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The line between race and class is one of the most potent fault lines in left politics today. Theres a sense that a contradiction exists between fighting class inequality and fighting racial inequality. Among liberals, this has become almost an article of faith. Even among leftists, theres a sense that these are dangerous waters, and that special theoretical acumen is necessary to navigate them successfully.

It wasnt always like this. In fact, the split between race and class can be traced to a specific moment in American history, when the causes of racial and class equality were sundered. That moment was the Red Scare in the middle of the twentieth century.

Before the Red Scare, there was a potent movement for black equality that included the Left, most centrally the Communist Party. Based in the new industrial unions, this movement fought for black equality in housing, employment, and at the ballot box, and linked that fight to the broader struggle against capitalist domination. The anticommunist campaign of the late 1940s, however, beginning under the Truman administration, crippled this movement, delaying the fall of Jim Crow by a decade or more and narrowing the movements focus to legal equality, leaving its larger ambitions unfulfilled.

In the 1940s, the movement for black equality made its biggest strides since Reconstruction. In 1941, prodded by socialist A. Philip Randolphs March on Washington Movement, Franklin Roosevelt issued executive order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industry and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee. It was the first substantive federal commitment to civil rights since the 1870s. In the courts, the NAACPs legal team won rulings against the white primary system and against racially restrictive housing covenants. In just six years, the NAACP went from 50,000 members to 450,000. One result of this ferment was a narrowing of the black-white wage gap at a speed not approached since.

At the heart of all of this activity was the militancy of the black working class. Two processes had come together to enable this militancy. First, technological change in Southern agriculture had pushed black Americans out of the cotton fields and into the cities, creating a black proletariat on a scale never seen before. Second, the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) created a union movement that broke, however incompletely, with American labors historic embrace of white supremacy.

Black Americans streamed into the CIO unions, whether in Detroit in the United Autoworkers, Alabama in the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, Chicago in the United Packinghouse Workers, or at sea in the National Maritime Union. While most CIO unions were to the left of the more conservative American Federation of Labor when it came to race, the leftmost were the unions in which Communist Party (CP) members played a leading role. Known as the left-led unions, these organizations were ferocious in their assault on racial inequality, whether on the factory floor or in the community more broadly.

In North Carolina, Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO (FTA) was emblematic of this kind of unionism. When Local 22 won its first contract from RJ Reynolds in 1944, it created a network of black shop stewards who became leaders in the fight to democratize Jim Crow North Carolina. Local 22 activists fought against police abuse of black Americans, conducted voter registration drives, and even revitalized the local NAACP, turning it into the largest in North Carolina. Led by CP cadres who were committed to training worker militants, the local even maintained its own library of black and working class history. As one black worker remembered, at that little [city] library you couldnt find any books on Negro history They didnt have books by [Herbert] Aptheker, [W.E.B.] Du Bois, or Frederick Douglass. But we had them at our library.

At the same time, in New York City, the United Public Workers of America (UPWA), another left-led union, fought for the rights of black public-sector workers. Though black public workers were subject to discrimination and segregation, institutions like the Post Office and the Internal Revenue Service were nonetheless engines of class mobility, allowing black workers to access levels of job security and compensation that were unheard of in the private sector.

In New York in the 1940s, they were led by black militants like Ewart Guinier, who ran for Manhattan Borough President on the American Labor Party ticket, and Eleanor Goding, who headed the local for Department of Welfare workers, and was the first black woman to head a union local in New York City. The union fought discrimination in government hiring, and was a key force in pushing for the FEPC. It also had an internationalist vision, organizing workers on the Panama Canal and fighting against the discriminatory wage system the US government used.

The UPWA wasnt alone in linking the fight for civil rights with international solidarity. Inspired by antifascist mobilization and anticolonial revolt, black organizations and intellectuals advanced a critique of white imperialism that identified colonialism with the power of capital. Figures like George Padmore and Henry Lee Moon sought to link black organizations in the United States with unions of black workers in the colonial world. Activists around the Communist Party founded the Council on African Affairs to promote African independence. The Council especially prioritized the struggle of black workers in South Africa, acting as the vanguard for an internationalist black political consciousness that extended well beyond the Marxist left.

In the years immediately following the end of World War II, organizers had good reason to think that Jim Crow and the larger American caste system were on their last legs. A movement that spanned from liberal organizations like the NAACP to the Communist Party, and based on the militancy of black workers, was mounting a challenge to racial inequality that recognized the need to completely remake American society. Pillars of white supremacy, like the white primary, were falling, and the federal government was dragged, inch-by-inch, into open opposition to Jim Crow. Within a few years, however, many of the organizations leading this charge would be destroyed, their activists scattered and demoralized, while the surviving elements of the struggle adopted a far more cautious stance.

