>Henwood wrote:
>>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
>
>In the last sentence, what does "this" and what does "that fact" refer to?
>Are you saying that without the USSR as a symbol of an alternative, however
>flawed, and with the "capitalization" of China, leftists - especially highly
>effective & motivated communists - have lost heart and motivation so that
>leftist based groups are weakening? If so, is this a popular line in the
>regularly published left? Couldn't it be simply that the forces of capital
>are stepping up the assault?
And why can the forces of Kapital step up their assault. Because, among other reasons, the USSR acted as a check on their freedom, as did Communist Parties around the world. I say this as no particular fan of Soviet society; I could make a list as long as anyone of the USSR's brutalities and idiocies, and those of the world's CP's. (I'm just reading David Macey's Foucault bio, and there's something in almost every chapter about the idiocy of the French CP - from their analysis of homosex as an insult to French womanhood, to their philoscophical cretinousness, to their cowardly behavior in May 1968.) But I had a conversation the other day with a British friend of mine who told me about a meeting he was at recently with a bunch of CPGB old-timers, who had spent their lives organizing tenants in London and the like, and I was struck by the similarity of that to what I've heard about the CPUSA here - not the leadership, which is almost irredeemably stupid, but with all the fine people who organized popular schools, unions, community groups, civil rights organizations, etc. You can't talk about the decline of "The Left," such as it is, without talking about the ebbing of just this sort of thing. It's part an ebbing of spirit, and part an unraveling of organizations, and as I said here a couple of weeks ago, all the anti-Communist leftists who thought the end of the USSR would make their work easier have proven to be wrong so far. Maybe sometime in the future the fact that the label "Communist" will lose its demonic quality will be good for us, but not yet.
Doug