On 2010-07-28, at 11:07 PM, SA wrote:
> Marv Gandall wrote:
>
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>> That's a pretty harsh judgement, too harsh IMO. Even anti-Communist historians acknowledge the outsized role played by the party in organizing the unemployed and the industrial unions, and against Jim Crow and fascism during this period. The material posted by Charles indicates that sustained and nationally coordinated activity among the unemployed and tenants began early in the Depression, prior to the New Deal. The Soviet Union was less important as a "sugar daddy" than that it was still endowed with the prestige of the Russian Revolution which served as a powerful inspiration for a large part of that generation of workers and intellectuals (Jews and non-Jews) - particularly against the backdrop of capitalist crisis and the rising threat of fascism.
>
> I'm not trying to deny that the party did all these good things. I'm just saying that they didn't *appear* to amount to all that much at the time. What looks to you in retrospect like "sustained and nationally coordinated activity" looked at the time like scattered local actions, stirred up by a CP that had - what, 10,000 members? A "national conference" was often perceived rightly as CP headquarters deciding to book a hall and instructing its cadre to drag enough people to it to make it look full. I'm certainly not criticizing it - far from it. I'm just saying it didn't feel like an unstoppable groundswell at the time.
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Not to quibble, but I think you may be seriously underestimating the national impact that a small left-wing party of "only" 10,000 highly motivated and skilled members embedded in all major industries and neighbourhoods would have in the US today. During the much deeper global capitalist crisis of the 30's, and particularly in the context of a rising international labour and socialist movement and the increasing appeal of the USSR, Communism DID feel like an unstoppable groundswell - not only to American workers and intellectuals, but also to anxious businessmen and state officials attentive to the potential threat which the CPUSA posed to the system. For a time, there appeared to be good cause for either hope or worry; by the end of the decade, the party had grown tenfold and become a major force in the dynamic CIO.