with one another, which many now and then have condemned as a form of class collaboration. Based on this theory, Browder no longer believed that a revolutionary working-class party was necessary and that socialism could be achieved via gradual reform. As a result, the prime directive of the newly-formed CPA was to promote national unity above all. Ultimately, Browder’s theory of peaceful cooperation was quickly proved wrong by history, as, once the war ended, the temporary alliance between the USSR and the USA dissolved into the Cold War.
While crucial contributions to the struggle for communism were made during this point in our history, it is imperative that we learn from the mistakes and assumptions which eventually led to the liquidation of the CPUSA—in particular, the flawed understanding contained within the slogan “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.”
The slogan of “Americanism” was originally coined by Browder in 1934. It was developed in the midst of a huge upswing of membership, influence, and activity. In the early period of the CPUSA, the bulk of its membership was composed of immigrant workers, especially from Germany. The Party structure was dominated by nationality interest groups, and Party press was often in languages that weren’t English. The slogan intended to convey the message that Communism was a continuation of the revolutionary and democratic traditions of the US and its people's struggles, not something transplanted onto American soil from the outside. The introduction of the slogan sought to make communism and the CPUSA ‘as American as apple pie.’ It succeeded: the period signified the first time the majority of Party membership consisted of native-born citizens [1].
The CPUSA continues to carry on the positive elements of “Americanism” to this day. Georgi Dimitrov and Vladimir Lenin made it clear: communists are ardent proletarian patriots. That is, we maintain a national pride for our working-class and its storied struggles—especially those formed in opposition to reactionary historical elements! The love for our nation is directed towards the toiling masses; it is a means to progress, not an excuse for conservatism. As Lenin wrote in 1914:
We love our language and our motherland; we, more than any other group, are working to raise its laboring masses[…] to the level of intelligent democrats and socialists. We, more than anybody are grieved to see and feel to what violence, oppression and mockery our beautiful motherland is being subjected by the tsarist hangmen, the nobles and the capitalists[…]
We are filled with national pride, and therefore we particularly hate our slavish past... and our slavish present, in which the same landowners, aided by the capitalists, lead us into war to stifle Poland and the Ukraine, to throttle the democratic movement in Persia and in China, to strengthen the gang of Romanovs, Bobrinskis, Puriskeviches that cover with shame our Great-Russian national dignity.[2]
For Lenin, proletarian patriotism differed from traditional patriotism by centering the revolutionary working-class and the promising future of a country rather than its “slavish past.” For him, there was a clear difference between progressive and reactionary types of patriotism. For Dimitrov, this concept gains another saliency: progressive patriotism is also an essential component in the struggle against fascism. Dimitrov emphasized that the role of the communists is to fight against the falsifiers of our history and to link contemporary struggles against fascism and towards socialism with the revolutionary and democratic traditions of our people. Dimitrov writes:
Communists who suppose that all this has nothing to do with the cause of the working-class, who do nothing to enlighten the masses on the past of their people in a historically correct fashion, in a genuinely Marxist-Leninist spirit, who do nothing to link up the present struggle with the people's revolutionary traditions and past—voluntarily hand over to the fascist falsifiers all that is valuable in the historical past of the nation, so that the fascists may fool the masses.[3]
In other words, failing to struggle around a progressive concept of patriotism was to cede a decisive terrain of battle to reaction. The most obvious example today is the MAGA movement. Applying the ideas of both Lenin and Dimitrov on patriotism in practice is what the slogan of “Americanism” and Browder’s CPUSA set out to do—and this approach led to the most successful years in the Party’s history.
American communism, under this view, is not just an alternative form of social organization but also the continuation of the revolutionary and democratic traditions of the American working-class. Furthermore, it engages these traditions in a way that lends itself to the liberation of the proletariat. Communists do not abandon the democratic aspirations embodied in the traditions of the working-class in the US; rather, we reveal the class contradictions which prevented those struggles from reaching their full realization under capitalism. In this sense, communism represents not a rejection of America's revolutionary traditions, but their completion. They link the democratic traditions of the people toward the realization of socialism without reproducing their reactionary hang-ups.
