The Red Purge's Lasting Impacts

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>The Red Purge has also had deleterious impacts on non-socialists as 
>>well, as you can obviously see in the attitudes of most LBO 
>>anarchists and non-socialists here.
>
>There's some truth to this, but there's also some bullshit to it 
>too. Any critique of the politics, organization, or rhetorical style 
>of the sects is dismissed by sympathizers as redbaiting. Sometimes 
>it is redbaiting, but sometimes it isn't. Many socialists (e.g. 
>David McReynolds) and many Marxists (e.g. me) have problems with our 
>vanguard parties. Anarchism, too, is a highly honorable radical 
>tradition, and it's offensive to see it treated as a species of 
>McCarthyism.
>
>Doug

The Red Purge's lasting impact on American political culture is to 
narrow the range of political expressions by creating an 
obsessive-compulsive impulse to remind all (including others on the 
left) that the idea of socialist revolution and political parties 
which advocate it (aka "vanguard parties") are beyond the pail.  To 
my knowledge, that's not a US anarchist thing; that's a US 
politico-cultural thing.  As I already mentioned, the Red Purge has 
had negative impacts on not just anarchists and other non-socialists 
but socialists in the USA as well.  US socialists (especially of the 
kind who don't renounce the idea of socialist revolution) are 
generally obliged to stay in the political closet -- hence the 
proliferation of what is often referred to as "fronts," e.g., Refuse 
& Resist, Not In Our Name, the International Action Center, the 
International A.N.S.W.E.R., etc.  They are not so much "fronts" as 
closets, however.  Compare US political culture that mostly closets 
socialism to French or Italian or Argentine or British or South 
Korean or even Japanese political culture, where most left-wing 
individuals' and institutions' political affiliations are out in the 
open, where you have unions, newspapers, prominent intellectuals, 
etc. openly affiliated with a wide variety of political parties on 
the left (Communist, Trotskyist, etc.).
-- 
Yoshie

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