A union activist emailed me a few days ago to challenge my coverage of the Madison Wisconsin labor protests.
The anonymous comrade admitted that there might have been a few socialists in evidence, but there were definitely no communists.
Well here’s a photo from today’s Peoples World that tells a different story.
On the far left is Mark Froemke, a member of the Communist Party USA National Board and a big player in North Dakota and Minnesota labor circles and Democratic Party/Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party politics.
Next to him is Scott Marshall, Chicago based Communist Party USA Labor Commission chair – the party’s top labor union organizer of organizers.
All five comrades in the picture come from Steelworkers Organization of Active retirees, an old Communist Party front group.
Just all drove to up to Madison to be sociable, no doubt.
So what if Communists were at the protests. There were a 100,000+ people in the streets. Everyone was there from seeing eye dogs to firemen, to off duty cops. Theoretically everyone has a right to free speech, yes? This includes leftists, right? Wisconsin’s workers, have a right to protest against a 10% cut in take home pay. I bet if I cut your take home pay by that much you’d be protesting too. You can’t even imagine that all these “communists”, “anarchists” and “socialists” actually live in Wisconsin or that there were once THREE 3-term Socialist Party Mayors in the City of Milwaukee.
The CPUSA isn’t particularly communist, they are owned and run by the DP, not the other way around. In fact every real communist in the US views the CPUSA as a centrist/conservative disgrace–as pro-capitalist sell-outs. You all don’t know anything about the US left or its history. The CPUSA reps showed up for one or two days during the protests which took place over the course of a whole month. Whether or not communists supported workers in Wisconsin wouldn’t have changed the fact that the protests happened in the first place.
Stalin’s victims were opponents from the left-opposition mostly. Between 8 to 16 million of them died fighting him. Most tendencies on the left today are descended from Stalin’s political opponents, not his collaborators. Right-Wingers would never get sent to a Gulag. The old joke of a communist firing squad being where they stand in a circle and shoot each other is historically accurate.
Time to take off the tinfoil hat sparky!