What does the 1936 Communist Party USA platform actually say, line-by-line, and how does it compare to Skousen’s list?
Executive summary
The 1936 Communist Party USA (CPUSA) election platform is publicly archived and, read directly, is a campaign pamphlet that emphasizes workers’ rights, unemployment relief, civil liberties, anti-fascism and support for Popular Front alliances rather than a secret list of conspiratorial “goals.” The long-circulating 45-item “list” in Cleon Skousen’s The Naked Communist is an interpretation and distillation that critics have disputed; the exact line‑by‑line comparison cannot be completed from the provided sources because Skousen’s original 45‑point text is not included among them [1] [2] [3].
1. What the 1936 CPUSA platform actually contains, paragraph by paragraph
The original 1936 Communist Election Platform is preserved in multiple digital archives and appears as a short campaign pamphlet issued by the CPUSA in July–August 1936; the text is available page‑for‑page at archives including the Internet Archive and Marxists.org, where it reads as a conventional left‑wing electoral program calling for immediate relief for the unemployed, national planning to end mass unemployment, workers’ rights and collective bargaining, civil liberties for political dissenters, anti‑lynching and civil rights measures for African Americans, and opposition to fascism at home and abroad [1] [2] [4]. The platform’s tone in 1936 reflected the party’s strategic shift to Popular Front tactics—support for anti‑fascist alliances, tactical cooperation with liberal and democratic forces, and a relative downplaying of revolutionary rhetoric compared with earlier periods [5] [6]. The pamphlet’s concrete demands and campaign language are straightforward and focused on social and labor reforms, not the covert cultural or institutional subversion framed later by critics [1] [2].
2. What Skousen’s “45 goals” claim to be and where that claim sits in the record
Cleon Skousen’s The Naked Communist popularized a list of 45 goals allegedly drawn from the CPUSA’s 1936 platform; that list has been widely repeated in conservative circles and was cited in a 1962 Congressional Record excerpt, but the provided reporting points out that Skousen’s framing cast those items as a program to “destroy the moral framework” of America—a polemical interpretation rather than a verbatim republication of the pamphlet [3]. Contemporary and later historians of the CPUSA note that by 1936 the party was moving toward coalition politics, supporting some New Deal measures and allying with labor and civil‑rights causes, which complicates a literal reading of any extracted “subversive” goals [5] [7].
3. How the platform and Skousen’s list diverge in form and implication
Formally, the CPUSA pamphlet is an electoral platform with specific reform demands; Skousen’s 45‑point list is a numbered inventory presented decades later as evidence of a conspiratorial long‑range strategy [1] [3]. Substantively, many items often attributed to the CPUSA in public discourse—moral corruption, undermining family life, controlling media and education—are framed by Skousen in ways that go beyond the platform’s calls for civil liberties, secular reforms and expanded social programs; the archives show a program focused on socioeconomic and political reforms rather than a secret cultural war plan [2] [4]. Scholars and left‑wing histories emphasize the CP’s practical electoral and labor goals in 1936 and its tactical willingness to support broader anti‑fascist coalitions, which suggests that Skousen’s list is best understood as a polemical re‑reading rather than a faithful line‑by‑line transcript [5] [6].
4. Limits of the available reporting and what is required for a strict line‑by‑line comparison
The primary platform text is available and citable in full in the provided sources [1] [2] [4], so a literal line‑by‑line quoting of the CPUSA platform is possible by consulting those PDFs; however, the provided collection of sources does not include the verbatim 45‑point list as published in Skousen’s book or the precise 1962 Congressional Record excerpt that reproduces it [3]. Therefore, a faithful, source‑transparent line‑by‑line juxtaposition requires obtaining Skousen’s original 45‑point list (or the Congressional Record citation) to place each numbered item alongside the corresponding platform text; without that, only a general comparison—showing that the CPUSA platform reads as labor and civil‑rights policy rather than a secret program of cultural sabotage—can be responsibly asserted from the available material [1] [2] [3].
5. Bottom line and reader takeaway
Reading the CPUSA’s 1936 pamphlet itself shows a campaign agenda focused on unemployment relief, workers’ rights, civil liberties and anti‑fascism consistent with Popular Front strategy; Skousen’s later 45‑point formulation is an interpretive, polemical distillation that repackages some themes as a conspiratorial blueprint, a claim that requires direct textual evidence from Skousen’s publication for definitive verification—evidence not present among the provided sources [1] [2] [3] [5].