The great internal barrier to the development of The Left in the United States has been race. The slogan of Black and White, Unite and Fight, with the more or less controlling parties or other organizations, however anti-racist they were or tried to be, were _grounded_ in the "white community." That meant that, despite the real very real achievements of the CPUSA in this area (leading J. Edgar Hoover to say you could recognize a Communist because he would be comfortable with "colored people), the movement of the'30s was not a racially united movement -- especially in the CIO, which deliberately did not attempt to extend its organizing into the south. The '60s produced a totally new phenomenon: The Black Panter Party, a Party with its base in the black community but totally commited to cooperation and joint struggles with white radical groups. (To a lesser extent Latino organizations were developing with similar principles: e.g. the ATM in Los Angeles.) Moeover the Black Liberation Movement as a whole was (a) strong enough for its momentum to exert a certain implicit discipline over the Sectarian Organizations of the White Left. The SWP could never be quite as stupd as it wanted to be. Fred Hampton travelled to Madison Wisconsin in the fall of 1969 to co-lead a mostly white anti-war march with the local white leader. He spent the last months of his life both speaking to any white group that invited him to and travelling from Black high school to Black high school in Chicago, and the core of his speech was a critique of Weatherman, a group which by deserting organizing for personal expression broke the embryonic ties between white and black leftists. (Malcolm X was assassinated just as he was developing the same perspective. King had been working towards the same general perspectvie from the beginning. These were all embryonic and any fool can find a thousand criticisms of everything that happened in the '60s, but there just had not been anything like it before.
U.S. life changed after the '60s in a way it had not changed after the '30s.
One more thing. Not a lot of people may have recognized this explicitly, but the '60s smashed forever the central assumption of the First, Second, Third. and Fourth Intgernatioanls that a left movement to be effective had to revolve around a single hegemonic Party. Again, I think the strength of the Black Liberation Movement, the sort of gravitational force it exerted on all the small and large movements of the period was probably crucial here, and there is no reason ever to expect history to repeat itself in any recognizable form -- but the fact is there of a coherent left movement of multiple and conflicting 'part,' is there for a beaconof possibility which simply wasn't offered by the '3-s/
CArrol
Joanna wrote:
>
> Addressed to Carrol: you said in a recent post that the sixties were
> more radical than the thirties.
>
> Could you elaborate?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Joanna