Gus Hall and reality
McLaughlin, Neil
Looking through the American Communist party's (CP) paper, the People's Daily World, is like entering into the twilight zone—a place where reality is suspended. During a time when Stalinism has...
...Although this is broadly true, the CP's views are somewhat more strained...
...I find some of the Soviet critics to be so relentlessly negative, so willing to echo Western propaganda, so devoid of any recognition of the positive accomplishments of Soviet society, that I occasionally have cause to wonder: If this is glasnost, who needs anti-communism...
...Although Parenti says he is not a member, he writes regularly for the party press, and his politics are indistinguishable from the most orthodox in the CP...
...As it became clear that Gorbachev would not be easily dislodged from power, and as changes in Eastern Europe accelerated, the CP has slowly come around to an acceptance of glasnost...
...Consequently, the CP has adopted reform politics in a Stalinist manner...
...It's true that there was an element of coercion involved," a major official in the CP responded to my inquiry several months ago about the information on Stalin's crimes then coming out of the Soviet Union...
...Parenti criticizes Yegor Yakovlev, editor of the Moscow News...
...Gus Hall and the CP have been lying about Stalinism for decades now, so it will take some time for them to readjust to reality...
...Several months ago Gus Hall wrote that "I would not compare this period to the sharp effects of the Stalin revelations and the Hungarian events when the impact on the left and on our party was devastating...
...Still, there are signs of crisis within the CP...
...Gorbachev was not attacked directly...
...It has become conventional wisdom on the American democratic left that the CP has been opposed to perestroika and glasnost...
...What source of information allows you to conclude that Stalin's victims numbered in the millions...
...Isolated from the demands of political power and compromises, the CP membership is often more orthodox politically than the bureaucrats who actually had to run the Communist governments in Eastern Europe...
...The massive upheavals throughout Eastern Europe have silenced Parenti, but the party retains a Stalinist style...
...Are you relying on Western anti-Soviet writers for such numbers...
...It is now clear," he writes, that "there are now many millions of non-communists who want to participate fully in building socialism...
...Discussion pieces that Political Affairs published before the conference dealt with Puerto Rican independence, disarmament, women's equality, and electoral politics...
...Parenti asks Yakovlev...
...During the early days of glasnost, the CP was critical of the Gorbachev reforms...
...and, worst of all, included at least two articles in each issue that "mention or dwell upon Stalin's crimes...
...Perhaps it is just as well that they have little to say about recent events in Eastern Europe...
...What reliable research has been done on this in the Soviet Union or elsewhere...
...Party leader Gus Hall and the People's Daily World tended to counterpoise criticisms of Yeltsin with positive references to "Comrade" Yegor Ligachev, a Politburo member opposed to the new openness...
...The prestige of the party leadership is still tied to its connection with the Soviet Union...
...The paper has all but ignored the issues that strike to the very core of the party's reason for existence...
...When the Polish Communist party first cut a deal with Solidarity, the People's Daily World published a piece entitled "In Defense of Living Socialism," which argued that "Lech Walesa is no friend of working class people" and that American Communists should express their interna258 • DISSENT Notebook tionalism by petitioning American politicians to cut all aid to the Polish union...
...That caveat out of the way, he wrote last year that we need not "accept every new development and every utterance in the USSR uncritically...
...Even CP members have noticed this phenomenon...
...Twenty years ago Medvedev was under surveillance by the Soviet government, but he has recently been elected to the Congress of People's Deputies, and his thoroughly documented indictment of Stalinism has been excerpted in the Soviet press...
...But in the same article in Political Affairs he asks "Why, in the past year or two, have more full-time cadre than in the past asked to be released [from their party jobs] so they can get jobs in the private sector...
...Instead of seeing mass desertions from the East European Communist parties as a defeat, Hall views new opportunities for recruitment...
...Parenti seems not to be familiar with Roy Medvedev's research on Stalinism in his book Let History Judge...
...the "new thinking" in the party came about not as a result of a vibrant internal debate but by following a calculated lead...
...His only discussion of glasnost was to caution against the "anti-socialist offensive" being undertaken by the New York Times, Time, and liberal politicians...
...Parenti is always careful to state his support of glasnost and perestroika...
...A public break with Gorbachev would cost too much...
...It is not difficult to understand why the CP leadership has shifted to public support of glasnost— even though Moscow's current positions contradict much of what the CP has been saying for fifty years...
...Given Parenti's prominence, one must assume that his views reflect a significant current within the CP...
...In an editorial response to West German Chancellor Kohl's proposals to reunify Germany, the People's Daily World claim that this is an attempt to destroy socialism in East Germany by making a "bid to grab the considerable wealth of the world's tenth ranking economic power...
...Parenti takes the paper to task for a headline that refers to "the millions that Stalin destroyed...
...In the early days of glasnost, the intellectual Michael Parenti played the role of ideological "hit man" for orthodoxy, or "bad cop" to Gus Hall's "good cop...
...Judging from these discussion pieces, the party is responding to glasnost by hoping it will go away...
...In April 1988 its theoretical journal, Political Affairs, published a speech by Nikolai Bukharin, with an editorial box acknowledging that Bukharin had been executed on false evidence...
...The "new thinking" of the Moscow News has gone too far by having, among other things, printed an adulatory article about Andrei Sakharov without bringing out his "right wing" politics...
...instead, the CP press kept criticizing Boris Yeltsin, the Soviet reformer...
...This understatement, to put it charitably, suggests a deep confusion in the party cadre that helps explain its reluctance to deal seriously with the collapse of communism...
...A sense of denial has pervaded the CP's approach to the changes in Eastern Europe from the very beginning...
...Hall argued that Communists must reject "some of the extreme and sensational statements by individuals coming out of the Soviet Union...
...And many of the party cadre are swept along in the epidemic...
...SPRING • 1990 • 259...
...Gus Hall's preconference essay, "The World in Transition," addressed the end of the Reagan era and the cold war but largely ignored upheavals in China, Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union...
...Up to now it has been able to combine public support for glasnost with efforts to allow the membership to express differences with the "new thinking...
...This past July the party held an ideological conference in Chicago entitled "The Clash of Ideas in a Changing World...
...But this has its costs...
...During a time when Stalinism has collapsed throughout Eastern Europe, the headlines of the paper have dealt almost exclusively with domestic social issues, superpower disarmament negotiations, and events in El Salvador and South Africa...
...A party that distinguished itself by unswerving support for Stalinism, the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, and the crushing of Solidarity, could do worse than keep quiet for awhile...
...You almost never headline developments in socialism on your front page," complained a reader in a recent letter to the editor...
...Nor is this kind of orthodoxy a marginal phenomenon...
...All vital political issues, but none are as central to the crisis facing the CP as the changes in the communist world...
...Such avoidance makes a certain amount of sense...
...promoted "a return to private property, selfenrichment and the removal of state regulation...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
