Herbert Aptheker's Unity of Theory and Practice in the Communist Party USA: On The Last Night, and During the First Two Decades

Abstract

Herbert Aptheker joined the Communist Party USA immediately following the announcement of the Hitler–Stalin Pact. During the first two decades of this membership, Aptheker emerged as a prominent intellectual and theoretician within the CPUSA. Although he never held a leadership position, his was often “the voice” of the Party. He held fast to the Party line throughout the tumultuous 1950s, as the CPUSA was ravaged from within by internal conflict and from without by government assault. While others wavered, Aptheker supported entrenched hard-line leaders and retained an unshakeable faith in the exemplary character of Soviet socialism. Fifty-two years after joining, Aptheker, along with hundreds of others, walked away from the miniscule remnants of the Party, convinced that the CPUSA's compounded crises, exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, had become insurmountable. Nonetheless, Aptheker restated his belief that a “real” Communist Party, freed of the distortions of Stalinism, could yet emerge to act once more as a “true vanguard of the masses in the United States.”