Commie Coeds vs.
Corporate Capitalism
By Robert Stacy McCain

April 2000


Something about the protests in Washington against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that didn't get much press was the Commies.

I say they "didn't get much press," but in fact, the presence of the Communist Party USA at the anti-IMF rally didn't get any press at all -- except for a couple of paragraphs in The Washington Times, courtesy of yours truly.

Most Sundays, I'm the night guy on the national desk, which means I don't go into work until 2 p.m., but on April 16, 2000 -- "A16" being the name the anti-IMFers gave their "mobilization against globalization" -- I left home early, hoping to spend a few hours catching a little mise en scene of the protests downtown. So at 10 a.m., I kissed the wife and kids and left behind my happy petit bourgeois household for a taste of adventure among the radical wannabes.

Parking in downtown D.C. on a Sunday morning is not usually a problem, but the anti-IMFers screwed that up. The cops had cordoned off several blocks around the World Bank building and, despite their conspicuous concern for environmental degradation, many of the radicals apparently chose to drive to the protests and there was no parking anywhere near the Ellipse at 16th and Constitution, where the big rally was taking place. As I sat at a stoplight a couple of blocks away, I could hear some guy on stage howling, "Which side are you on?"

Not yours, pal.

I drove all the way to the Capitol and walked the dozen or so blocks back down Constitution Avenue to the rally. It was a beautiful spring morning, sunny and warm. Walking past the federal courthouse, I noticed cops standing on guard near John Marshall Park, which was tied off in yellow crime-scene tape: "U.S. MARSHALS LINE -- DO NOT CROSS." I suppose they were preparing for mass arrests of people who had nothing better to do on a lovely April day than to storm the barricades of worldwide capitalist hegemony.

The rally seemed to be losing stragglers. On my way down Constitution Avenue, I passed occasional clumps of kids carrying anti-IMF signs, walking the opposite direction. One such clump -- half a dozen college-age boys -- was laughing and joking, shouting: "Down with hope, up with dope!" I suppose they were Georgetown students or local stoners from Bethesda who had come downtown hoping to score with some left-wing chicks, but were leaving disappointed.

At the National Archives, tourists were lining up to see a photography exhibit, "Picturing the Century." A strange contrast -- the Docker-wearing middle-class tourists from Ohio and Pennsylvania, kids in tow, taking in a bit of history while, just a few blocks up the street, the hardcore left was rallying to overthrow the System, man.

And lined up along Constitution Avenue near the National Air and Space Museum were the carts of immigrant vendors, ready to sell hot dogs, Cokes and tacky souvenirs to the tourists. Picture radical poseurs Jason and Tiffany traveling all the way from Cambridge, Mass., to protest capitalist exploitation of the Third World. When they get thirsty, Jason and Tiffany find themselves buying $2-a-bottle Evian water from Ayub, the Pakistani snack-cart owner. Only in America.

That the anti-IMF crowd weren't really serious about the oppression of the proletariat became obvious when I got to 1111 Constitution Ave., home office of the Internal Revenue Service. A few blocks away, police in riot gear were standing ready to defend the World Bank, but the IRS building was completely unguarded. Just a day after April 15, and not a protester in sight at the IRS, nor any sign of concern that the anti-globalists might turn on this agency which funds the entire federal government of imperial "Amerikkka." Which side are you on, indeed.

Finally arriving at the Ellipse, I am immediately set upon by guys hawking the Socialist Worker newspaper for 50 cents. This was why the media silence about the heavy Red presence at A16 was so puzzling to me. No one could enter the Ellipse without walking past three or four of these Socialist Worker vendors and yet I was the only journalist who thought this worth reporting.

Once you got past the Socialist Workers, there were still more entrepreneurial leftists, hawking the Worker's Vanguard. Then there was the guy selling yellow "Mumia Must Live" buttons for a buck each. Yeah, save the cop-killer, $1. Despite being an objective member of the working press, I couldn't resist muttering to the Mumia freak: "Tell it to Daniel Faulkner's widow."

A scaremonger like Morris Dees may worry about the far right infiltrating the anti-globalism movement, as Alexander Cockburn reported April 19, 2000, in NYPress, but the scene on the Ellipse was about as hard left as anyone could imagine in the post-Soviet era. The place was positively brimming with rage against corporate capitalism, from T-shirts ("Mean Corporations Suck") to handmade signs ("Corporate Press Is Not Free"). At the International Socialist Organization table, you could get a nice blue-and-white sign reading, "Workers of the World Unite and Fight." Another group distributed red T-shirts lettered in black: "Abolish the World Bank! End the IMF! Dissolve the WTO! Socialist Party USA."

