Now they found that in some countries such factory cells were impractical forms of organization. They just didn’t work out. And it was particularly true in the United States of America because most workers in most of the factories had very little opportunity to discuss political business while they were at work.
In some of the other countries workers did engage in that kind of effort and activity. So shop units and shop cells were possible of organization and were effected. In fact, they were openly known.
In the united States the Communist Party adopted the practice of adapting its basic organization, the elementary part of the organization, to whatever circumstances they found themselves in.
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.