Oh, sure, if that's what you were talking about. They're reviled among the general public, and sometimes for really idiotic reasons. I remember our class being told by our third-grade teacher that we we were free and the Russians weren't because we could choose among brands of cereal and they couldn't!
But a lot of that sort of revulsion isn't based much on *knowledge* of either the Stalinist system or the history of the CPUSA. And, because the condemnations in these cases come from the RIGHT, they certainly don't concentrate on its record vis-a-vis Black freedom stuggles here, or on other stuff that should concern the LEFT. I mean, can you imagine Newt or whoever denouncing the CP for using "national unity" and "win-the-war" as excuses for betraying the fight against racial discrimination?!
My point was that the kinds of events that Denby, for one, was raising, are what is not well known. These are the events that are relevant to what was under discussion -- the CP's relationship to the Black struggle, the labor movement, the left, etc. This is why I mentioned the revisionist histories and the propaganda films I mentioned. For sure, while the left was watching "Seeing Red" and "The Good Fight," everyone else was watching "Rambo." But what's relevant *here* is that the left was watching "Seeing Red" and "The Good Fight." Add to this the general tendency to discount right-wing propaganda, the stuff about "my enemy's enemy is my friend," and the indiscriminate unity that's the legacy of the New Left, and the result is that leftists today under a certain age really don't know the true history of Stalinism at home.
Doug: "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."
Well, this is a lot clearer. If you're speaking from a *sociological* point of view, I don't disagree that much.
The difference between what you say here and what you wrote before:
"But I think the story of the CP(USA) is complex & contradictory. ... American Communists did many admirable things amidst the many brutalities & idiocies that are all too well known .... On race, they were way ahead of their time; ...."
is that now you have distinguished between the Stalinist PARTY (as represented by its leadership) and PEOPLE in the party.
This distinction is all-important; as I've noted, if one is evaluating the PARTY, "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." The nauseating thing about so much of the revisionist history is precisely that it purposely confuses the party with the membership, acts as if the members *were* the party, as if policy and the party's whole raison d'etre were being determined by cuddly Bill Bailey and not by its financiers in the Kremlin.
That said, it is important to keep in mind that a lot of "good people" had to be doing a lot of looking the other way when dissenters were being thrown down stairs, and engaging in a lot of willful suspension of disbelief (during the Moscow frameups, for instance). If one is looking for genuine role models, it might be more helpful to follow up on Chistopher Hitchens' recent comment about the anti-Stalinist left, the legacy of which has been hidden by two different kinds of histories (_The Nation_, Aug. 24/31, p. 8): "These are among the elements in intellectual history that have been airbrushed by cold war mentalities on the soft left and the revisionist right. We still have no cultural understanding of the premature anti-Stalinists."
This is from the article of Hitchens' that Jamie Owen Daniel pointed us to, and I want to thank him for that. It was excellent. (Since I was mentioning that the true history of the CP isn't well known among people below a certain age, it is worth mentioning that I didn't know, until Hitchens pointed it out here, that the two top leaders of the CP testified before HUAC -- of their own free will! -- to "denounce Trotsky and his followers as agents of the Gestapo and to call for their forcible suppression.")
Doug: "This sort of "enemy" talk makes me very uncomfortable. I first read this passage in REMARKS ON MARX [Semiotext(e), 1991] ...."
Foucault's point is very well taken. I agree with him entirely. I wasn't doing what he was criticizing. What he criticizes is "when you find yourself facing someone with ideas different from your own, you ... identify that PERSON as an enemy (of your class, your society, etc.)" [my emphasis]. That's he's talking about not turning another PERSON into an enemy doesn't come out very strongly in this one passage (the final one in the whole book), but when read in connection with the prior two Q&A's, it is quite clear that this is what he's talking about.
Now, what I wrote was "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" [emphasis added]. I didn't call any PERSON an enemy.
I would certainly not call Charles Brown or Jamie Owen Daniel or Mark Jones or Louis Proyect, etc. enemies, and that's because I don't think of them as enemies. Marx taught us that capitalISTS are not the enemy, CAPITAL is. The capitalISTS are merely personifications of that relation, and only insofar as, and when, they function as capitalists.
I'm sorry this wasn't clear, it's a matter of different political cultures, perhaps. In Italy, for instance, no one would confuse the two things. The far left regards rank and file members of th e Stalinist party (and its successor) as comrades, and calls them comrades; wrongheaded, benighted, etc. comrades, but comrades. Stalinism -- its ideology and its social system -- and the Stalinist party are enemies.
I believe that what Foucault calls the "model of war" should not be used to discuss things with other people. For instance, don't attack other people personally; attack the ideas that they happen to be the ones bearing at the moment.
But I believe that the model of war *must* apply to the clash of ideas. There can be no peaceful coexistence of ideas. The nature of ideas is to become ever-more sharply differentiated. Thus, the idea of "socialism" divides into nationalized property and planning under state-capitalist tyranny on the one hand, and Marx's philosophy of socialism as a new, human society in which production is run by FREELY associated individuals, and the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. *They* must fight to the death, no matter how cordially *we* behave to one another. The struggle continues.
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.