Though anticommunism in the United States stretches back to at least the American response to the Paris Commune, a distinct wave gathered strength in the years following World War II. The United States and the Soviet Union had been allies in the fight against fascism, putting a temporary cooler on red-hunting passions. But after 1945, as the Cold War set in, attacks on American supporters (or even insufficiently hostile opponents) of the USSR came into fashion.

Moreover, the end of the war witnessed a massive strike wave by workers whose demands had been suppressed during the war years. 1946 saw the largest strike wave in American history, with more than five million workers involved. Employers were eager to regain the upper hand, and anticommunism was a key part of their arsenal.

The anticommunist push began in earnest in 1947, when Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9835, establishing a loyalty oath program for federal employees. It subjected all two million federal workers to investigation into their political beliefs, in order to determine whether they were members of, or even sympathetic to, subversive organizations, which were determined by the Attorney Generals List of Subversive Organizations, and included the National Negro Congress and the Council on African Affairs.

Trumans anticommunist initiatives gave the signal that red-hunting was now an official American pastime. In the House of Representatives, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which had existed since the late 1930s, turned its attention to Hollywood, seeking to root out subversive influences in the film industry. FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who had been hunting communists since his days as a young operative in the War Emergency Divisions Alien Enemy Bureau during World War I, designed and carried out Trumans loyalty oath program, used the program to double the size of the FBI, and routinely passed information from his investigations to HUAC. Joe McCarthy, the man who would give this moment its name, was actually a late-comer to the party, getting involved only in 1950.

The black left was a major target for this anticommunist network, composed heavily of Southerners for whom segregation was part of the American way of life. The CAA and the Civil Rights Congress (the successor to the National Negro Congress) were both the targets of investigation, and ultimately collapsed under the weight of repression. W.E.B. Du Bois himself, in his eighties, was arrested and appeared in court in chains for his activism in the global peace movement.

Yet the investigations launched by the anticommunist network went far beyond defiant radicals like Du Bois. Because the Communist Party and its fellow travelers had been so central to the movement for racial equality in these years, there were few black activists who had not rubbed shoulders with communists in the course of their work. This was all the pretext needed for the FBI or HUAC to launch an investigation. Even black liberals who couldnt possibly have been construed as communists, like friend of the Roosevelts Mary MacLeod Bethune or congressman Adam Clayton Powell, were subject to investigation.

This wide net of repression had a chilling effect on black activism. Liberal organizations like the NAACP raced to distance themselves from anyone tainted by communism, which in local branches often meant expelling some of the most dedicated activists. Though liberal black intellectuals and activists had been a vital part of the anticolonial push before and during World War II, they now retreated from anything that could be construed as opposing American geopolitical aims. While the CAA fought to bring attention to the United Kingdoms brutal counterinsurgency in Kenya, the NAACP confined itself to opposing the far less geopolitically explosive efforts of Italy to hold on to its African colonies.

Even more destructive, however, was the Cold War in the union movement. HUAC and Hoover, of course, paid special attention to the left-led unions. They were joined in this effort by Congress, which in 1947 passed the Taft Hartley act, requiring, among other things, that union officers sign affidavits swearing that they were not supporters of the CP and had no relations with organizations advocating the overthrow of the government.

Inside the union movement, the liberal labor bureaucracy was also moving against Communists. The CIO leadership had always had an ambivalent relationship with communists in the unions, recognizing that they were often the most talented and committed organizers, while also fearing them as a political challenge. During World War II, the CP had endeared itself to the union leadership with its militant defense of the no strike pledge as necessary for the defeat of fascism. After the war, however, as the USSRs geopolitical interests diverged from the United States, the CIO leaders who had tied their fate to the Democratic Party viewed the CP as at best a liability, and at worst as traitors.

In the CIO, these tensions were sharpest between the left-led unions, whose leadership supported the CP, and the liberal union leaders. In 1948, the CIO leadership got its chance to take decisive action when the left-led unions endorsed Henry Wallaces left-wing third party run for president. Over the next two years, eleven unions were forced out of the CIO, representing about a quarter of a million workers, or a fifth of its total membership. Over the next few years, these unions would be subject to thousands of raids by CIO unions intent on destroying them.

The left-led unions were the ones most committed to civil-rights unionism. Isolated from the CIO and the rest of American liberalism, they were an easy target for the investigators. Ferdinand Smith, a Caribbean-born leader in the National Maritime Union in New York, was deported back to Jamaica in 1951 after the NMU purged its communists. After the UPWA was expelled from the CIO, New York City refused to recognize the contracts it had won protecting black workers, and Eleanor Goding was fired from her job with the Department of Welfare.