Section II: The Problems of Proletarian Patriotism
“Americanism” was not, however, without its contradictions. And its ultimate failure teaches us a key lesson: the traditions of the working class can not simply be celebrated, but must be propelled forward with the aim of revolutionizing them; they must be actively divested of their reactionary elements.
This is where Browder’s conception went wrong. The politics surrounding the slogan of “Americanism” failed to elevate these concepts and traditions to the level of genuinely critical proletarian politics at the Party’s pivotal moment. Browder’s approach limited CPUSA’s patriotism exclusively to continuation, and inherited the limitations of bourgeois frameworks and concepts. This uncritical patriotism led to the blurring of the demarcation between communism and bourgeois ideology, which resulted in a collaborationist understanding of class struggle and the dissolution of the CPUSA for the CPA. It was due to the failure to self-criticize and correct these errors, Foster argues, that “cause[d] Browder, several years later, also to accept the leadership of American imperialism in the realm of practical politics” [4].
One form this acceptance of bourgeois patriotism took was fetishization of the United States and its own history as unique among nations. This revisionist exceptionalism was a fundamentally nationalist idea which shaped the basis for a grave blind spot in judgment. In Gus Hall’s article, Opportunism – The Destructive Germ, he argues:
“Communism is 20th century Americanism” was a classless, utopian slogan advanced by Browderism. As a slogan, it sounded good, but it had nothing to do with either communism or “Americanism”. The “Americanism” in the slogan was attached to an opportunistic concept of a smooth, endless extension of a “Jeffersonian” society, without classes or the class struggle—blissful, without contradiction or strife. It was also an attempt to opportunistically appeal to the more backward sentiments of nationalism. The “communism” in the slogan was attached to a brand of “socialism” which monopoly capital—or at least sections of big business—could accept without struggle because it was socialism in name only.
To Hall, Browder’s problematic juggling of patriotism and socialism only had the consequence of making both terms empty and opportunistic.
An example of this is shown in Browder’s original article series What is Communism? He makes the absurd statement, “the Declaration of Independence was for that time what The Communist Manifesto is for ours." The American Revolution, while serving a progressive historical function for the development of capitalism in this country, cannot be conflated with the ideals and concepts of Marxism. It was fundamentally a bourgeois revolution with several reactionary elements, including the rebolstering of slavery, the denial of women’s suffrage, and the continuation of genocidal displacement against Indigenous peoples. While these types of historical documents contain admirable democratic ideals which communists should link to the struggle for socialism, Browder takes a step too far by directly identifying the ideology of the Communist Manifesto to that of the bourgeois-democratic ideals present in the Declaration. By doing this, Browder ends up conflating the two and, by extension, erases their respective differences in class character.
In 1952, former party leader William Z. Foster published his book History of the Communist Party of the United States. In it, he argues that Browder failed to “differentiate fundamentally between the narrow, restricted type of democracy conceived by the bourgeoisie and the broad popular democracy fought for by the proletariat.” An example of Browder’s failure to differentiate bourgeois and proletarian democracy can be found in his Report to the Tenth National Convention of the party in 1938. In it, Browder states:
A full and complete application of Jefferson’s principles, the consistent application of democratic ideas to the conditions of today, will lead naturally and inevitably to the full program of the Communist Party, to the socialist reorganization of the United States, to the common ownership and operation of our economy for the benefit of all.
In this report, Browder completely conflates Jeffersonian democracy with the party program. This conflation went so far that it was even added into the Preamble of the Communist Party constitution, which read that the Communist Party “carried forward the traditions of Washington, Jefferson, Paine, Jackson, and Lincoln under the changed conditions of today.”
