>--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>.> between the USA, where all currents of the left
>have
>> been weaker than
>> almost anywhere else since the Red Purge, and
>> Western Europe, where
>> both the Communist and non-Communist left have been
>> far stronger than the USA, is still stark.
>
>In France, for example, it was the bourgeoisie that sold out the
>country. The communists emerged from the United Front as patriots.
>In the United States, the Communist Party USA lost its definition.
>I recall reading in Peggy Dennis' autobiography about how a lot of
>CP who were in trade union leadership positions found it difficult,
>if not impossible, to take up struggles against the government, etc,
>after having quieted any criticisms during the United Front. As you
>might know, the CPUSA came out against strikes, most notably strikes
>by the UMWA, because they would have hurt the war effort. In other
>words, the CPs in other countries came out of the United Front as
>leaders, whereas the CPUSA tailed and came out in a much weaker
>position.
The Popular Front Americanism certainly weakened the CPUSA. In terms of its impact on the CPUSA's trade union work, I recommend Nelson Lichtenstein's _Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II_, <http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1693_reg.html>. That doesn't explain, though, why the anti-Communist left of all varieties -- from anarchists to anti-Stalinist Trotskyists to social democrats -- in the USA are weaker today than in Western Europe. If the Popular Front Americanism was the main problem, one would expect other currents of left-wing politics to benefit from the CPUSA's self-inflicted trouble and grow at its expense, but that's not what happened. The peculiar strength of American anticommunism made all schools of left-wing organizing here much more difficult than elsewhere, and we can see the result in the precarious lives of American workers without universal health care and other vital social programs, toiling for longer hours than any other rich nation's working class. -- Yoshie
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