In North Carolina, Local 22 went on strike against RJ Reynolds in 1947, but was crippled by anticommunism. Its leaders refused to sign the Taft Hartley affidavits, disqualifying the union from NLRB protection. At the same time, CIO unions began raiding Local 22s members, fanning the anticommunist flames on which RJ Reynolds was already pouring gasoline. By 1950, Local 22 had been destroyed, and its militant black leaders blacklisted.

This story was repeated across the country. In unions that remained in the CIO, like the UAW, black militants were marginalized and pushed out of leadership. In the expelled unions, organizers tried to maintain the movement they had built over the previous decade, but, caught between state repression and the opportunistic offensive by the liberal unions, were quickly overwhelmed. Most of the left-led unions either disappeared or merged back into other CIO unions over the next decade.

Under the anticommunist assault from the reactionary right and liberal Democrats alike, the black left buckled. A generation of activists, intellectuals, and shop-floor militants was politically dismembered. Investigated, jailed, fired, blacklisted, and deported, the people who made up that movement for racial equality that had cohered in the first half of the 1940s were isolated from one another. The progress towards dismantling the American system of racial domination that had seemed so dramatic just a few years earlier ground to an abrupt halt.

When civil rights insurgency broke out once more, most dramatically in the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, the politics animating it were different from those of the earlier wave. Old Left veterans were everywhere in the Civil Rights Movement, from Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organizer E.D. Nixon in Montgomery, to the Southern Christian Leadership Conferences Jack ODell, who came out of the CP. But their old commitment to remaking the American political economy was no longer a defining characteristic of the movement.

The nature of racial oppression itself had been redefined at the height of the Cold War. While even many liberals in the 1930s and 40s had agreed that racial inequality was intimately bound up with the structure of economic power in American life, the anticommunist crusade had made these sorts of critiques politically radioactive. Instead, liberal intellectuals like Gunnar Myrdal and Harry S. Ashmore redefined racial inequality as a kind of ugly atavism, an exception to the American creed that only held the country back from its mission of global leadership.

For much of the classic phase of the Civil Rights Movement (195565), this was the understanding of racism that most directly informed the movements political vision. The fight against discrimination became severed from the fight for a more equal country overall.

To be sure, there were those who tried to resist this separation. At the grassroots, organizers like Ella Baker or Bayard Rustin came out of the Old Left, and knew full well that legal equality without redistribution would be a hollow victory. The 1963 March on Washington was built with crucial assistance from the United Autoworkers, and the marchs full title was The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The policy objectives of this tendency in the movement were summed up in the Freedom Budget, a proposal that attempted to translate the Civil Rights Movement into a campaign for full employment and public works.

Yet it is precisely here that the destruction of the first civil-rights movement was felt most acutely. While the Freedom Budget put forward an ambitious agenda, it was markedly different from the kind of transformation sought by the organizers of the 1940s. Its ideological vision was constrained from the start, as its authors described its ambitions as, No doles. No skimping on national defense. No tampering with private supply and demand. Just an enlightened self-interest, using what we have in the best possible way. For these exponents of racial liberalism, egalitarianism required no major political conflict, and became a technocratic project of social modernization.

Moreover, the strategy for achieving the Freedom Budget was one forged in intimate alliance with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Whereas figures like Du Bois or Padmore understood that militant struggle would be necessary to force reform, the proponents of the Freedom Budget convinced themselves that their stature within the Democratic Party would be sufficient to win their agenda. They were mistaken.

In the second half of the 1960s, as the movement searched for a way forward after the consummation of its victory over Jim Crow, some wings began moving towards the kind of politics that had animated the movements first wave. Martin Luther King, Jr was a key figure who pursued more and more radical confrontations with the American power structure. In doing so, however, he was largely isolated and alone, without comrades.

Instead, the increasing militancy of the movement more often led away from class politics. Figures like Roy Innis and Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Inequality embraced a cultural radicalism before signing on to Richard Nixons black capitalism. At the other end of the spectrum, many movement activists turned to municipal politics, electing black mayors and city councillors. This strategy reached its nadir in the early 1970s, as the urban fiscal crisis led the new black city governments to be the agents of austerity against black public workers. Some of the more serious New Left formations, like the Black Panthers or various New Communist Movement groupings, attempted to provide an alternative, but their efforts were insufficient to replace the movement destroyed by anticommunism.

