Re: Powerlessness Corrupts

[Mark Lause <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles,

You've asked the question.  I'm answering, though I suspect that you're
never going to convince people on this by email, and I don't expect to
convince you by email either.

Objections to the CP aren't just that it tends to be overly simplistic.
That's a problem that goes beyond the CP to any organization, I guess.
However, the CP does seem to be particularly adamant.  If you disagree with
the party, you get denounced as a scum-sucking reactionary, revisionist
bastard.  That does irritate people.

However what really irritates them is that you can be denounced a
scum-sucking reactionary, revisionist bastard one day by a party that is
perfectly capable of adopting the position it just denounced and which then
still denounces you as a scum-sucking reactionary, revisionist bastard for
not having had the position that you did and do have.

The real problem with the CP's record is that it's perfectly capable of
making 180-degree turns.  Ideologically dominated by the idea that it needed
to defend the Soviet Union, it was dragged through hell by Stalin.  Undeer
Stalin, what would get you shot in the Soviet Union one day would get you a
medal a few weeks later.  Here, what might be totally denounced as
reactionary drivel one day can become progressive and laudatory the next.
The "third period" marked years of intense (and howling mad) sectarianism in
which they insisted on having their own "red unions," and this flipped to
allow the party to train and elevate a generation of secondary leaders of
the militantly class collaborationist AFL-CIO.  The party's shifts and
shambles in the years leading to World War Two inspired observers (and
members) to refer to its leader, William Z. Foster as "Zig-zag Foster."  He
was replaced by Earl Browder, whose nonsensical "Communism is 20th century
Americanism" suited a wartime party's cozying up to a US government in
alliance with the Soviet Union, but ended pretty quickly with another major
reversal.

The result by the 1960s and 1970s makes the CP a hard sell to many people
who weren't "legacies," that is from CP families.  Welcome to rush week.

I think the CP achieved some good things, and I'm glad you are happy with
it.

Really.

However, you have a very, very hard sell to convince anyone familiar with
the party's history that it can ever be anything more.

Solidarity!
Mark L.