>too much of the left is implicated in the failure of Stalinism,
>not excluding the "independent" leftists who genuflect to
>"mistakes";
I guess I'm caught up in this net, for some of the things I've said here recently. But I think the story of the CP(USA) is complex & contradictory. I don't understand why saying that American Communists did many admirable things amidst the many brutalities & idiocies that are all too well known is the equivalent of genuflection, though. On race, they were way ahead of their time; in terms of building a popular radical culture, have they had any equal?; and in terms of gender, there were things going on below the rather depressing surface (see the recent NLR article on the CPUSA & race/gender/class). That's not an excuse for the Gulag, but on the other hand, it's too easy to use the Gulag to occlude everything else.
Doug