In the period of great unemployment people weren’t working in the factories. So we found them in the neighborhoods. And in the neighborhoods where we could recruit a half dozen Communists we made a neighborhood branch.

At first we called them units. In later years I understand they were called branches. But at the time when I was most active we always referred to them as units. And we would try to get each neighborhood branch to assume some responsibility for some factory or some industry, to carry on agitation and propaganda among the workers of a particular factory or plant for the purpose of trying to recruit those workers into the party and establish a shop unit or what later became known as a branch.

So the point that is of importance here, as I see it, is that the party was flexible in adopting forms of organization, but it was inflexible as to the purpose of those organizations. And their purpose certainly was always as far as I knew—and I was one of those who insisted that it must be kept foremost—to lead the working class to overthrow the capitalist class in political power.

Now I think that there is a great deal of misconception and misunderstanding as to just what that may involve.

The Communist Party went to great length to try to draw a distinction, particularly in the United States, between overthrowing the rule of a particular class and overthrowing the form of the particular government. And it was always the party’s claim in the United States that what they were trying to accomplish was to unseat the robber barons and the big business interests who had seized the seats of government in the United States, and the Communist Party always played down the problem of changing the form of government because nearly all liberal persons you come across will raise the point that one thing that America contributed which the rest of the world has never enjoyed is the right to individual freedom.

The preservation of the constitutional democratic form of organization in the United States governmental structure has always held a very firm appeal to any person who has made any study of governmental structures. The Communist leadership found it virtually impossible to convince anybody that is acquainted with that fact that this constitutional, democratic form of representative government should itself be changed. However, I think that it is a form of self-delusion, and I think that perhaps I have to admit my own in that connection because, among the principles that Lenin hammered away on was the necessity, once the workers seize power, of completely destroying the bourgeois forms of organization. And there is no question about it; there is plenty of literature to substantiate that that would include what was referred to as the constitutional democracies.

You must recall that in the history of the Russian Revolution when the Bolsheviks seized power they replaced a representative form of government, which had been completely unable to solve the economic, financial, and political problems that confronted the people in old Russia. So it was quite natural that the Bolsheviks should say we must sweep aside all these forms that are hindrances.

And I fear that the average person who attempts to transplant an arbitrary form or an idea which is erected in one part of the world because of a certain historical set of circumstances and arbitrarily transplant it to another part of the world under entirely different historical circumstances finds himself trying to solve an impossible problem. And I think that that is basically the problem which the Communist Party itself ran into.

There is no question about it: Lenin’s teachings and the teachings of the Communist Party call for the change of the form of the present so-called bourgeois democratic governments.

I don’t know how valuable or informative this line of response is for your committee, but I would just interject this part of my own thinking, that it is self-delusion on the part of those who think that it does not involve sweeping aside the present constitutional government.