>Doug: "Andrew, anyone who's drawn more than 3 or 4 breaths in
>the U.S. over the last 60 or 70 years is fully aware of the
>shortcomings of the CPUSA."
>
>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.
Andrew, maybe you grew up in a different environment from mine, but I remember hearing nothing except tales of horror about the Communist Party and their evil scheming. I bet if you polled Americans, the CP would end up somewhere around pederasts and Satanists on the prestige scale.
I've never held back in my criticism of Stalinism or the USSR or the idiocies on view every week in the Peoples Weekly World. What I am saying is that there were many good people in the CPUSA who did many good things despite the leadership and the Moscow connection - things worth studying today, in fact.
>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 sort of "enemy" talk makes me very uncomfortable. I first read this passage in REMARKS ON MARX [Semiotext(e), 1991], an interview of Michel Foucault conducted by Duccio Trombadori of the PCI, and it had quite an effect on me. Of course MF himself was a relentless and often cruel polemicist, but still....
<quote> Duccio Trombadori: But still apropos of polemics, you have also stated clearly that you don't like and will not accept those kinds of arguments "which mimic war and parody justice." Could you explain to me more clearly what you meant by saying this?
Michel Foucault: What is tiresome in ideological arguments is that one is necessarily swept away by the "model of war." That is to say that when you find yourself facing someone with ideas different from your own, you are always led to identify that person as an enemy (of your class, your society, etc.). And we know that it is necessary to wage combat against the enemy until triumphing over him. This grand theme of ideological struggle has really disturbed me. First of all because the theoretical coordinates of each of us are often, no, always, confused and fluctuating, especially if they are observed in their genesis.
Furthermore: might not this "struggle" that one tries to wage against the "enemy" only be a way of making a petty dispute without much importance seem more serious than it really is? I mean, don't certain intellectuals hope to lend themselves greater political weight with their "ideological struggle" than they really have? A book is consumed very quickly, you know. An article, well.... What is more serious: acting out a struggle against the "enemy," or investigating, together or perhaps divergently, the important problems that are posed? And then I'll tell you: I find this "model of war" not only a bit ridiculous but also rather dangerous. Because by virtue of saying or thinking "I'm fighting against the enemy," if one day you found yourself in a position of strength, and in a situation of real war, in front of this blasted "enemy," wouldn't you actually treat him as one? Taking that route leads directly to oppression, no matter who takes it: that's the real danger. I understand how pleasing it can be for some intellectuals to try to be taken seriously by a party or a society by acting out a "war" against an ideological adversary: but that is disturbing above all because of what it could provoke. Wouldn't it be much better instead to think that those with whom you disagree are perhaps mistaken; or perhaps that you haven't understood what they intended to say? <endquote>
Doug