To uncritically accept the traditions of slaveowners and reactionaries denies the class content of bourgeois democracy. It fails to acknowledge the constraints inherent to bourgeois democracy, let alone the atrocities committed by the United States historically and today against Black Americans and Indigenous peoples. The hegemony of the ruling class, the structural repression of democratic demands, and the immense power of capital add up to a regressive ideology which “Americanism” failed to combat in full. Further, this patriotic approach to history erased the role of the multiethnic subaltern classes, the masses of which are just as much a part of our tradition, and which constitute the authentic origins of our current democratic movements.
A cautionary example is seen in the so-called “MAGA Communist” movement. The “MAGA Communists” suffer from the same error as Browder did: they treat national democratic traditions uncritically similarly to Browder’s position, and are led astray down a road of reactionary politics and the reproduction of these traditions’ negative hang-ups. In this sense, MAGA Communism and the worst parts of Browderism are two sides of the same coin which failed to mint.
Section III: Proletarian Patriotism in Practice Today
In 1934, Vincent Spotted Eagle, a Native American member of the California Communist Party, wrote in a letter to the Western Worker:
Before the white man came, our mode of production and distribution were on a cooperative basis, without any exploitation. This is Communism, which is true Americanism. And this is why I joined the Communist Party.
Communism, however, cannot be “true Americanism,” because Americanism itself remains a bourgeois conception. As an ideology, Americanism emerged from the colonists’ struggle against British domination, the rise of an ascendant colonial capitalism, and the formation of a new national consciousness. Certainly, some ideas within Americanism overlap with traditions later carried into the socialist movement, but to conflate the two—to reduce communism to Americanism—is to mislead the masses away from the goal of democratic revolution. Although the participation of the toiling masses was decisive in the struggle against the British Crown, leadership ultimately rested with the emerging colonial bourgeoisie, which structured the new republic according to its own class interests and ideals. Americanism is therefore inseparable from the framework of bourgeois democracy and cannot be confused with the project of communism. The overall idea was correct—the politics surrounding it were not.
Recently, however, a positive example of the practical application of these concepts has arisen: in the recently viral political rhetoric of democratic socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a conversation with David Axelrod at the University of Chicago, AOC talked about how the need to “restructure power to where it belongs” is an aspiration that is found within the heritage of our country; that the American Revolution was a fight against “the billionaires of their time” waged by the toiling masses, which expanded our understanding of democracy significantly from where it began. She ends by saying that it is “the most American thing in the world to be fighting for the working-class” and that it is patently un-American to roll back the democratic gains of the people and “transform our country into a land of kings and landed gentry.”
What AOC articulates well here is that the political project of the working-class must be rooted in the democratic traditions of our country. However, she does this while avoiding the pitfalls that Browder fell into in his handling of this question. Browder focused on and centered the bourgeois democratic figureheads of these movements, which erased the role of the working-class in these struggles, flattened the class struggles that defined these movements and moved them forward, and obscured the class character of their bourgeois ideals. On the other hand—perhaps because of her position as a woman of color representing the populist center-left—AOC prioritizes the historic struggles of the multiracial working-class as the primary movers of history toward a more complete democracy, connecting this momentum to the current fight of today’s American working class against Trump and the billionaire domination of our political system.
In the final analysis, the slogan “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” contains both a necessary insight and a profound danger. Its strength lay in its attempt to root the communist movement within the historical experiences and struggles of the American working-class, correctly recognizing that socialism cannot develop as an abstract import but must emerge from concrete national conditions. Yet its fatal flaw was collapsing the distinction between bourgeois democratic traditions and proletarian revolutionary politics. By failing to critically transform these traditions—by treating them as something to be continued rather than transcended—the Browder line blurred class antagonisms and opened the door to opportunism, revisionism, and ultimately liquidation.
