“Engels believed the transition to socialism in England might be peaceful”. They did fight for freedom in WW2, but in the years since then, a peaceful transition to socialism is exactly what they’ve done!
I think the “names” have changed, but the goals are the same. In the sixties their “fronts” were the Sexual Revolution, Feminism, Civil rights, Black Panthers, Weather Underground, Gay rights, Global Warming, etc.
Thats all just being regurgitated now in slightly different trappings, as Transgender rights, BLM, CRT, Antifa, and Climate Change.
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Didn’t at least one of the BLM founders say they were “trained Marxists”?
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Possibly. Marxists in America have always been in the lead of various social movements. (I don’t know what ‘trained’ means, though, in today’s context. How to put out a press release? How to organize a demonstration? How to create a ‘telephone tree’? Maybe, although from what I can see of the Left today, they’re too self-centered to undergo any such training. But I may be wrong. Our side certainly could use some.)
In the 1930s, the CPUSA was very active in fighting for Black rights … it gave them a foothold in Northern Black communities. (See, for example, ‘The Scottsboro Boys’. [Scottsboro Boys - Wikipedia]. When the Southern Civil Rights movement began in the 1950s, it was people close to the CP (ex-members, but not ‘ex-’ because they had rejected Communism) who played a leading role advising Martin Luther King. (Which is why Robert Kennedy, when he was Atty General, authorized the bugging of King’s offices.(Since King was a very active adulterer, these tapes entertained a lot of people in Washington, apparently.)
Rosa Lee Parks, the (rightly) acclaimed heroine who initiated the Montgomery bus boycott, had been ‘trained’ in the Highlander Folk School, founded by someone (Donald Lee West) who was probably a CP sympathyzer, although not a member. (I say ‘probably’ because it’s not clear. Certainly he worked very closely with the CP, although in those days it was hard to avoid doing that if you were active in the trade union or Black rights movements.)
The CPUSA played a leading role in organizing the CIO (the industrial, as opposed to the craft, trade unions) in the 30s. CP college kids quit school and ‘industrialized’, getting jobs in the auto, rubber, steel, maritime, etc industries. They brought their skills – training – as organizers with them, plus having a formidable back up organization. (At its height the CP had 100 000 members and probably something like ten times that many sympathyzers – equivalent to twice that number today).
Eventually, the CP ended up controlling 11 national unions, about a third of the CIO by membership, and played leading roles in many others. Most of this was destroyed by the anti-Communist reaction in the late 40’s and 50’s. (Although there was a ‘witch-hunt’ which caught innocent non-Communist leftists, there were also real witches. The Left has never admitted that Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent, although the evidence after the Verona tapes seems incontrovertible to me.)
So, yes, Marxists have been active in, and have been in the leadership of, ‘social justice’ (real social justice) movements in the US.
As a tiny footnote: when I did voter registration work in Tennessee during ‘Freedom Summer’ in 1964 (see ‘Tent City’ for the background to this [ Tent City (Tennessee) - Wikipedia ], every single one of the young white activists I worked with was a liberal, or further left. (And by ‘further Left’ I don’t mean the CP. By then, they were regarded by almost all of us as old, tame, fuddy-duddies, not revolutionary at all.)
Black rights just was not a thing conservatives cared about. (Yes, I know about Barry Goldwater and integrating the National Guard in Arizona. As individuals, Northern conservatives were not particularly racist. Wiliam Buckley was no racist, but he initially sided with the Southern segregationists, and for understandable, conservative, reasons. But conservatives don’t go shaking up society. That’s just a fact. And it’s one of our weaknesses now, when we need to shake society up.)
Note that ‘Democrat’ then did not mean ‘liberal’, just as ‘Republican’ did not mean ‘conservative’. You had both tendencies in both parties.
Finally, in the anti-War movement during Vietnam, the Marxist (Trotskyist flavor) Socialist Workers Party played a leading role in organizing and giving sensible (from its point of view) tactics to the anti-Vietnam War movement. They only had a few thousand members at most, but that didn’t keep them from exercising great influence. [ See Out Now by one of its leaders, Fred Halstead. Amazon.com ]
(One of the things I learned as a Leftist is just how powerful a relatively small, but well-organized group of dedicated people can be, if they’re reasonably sensible. [Note that the CPUSA was NOT sensible before 1934, when it, along with all the other CPs in the world, was in the ‘Third Period’ – this let Hitler into power in Germany, after which Stalin sobered up and made the CPs start acting like liberal activists instead of crazy ultra-leftists. But that’s another story.)
So, yes, organized Marxists have played major roles in history, including in American history. I don’t think this what most ‘conspiracy theorists’ mean, however. But if it is, they’re absolutely right.