Racial equality and class equality had been divorced as political visions. The repression of class radicalism during McCarthyism created a void that has defined American politics since. This repression combined with the limits of racial liberalism to create a predictable dynamic in American politics, whereby dissatisfaction with the anemic vision of racial liberalism gave rise to movements of rebellion. However, those movements, detached from class politics and the kinds of social forces that could give them weight, either dissipated into the ether of marginal militancy, or were reabsorbed into a renewed racial liberalism.

The anticommunist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s dealt a hammer blow to the movement for racial equality. The growing strength of a movement that linked remaking the countrys racial order with remaking its economic order was a direct threat to plans for the American century. Though the Left as a whole suffered grievously in these years, much of the fiercest repression was reserved for black leftists.

In recent years, however, much of the emphasis in American historiography has suggested precisely the opposite. This interpretation, articulated most directly in legal historian Mary Dudziaks book Cold War Civil Rights, has argued that the Cold War actually benefited the movement. Because the United States was competing with the USSR for the allegiance of the decolonizing world, movement organizers were able to portray racism as an obstacle to American hegemony, and secure the states support in the project of demolishing Jim Crow. The Justice Departments amicus curiae brief in Brown v. Board of Education arguing segregation had an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries exemplifies the way the Cold War allowed the movement to turn up the heat on the American state.

Yet as the above history should indicate, such a narrative succeeds only by retrospectively treating what the movement did actually achieve as all it ever sought to achieve. In the 1940s, it is plain that the movement had a more far-reaching vision for equality. This vision was precisely what the onset of the Cold War made impossible. Similarly, even the etiolated vision of the Freedom Budget, so carefully constructed to remain within the bounds of Cold War liberalism, never came to fruition, despite the best efforts of its backers like King and Rustin. If the Cold War enabled a certain kind of civil rights agenda, it only did so by greatly curtailing that agendas ambitions.

The ambition of civil-rights unionism is precisely what is needed to give substance to antiracist politics today. For all the lip service paid to intersectionality in contemporary discourse, too many visions of black advance are all too happy to see that advance occur within a society whose fundamental structure remains unchanged. Often, it seems that antiracism is defined simply as the equal distribution of inequality. An earlier generation of civil rights struggle saw things differently. They, and their opponents, understood that black equality required a fundamental transformation of American society.

Go here to see the original:
How McCarthyism and the Red Scare Hurt the Black Freedom Struggle - Jacobin magazine

Bettmann via Getty ImagesA Communist Party rally calling for relief for the unemployed, San Francisco, circa 1930

One summer night in the early 1960s, at a rally in New York City, the cold war liberal Murray Kempton admitted to an audience full of old Reds that while America had not been kind to them, it had been lucky to have them. My mother was in the audience that night and said, when she came home, America was fortunate to have had the Communists here. They, more than most, prodded the country into becoming the democracy it always said it was. I was surprised by the gentleness in her voice, shed always been a hot-under-the-collar socialist; but then again, it was the 1960s, and by then she was really tired.

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was formed in 1919, two years after the Russian Revolution. Over the next forty years, it grew steadily from a membership roll of two or three thousand to, at the height of its influence in the 1930s and 1940s, seventy-five thousand. All in all, nearly a million Americans were Communists at one time or another. While it is true that the majority joined the Communist Party in those years because they were members of the hard-pressed working class (garment district Jews, West Virginia miners, California fruit-pickers), it was even truer that many more in the educated middle class (teachers, scientists, writers) joined because for them, too, the party was possessed of a moral authority that lent concrete shape to a sense of social injustice made urgent by the Great Depression and World War II.

Most American Communists never set foot in party headquarters, nor laid eyes on a Central Committee member, nor were privy to internal party policy-making sessions. But every rank-and-filer knew that party unionists were crucial to the rise of industrial labor in this country; that it was mainly party lawyers who defended blacks in the Deep South; that party organizers lived, worked, and sometimes died with miners in Appalachia, farm workers in California, steel workers in Pittsburgh. On a day-to-day basis, through its passion for structure and the eloquence of its rhetoric, the party made itself feel real and familiar not only to its own members but also to the immensely larger world that then existed of sympathizers and fellow-travelers. It had built a remarkable network of regional sections and local branches; schools and publications; organizations that addressed large home-grown miseriesthe International Workers Order, the National Negro Congress, the Unemployment Councilsand an in-your-face daily newspaper that liberals as well as radicals regularly read. As one old Red put it, Whenever some new world catastrophe announced itself throughout the Depression and World War II, The Daily Worker sold out in minutes.

It is perhaps hard to understand now, but at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of ones own humanity that made life feel large: large and clarified. It was to this inner clarity that so many became not only attached, but addicted. While under its influence, no reward of life, neither love nor fame nor wealth, could compete.

