[lbo-talk] Cuba petition

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Wed Apr 16 09:48:52 PDT 2003


On Justin's comment that DSA'ers routinely call all those to it's left Stalinists, I've never and doubt I would (even during the merger negotiations with NAM and DSOC to create DSA, Irving Howe's faction didn't call the August 7th Caucus of NAM [Carl Boggs] on the left of NAM that rejected merger) hear anyone call Solidarity, for example Stalinists or 'oids. Paul Buhle, who is a DSA member, has an excellent biography of L. Fraina aka Corey (Columbia Univ. Press has reissued Corey's book from the 30's, "The Decline of American Capitalism."), one of the founders of the CPUSA, who was treated shabbily by the Party, which alleged pilferage of the Moscow Gold. (About which, one of the best letters I read from Bertram Wolfe to Benjamin Gitlow, at the Hoover Inst. one day, related, ahem, a shipment of, "furniture, " from Moscow to NYC HQ of CPUSA). Corey in an article in the Antioch Review in '46 made a case for Stalinists not being a tendency on Left at all, but as a totalitarian interloper from the Right. Order, suppression of working class democracy, alliances with forces like the KMT which anyone should have been able to see were just biting at the bit to massacre Communists, what makes Stalinists any part of the project of the left? Just the nucleus of a new bourgeoisie w/psaudo-left trappings and vulgar marxist trimmings. Michael Pugliese



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