Since the under-35s have migrated into the toothless, slack jawed droolers of my generation (50-something), I have to disagree or at least counterpose Louis Proyects' characterization:
My 60s generation of the 1960s accepted without question that the CPUSA was pure evil, as was Stalin. We decided to do everything completely different from the stodgy "old left" CP. This was a huge mistake since there was much of value in the legacy that the CP left. The party had sunk deep roots in American society while the ultra- radical groups we spawned withered on the vine. Our biggest problem was that we didn't know how to relate to the ordinary working person.
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This isn't as good as the Fred Baker story, but it seems to me to fit with it. It follows what the US communist movement meant to me.
I am from Los Angeles and moved from downtown to the suburbs when I was fourteen, where the family of my best friend in the ninth grade turned out to be stone cold communists. My friends' father had served in the Abraham Lincoln brigade and his mother was an elementary school teacher who first turned to running her own commie inspired day camps during the summer (late fifties-early sixties) and later became the assistant director and then director of a Head Start program (seventies through early nineties). Their house was a barn yard of animals, kids summer camp equipment, interesting books, paintings and prints on the walls from Picasso to Hart Benton, great dinners, and formative years of conversations on politics, writing, and art--of course often with the ironic subtext on being Jewish. And, also the music--Led Belly(?), Josh White, and later Pete Seeger, not to mention the modern Russians Stravisky and Prokofiev(?), and Spanish guitar, classical and flamenco.
His parents had met in Berkeley in the Thirties and after the old man got back from Spain with two severely fractured legs sustained in a truck accident, they got married and moved to LA for WWII to work in defense jobs--he was F-4 from his injuries. They started off with some limited union activities since the old man had worked briefly in ILWU (SF general strike), but they got scared out of anything more overtly political during the HUAC Hollywood hearing which basically ruined unknown numbers of ordinary people's lives.
In any case, I never bought the Uncle Joe line, or its blind allegiance to the USSR, so Louis is right about that part. But during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was in one of these endless arguments with the old man. I was maintaining that Castro should negotiate through the UN for Cuba's right to their own governmental structure, in other words legitimatize the revolution, and the right to arm themselves however they saw fit.
Suddenly the old man just looked at me and laughed. Negotiate rights, "Chuck, what are you talking about?" I'll never forget his laugh or this moment. Suddenly, it seemed I understood something, although I still can't say what exactly. Perhaps that all this was a farce, and the real question is always about power, not morality or rights or any of the middle class excuses that mask power.
Some where about this time, I had read 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' and asked the old man what he thought. He said it was good for bourgeois literature, implying with a knowing smile it was make-believe, and then said I should try Malraux or Orwell who were better.
My buddy's older brother was up at UCB while we were still in high school and he had been to the SF HUAC demos at the Federal Building and would be in the later FMS demos. I eagerly listened to his first hand reports. A year or so after the HUAC demos, my so-called US Government high school class watched a propaganda film on these demonstrations--I still remember one line from this civics lesson, "See, the violent students, strike out that the Peach Officers!" The whole class laughed because the narration was in absolute odds with the images on film which showed the cops beating the students and dragging them down the steps by their hair and clothes.
I couldn't wait to get up to Berkeley and fight the good fight. That of course turned out to be a much more complex and long lived thing to do than I ever could have imagined. Later during a period when I was working in student and then community based projects with disability, poverty, and civil rights I often realized we were re-capitulating, re-learning, re-creating organization, rhetoric, and political positions along with the many pitfalls that had all gone on before us. We were always re-inventing the wheel!
I think now, that is the way it is supposed to be. We are locked into a different historical dialectic than the union movements, the communists, or the later civil rights movements, or the various political movements that have followed. It is in some sense always necessary to re-invent, re-creat, and recapitulate the process in different but related trajectories. Some times words like solidarity and fraternity come alive roaring the fires of life, and sometimes they are nothing more than embers glowing in the dark.
During the early phase of the Nicaraguan revolution, I re-read L'Espoir and thought at forty-something, about those long ago conversations from fourteen to twenty over leg of lamb or corned beef talking about politics, art, writing, and activism. The words lyric illusion from Malraux and the very old French, en delire, blended as something tangibly grasp of my experiences in the sixties and early seventies.
Here is a piece of Marx from the failed one issue magazine, Jahrbucher, 1844:
Even greater than the external obstacles seem to be the inner ones. Even though there is no doubt about the "whence," there does prevail all the more confusion about the "whither." It is not only the fact that a general anarchy has broken out among the reformers; each one will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea of what is to happen. But that is exactly the advantage of the new direction, namely, that we do not anticipate the world dogmatically, but rather wish to find the new world through criticism of the old. Until now the philosophers had the solution to all riddles in their desks, and the stupid outside world simply had to open its mouth so that the roasted pigeons of absolute science might fly into it. Philosophy has become secularized, and the most striking proof for this is the fact that the philosophical consciousness itself is drawn into the torment of struggle, not only outwardly but inwardly as well. Even though the construction of the future and its completion for all times is not our task, what we have to accomplish at this time is all the more clear: _relentless criticism of all existing conditions_, relentless in the sense that the criticism is not afraid of its finding and just as little afraid of the conflict with the powers that be. (from _Karl Marx, Essential Writings_, Bender, FL, Westview Press, 1972, 41p)
But who has written the theory of aftermath, the long slow bureaucratization, the death of movements that were in some measure successful and ossified where they stood--as if unexpectedly--when they had only intended to stop momentarily to catch their breath?
Chuck Grimes