The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States. For approximately the first half of the 20th century it was the largest and most widely influential communist party in the country, and played a prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, founding most of the country's major industrial unions (which would later implement the Smith Act) and pursuing intense anti-racist activity in workplaces and city communities throughout this first part of its existence. Simultaneously the CPUSA survived the Palmer Raids, the first Red Scare, and many similar attempts at suppression of communist activity by the Government of the United States through the end of World War II.

By August 1919, only months after its founding, the CPUSA had 60,000 members, including anarchists and other leftists, while the more moderate Socialist Party of America had only 40,000. The sections of its International Workers Order meanwhile organized for communism around linguistic and ethnic lines providing mutual aid and tailored cultural activities to an IWO membership that peaked at 200,000 at its height. By the 1950s, however, the combined effects of the second Red Scare, McCarthyism, the Secret Speech, and the Cold War began to break apart the Communist Party's internal structure and confidence. U.S. Government prosecution efforts were aided by the party's membership in the Comintern because it cast the Party not only as subversive, but also as a "foreign" agent.

Members who did not end up in prison for party activities tended either to disappear quietly from its ranks or to adopt more moderate political positions that were at odds with the CPUSA's party line. By 1957, membership had dwindled to less than 10,000, of which some 1500 were FBI informants. Thus eliminated as a revolutionary opposition force, the party transformed its militant revolutionary line into a more evolutionary one, participating with more vigor in the U.S. electoral system and advocating "peaceful coexistence", shifts which by the early 1960s led to dozens of angry breakaways by more militant CP members who saw them as conciliatory "sellout" moves.

That New Left continued to follow the idea of armed class war and generally turned to Mao Zedong, the Black Panther Party, the Cuban revolutionaries or similar figures for inspiration. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 led to further disillusionment and defections. Meanwhile, the major leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement were very careful to keep communists at arm's length for fear of also being branded communist, policies that isolated the CPUSA even further.

With continued erosion of what little mass support remained for the party, and very little if any continued influence in mainstream politics, in the late 1980s the party finally became estranged even from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself. Its opposition to Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika meant the Communist Party of the Soviet Union cut off its financial and material support of the CPUSA in 1989. The party languished without the state support from such a major entity.

And in 1991, the party held its convention and tried to resolve the issue of whether the collapse of the Soviet Union should mean that the Party reject Leninism. A Party majority reasserted its classic Marxist-Leninist line, and the faction urging social democracy left and established itself as the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

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