Let me also use this as an opportunity to comment on the related notion that the collapse of the USSR has been bad for the left. First, this makes a fetish out of the left, as if the point were its its preservation and expansion rather than social transformation. Second, it is no mystery why the left has suffered from this:
too much of the left is implicated in the failure of Stalinism, not excluding the "independent" leftists who genuflect to "mistakes";
by virtue of the symbiotic attempts of the Stalinists and the U.S. government to identify Marxism and socialism with state-capitalist totalitarianism, the concepts of socialism and Marx's own Marxism have been wrongly discredited as well in the public mind;
because of this, and because of the very successful attempts of the Stalinists to use calls for "unity" (behind their leadership, of course) to suppress a real debate on the left, and the acquiesce of supposed independent leftists to this "unity," genuine Marxian socialism is almost unknown, and therefore cannot represent an opposite pole of attraction to capitalism at the moment;
too much of the left, not only the Stalinists, has impoverished the concept of socialism, reducing it to nationalized property and the Plan, so that, with the failure of this concept, it has no real alternative to existing society to offer.
As for Charles Brown's post, it seems that Denby struck a very raw nerve. Brown accuses him of lying -- "sectarian prevarication." The people who wrote the book on falsification and rewriting of history shouldn't throw stones.
Rather than engaging Denby's substantive points (which is rather reminiscent of the Howard Fast incident Denby recounted), Brown decides to throw up irrelevant smokescreens. He conducts a few virtual popularity contests. He says that Angela Davis credited Black mass support for her freedom, which seems to, but doesn't, contradict Denby's statement that, *when she was freed*, she credited the CP. He engages in bureaucratic hairsplitting about whether Fast was an official Party spokesperson -- I don't remember him objecting when others on this list have judged the CP in terms of the deeds of its rank and file, instead of official policy and such, but I guess that's OK only if you're extolling it. (BTW, those who glorify the CP rank and file might reflect on Denby's eyewitness account of what a CP meeting was really like if you weren't part of the amen chorus. And there are myriad more marvelous stories, including a long legacy of violence against other leftists, but I guess that wasn't official Party policy.)
I mentioned that Brown has not engaged Denby's substantive argument. Here again are some of the points he made that have not been addressed:
(1) "When I talk to Negro Stalinists, I know and feel that it is the party first, second, and always. With this the question of Russia is always tied in. But it is never the Negroes first, no matter what they say."
(2) "Why didn't one of the leading Communists or why didn't the CP as a whole support the March on Washington Negro mass movement?" (Anyone know the answer? How about you, Charles? You seem to be quite the expert on Party history.)
(3) "how much control do Russian workers have of production? ... Who controls the factory committees? ... Does this control come from the workers on the line or from the Kremlin on down?"
(4) "the Party had betrayed the "Double V" movement (victory abroad and victory at home)"
(5) Older Blacks "saw the CP crush the Hungarian workers' revolt, killing thousands and imprisoning many more."
(6) Angela Davis "said she was a Marxist. ... [She] stated that she would work to free political prisoners all over the world." But "[w]hen she was freed and a citizen of Czechoslovakia tried to get her to sign a petition opposing the jailing of political prisoners in that country, she wouldn't even look at him."
(7) While the U.S. was "senselessly slaughter[ing] the Vietnamese people," President Nixon "was off to China, sipping tea with Mao Tse-Tung. He followed this up with a trip to Russia and champagne toasts with Brezhnev."
(8) When Angela Davis "was freed by a jury [she] gave credit to the Communist Party for freeing her."
(9) When he saw pictures of Davis "joining in" with ordinary Cuban workers, he was reminded of the Black woman who asked "After the revolution, when I put down my rifle, will I have a broom pushed into my hands?"
Ciao
Andrew
Andrew ("Drewk") Kliman Home: Dept. of Social Sciences 60 W. 76th St., #4E Pace University New York, NY 10023 Pleasantville, NY 10570 (914) 773-3951 Andrew_Kliman at msn.com
"... the *practice* of philosophy is itself *theoretical.* It is the *critique* that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea." -- K.M.