Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster.

• Author: Knoll, Erwin
• Position: Brief Article

As we survey the barren, desolate landscape of the American Left at the end of the Twentieth Century, we have every right and reason to ask, What happened? How did we arrive at this forsaken place? Where did we take a wrong turn--if we took a wrong turn?

There were times in this century, after all, when the most solidly entrenched plutocrats thought a new American revolution was in the offing. There were times when labor unions were determined to transform--not merely meliorate--the lives of working people, times when movements of the Left mobilized millions of Americans, times when every dirty electoral trick had to be deployed to keep, for example, Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign from turning California upside down, times when radical newspapers rivaled the commercial press in circulation and influence.

How did we come to lose all that? What brought us to the poor, shriveled prospect that is the Left today?

Oh, I know there are devoted individuals and even dynamic groups waging intensive political struggles in behalf of the interests to which they assign priority--environmentalists, feminists, lesbians and gays, African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, the disabled, the elderly, people on welfare. There are dedicated activists committed to resisting militarism and war, and to protecting civil rights and civil liberties. In no way do I denigrate any of these admirable efforts when I say that, even taken together, they are no substitute for a broad, visionary political movement that focuses on building a better society and, for that matter, a better world for all.

Without self-consciousness or embarrassment, the Left used to talk about its concept of "a beautiful tomorrow." How did we lose that dream?

We need to ask the question not to assign blame or engage in sectarian recrimination. The Left, even in its heyday, did too much of that, and what's left of the Left still does too much of it even in its current pitifully debilitated state. But we need to understand the past if the Left is ever to have a future.

The easy explanation, of course, is that we fell victim to the wily misrepresentations and repressive machinations of American capitalism and its obedient servant, the State, which deprived the Wobblies of their free-speech rights and locked Gene Debs away in the Atlanta penitentiary and smashed radical organizations in the Palmer Raids and mounted a great Red Scare after World War I and another after World War II, invoking the...