Mr. Tavenner. Let us return at this point to that period of your Communist Party experience when you were assigned as agitprop or agitation propagandist in Seattle.
You have told us that you were relieved from that position. But how long did you serve in that capacity here?
Mr. Dennett. My memory is a little indistinct as to how long. It was only a very few months. It seems to me that it was between April of 1932 and some time in the summer of 1932 because I am quite sure that I went to Bellingham as the section organizer late in 1932.
Mr. Tavenner. The committee would be interested in learning the nature of your activities while engaged as an agitprop in Seattle.
Mr. Dennett. Actually in that first assignment no one seemed to know exactly what my duties were. I was struggling to find out. In the process of it I learned that the head of an agitprop department had to do almost all of his work through the organizational apparatus of the party, and it was his responsibility to see to it that the organizational structure of the party became thoroughly indoctrinated with the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism, as it was called.
Now the main thing that they were concerned with was to spread the knowledge of the theory and tactics of the class struggle. And I believe from my own study that it must be acknowledged that Lenin was the greatest master of that because Lenin proclaimed that every act has a class character to it, and he contended that every act of the employer is a class-conscious act, every act of the bourgeois politician is a class-conscious act. That was his contention.
And it was his contention that it was necessary for the workers to become thoroughly conscious that this is the nature of our present-day society, and they must learn the methods by which to overcome the ruling class.
Now this stems from the teachings of Marx. Marx originally stated that the capitalist state is the executive committee of the ruling class.
That is an abstraction which is very difficult for the average person to comprehend. I used to think that the reason it was so difficult was because these people had not come into contact with the material experiences which would be convincing.
In later years, since my leaving the party, I have had to reflect upon that a little bit more carefully, and I am rather inclined today to believe that both Marx and Lenin were in error in trying to apply a uniform rule.