> 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.
I think you have a point here. We have to remember that what most Americans mean by "anti-communism" is not necessarily what leftists might mean. Ever since 1917, very diligent right wing/big business propaganda in the U.S. dinned the equation "left = horrible, loathsome Bolshie monsters slaughtering and starving innocent Russian peasants, etc." into Americans' ears, to the point that no self-respecting middle-class American (or American aspiring to middle-class status, which is just about everyone in the working class) would want to have anything to do with anything that might oppose big business.
This propagandizing has been so thorough and so successful that even today, long after the "communism" of the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s has had any actual presence in the world, I would bet you that most Americans still shudder at the mention of the "C-word."
I would dearly love to figure out some way to rehabilitate the "common"/"commonwealth"/"communal"/"communistic" sort of rhetoric for the 21st century. The old idea of "all of us ordinary folks working together to free ourselves from the damn system," which sounds hopelessly naive now, I guess, was a very attractive part of the language of the Left when you look back at what was being said in the good old days of the '30s to the '48 Progressive Party.
The trouble is, of course, that it can be perverted so easily to something really nasty. Leaving aside everything that we refer to by the (often misleading) shorthand term "Stalinism," just this morning on NPR I was listening to an interview with Gen. Clark in which he, of all people, averred something along the lines of, "I've always been for the ordinary people. That's who I was working for in the Army -- the ordinary soldiers." !!!
And of course one can't forget the Nazis' "Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz": "the common need before private need."
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt