When a comrade confesses, the communist custom is for other members to heap abuse on him, often in the most sarcastic and sneering manner. “You’re a deviationist.” “You’re a chauvinist!” The idea is to drive the member to the lowest depths of humiliation. When Earl Browder was deposed in 1945, a national officer suggested that he be given a job scrubbing floors at national headquarters. Browder later told the Yonkers, New York, communist club, “If there had been any evidence that there existed a real need for my services in this capacity, I would gladly have given them.” Members often work themselves into a state of frenzy, tearing apart their best friends. Sometimes self-criticism becomes contagious, with Party sections and committees confessing en masse. Tongues are sharp, but comrades soon learn whom to criticize. To attack a fellow comrade, especially one you don’t like, is the thing to do. In attacking the club chairman the comrade had better take things a little slowly. If he is a friend of the chairman’s superior and thinks he can get the chairman’s job, then it’s proper. If not, he should be content with self-criticism. Good Party manners would say “no” to disparaging a state or national leader, unless one was assigned as a “hatchet man” for another top official. Communist criticism flows more safely downward than upward. Criticism is encouraged—but it must be of the right kind. An organizer isn’t doing his job. To criticize him is proper; that’s _constructive criticism_, designed to make the Party stronger. “But this criticism,” one high official said, “must never depart from the line of the Party....” That’s the crux: Criticism must be limited to how the Party line can best be advanced. Anything else is _destructive criticism_. It’s like a house full of furniture. A comrade is permitted to discuss how the furniture can be arranged, whether the blue chair should be in the front room or the bedroom. But as soon as he questions the size of the house, whether a new room should be added, or the entire house destroyed and rebuilt, well, that’s too much. The Party line must not be questioned. Some members learn the hard way. They push criticism too far and are quickly put in place. John was highly regarded as a club chairman. He was aggressive and a hard worker. Promotion was his reward. He was sent by the National Committee to another city as a section organizer. Soon things began to hum. He reorganized some clubs. He shifted other Party activities. He was putting his ideas to work. Then he went one step too far. He suggested that the state organization, headed by his superior, could be improved. John should have known better. An organizer can work out new schemes to sell the _Daily Worker_, to recruit members, and to reshuffle clubs; in fact, that is Party initiative. But he doesn’t criticize state chairmen and, as John did in this instance, threaten to take up the matter directly with national headquarters.