Lovestoneites

The Lovestoneites, led by former General Secretary of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Jay Lovestone, were a small American oppositionist communist movement of the 1930s. The organization emerged from a factional fight in the CPUSA in 1929 and unsuccessfully sought to reintegrate with that organization for several years.

Over the course of its existence the organization made use of four names:

The members often referred to their organization as the Communist Party (Opposition) or "CPO."

Activists in the Communist Party (Opposition) played a role in a number of trade union organizations of the 1930s, particularly in the automobile and garment industries. A growing disaffection with the Soviet Union in the years after the Great Purge of 1937–38 ultimately led the group to drop the word "Communist" from its name before its dissolution in the first days of 1941.

The Communist Party (Opposition), known commonly as "The Lovestoneites", was one of two primary opposition organizations which split away from the Communist Party USA in the late 1920s and early 1930s, paralleling factional differences within the Soviet leadership. A so-called Left Opposition centered around James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and others, supported Leon Trotsky and were expelled in 1928 to form the Communist League of America. Soon thereafter, another cleavage emerged, this time between the supporters of Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin. When Bukharin was purged from the Soviet leadership, his supporters in various countries, known as the Right Opposition, were also expelled or left the various national parties. In the United States this tendency was led by Jay Lovestone, former General Secretary of the Communist Party.

The group began as the Communist Party, USA (Majority Group) in the fall of 1929, following the expulsion of Lovestone and his factional cohorts from the CPUSA.

The new organization made its presence known with the first number of a new newspaper, The Revolutionary Age, subtitled "An Organ of Marxism-Leninism in the United States." The first issue was dated November 1, 1929, and featured "An Appeal to All Party Members and Revolutionary Workers" above the fold, in which the new "Communist Party USA (Majority Group)" declared itself the continuer of the "glorious traditions" in fulfilling the "tremendous tasks" set by a previous publication of the same name in establishing the American Communist movement in 1919. The organization declared that:

Under the pretext of 'fighting the Rights,' the present leadership of the Communist International has been revising the fundamental principles of Leninism and distorting and destroying the Leninist line of the Comintern. As a result the sections of the Comintern have been thrown into isolation, chaos, and confusion, and the best and most experienced revolutionists driven out and expelled to be replaced by incapable politically bankrupt 'new leaderships.' * * * Against the revision of Leninism, against the destruction of our parties and of their mass influence it becomes the duty of all Communists, of all revolutionary workers to fight.