Taking the last sentence first...Suspect our definitions and examples of anti-Communist(s)/anti-Communism(s) and anti-communist/anti-communism(s) would be as different as the politics of say, A.J. Muste, Dorothy Day and the Berrigan brothers to Cardinal Spellman, Thomas Dooley and Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Or mine to Tail Gunner Joe or J. Edgar Hoover, who three yrs. ago or so you, at least three times in a heated exchange w/ me on Stalinism and your lack of knowledge of anti-Stalinist marxist writings like the 2 vols. by Fernando Claudin on the int'l. Communist movement, translated by Monthly Review Press in the mid-70's, or more theoretical accts. like Nicos Poulantzas, "State, Power, Socialism, " that I was glad to see Verso reissue in their Verso Classics series. Though you did tell me offlist a while ago you have read Dorothy Healy autobiography and agreed with the reasons for the (long overdue) CofC/CCDS split w/ the "Hallites" (in my volumnious reading on the CPUSA I've never seen such an awkward construction, just made it up...perhaps I'll just call the folks like Tim Wheeler in the CPUSA, loyal to the moribund Gus Hall tendencies, the Old Guard, which is what the "Militant" tendency of the Socialist Party here in the 30's called the pro-FDR needle trades union Social Democrats in the SPA. Next a more direct, less roundabout answer...or at least the beginning of one.
If my great-grandparents hadn't moved from the Puglia region of Italy, just before WWI, to settle just outside of Pittsburgh (down the street
from where my Grandma lived was the first Heinz factory. From the time I was about 13, I became more and more alienated from that side of my families roots, their conservative pre-Vatican II Catholicism, support of the Vietnam War, racism and other parochialisms and chauvinisms...moving away from that was a chief fuel for my budding angry teenage marxist and punk rawk moves in the period just after, though as a elementary school kid I was intensely conscious of Kent State, My Lai and Attica. What kind of 2nd grader walks to school despondent that Nixon had just won in '68 or 4th grader that Rockefeller slaughtered tons at Attica, or 5th grader puts on his walls the photos of the massacred children and women in the ditch at My Lai from Life magazine?) and I had grown up in Italy, in the 70's and 80's I would have been a proud member of the PCI and later of their successor the DL. Though, in the earlier period, the parties to the left of the PCI, like the Il Manifesto group, the PdUP or Autonomia Operaia (Workers Power) I could have been recruited into. (The writings of Sergio Bolognia and Mario Tronti, in Telos and collected in, S. Lotringer & C. Marazzi (Eds.), "Italy:Autonomia: post-political politics, " published by Autonomedia, though I am far, far, far from being as expert in them compared to the longtimers at the aut-op-sy list, have had their attractions to me. Though my pragmatism, would I expect have made me happier and more productive as a communist in the PCI.
All that above is a roundabout way of conveying that the type of communist politics I could identify with, the Eurocommunism of a Berlinguer or Poulantzas or Hobsbawm, has unfortunately, little to do with the historical theory or practice of the bulk of US Communist politics, whether CPUSA (talking majority tendencies in the main, in '56 or '57 I would have spoken in favor of the approach of A.J. Muste and Sid Lens via the united front/realignment/regroupment effort te American Forum for Socialist Education to coalesce anti-Stalinist communists, Socialists and independent marxists and progressives.
And, over the last decades, I haven't had any difficulty working with
(and haven't had conveyed to me, face to face, feedback along the lines
of, "You red-baiting, anti-Communist, revisionist, running dog Pugliese,
come the Revolution, the Cheka is gonna re-educate your punk ass..."
Though the WWW is another kettle o' fish [note to self, google,
"Pugliese+'social fascist,' " heh!] with communists from CofC/CCDS, Line
of March, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, former cadre of the DWP of
Marlene Dixon, a gaggle of Trotskyists from the 57 varieties of LDT'ism,
and communist/socialist comrades on the WWW (the ones who have contempt
for Proyectism, unlike Yoshie and you and Jim F., the occasional hate mail
I get [except for the death threats from a U. of Chicago neo-nazi,
enamored w/ Ezra Pound, I got in 2000, though lnp3 has wished me an early
death too] almost all come from Proyectians) in Europe mainly that have
decades of experiernce in maoist, post-maoist, trotskyist and
post-trotskyist and Eurocommunist formations, though we polemicize back
and forth, none level the type of invective your type of Communist does at
folks like me, which at the highest volume you can reach, when you get
going, resembles the worst caricature of what Communists believe. No
wonder why Rakesh called you once, the cliche of the Bolshevik. (Though,
the abundent historiography on the CPSU, from academics and CPSU'ers
themselves, on the period till the consolidation of Stalinism, reveals a
rich, free wheeling, democratic debate, only drenched in blood later.)
>
CB>...You are most frustrating when you cite such musty stuff as Dimitrov
> and
> Aptheker...
>
> ^^^^
> Well, if it frustrates you, I'll keep citing it.
Isn't that childish? If I said, say, I don't like eggplant(I do, btw)
and you were the owner of the only vegetable stand for miles, would you
refuse my $'ers for any veg. except eggplant?
>
> Charles,fresh as a daisy.
Charles=polibot.
-- Michael Pugliese, hella' phat, phresh for a geek. P.S. Slang dictionary http://www.slangsite.com/slang/P.html has a great one I'd never heard before >...phillatio: Licking a stamp.