SA wrote:
>
> My point was that if something significant were to end up coming
> out of today's "scattered actions," those actions will one day have
> great importance attached to them by future historians (and readers of
> history), even though nobody is paying much attention to them now while
> they're happening. That's why I pointed to how scattered/anomalous
> Communist actions seemed in 1929-32 (relative to what came later).
NO ONE AT ALL? Actually, very few people (but they were the people that counted) "paid attention" to the first stirrings of the Civil Rights movement in the South in the late '50s. Nor did many people pay very much attention to the first years of SDS or to the first local or statewide anti-war demos.
I've (too late) become greatly interested in what, from say 1945 to 1965 CP local branches, CP fronts, ex-CP members who remained left, and the infamous "Fellow Travelers" were doing. As far as I know, no one (exept the FBI) paid any attention to actions against the Korean War, though there must have been such! I have sneered at the CP as much as anyone, but having become interested (again too late to do serious researchmyself) in what seems to me "the normal" in capitalist history: What I think of as Interims, when, really, "The Left" is more than weak; it's for all practical purposes non-existent. They always end -- and what I want to understand more clearly is how activities during those long interims links to the explosive periods that follow.
History never repeats itself, so such research would be of little direct predictive worth, but I'm still curious.
Carrol