>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.
This is really sick stuff. I urge anybody who really wants to understand the complexity of what it meant to belong to the CP, I urge you to track down Junius Scales's "Cause at Heart." Junius was the first CPer to be convicted on the Smith Act. He was leader of the southern district and grew up in an aristocratic family. He grew to hate racism at an early age and joined the CP because IT WAS THE ONLY SERIOUS OPPONENT OF RACISM IN THE SOUTH. He quit the CP shortly after the Kruschev revelations. One of the things that really disgusts me about the Trotskyist movement nowadays is this facile dehumanization of other leftists. In Trotsky's debate with the Schachtmanites, he spoke in terms of a "scratch turning into gangrene." He also referred to Stalinism as the "syphillis" of the workers movement. In plain fact, the CP has functioned for the past 50 years as a mildly reformist left group which has actually helped in significant ways on peace, civil rights and labor issues. So what if Angela Davis didn't take the "correct" position on Czechoslovakia. Neither did Castro. Ooops, forgot. Andrew Kliman thinks that Castro is no better than Batista.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)