At the same time, it was this very all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of Communists the true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith, even when a ten-year-old could see that a double game was being played. The CPUSA was a dues-paying member of the Comintern (the International Communist organization run from Moscow), and as such, it was accountable to the Soviets who intimidated communist parties around the world into adopting policies, both domestic and foreign, that most often served the needs of the USSR rather than those of the Cominterns member countries. As a result, the CPUSA turned itself inside out, time and again, to accommodate what American communists saw as the one and only socialist country in the world, which they were required to support at all costs. This unyielding devotion to Soviet Russia allowed American Communists to deceive themselves repeatedly throughout the 1930s and 1940s and much of the 1950s as the Soviet Union rolled over Eastern Europe and became steadily more totalitarian, its actual life ever more hidden and its demands ever more self-serving.

In the early 1950s, the CPUSA came under serious fire from the wild panic over American security that McCarthyism set in motionscores of Communists went underground out of fear of prison and perhaps worsebut then, in 1956, the party very nearly disintegrated under the weight of its own world-shattering scandal. In February of that year, Nikita Khrushchev addressed the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and revealed to the world the incalculable horror of Stalins rule. That address brought with it political devastation for the organized left around the world. Within weeks of its delivery, thirty thousand people quit the CPUSA, and within the year, the party was as it had been in its 1919 beginningsa small sect on the American political map.

*

I grew up in a left-wing home where The Daily Worker was read, worker politics (global and local) was discussed at the dinner table, and progressives of every type regularly came and went. It never occurred to me to think of these people as revolutionaries. Never once did I have the impression that anyone around me wanted to see the government overthrown by violence. On the contrary, I saw them as working to see socialism become the norm through a change in the law: a change that would insure that, with the defeat of capitalism, American democracy would keep its broken promise of equality for all. In short, however nave that may have been, I saw the progressives, always, as honest dissenters.

When I graduated from City College in the late 1950s, I went west to UC Berkeley, to pursue a graduate degree in English literature. For the first time, I met Americans en masse. Until then, all Id ever known were urban Jews and Irish or Italian Catholics, mostly of immigrant origin. Now I discovered that America was a natively Protestant country; which meant that, there in Berkeley, I met people from Vermont and Nebraska and Idaho, every one of whom had remarkably good manners and thought of Communists as the nameless, faceless evil from across the sea. Your parents were Communists? one after another said to me. No one seemed ever to have laid eyes on one.

The shock to my nervous system was profound. It made me both defensive and aggressive, and in time I began finding excuses to announce myself as a red diaper baby wherever and whenever I couldexactly as I would have announced my Jewishness in the presence of open anti-Semitism. Most often, the red diaper declaration made people stare at me as if I were a curiosity, but there were times when the listener viscerally shrank. Decades later, I seemed not to have gotten over the experience of all those educated people characterizing the women and men among whom Id grown up as somehow other. Once in a while it flashed through my mind that I should write a book.

By that timeIm now speaking of the mid-1970sI had been working at the Village Voice for some years and had become a liberationist writer, on the barricades for radical feminism. Everywhere I looked in those years, I saw discrimination against women and every piece I wrote was influenced by what I saw. That was the easy part. Soon enough, howeverand this was the difficult partthe womens movement itself began to spout a separatist line that contained strong suggestions regarding what was proper and improper for a card-carrying feminist to say or do. In no time at all, those suggestions became imperatives.

One afternoon, at a meeting in Boston, I stood up in the audience to urge my sisters to give up man-hating: it wasnt men, I said, we needed to condemn, it was the culture at large. A woman on the stage pointed an accusing finger at me and called out: Youre an intellectual and a revisionist! Youre an intellectual and a revisionist. I hadnt heard those words since childhood. Overnight, it seemed, the politically correct and the politically incorrect were upon us, and the speed with which ideology developed into dogma made me reel. It was then that my sympathies for the Communists reawakened, and I felt new respect for the ordinary, everyday Communist who, on a daily basis must have felt repeatedly subdued by dogma.

My God, I remember thinking, Im living through what they lived through! For the second time, I thought of writing a book: an oral history of ordinary American Communists that would serve as an inspired piece of sociology about the relationship between ideology and the individual, showing clearly how the universal hunger for a large life is inscribed in the relationshipand how destructive of that hunger it is when ideology is overtaken by dogma.

