Well, Andrew, are you going to read some other stuff, e.g., some of the books I suggested? Or have you already read them? For a novelistic account of reds and blacks, which is absolutely brutal in its criticism of the reds, there is a novel by Chester Himes, the name of which escapes me at the moment.
By the way, W.Z. Foster, longtime CPUSA leader, wrote an interesting account of his working life,"Pages from a Workers Life" (I think that is the title). He was a strong anti-racist before he became a red. Did he just forget all of that when he became a party leader?
Michael Yates
Andrew Kliman wrote:
> Doug wrote:
> "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."
>
> 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.