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Lately, a small number of the newer historians of the CP, most notably Mark
Naison, have been making a similar points about the CP in the early 1930s.
Specifically, Naison and a few      others have been challenging the notion that the
practice of U.S.     Communists was completely out of touch with American reality,
and     completely dominated by a foreign-based hierarchy, during the infamous
Third Period — the period in the international Communist movement that extended
from 1928 to approximately 1935. The Third Period continues to have a bad name
not only among anti-Communists, but also among many of the revisionist historians
who are otherwise sympathetic to the party practice (especially in the subsequent
Popular Front period of 1935 to 1939). In the eyes of these Popular Front-oriented
historians, the party's ultra-revolutionary Third Period "class against class" stance,
and the supposedly unrelenting dogmatism of its theoretical work in this era,
resulted in hopeless sectarianism and isolation. There is certainly some validity to
these criticisms, but, as Naison recently urged, a closer look the U.S. party during
the Third Period practice is warranted/

The CP's Third Period line posited the radical destabilization of world
capitalism and imminent revolutionary upsurges around the globe. This line was
first advanced by the Communist or Third International, the world organization of
Communist and allied parties, in 1928. It predicted economic calamity for
capitalism over a year before the Crash of 1929, at a time when capitalism's eternal
prosperity was regarded as (in the United States at any rate) an unassailable truth.
The accuracy of this prediction gave the line credibility among its adherents.
Furthermore, the economic determinism of Third International Marxism led to the
assertion that economic crisis would lead more or less directly to popular uprisings
and revolutionary consciousness. That this notion later proved to be mistaken does
not negate the fact that it engendered confidence, elan, and a sense of urgency in
cadre, allowing them to more easily overcome the widespread demoralization