*

I did write the bookand I wrote it badly. The problem was that by the time I set out to write what became The Romance of American Communism, I was indeed romanticallythat is, defensivelyattached to my strong memories of the progressives of my youth. To conceive of the experience of having been a Communist as a romance was, I thought and still think, legitimate; to write about it romantically was not. To do so romantically ensured that the complexity of my subjects lives would not be explored; there would be no presentation of the branch leader who loved humanity yet ruthlessly sacrificed one comrade after another to party rigidities; or, equally, the section head who could quote Marx reverentially by the hour, then call for the expulsion of a CP member who had served watermelon at a party; or, worse yet, much worse, the party organizer who forced some directive originating in the Soviet Union on a local labor union when clearly that directive meant a betrayal of its membership.

As a writer, I knew full well that the readers sympathy could be engaged only by laying out as honestly as possible all the contradictions of character or behavior that a situation exposed, but I routinely forgot what I knew. I read the book today and I am dismayed by much of the writing. Its emotionalism is so thick you can cut it with a knife. The same rhetorical qualifierspowerfully, profoundly, deeply, at the very core of his beingdisfigure thousands of sentences. Then again, although the book is not long, it is strangely over-written: where one word would do, three are sure to appear; where two sentences tell the story four, five, or six clutter the page. And every one of my subjects is either beautiful or handsome, while all are well-spoken and a remarkable number come out sounding heroic.

The book was attacked by the intellectual heavyweights on the left and on the right. Irving Howe wrote a vitriolic review that sent me to bed for a week. He hated, hated, hated the book. And so did Theodore Draperhe vilified it twice! And so did Hilton Kramer, and so did Ronald Radosh. Because these men felt free to mount such an aggressive attack, I was persuaded that I had brought it on myself through the weaknesses in the writing. Of course, they were all violent anti-Communists and would have hated the story I was telling if Shakespeare had written it, but it was incredibly nave of me not to have realized that all the cold war animosities were as alive in 1978 as theyd been in 1938.

What was not nave was to have considered the life of an American Communist worth recording. And indeed, the stories that the Communists told me are still vivid, their experience still moving, and they themselves are indisputably present. As I encounter once again, in the pages of that book, the women and men among whom I grew, they and their moment come vibrantly to life. I am startled by all that I ignored, charmed by all that I captured; either way, it seems to me that the Communists mattered when I wrote about them, and they matter still.

One thing I cannot regret, then, is having written of them as though they were all handsome or beautiful, all well-spoken, and many heroic. Because they were. And this is why:

Theres a certain kind of cultural herothe artist, the scientist, the thinkerwho is often characterized as one who lives for the work. Family, friends, moral obligations be damned, the work comes first. The reason the work comes first in the case of the artist, the scientist, the thinker is that its practice makes flare into bright life a sense of inner expressiveness that is incomparable. To feel not simply alive but expressive is to feel as though one has reached center. That conviction of centeredness irradiates the mind, heart, and spirit like nothing else. Many, if not most, of the Communists who felt destined for a life of serious radicalism experienced themselves in exactly the same way. Their lives, tooimpassioned by an ideal of social justicewere irradiated by a kind of expressiveness that made them feel brilliantly centered.

This centeredness glowed in the dark. That was what made them beautiful, well-spoken, and often heroic.

Whatever my shortcomings as an oral historian, and they are many, it seems to me that The Romance of American Communism remains emblematic of a richly extended moment in the history of American politics; a moment that, regrettably enough, speaks directly to our own, since the problems on which the CPUSA focusedracial injustice, economic inequality, the rights of minoritiesall remain unresolved to this day.

Today, the idea of socialism is peculiarly alive, especially among young people in the United States, in a way it has not been for decades. Yet today, there is no existing model in the world of a socialist society to which a young radical can hitch a star, nor is there a truly international organization to which she or he can pledge allegiance. Socialists today must build their own, unaffiliated version of how to achieve a more just world, from the bottom up. It is my hope that Romance, telling the story of how it was done some sixty or seventy years ago, can act as a guide to those similarly stirred today.

This essay is adapted from the authors introduction to a new edition of her book The Romance of American Communism, published by Verso next week.

Originally posted here:
What Endures of the Romance of American Communism | Vivian Gornick - The New York Review of Books

As you while away the hours during your COVID-19 house arrest, you're probably wondering who's to blame for your sorry fate. Fortunately, the team of Columbos at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has discovered the real killers of everything we once enjoyed, like jobs and fresh air, and it's GASP! the communists.

From the moment the coronavirus emerged in central China, Beijing has acted in a way that made a pandemic possible and then inevitable. It covered up what was happening in Wuhan. It silenced whistleblowers who sought to warn the world. It stole medical supplies from other countries, even while claiming the sickness was no big deal.

