I penned a piece on Lou's list about an old comrade, Jim Henderson, who had just passed away. The tales he told of the "Red North" of Queensland and the number of branches he built and the struggles that he took part in were truly amazing to listen to.
I tell my students that the practice of burning the sugar cane came out of a great safety struggle lead by the CPA. The fires got rid of the disease carrying vermin. This astonishes them. Just another part of our history that will never be written short of a revolution.
The popular image of the communist will still be that of the Seinfeld Episode or the Simpsons Episode the geek or the social leper. At best the liberal media patronizes the old communists. We will never see the Communists presented as they were - the most socially aware and committed people of their generation.
I also wanted to comment on what appears to be an attempt to revive anti-communism as a discourse. Here in Australia there have been an astonishing number of school kids defying authority to go to anti-Racism rallies. Resistance- the youth Wing of the DSP (Green Left Weekly) has played a brilliant role here. As a result the words "brain-washed" and "manipulated" have reappeared in the mainstream media. We have also been told again how the Marxists killed 100 million people.
Whether anti-Communism can be so easily revived is open to question, I think. But it does seem to me that to the extent we can address the problems created by capitalism we will see red-baiting reemerge in a big way.
In other words we can never rehabilitate the word "communist" - it will always represent the threat of absolute negation. The liberal pseudo-rehabilitation as in Seinfeld or The Simpsons is wholly dependent on our continuing political irrelevance.
But given the scale of the crisis we are entering - that cannot be guaranteed. Even our generation will get some things right.
regards
Gary