And it’s one of the things that frustrates the hell out of me, to watch our country being destroyed, while the Right remains fractured and largely ineffective. A couple of hundred thousand people in the right kind of organization – less than one quarter of one percent of the number of patriots in the US – could move mountains.
For those who would like to read a very well-written history of the CPUSA, assuming you can find a copy, see Irving Howe and Lewis Coser’s The American Communist Party - A Critical History : https://www.amazon.com/American-Communist-Party-Critical-History/dp/B000XIXP9C ] They were sort-of Trotskyists, and so had a good understanding of Marxism, and of the psychology of the people who joined or supported the CP.
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Joe McCarthy was too restrained.
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Interesting to hear from an (ex-) insider of the Communist conspiracy. Thanks, Doug1943.
For all their fanaticism, for all their organizing, they did not “move mountains”. They did not succeed.
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In case you may find something in them interesting, these are two recent articles of mine, one about the abominable Karl Marx, the other about Trotskyism in South Africa and Britain:
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Quite right, thank God (or whatever)! They basically did the liberals’ job for them: advancing Black rights, organizing unions, pushing for various welfare state measures.
But what they really wanted was a Soviet America.
It was the great tragedy of the 20th Century … or one of them. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Socialist/Marxist movement was not aiming at a totalitarian society. Even the far Left of that movement did not envisage a Party-state, where you couldn’t even organize a chess club unless it was under the aegis of the Party. But the evolution of the Russian state after the revolution changed everythng, for the worse.
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Whoa!!! I’ll read them immediately! Thanks!
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Good Lord! Here I’ve been prattling on about Marxism etc … like an undergrad physics major sitting next to Richard Feynman on the subway, whom he does not recognize, explaining relativity to him.
We should have a discussion about ‘permanent revolution’ (an unfortunate choice of words), and the dual meaning of ‘terrorism’, but not now. In the meantime, I’m going to try to get some of your books.
Ted Grant’s American heirs, by the way, are now, I believe, doing an ‘entry’ into the DSA, itself doing an entry into the Democratic Party. Should be fun to watch, since there are rival Marxists there doing the same thing. And they hate each other far more than they hate us.
Postscript: just bought your books on the PLO and the Baader-Meinhof gang, plus one of your recent novels. Note to others: go to Amazon, Books, and put in ‘Jill Becker’ – unless all the rest of you already know who she is.
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I expect that you know more about the history of Communism in the West than I do.
I know for sure that your last sentence, “And they hate each other far more than they hate us,” is bang-on-the-nail true.
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We’re all specialists in something. I’m tolerably ignorant about a whole slew of subjects – including areas of Marxist history – that I would like to know more about. But it’s a conflict: seeing what the Left is doing to America right now makes me feel guilty if I spend any amount of time doing anything but trying to fight it.
(Lenin once said he felt guilty listening to classical music, because it made him feel like stroking heads, instead of breaking them.)
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You might also be interested in “The Soviet Union and Terrorism”, by Roberta Goren, a book edited by me and with an Introduction by the great Robert Conquest. It is now a rare book but can be found. Published by George Allen and Unwin, London, 1984. An American public library could probably get hold of a copy .
Just looked it up at Amazon. They are selling it. (But it is prohibitively expensive!)
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Speaking of terrorism, the whole of the archive compiled by “my” Institute for the Study of Terrorism in the midst of the Cold War has been thrown away by a woke university:
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Yes, I think you’re right that the globalists and oligarchs don’t want communist style Socialism , but a mix of capitalist/socialism that is more like fascism. Or some kind of feudalism.
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Jillian - you say the communists did not succeed - maybe not completely, but they’ve gotten pretty damn close - they got Obama, a communist in every way but the card, as president for two terms, and now his puppet Biden!
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Doug, what Congress can do is fund the military in order to enable it to do its job of defense and offense. Well…first Congress has to be capable of doing its job.
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I can see that TAC Forum is going to require more time… 
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Welcome Doug, and all the info that you bring along.
And…well done on the post containing multiple replies. We must work together to get around the Moderator. 
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Jeeee…zuz. 1984 has arrived for sure. Has anyone tried to follow up on what Leicester University did?
I have Robert Service’s book on the USSR, and I think an ex-wife knew him personally (she being a Soviet/Russia specialist).
I’ve just bought about a dozen books on Russia, to try to figure out what went wrong in the 1990’s. I have some (trivial) stories of my own to illustrate what was wrong with the American approach, but I want to find out what happened to all the money that was dumped in.
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Thank you for the welcome. It’s a great pleasure to find people who share a basic rational worldview, even if we disagree on this or that.
What does the moderator do that shouldn’t be done?
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