That shirt included a URL -- www.votesocialist.org -- which might cause thinking people to ponder why an anti-capitalist outfit would take advantage of the World Wide Web, using computers and software developed by corporate giants like IBM, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. But socialists aren't thinking people, and thus don't consider the material advantages bestowed on them by profit-making corporations. For that matter, I doubt many of the people walking around the Ellipse for the A16 demonstrations ever gave a moment's thought to whether their radical T-shirts had been manufactured by the same "global capitalists" they were protesting. Ungrateful wretches! Second-handers! Where's Ayn Rand when you need her?

On stage at the Ellipse rally, bad folk-rock acts alternated with left-labor speakers. This was another weird thing about the anti-IMF scene. There was a bit of a union presence at the rally -- SEIU, Teamsters, Steelworkers and so forth -- and blue-collar Democrats like Rep. Dennis Kacinich of Ohio took their turns at the microphone. But the great mass of the crowd was composed of the crunchy-granola campus "activist" types who have made themselves such pests for the past 20 years.

Save the whales, nuclear freeze, gay pride -- "Break the Bank" was just the latest protest scene for these militant opportunists, who don't know zip about the lives of Ohio steelworkers or truck drivers. But with the gentrification of the Democratic Party in the post-Reagan era, the union bosses must find allies where they can, and if that means making common cause with lesbian sociology professors from Yale and enviro-anarchist wannabes from Eugene, Ore., so be it. The class struggle mentality must be maintained at all cost, including an alliance with academic dilletantes and NGO social workers who never in their lives punched a timeclock. Or had much contact with reality, period.

Take, for instance, the Labor Party, which was distributing fliers on the Ellipse that included a description of their 16-point program: "A Living Wage Job (at least $10/hr) as a Right ... A Tax System Where the Wealthy Pay Their Fair Share ... Less Work with No Reduction in Pay" and much else. Lunacy, in other words. They might as well demand free tickets to Disney World. To take just one example, the top 2 percent of income earners already pay 40 percent of federal income taxes. If that's not enough to qualify as "Their Fair Share," I don't know what is. The big tax hit for working people is the payroll tax -- Social Security and Medicare -- but on that topic, the Labor Party propaganda is mute.

As a movement, this idiocy is going nowhere and thank God for that. The Labor Party handout bears the union label of the "Allied Printing Trades Council" -- paying union wages for a job that could be done just as well by anybody with a computer at home and a Kinko's in the neighborhood.

The same APTC label is on the freebie tabloid paper they're handing out at the Workers' World Party table. Who knows what the WWP, headquartered on West 17th Street in Manhattan, is paying to print this weekly rag? Never mind finding writers like Deirdre Griswold to produce insane gibberish like this: "In the Democratic People's Republic of Korea -- the socialist north of the divided land -- no date is more important than April 15, the birthday of Kim Il Sung. .... This year, as Koreans celebrate Kim Il Sung's birthday -- and in the U.S.-occupied south, where such actions must be taken in secret because of repressive 'national security' laws -- they will also be telling the world that they are proud of and confident in their new leader, Kim Jong Il, who is following in the socialist footsteps of Kim Il Sung." Yeah, I'll bet they're really celebrating in Pyongyang, where thousands have starved to death under the last genuine Stalinist regime on the planet.

I'm not up to date on the various Marxist outfits represented at the A16 rally -- League for the Revolutionary Party? International Action Center? -- so I don't know which ones are Trotskyists, which ones are Mensheviks and which ones are Maoists, but I know the original Big Red when I see it. The colorful banner proclaims, "People & Nature Before Profit$ ... Young Communist League USA," and the kids at the table are handing out the People's Weekly World, official organ of the CPUSA. The Bolsheviks -- who seized power from a backward czarist regime and actually managed to make things worse, who spent more than seven decades proving the murderous futility of revolutionary socialism -- are still at it.

During the life of the Soviet Union, CPUSA was never anything other than a tool of its masters in Moscow, as Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Kyril M. Anderson conclusively documented in their 1998 book, The Soviet World of American Communism. Nowadays, judging from the People's Weekly World, the Communst Party USA is indistinguishable from the left wing of the Democratic Party.

In the People's Weekly World, Alberto Rivera reports the CPUSA "had a spirited contingent" at the April 5 march on City Hall "to protest the escalating campaign of brutality led by the New York City Police Department, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir." Terrie Albano writes, "Elian's saga makes the case to end the embargo against Cuba. ... Facing the conflict-laden U.S. policy toward Cuba and ultra-right political pressures, Janet Reno and the Clinton administration made a big mistake [by not immediately returning Elian Gonzales to Cuba] and dragged the ordeal out." The ritual denunciations of racism and "environmental destruction," the vocal support for the janitors' strike in Los Angeles, the "demand that Congress provide billions of dollars" to repair crumbling urban schools, Joelle Fishman's self-congratulatory report about Yale students demonstrating "to stop sportswear with college insignias from being produced in sweatshop conditions around the world" -- in all of this, the People's Weekly World has no quarrel with Maxine Waters, David Bonior or Warren Beatty.

