Gordon Fitch wrote:
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> In any case the IWW lives!
So does the SLP. But the CPUSA makes a better comparison. Technically it is still a functioning organization with a nominally continuous history. But to say that the CPUSA of the 1930s still lived would be bizarre. It is equally bizarre to say that the IWW of Bill Haywood (who took his guns with him when he went to New Mexico to clean out the anarchist leadership there) still lives.
There is a way in which both the IWW and the Socialist Party of Debs still live. The best of both went to the formation of the CPUSA, and before that party more or less died it had helped inform the black and anti-war movements of the '50s and '60s. We are our history.
I vaguely remember an anecdote about Big Bill Haywood strapping on his .44 before going to "clean out a nest of Anarchists" in the local in [I think] Arizona. And though Utah Phillips tells the dullest jokes this side of Addison and Steele he could really make his guitar speak out.
Carrol