The lesson for today is not to surrender the fight for history, patriotism, or national tradition to reactionary forces, but to struggle over it with clarity. Communists must neither reject the democratic and revolutionary elements of the past nor accept them uncritically. Instead, they must expose their class limits, elevate their progressive content, and subordinate them to the independent political project of the working-class; our task as communists is to build a working-class patriotism [5]. Only in this way can the movement avoid the errors of Browderism while still accomplishing the task that Dimitrov and Lenin set: to link the fight against fascism and for socialism with the living, contradictory history of the people.
It is precisely in this context that the CPUSA’s more recent formulation of “Bill of Rights Socialism” should be taken as a productive theoretical example. The concept represents an effort to anchor socialism in widely recognized democratic struggles—such as civil liberties, racial equality, and economic rights—without dissolving the class content of the movement. It works to center the historic struggles and democratic and revolutionary traditions of our multiracial working-class, rather than those of bourgeois-democratic figureheads. “Bill of Rights Socialism” is unique, additionally, in that it more broadly tackles the question of what a socialist system would look like in the United States, which necessarily includes the challenge of rooting the communist project in our national democratic traditions.
At its best, “Bill of Rights Socialism” corrects earlier errors by distinguishing between the formal promises of bourgeois democracy and the unrealized material demands of the working-class and oppressed. In this sense, it does not present socialism as the simple continuation of the democratic traditions of the American working-class, but as their fulfillment through struggle, transforming abstract rights into concrete realities. Bill of Rights Socialism is a blueprint as to what a correct application of Lenin and Dimitrov’s teachings could look like in this country.
However, the same danger remains: if these democratic ideals are not consistently grounded in class struggle and the independent political role of the working-class, they risk once again becoming empty, cross-class slogans. A practical danger is also present: the CPUSA appears to treat Bill of Rights Socialism almost as a pure slogan rather than a full theoretical concept that needs to be developed in broad, politically engaged practice. In its current form, it remains but a seed, limited in its full potential. There have been attempts to deepen the theory [6], but this potential can only be realized through practical refinement in the modern political arena.
What this practical refinement looks like in reality was glimpsed in the kind of rhetoric articulated by AOC. Rather than presenting socialism as the simple continuation of America’s founding ideals, AOC roots democratic struggle in the activity of the multiracial working-class itself: the masses who fought slavery, expanded suffrage, built labor unions, won civil rights, and continue today to struggle against billionaire domination and reactionary politics. This approach neither rejects American democratic traditions nor worships them uncritically; it subjects them to struggle, revealing both their emancipatory potential and their bourgeois limits. In this sense, it points toward the kind of working-class patriotism Lenin and Dimitrov envisioned and toward the kind of political orientation “Bill of Rights Socialism” must develop. The task is not to dissolve communism into Americanism, but to root socialism within the real democratic struggles of the people while maintaining the political independence and revolutionary horizon of the working-class. Only through this synthesis can a genuinely American path to socialism emerge without collapsing into Browder's "Americanism."
Citations
[1] – Klehr, Harvey, and John Earl Haynes. The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself. Twayne ; Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992.
[2] – Lenin, V.I. “On the National Pride of the Great Russians.” Lenin: On the National Pride of the Great Russians, 12 Dec. 1914, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/dec/12a.htm.
[3] – Dimitrov, Georgi. “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism.” The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism, 2 Aug. 1935, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm.
[4] – Foster, William Z. “Browder and American Democratic Traditions.” History of the Communist Party of the United States, International Publishers, New York City, New York, 1952, pp. 339
[5] – Sims, Joe. “Some Thoughts on Patriotism, the National Question and the Leninist Tradition.” Communist Party USA, 25 Aug. 2014, www.cpusa.org/article/some-thoughts-on-patriotism-the-national-question-and-the-leninist-tradition/.
[6] – Crowder, Brad. “Bill of Rights Socialism and the Future of the Republic.” Communist Party USA, 8 Dec. 2020, www.cpusa.org/article/bill-of-rights-socialism-and-the-future-of-the-republic/.
