New York Communist

The New York Communist was a short-lived weekly newspaper issued by the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party of Local Greater New York, encompassing the New York City metro area. The paper was edited by the renowned radical journalist and war correspondent John Reed. Only 10 issues of the paper were produced during 1919 before the publication was absorbed by The Revolutionary Age following the Left Wing National Conference of June 1919.

According to a declaration in its inaugural issue, no doubt written by editor John Reed, "thousands of members" of the Left Wing Section living in New York City were engaged in "fighting for control of the local Party machinery, against a fierce and unscrupulous resistance by the petty politicians who direct the Party machine." While noting enormous contributions to this movement made by the long-established Left Wing weekly of the Left Wing Section of Local Boston, The Revolutionary Age, "as long as the entire machinery is not in our hands, a New York is essential," Reed declared.

For the next 10 weeks, Reed's newspaper documented one of the most ferocious factional struggles in the history of the Socialist Party of America, a veritable war marked by arbitrary dissolutions of party units, lockouts from facilities, and takeovers of scheduled meetings. This blow-by-blow coverage which makes The New York Communist one of the most important primary sources for historians studying the process of formation of the American Communist movement during the tumultuous year of 1919.

According to historian James Weinstein:

"Reed and his colleagues viewed the Socialist Party moderates as consistent supporters of 'liberal state capitalism' as a result of their commitment to parliamentarianism. Although they did not yet attack the old party leadership as prowar, they did tend to equate it with European social democracy, which, Reed wrote, was 'as responsible for the war as Wilhelm.' * * *



"While the Left Wing in New York, as throughout the United States, became more and more caught up with the insurrectionary perspective of the new Communist International, the old leadership of the Socialist Party reacted to the wartime repression and postwar antiradical hysteria by appealing to traditional American democratic rights and liberal values. Thus, at the same point in time, each wing exhibited one side of the polarity that has characterized the movement as a whole since World War I: in its revolutionary phase a resort to abstract revolutionary appeals; in its popular (defensive) stage a falling back on the dominant liberalism."

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