Date: 	Sun, 29 Jun 1997 19:16:12 -1000
From: Stephen E Philion <philion-AT-hawaii.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: CPUSA and womens movement


On Sun, 29 Jun 1997, neil wrote:
> Louis P's  embellishment of the  30s and 40s era CPUSA
> on the womens movement and struggle is so much hogwash.

How could Louis's post be read as "embellishment"? Can you cite how Louis
did this? It struck me that he went out of his way *not* to embellish the
CP on gender issues.  I mean, the reference to the difference between the
west coast Healy factions and other factions of the CP on gender issues
that Louis mentioned seemed to indicate a more nuanced analysis than
"embellishment," if we were reading the same post.
 > 
> Just look at the following positions of the CP of this
> period when it became throroughly  Rooseveltian
> and the unofficail 'left" wing troppers and door-bell 
> ringers of the Democrats;

Below you don't list any concrete positions.  Besides, I thought we were
talking about the role and attitudes of activists, which often differed
from the CP leadership.  Are you saying that all activists in the CP
supported a bourgeois notion of a "woman's place."?  
 
> 1) The CP was an unstinting promoter itself
> of  bourgeois 'family values' (then issued under 
> the rubric of the "working class family") and 
> the "womans place" is merely as loyal support 
> for here working class husband.. It only differs with the
> ruling class in that it promotes the influx of 
> women into industry with less discriminatory
> practices . Nothing wrong with that
> part EXCEPT that it is carried out under the
> signboard of the CPs "20th century americanism"
> US patriotism, and uncritical support for  
> WW2.
>
Well, again all you do is, without references (as Louis provides in almost
every post), is tell us your version of CP history here.  I mean, did
noone in the CP question CP gender politics? Advocate something different?
*Do* anything that resembled a politics that supported an alternative
gender politics? Noone, nowhere, never ever never? Hmmmm.

 THe CP also has NO criticism of   all the US Japanese 
> "nisei"  being stripped of all freedom and being
> put into special camps.
> 
> The CP hails the A-bombing of Japanese civilian centers
> as " The ole 1-2 punch" in 1945

And what praytell does this have to do with the question at hand?  


> 
> The CP does have problems with the abortion question too, even 
> at this time- 40s early 50s  --part of the party is for it- in  emergencies
> only- while a significant section has a Catholic church 
> like position and considers it  at all times "murder".

I'd love to see some documentation of this assertion.


> 
> Other than hailing the "devotion of women to the US war effort' 
>  in its then typical  'red white and blue" americanism, I don't
> know where the CP ever seriously  mounted or built any
> politics/campaign to stop the factories being nearly emptied of 
> women in the post WW2 period to make way for the 
> returning  male GIs getting back to waged slavery.

This is probably a fair criticism, but it begs several questions. One,
same as above, were there differences between CP leadership and activists
on these issues?  Did the repression of those activists (i.e. their
purging from unions) exacerbate their inability to oppose women being
kicked out of work?  I think these are important historical questions that
looking at official stands of CP leadership does not begin to answer (or
perhaps *only* begins to answer). I would only note that your position on
this is quite similar to Post modernists...No need to examine history too
closely.  Just claim that the CP (activists, leadership altogether as one
homogenous and harmonious entity free of struggle) said X and that is
sufficient for the purpose of discussion.

> 
> The only "progress" that one could glean here was in
> CP influenced early 50s  movies lke "Salt of the Earth" where 
> the role and importance of women workers in 
> class struggle and the fight against the "nuclear family"
>  male chauvinism is brought out quite strongly.
> 
Alas, we are getting somewhere.  So, there was some progressive gender
politics that existed in the CP after all.  Well, imagine if the CP had
not been purged from the union movement and the price paid for making such
a movie was not exile, blacklisting...Maybe the film could have been seen
by more Americans, especially working class women?  Maybe, just maybe,
those activists who were kicked out of the union movement might have been
able to advance a more radical class politics of the sort that *Salt of
the Earth* endorsed?  


> But in the overall context of CP party operations , this 
> effort is a maverick one , buried by the CPs degeneration
> into liberal capitalist politics and business career  unionism,
> and endless hypocritical  pacifist like appeals to the UN.
> It is utterly hostile to independent forms of worker 
> organizing , class struggle, anti-imperialism  and revolution.
> Its champions are not worker militants & revolutionaries but 
> the Roosevelts, Henry Wallace, and Adlai Stevenson.
> 
Seems to me that the problem for the labor movement in the 50's was more
related to the undemocratic mechanism of McCarthyism to expel CP activists
from unions.  If CP activists were so lockstep in line with establishment
politics at that time, why was it necessary for the state to use such
extra legal means to repress them?  I could, by the way, and do, make many
of the same criticisms that you make of the CP leadership's politics *and*
still raise the kinds of questions I do.  

> Neil
> 
> 
> 
> 
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