That's all very crappy of China. However, America's favorite capitalist, Donald Trump, fell for Beijing's reassuring bananas in his tailpipe because he was too lazy to take a global pandemic seriously. He downplayed what was happening when COVID-19 hit the US. He silenced whistleblowers who tried to warn us. He's even stolen medical supplies from his own country and distributed them to his most loyal cronies. Trump's capitalist zeal is also why Trump is desperate to reopen" the country prematurely. It isn't very communist of communism to own COVID-19's means of production. It should at least share some of the blame with capitalism.

Clue - Communism is just a red herring.www.youtube.com

VOC not only blames communism for this crisis but has now added the coronavirus's ongoing death toll to "the historical victims of communism." VOC doesn't bother distinguishing which COVID-19 victims died with communism or from communism. No one ever pins all the deaths from slavery and homelessness on capitalism. It's like that happened when capitalism was still a minor.

From the Daily Caller:

"Any cursory look at the facts show that the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, and WHO Director Tedros are continued threats to global public health. We call on all western media to verify any claims from these discredited organizations before parroting them."

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu has received racist death threats because he's just trying to do his job. It's unclear why VOC considers him an active threat to global public health." Arizona Sen. (for now) Martha McSally called on Dr. Tedros to resign because she believes he's part of the Chinese coverup. She's making political whoopie with Trump, who's desperate to blame anyone but himself for the impact COVID-19 has had on the US.

COVID-19 is a natural disaster that Trump bungled, but he'd prefer if the virus is viewed instead as a biological WMD that China unleashed on us. Republicans and conservatives in general are hopping on the xenophobic bandwagon. Bill Maher who's constantly torn between disliking Trump and believing white men should say whatever they want without consequence defended the president's attempt to rename COVID-19 the Chinese virus." It's apparently too politically correct" to reject Trump's obvious and shameless propaganda. He wants to demonize and scapegoat an entire country and group of people, even if means actual, unrelated Americans are targeted because of their appearance. Don't let him.

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Communism Is Just A Red Herring. Trumps Why Youre Hiding In The House From COVID. - Wonkette

The coronavirus is spreading around the world, and a world-wide effort is underway to contain it. In the second half of the Twentieth Century containment was also a major theme. Its useful to compare the two.

The dominanttheme in international relations in the second half of the Twentieth Century was the struggle between Western capitalism and Soviet-style communism, and the leading Western approach to defeating communism was the "containment" strategy, articulated by the American diplomat George F. Kennan. The theory, in short, was the liberal capitalist West needed to contain the Soviet-style communism from spreading around the world, notably in places like Korea and Vietnam. If the West could defeat the Soviets in these small battlegrounds, then the politico-economic disease of communism could be contained.

A dominant theme of domestic policy in the United States and many Western democracies during this same period concerned the struggle between the people and organizations that had the power and wealth and those who sought liberation and equality. Those in control, to grossly oversimplify, were white males who controlled industry and politics, while those who sought liberation and equality were led by women and African-Americans in the Women's Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, but as the Twentieth Century evolved they came to include the LGBTQ community and citizens, generally, who fought to save the planet.

The economically well-off and politically powerful white males were accused of containing women and blacks in the United States, even as they were credited by many with containing the Soviet Union many, but certainly not all, since there were dissenters in the United States, especially the most liberal, even radical, segments of America's youth. Indeed, the youth who marched and protested against the war in Vietnam were against the "System," which was seen as suppressing women and blacks even as it promoted a morally depraved form of capitalism abroad via a brutal and useless war in Vietnam.

There is an obvious parallel today with the capitalist Kennan-style effort to contain the spread of communism, which was regarded as a political-economic disease, one which was harmful to human beings and needed to be eradicated from the earth. COVID-19 has to date infected more than 600,000 Americans, although that figure is confirmed cases, and experts say the number infected could be five or ten times higher. It has killed over 25,000. COVID-19 is an actual physical illness, is definitely harmful and in some cases, anywhere from 1 to 15 percent depending on your age and health can kill you.

An animating theme of the liberal West's effort to terminate communism, an effort that took 45 years, was international cooperation and coordination. No one country could contain communism on its own, although the United States led the way. Still, we needed the support and cooperation of England, France, then West Germany, the rest of free Europe, Canada and Japan to achieve victory. A go-it-alone mentality would not have worked, and the Cold War ultimately ended when the teamwork put together by the United States and our allies won the war against the Soviets, who were imploding on their own and were being guided toward dissolving their empire by Premier Gorbachev.

As the Berlin Wall fell, women and blacks in the United States, and environmentalists and the advocates for the LGBTQ movement were breaking down the walls of containment at home. Tens of millions of women had walked beyond the walls of their kitchens and laundry rooms into American industry and politics and American economic life in general; and American blacks, with less success but still notable achievements, had thrown off the economic chains that constrained them and entered mainstream American political and social life.

