Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 00:43:57 -0500 (EST)
From: "Charlotte L. Kates" <ckates-AT-eden.rutgers.edu>
Subject: M-I: Farewell, 1956.


Lou wrote:
If the CP is ever to become a significant force in American life, it must
do a number of things, one of which is acquire the ability to attract and
hold millions of Ms Adlers.  This can only be done by a thorough
house-cleaning of the type effected in eastern Europe over the past ten
years, and a fond but firm farewell to the culture of the 1950s from which
it has suffered lo these many years.


	Yes, yes it must. At one time, as we know, the Party had a
culture--a vibrant culture, rooted nearly always in  a burgeoning youth
cadre. The 1930's. Even the 1980's. The Party took delight in its
membership, its constituency, itself. The Party's young leaders of the
1930's remain, in many senses, its leaders today, without the hope and
brilliance of their halcyon days. The Party's young leaders of the 1980's
are, by and large, gone, due to both the traditional attrition and the
momentous events of 1991.

	It was the year the Soviet Union fell and the CPUSA nearly did.
The Party's foundation and attraction were not built on the United
States--they were built on the USSR. It was the great fact of the
existence of actually existing socialism that drew many members to the
Party, and without that constant, the Party was devastated, and its rotten
infrastructure revealed from beneath the pretty veilings of Soviet flags.
It was not a struggle over Gorbachev that plagued the CPUSA that year. The
events in the USSR were mere inspiration. It was Gus Hall that was the
issue, at the center of the debates on Stalinism and Czechoslovakia in
1968 and Gorbachev was always Gus Hall's opinions and actions.And the
majority of the young cadre lost, and left, for the Committees of
Correspondence, for other organizations, for obscurity in the middle.
"They went back into everywhere."

	I wasn't there then; I came two years later, inspired mainly by
the Party's history, the USSR's history, the biographies and writings of
Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Alexandra Kollontai. I did the expected, the
respected. I was thirteen when I joined and I was on the next young cadre
track, and perhaps I still am. I'm really not sure, but somewhere along
the way, with a great deal of help, I saw the truth of the Party and the
truth of its culture. That culture--one  of death, paranoia, and
obsequious fawning at the feet of the Democratic Party and AFL-CIO, that
culture with a great love for factionalism and turning inward, that
culture with devotion to the "mass Party" of the type of Browder, yet not
to a mass revolutionary Party--shocked me with its ignorance, brutality
and utter sadness. 

	And I knew what was good in the Party, and I still do, yet it has
been covered over with so many layers of covers and lies
that it is near invisible to those suddenly hit with the truth after being
fed illusions for so long. 

	We will never have growth without truth. We will never have a mass
Party, a true mass Party, if we disrespect and turn on our own members. We
will never have Ms Adlers again if we do not enter the real world, of
1997. It's not 1956 anymore, but since the Party still cannot face the
truth of that year and move on, it seems equally incapable of recognizing
1991 and moving on. A youth cadre built on a decayed structure will not
stand like those of the past, yet perhaps it may build something more
lasting.

	No one joins a revolutionary Party to be a relic of the past, to
factionalize and mourn the loss of the Soviet Union; yet, this is what the
Party does. This is the true and quite unfriendly face of the "new mass
Party." And yet, I remain, as do we all, hoping to make something better
of this crumbling Party of decaying leaders, structures and ideas--a Party
for Ms Adlers,a Party that causes the many departed to come back out from
everywhere, a Party, finally, of, by and for the people. 


Charlotte L. Kates



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