While the book does focus a lot on drug use and sex, it tries to capture the politics of the time. It’s been pointed out in other publications that the Revolutionary Communist Party is the only surviving “New Communist” party left.
The excerpts:
I was at Rusty’s house, late one afternoon, after getting off work, when the news came on and led with the death of China’s Chairman Mao. He was in his 80s so there wasn’t much of a mystery around his death. At the time I didn’t think much of it.
“Do you think anyone killed him?” Rusty said.”
“He is in his 80s,” I answered. “He was bound to die sooner or later. All any enemies had to do was wait for it.”
That was on September 9, 1976. Mao had led China since the Communist revolution of 1949. I didn’t realize that his death would have an impact on the world. I also didn’t realize what changes would take place in China after he died and I didn’t realize that Mao’s influence would be felt in the future.
I remembered back to a Saturday late in the summer of 1976. I happened to go to the Community Mercantile food coop’s 5-year anniversary. Many of the people who worked at the Public Notice went to buy their food at this place. A lot of other people I knew belonged to the food coop and bought their food there. By joining, they were technically part owners. It was a simple looking building, probably a small “mom and pop” grocery store at one time. By then it was a plain white building, very utilitarian. It was brown on the inside and lacked any advertising or frilly colors that might be found on a regular grocery store. That day, there was a local folk band playing. The band members were about my age and included a guitar and banjo player. There were a few booths serving refreshments and there seemed to be a picnic atmosphere to the event.
Over on one wall was a Chinese flag. The big red flag with small yellow stars caught my eye. I had suspected there were some people in Lawrence who were pro-China. This was blatant proof. I was beginning to notice that several organizations and people in the town were following a pro-Chinese political trend. This is what would later be known as the “new communist” movement.
Some foreign students actually introduced me to the hard-core-Marxist left. I was walking toward the Kansas Union one day and there were a bunch of Iranian students handing out leaflets. They had a table with some literature. I walked up to the table and took one of their pamphlets.
“DOWN WITH THE SHAH,” screamed the title.
They called him a dictator and anti-democratic. They complained that the US was supporting this guy. The organization was called the Iranian Student Association. I found their cause interesting.
“Our government supports this dictator?” I asked one student whom I later knew as Asghar.
“Yes,” Asghar said. “We are having a meeting tonight if you would like to come. It’s at 7p.m.”
“I think I might come to this.”
After all, 7 p.m. was early enough that I could get out in time for a few beers at the Bier Stube before I called it a night. Asghar was a short student, about my height. He had dark short hair. All the students had dark short hair. They looked rather clean cut, except there was a woman with them. She had on a scarf. She was moderately dressed.
I came to the meeting room, in the Kansas Union, listed on the pamphlet. I sat down in a cheap plastic chair. There I saw several different speakers, at a wooden podium, talk of bringing democracy to Iran. One of them was Asghar. But he kept insisting that he wanted a democracy for “those who toil the land.” It didn’t take me long to realize that these students were hard-core Marxists. I agreed with their criticism of US foreign policy. I was an anarchist, although I was beginning to move toward some type of Western Marxism. I had realized early on that the US foreign policy was bogus. After all, why did the US support a dictatorship in Pakistan over the democracy of India during the war over Bangladesh? The Soviets supported India. And why did the US continue to support Nguyen Van Tu in Vietnam, when he banned all opposition from taking part in an election? We were clearly not defending democracy. What were we supporting -- in Vietnam, Iran and Pakistan?
There were only about 15 people in the chairs. But I was intrigued. I also met Shokrollah for the first time at that meeting…………
We watched excerpts of the trial on TV. Chiang remained defiant. Many people believe she made fools of her prosecutors by putting up tough arguments to the charges made against her. At the end of the trial, she was sentenced to death, but the sentence was postponed for two years to give her time to reform. She was dragged from the courtroom shouting:“It is right to rebel!”
Chiang was never executed, but also never seen in public again. I was impressed by her performance. The whole government tried to demonize her as a tyrant and yet she came out looking like a defiant rebel.
One day, Shokrollah brought into one of the meetings the Revolutionary Worker, the official newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
“This paper is the one that is closest in America to what we think,” he told me.
The paper had a kind of 1960s tone. It used the word pig to describe the Shah of Iran and talked about the pig system. I found out later that the party grew out of a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society. There were some other pro-China parties that were active in the mid 1970s. There was the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist, which was actually the official affiliate of the Communist Party of China. There was a Communist Workers Party, which had a more independent line than either RCP or CPML
I had met members of both the RCP and the CWP who occasionally come to the campus. Member of the RCP often attended rallies by the Iranian Students. One guy named Gus, who had long, blond hair and thick, dark-rimmed glasses, often made speeches at rallies held against the Shah.
“The worker’s need to seize power and establish a workers dictatorship,” he said at a rally held on campus one afternoon.
I ran into a member of the CWP, a short, thin student with long dark hair, handing out newspapers near the Kansas Union one after noon.
“Communist newspaper,” he said to everyone who passed him by.
He gave me a paper. I was amazed at his openness about being a communist.
“That’s how they started the Russian Revolution,” he said. “They had to get the ideas out to the people. That was the only way to reach them and build a revolution.”
There was also a group of the Socialist Worker’s Party, a Trotskyist group that set up tables in the Kansas Union and sold books and their newspaper, the Militant. The thing that all of these groups had in common was their belief that the US workers were on the verge of rebelling against the capitalist system. These groups were on the rise and they were involved in lots of single issue organizations. But unlike the New Left of the 1960s, these groups could not get any publicity from the mainstream press unless they happened to be some place where a riot took place. Then they were only mentioned. The mainstream press had developed the useful tactic of pretending these groups didn’t exist. Every once in a while I saw Time or a local newspaper refer to “the US Communist Party,” the pro-Soviet Party, as if it were the only communist party in the US. The Communist Party USA didn’t even have a presence at KU.
No comments:
Post a Comment