Investigation of Communist activities in Seattle, Wash., Area, Hearings, Part 2United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities
History
Investigation of Communist activities in Seattle, Wash., Area, Hearings, Part 2
United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities
Communism -- Washington (State) -- Seattle
Because there was such a popular demand for some change in the economic
situation to assure continued production and a cooperative effort, many
people tried to translate an ideal of a cooperative commonwealth into
some form of legislative effort. This resulted in many conferences and
the calling in of legal talent to try to draft a measure which would be
legal and which would satisfy the ambitions of the people to have the
so-called dream of a cooperative commonwealth organization.
Mr. TAVENNER. Describe in a practical sense what production-for-use
meant?
Mr. DENNETT. I wish I could satisfy you completely on that point
because that is one of the problems we ran into in trying to draw up
this initiative measure.
We could never satisfy ourselves that we had it satisfactorily
organized. However, the staff who worked on it worked long and hard and
finally produced a measure which was known as the production-for-use
initiative. It was ready for presentation to that convention. However,
some of us in the Communist Party, while we agreed that such a measure
was a good propaganda weapon and felt that it was an excellent means of
popularizing the ideas which we understood and claimed were the basis
of the operation of the economy in the Soviet Union, we were startled
when we read the document and found that it sounded a little bit more
like the Fascist corporate state that the Italian leader Mussolini had
established. We became so alarmed about it, and were so perplexed that
we asked a very world-famous person, who happened to be a guest of the
convention, what this person thought about it.
The person to whom I refer is Anna Louise Strong, who had just come
from the Soviet Union, extended greetings to us, to the convention, and
otherwise gave a very enlightening report on her travels, and won wide
acclaim for that effort.
Mr. TAVENNER. Did she, on the floor of the convention, address herself
to the problem of production-for-use?
Mr. DENNETT. She did not. Not at that moment. She spoke only in general
terms about it, referring to it in a complimentary way and hoping for
success. But at that moment she did not know very much about what was
in that document.
However, we felt that she, coming from the Soviet Union with fresh
knowledge, might know quite a lot about it and might be able to assist
us in revising the document so that it would be possible to satisfy
us that it was, in fact, a step in the direction of a cooperative
commonwealth.
So she consented very graciously to take the document and work on it
overnight. She did exactly that. And we read it the next morning, and,
much to our surprise, she had moved the emphasis in the control even
more in the direction of top control and less in the direction of
allowing the members or the organizations to have anything to say about
it, which was just the reverse of the trend that we had hoped for.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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