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In political ideology, a deviationist is a person who expresses a deviation: an abnormality or departure. In Stalinist ideology and practice, deviationism is an expressed belief which does not accord with official party doctrine for the time and area. Accusations of deviationism often led to . Forms of deviationism included revisionism, dogmatism, and bourgeois nationalism.
In a 1953 speech, Mao Zedong referred to both left and right deviationists.Mao Zedong, Refute Right Deviationist Views That Depart From the General Line, June 15, 1953. Online at Marxists.org. Accessed online 2009-10-11. Years later, in 1976, the Gang of Four would strike out against "rightist deviationism" in China. Criticize Rightist Deviationism (1976), ChinesePosters.net, International Institute of Social History. Accessed online 2009-10-11.
According to Trotskyist doctrine,James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, Indiana University Press, Bloomingham 1966, p.v. the Soviet Union became a "degenerated workers' state" and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) became "bureaucratic centralist". Trotskyites considered the Soviet degenerated workers' state still as "revolutionary workers' state" or "proletarian dictatorship". As such, the Soviet state was "Progressivism" in relation to "reactionary capitalism". Hence it was the duty of revolutionists in all nations, even if they were opponents of Stalin and his regime, to defend the Soviet Union against any "imperialist" state, including their own fatherland. Another revolution was, however, necessary in order to unseat the Stalinists, who would destroy the workers' state until it became fully capitalist.
CPUSA leader Earl Browder accepted the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 without hesitation. Comintern did find it necessary to fine-tune the CPUSA's stance. Immediately after the Pact, Georgi Dimitrov, chief of the Comintern, sent a ciphered message to Browder explaining that the CPUSA's line supporting the Pact was not fully correct because while it broke with President Franklin Roosevelt's policy of supporting Britain, France, and Lend-Lease aid, it failed to take the additional step of breaking with FDR's domestic policies as well. Browder and the CPUSA immediately made the required changes in its policies, and in 1940 the CPUSA did its best to oppose FDR's reelection to the presidency.Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 71–84.
World War II reduced the direct organization ties of CPUSA to Comintern and drastically reduced the volume of communications. Postal communications was less reliable and often delayed and subject to government inspection. International cable traffic was routinely reviewed by wartime security officials. Travel to the USSR became increasingly difficult. In 1940 the Voorhis Act was passed imposing regulatory requirements on domestic American organizations with foreign government ties. To avoid the Voorhis Act, in November 1940, CPUSA, with Comintern permission, severed its official membership in the Communist International, and the last officially designated CPUSA representative in Moscow left in 1941.Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, The Soviet World, pp. 87–88.
Browder developed the doctrine of indefinite collaboration with capitalism and the Harry Bridges doctrine of postwar extension of the no-strike pledge.
The wartime coalition gave Browder the vision of an Americanized Communist Party working with other American parties to solve the urgent questions facing the nation. To this end he began a policy of naturalizing the party, relaxing its discipline, and moderating its sectarianism. He transformed the wartime tactic of national unity into a postwar strategy and argued the possibility that progressive capitalism, to save itself, would embark on policies favorable to the workers at home and to the Soviet Union abroad.
In April 1945, however, Jacques Duclos of the French Communist Party, formerly high in the Comintern, published a repudiation of Browderism. Jaques Duclos, On the Dissolution of the Communist Party of the United States. Published in Cahiers du Communisme, April 1945. Reprinted in William Z. Foster et al. Marxism-Leninism vs. Revisionism. (New York: New Century Publishers, February 1946), pp. 21-35 in original. Publication of the attack by the New York World–Telegram panicked the CPUSA into drastic action against Browder: it unceremoniously expelled him in February 1946.
This view of the CCP contrasted sharply with the view of Moscow whose ideology was in line with orthodoxy of historical materialism of Marxism's early thinkers, that socialist societies must be preceded by capitalist societies, which would provide the material basis for a socialist economy. This orthodox theory of Marxism relied heavily on a dialectical "force of history" that would bring about the "objective conditions" necessary for a proletariat revolution to succeed. Any ideological concepts running counter to this thesis, that is, any formulations which called for skipping stages of historic development were considered in the orthodox view as adventurist and counter revolutionary.Foreign Influence - Weather Underground Organization (WUO). FBI Chicago Field Office Report, August 20, 1976. Section I. Ideology D. Influence of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought, Page 57 in original (p. 20 pdf).
Maoist deviationism inspired students and other young people who looked to the Chinese Red Guards as a model of activism.Paul Costello, U.S. Anti-Revisionism Third Wave, 1960-1970, Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line. Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved March 16, 2010. While some of these young activists were drawn to the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), the full flowering of American Maoism would not come until the proliferation of new groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Weather Underground (WUO), Black Panthers (BPP) and the Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) (CP–ML) after 1969.
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