CB: Hounding Communists and other radicals out of trade unions is an attack on trade unions, weakening them if not destroying them. It is certainly a class conscious attack on the working class by the ruling class, as are all the other attacks on Communists in the McCarthyism. Attacks on Communists are attacks on the working class.
Yes, the attacks on the CP'ers were attacks on the working class but it was never the intention to *break* the unions. During the 1950s you had the emergence of a social pact between the AFL-CIO bureaucracy which involved support for US aggression abroad and a sizable slice of the pie at home. You had an unprecedented rise in real wages as auto workers et al began to move to the suburbs, buy second cars and send their kids to college. Fascism is marked above all by the inability of the capitalist system to satisfy the basic economic needs of the working class during a period of a steep drop in profits. Workers go out on strike with an ever greater degree of militancy until the ordinary forces of repression (cops, army, etc.) prove incapable of breaking them. That is when fascist bands come into play. There was none of this happening in the 1950s.
Hitler is not the only fascist in history. South African fascists outlawed Communists as the McCarthyite did. In other words, McCarthyism is comparable to Apartheid fascism. Do you agree that Apartheid South Africa was fascist ?
No, I would characterize it in the same way that I would characterize Israel, a racist state with authoritarian features.
The McCarthyite attacks on Communist and radical union leaders is comparable the acts of various fascists.
Hitler made ultra-nationalist speeches. So did Teddy Roosevelt. But Roosevelt was not a fascist.
Also, a major part of Nazism was illegal war. It didn't just consist in the characteristics you describe above. Bush is carrying out an illegal war and conquest, like the Nazis did.
You are committing a logical fallacy. Lions eat meat. So do I. I am not a lion.
Of course, the Democrats were complicit. Before McCarthy, the Truman administration jailed the National Board of the Communist Party. That it was bipartisan makes it even more like a one party state.
The key term is "like". I am like Lenin in that I write about the need for socialist revolution, but I am not identical to Lenin.
If the things at UCLA are merely intramural competition between bourgeois liberals and conservatives, just a "witchhunt" why should we worry about it, unless it portends something more grave ? Like fascism ( which is not identical with Nazism )?
We should worry about it, but we also have to respect the need for scientific rigor. If you have a headache, brain surgery is not indicated. If you have a rightwing graduate from UCLA setting up a website, armed struggle is not indicated. -- www.marxmail.org
