>There is no
>doubt that Communists were prominent and
>important in founding the UAW and leading
>it until the Reuther purged.
The more I hear, the more I'm convinced that without communists of various sorts, there'd be hardly any "progressive" groups around - unions, tenant groups, whatever. The inspiring taxi workers strike in New York was organized in large part by a small group of mainly Indian Marxists, and I'm told that Maoists of various sorts figure prominently in Chicano/a organizations in the U.S. There was a thread here a few weeks ago on how the downfall of the USSR was bad even for the noncommunist left; this, I think, is one of the mechanisms behind that fact.
Doug