Sam Webb (politician)

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Sam Webb, CPUSA National Chair, and Nong Duc Manh (right), General Secretary of the Communist Party of VietNam, met in December 2006 in Vietnam to strengthen ties between the two parties. See http://cpusa.org/article/articleview/790/1/123/ for more on that historic meeting.

Sam Webb is the current national chair of the Communist Party USA, a position to which he was elected in 1998. He was re-elected at the 27th National Convention held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2001, and again at the 28th National Convention in Chicago, Illinois in 2005.

Webb, who now resides in New York City, was born in Maine, quarterbacked his high school football team and graduated from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia where he was a starting forward on the basketball team. He received a Masters in Economics from the University of Connecticut.

His public positions have been critical of the current United States government institutions and class structure, but relatively uncritical of the principles of American government, e.g. democracy and checks and balances, which is consistent with the current policies of the CPUSA. Webb is a staunch proponent of socialism.

Webb led the party when it made decision to support some candidates in the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election. While the CPUSA regards both major parties as capitalist, it believes that the current Republican domination is dangerous. Webb has argued that working people and democracy itself are threatened if the Republicans remain in power.

Webb has argued that independent politics should be done in a manner that builds confidence and victories, not in the usual manner that is seen as a losing scenario, even by proponents of third parties themselves.

Webb's leadership has led to dramatic new developments US Communist political thought, activism, and openness. This includes developing a wide-ranging discussion on socialism and how to get there along with deeper discussions and analysis of key democratic questions.

He is the author of "Reflections on Socialism", a paper reflecting ideas he first presented at the 2005 Left Forum in New York. This paper, whose purpose is to start a nation-wide dialogue on socialism yesterday, today and tomorrow points out that socialism is once again being discussed in the trade union movement, the student movement, in popular magazines and certainly in the halls of power worldwide.

In the last two years he has traveled to China, Great Britain, Vietnam, and Cuba where he met with Communist and Socialist leaders and he represented the Communist Party USA at the Athens, Greece, meeting of world Communist Parties.