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Abstract: In the wake of the Teheran Conference of 1943, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) adopted the political line that later became known as "Browderism." The Party dissolved itself in favor of a loose Communist Political Association, declared an effective end to the class struggle and argued that the war-time alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States could continue into the postwar era. The political content of "Browderism" scarcely changed until the eruption of the Cold War later in the 1940s. The British Communist Party, no less than that of the USA, had seen Teheran as an indication that in the postwar world there need be no return to the fierce class struggle characteristic of the prewar decades. It abandoned the insurrectionary model provided by the Bolsheviks, and set out to provide mettle for the wider labor movement rather than act as a vanguard party. Though some elements on the Party's left sternly criticized the leadership's post-Teheran policies, their comprehensive defeat at the Party's 18th Congress showed that the vast majority of the membership had been seduced by the allied powers' promises.
IN 1939, HARRY POLLITT, the leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain (henceforth CPGB), displayed a sturdy independence when the Communist International (henceforth Comintern) declared that the recently erupted Second World War was an imperialist war. Pollitt insisted that the Popular Front strategy followed since 1935 was still the right strategy and that the CPGB should therefore support the struggle for British national independence against Germany. Defeated in the Central Committee, Pollitt maintained this stance in private until his reinstatement as Secretary after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. This sturdy independence has perhaps lent credence to Pollitt's claim that the CPGB similarly resisted the ideological and political pressures resulting in "Browderism" in the United States.
Maurice Isserman readily accepted that "British Communists ignored all suggestions from Browder that they emulate the American example" (1982, 201) - a claim repeated in James G. Ryan's recent biography of Earl Browder (1997). But this is true only if the secondary matter of liquidating the Party - rather than the CPGB's political response to Teheran, which was very similar to that of the U. S. Party - is...