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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

You cannot get hold of a copy of Albert Camuss The Plague. Not surprising, of course. It could hardly be more topical.But even before the arrival of this pestilence, we were going through a Camus revival here and in the US. When Sartre died in 1980, the streets of Paris were lined with mourners. Camus, his great rival, was out of fashion. What has changed?

2o13 was Camuss centenary. Penguin marked it with a much-acclaimed new translation of The Outsider and there was a new biography, Robert Zaretskys A life worth living: Albert Camus and the quest for meaning.

Since then, books have been, pouring out. Camus at Combat: Writing 19441947, his 1950s notebooks, his Algerian Chronicles and this year alone, Camus: A Very Short Introduction, and, later this Summer, new Penguin editions of The Plague, The Fall, The Outsider and a book of essays, Committed Writing.

The last title is the clue. Camus was a great writer and philosopher, but, above all, he was a public intellectual, revered in the English-speaking world as a kind of French Orwell, or perhaps for younger readers, a French Hitchens. One American admirer wrote, He was one of the fiercest, most partisan polemicists in the history of French journalism.

Camus played an honourable role in the war, the Resistance and debates about Communism in post-war France. Unlike the once-famous Structuralists and post-Structuralists he was readable and took on the big issues of his day. You didnt have to read Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger to understand his writing.

The point is that Camus not only took on the big issues of the day. He was right about the big issues of post-war France. He was right about Vichy, right about punishing collaborators, right about French anti-Semitism and racism against Algerian Arabs and, above all, he was right about French Communism.

In his book, Past Imperfect, about the importance of Communism in French intellectual life in the decade after the war, Tony Judt wrote that these years were unique in the near-monopoly exercised by the appeal of Soviet Communism within the Left. When French Communists attacked East European emigres like Czeslaw Milosz for telling the truth about Stalinism in east Europe and when Communists denied the show-trials in Eastern Europe, Camus spoke out.

The one big issue where he was wrong, his critics argued then and now, was Algeria. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Algeria for understanding French political life in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Camus was born there. The Algerian crisis and eventual independence was one of the key moments in the anti-colonialist movement. But was Camus wrong? Look whats happened to post-colonial Algeria and the post-colonial Middle East. Who would you rather side with: Camus, or Fanon and Sartre?

The Left said Camus was wrong about Algeria. But the French Left wasnt right about anything. They were wrong about the Show Trials in eastern Europe (1947-53) and about Stalinism, about Maos Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and then Foucault was wrong about Iran in the 1980s. In a superb profile in The Nation, Thomas Meaney writes, His [Camuss] books outsell Fanons at the Librairie Tiers Monde on Abdel Kader Square. Thats in Algiers.

In his book, Culture & Imperialism (1993), Edward W. Said passionately attacked Camus for his stand on Algeria. Said was then at the height of his fame, as Sartre and de Beauvoir had been in the Fifties. He attacked Camus as a representative of French colonialism, whereas he was a poor and fatherless outsider. But it was Said, not Camus, who went to one of the most prestigious schools in Egypt and then Harvard. Camus, in contrast, was the son of a cellarman and an illiterate mother. Camus, Said wrote, is a novelist from whose work the facts of imperial actuality, so clearly there to be noted, have dropped away. Camus, he wrote, is a very late imperial figure.

The years have been kinder to Camus than to Said or Sartre. Said fought over Palestinian statehood from a beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side. Sensibly, because in all probability he wouldnt have survived for long in Gaza. Camuss passionate attacks on terrorist violence and nationalism in Algeria read well today.

This is why Tony Judt had a photo of Camus on his desk. Judt championed Camus for more than twenty years, from an essay in The New York Review of Books in 1994, Albert Camus: The Best Man in France. A group of interesting critics Judt and Claire Messud, at The New York Review, Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, Thomas Meaney in The Nation have admired Camus not just for his prose or his philosophical ideas, but for his political decency and moderation.

After the demise of Sartre and de Beauvoir, politically extreme and fashionable for thirty years, and French Theory, fashionable but impossibly abstract and opaque, Camuss moment has come.

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The return of Camus - TheArticle