At 12:12 PM 5/28/98 -0400, Charles Brown wrote: [SNIP]
> In other words, the ruling class gets a fresh
> start of a sort with the passing of each generation of the working class,
> especially when the ruling class
> succeeds in destroying the most class conscious and "memory
> preserving" sections of the working class, its parties, intellectuals etc.
This points to one of the reasons I think the history of the CPUSA is not best grasped within the framework (as was the case in a debate on the marxism list) of a debate over the abstract question of organizational principle (by abstract I merely mean abstracted from a particular practice and program). Whatever its many failings the CPUSA (and regardless of its own mistakes in the area) put race permanently on the agenda of the American Left and prepared the way for the Civil Rights movement. And in other ways the CPUSA of the 1940s/1950s (that is during the specific times when it was increasingly degenerate) did serve as a transmission belt between the struggles of the 1930s and those of the 1960s, though many of us at the time had no awareness of how much we owed the CP: we were only aware of how obnoxious its practice had become by then. That failure to comprehend our debts to the past (and the CPUSA's own failures) left us with a distorted (and idealist) sense of "where ideas came from." (It is equally false to hallucinate that one's own ideas are original and to think that they come "directly" from the texts of Marx or Lenin or Guevara.)
A few years ago at the Midwest Radical Scholars and Activists Conference in Chicago, Stanley Aronson (no great friend of the CP) noted that it was the CP that made available to the "folk singers" of the '60s the work of Guthrie and Ledbetter. The achievements of the 1960s themselves now reside "merely" in books and personal memories: they lacked even the imperfect institutional memory provided by the CPUSA and the SWP for the 1960s. I think that is one of the reasons the Gitlins and Altermans can get away with treating that homosexual/gender/race crowd as merely a bunch of academic freaks. In the 60s we learned in practice how fatal it was to all other struggles to ignore race and gender. Now the likes of Gitlin can easily lie about what we did and didn't learn then.
Carrol