The power held by economically and politically powerful white males, according to those they subjugated, was similar to a disease that, from their point of view, needed to be contained and ultimately eliminated. Thus those being contained fought back and tried to contain their oppressors.

The great liberation movements remind us that the struggle for human freedom is a struggle often between those who see their adversaries as sources of evil. This evil is what philosophers have called moral evil, by which they mean evil based on free will. Philosophers use the term natural evil to refer to pain, hardship and death brought about by natural forces, like tornadoes, hurricanes, and pandemic viruses.Some argue that natural disasters like hurricanes and pandemic viruses can be made more serious if human beings leaders and citizens alike do not act in a morally responsible way. Thus the distinction between natural and moral evil is not clear cut.

The extent of the coronavirus pandemic, though it has its roots in natural as opposed to human causes, does rest in many ways in the hands of political leaders, industry and technology, the medical profession, and citizens ourselves. It will probably be with us for at least several years, certainly until a vaccine is obtained and widely distributed. Brutal as it is, we do well to try to understand the challenges in the context of American and world history.

It is not necessary or desirable to separate this crisis from all previous crises and massive problems and declare it unique. Now is a time to integrate this phenomenon and the challenges it gives us into our national self-consciousness with previous crises and the challenges they gave us, even those which are not rooted in natural causes.

In the end, we will be stronger to the extent that we understand the crises and problems we have faced, the mistakes we have made, the successes weve had and the opportunities we have before usto change the world for the better.

Dave Anderson is the editor of Leveraging: A Political, Economic, and Societal Framework (Springer, 2014). He is also the author of "Youth04: Young Voters, the Internet, and Political Power"(W.W. Norton & Company, 2004) and co-editor of "The Civic Web: Online Politics and Democratic Values" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). He has taught at George Washington University, the University of Cincinnati, and Johns Hopkins University. He was a candidate in the 2016 Democratic Primary in Marylands 8thCongressional District. Contact him atdmamaryland@gmail.com.

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'Containment' again emerges as a dominant theme | TheHill - The Hill

The men and women who marched to their posts on the front line of defense against U.S. aggression, were not surprised by the concept Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro expressed April 16, 1961, during the farewell to victims of the air attack the previous day.

His exact words defining the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution were: "... What they cannot forgive us for, is that we are right here under their noses and have made a socialist revolution right under the United States' very nose... And that we are defending a socialist revolution with these guns, and that we are defending this socialist revolution with the courage of our anti-aircraft gunners, shooting at the aggressors planes yesterday!

A stigma was left behind and a new reality was emerging. Socialism had been, until recently, a bad word. Synonymous with repression, suppression of freedom, brainwashing, invalidation of the individual, frustration of human beings. Communism was much worse, portrayed in horror stories in Readers Digest and Blackhawk comics. The darkness behind the Iron Curtain made the international Communist movement public enemy number one, according to the Organization of American States Caracas Declaration of 1954, and Peruvian Eudocio Ravines slanderous work The Great Swindle, published in certain intellectual media of the time - who better than repenter to discredit ideas he once held.

Everyday people were inculcated with the harsh narrative that communism and socialism were equivalent to having your children stolen from you, to dying of hunger. If you were poor, you would be poorer. When a communist activist stood out on the basis on individual merits, people said to themselves: so-and-so is intelligent, it's too bad he's a Communist. If the person was decent too bad, he doesn't look like a Communist.

Cubans of that defining hour, in 1961, had not read Marx, Engels or Lenin. They had never heard of Gramsci or Rosa Luxembourg, but did not need to decipher Maritegui to understand, in practice, that socialism meant heroic creation. The common sense of the struggle demonstrated then, and much more with the passage of time, that the link between socialist ideas and those of Mart's was possible and necessary.

Revolutionary praxis dictated the course of events. The people understood what Fidel meant when he said imperialism was irritated by "the dignity, the integrity, the courage, the ideological firmness, the spirit of sacrifice and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people.

Cuban soldiers defended socialism at Playa Girn, as they would do later in the battle against counter-revolutionaries and during the October missile crisis. They and their successors have defended socialism from distortions and dogmatism, from reductionism and opportunism, from lies and betrayal. In the name of socialism they share the spirit of solidarity within and beyond the island.

"We chose socialism because it is a just system, a much more humane system," Fidel said in 1991. Cubans of today are committed to using these words to guide all our actions.

Continued here:
Socialism: Never again a foreign word Cuba Granma - Official voice of the PCC - Granma English