I really don't believe so, not after all the revisionist history and the putrid propaganda films like "Seeing Red" and the "Good Fight," which had not a word about their involvement in the slaughter of leftists in the Spanish Civil War. And it isn't a matter of shortcomings; as I said before, it is a matter of what the Party stood for as a whole, which was certainly not the interests of Blacks or workers, but those of Russian state-capitalism.
Doug: "Foregrounding only the negative side of this complicated institution does no one but anti-Communists a favor."
I don't get this at all. How is it *not* playing into the hands of the right-wing, which wants us to believe that private capitalism is the apex of human freedom, when one pussyfoots around and refuses to condemn the exploitative and oppressive Stalinist system and its ideological representatives? How does it help one's credibility to come off as an apologist for tyranny and oppression? How does it help when one makes it look like the right-wingers are the bearers of truth and human values? How does it help to fail to project a vision of true human freedom by failing to oppose oneself to the perversions that have usurped the names of Marxian and socialism? How does it help to fail to distinguish oneself from just one more corrupt exponent of realpolitik?
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
Beyond this, where I think you're going wrong is in thinking that there's only one enemy, and that it lies to the right. There is also the enemy within the left. Stalinism is part of the left, but in the same sense that cancer is part of the body. You seem to have no trouble seeing a lot of the union bureaucracy as an internal enemy of the labor movement -- and you seem have no qualms that slamming them is doing the right-to-work and neoliberal forces a favor -- so why not the same thing here?!
Now, if all you are talking about is *balance*, that's another matter. I'm all for balance when it's called for, but balance without equivocation and apologetic "yes, but..."s. So, for instance, all of you who have mentioned the good things you think the CP has done, how about a little balance? Just a teeny-weeny bit. How about even just one *unqualified* statement from each of you that Angela Davis was a hypocrite for refusing to sign an appeal on behalf of Czechoslovak political prisoners when Jirí Pelikán asked her to, noting that "[w]e too have many Angela Davises and Soledad Brothers"?
Not holding my breath,
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.