I was stunned by this quote from the chair of the CPUSA. I should not have been but the honesty of his opportunism is quite something. "The notion of the capitalist class on the one side and the working class on the other may sound "radical," but it is neither Marxist, nor found in life and politics. Pure forms exist in high theory, but nowhere else." -Sam Webb The whole article can be found at: http://www.peoplesworld.org/a-ragged-process/ It only seems a matter of time before they drop the pretense of being "Marxist." Some enterprising CP member might want to remind Webb of this: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...festo/ch01.htm
Awful junk. I remember reading one of his papers that we shouldn't even use the S word, because it would alienate people. Duuuhhhhhhhhh.
If you read the comments section after the article - it's raised a stink in the CP. To the point where the CP leadership had to issue a statement defending Webb against his critics. I've heard that Webb wants to change the name of the CP and make it a more explicitly social democratic group. If this happens some of the members will want to resist and, hopefully, Trotskyists can win some of them over to authentic Marxism.
Why be a Communist when you can be a Democrat? I can see why it would piss off the average member. Did the CoC ended up joining the Democrats?
The COC still exists but has shrunk. It seems after Gus Hall died some of them went back. I'm not a big fan of the CoC either. We had a Labor Party chapter here in the late 90's. The CoC people were all LP members, not that it meant much. In the run-up to the 2000 election, they packed a meeting and forced a vote to dissolve the chapter. They then handed out Labor for Gore t-shirts. Did the CoC ended up joining the Democrats?