The CPUSA and the DNC are indistinguishable, Gus Hall and Al Gore are reading from the same page and, except for the department store ads, you can't tell the People's Weekly World from the New York Times. For all the talk about Clinton-era "triangulation" and the "centrist" agenda of the New Democrats, it is passing strange to note this ideological convergence on the left. Indeed, in a lengthy political analysis in the People's Weekly World, CPUSA executive vice chairman Jarvis Tyner suggests an old-time Popular Front strategy for his fellow Communists:


"The U.S. ruling class has moved to the right since Reagan and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union.

"As a result, there is a level of alienation from the candidates of the dominant capitalist parties among millions of working people. In the last election, two-thirds of eligible voters stayed home. There is not yet a mass third party capable of challenging and winning.

"As the movement builds toward greater political independence and a people's party, which we are working for, the right danger cannot be ignored. It does matter who gets elected. The great strength of defeating the 'greater evil' is that it gives a reason to vote without spreading the illusion that the Democratic Party is some kind of 'people's' party. It's important to find ways of advancing political independence while not ignoring the danger on the right. This is especially important in presidential races."

Tyner then offers warnings against third party presidential candidates who might help elect George W. Bush by cutting into Al Gore's vote. On Ralph Nader of the Green Party, Tyner writes: "One concern is that he not take away from the effort to defeat the Republicans." Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party: "The ultraright isn't as dumb as they act and they are loaded with corporate millions. ... With Lenora Fulani at his side and $13 million to run on, we shouldn't be surprised if [Buchanan] makes a fake appeal to minorities. He's going to try to shed the charge of racism. That's what the Fulanis and Allen Keyes are there for -- to deflect the charge of racism. The presidential vote may be very close."

Sounding suspiciously like Al Hunt or Bob Herbert, Tyner writes: "The 1994 election results were a wake-up call in terms of the right-wing danger. The working class took the struggle to a higher level. ... That is what has set back the attack from the right and which will bring victory at the polls this year. Thanks to the the unity, courage, radicalization and new militancy of our multiracial working class, the right-wing forces are in disarray today and will be in greater disarray in the future" (emphasis added).

Let's sum this up. The vice chairman of the Communist Party USA does not want to "take away from the effort to defeat the Republicans," because the "presidential vote may be very close," and tells the Marxist-Leninist faithful that his strategy "will bring victory at the polls this year." Whose victory? The victory of the "working class," or the victory of Al Gore? According to this Bolshevik theorist, there is no difference, given the "greater evil" of the "right-wing forces."

I could imagine the bumper stickers: COMMIES FOR GORE 2000.

Obviously, the Communist Party USA is a neglible factor in the Gore coalition. Having lost the generous subsidies they received from Moscow during the Soviet era, the clowns at CPUSA must be in a pretty desperate fix if the best they can hope for is the election of Al Gore. What irks me is that the supposedly hawk-eyed operatives of the mainstream press can't be bothered to report a word of this stuff. Think about it. With everything written and broadcast about the anti-IMF protests, you'd think the Associated Press or CNN might find some opportunity to mention that the Communist Party was on hand for the A16 rally, advocating the election of Al Gore.

But no, of course not. Neo-Nazis for Bush -- that would be news. Commies for Gore? Not news. Just like it was not newsworthy that the assembled opponents of global capitalism included the CPUSA and no less than five other socialist organizations. No enemies to the left!

Most of the crowd at the Ellipse didn't look very revolutionary. Revolting, maybe, but not revolutionary. If this was the vanguard of the revolution, the chieftains of corporate capitalism have nothing to worry about. Aging hippies, militant lesbians, tofu-eaters, tree-huggers, bong-hitters -- not quite the Weather Underground.

Radical? Radically ugly, but that's about it.

As I was leaving the Ellipse, a couple of busloads of college students were arriving late for the A16 rally, and I was surprised to see among them a girl who wasn't half bad-looking. I flashed my press pass and asked this fresh-faced coed, "Where y'all from?"

"Boston," she answered, smiling.

"Baah-st'n," I said, mimicking her accent. "What part of Boston?"

"The suburbs."

Right. Suburban coeds against global capitalism. Only in America.

r.s.mccain@worldnet.att.net

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