Someone complains that I've under counted the largest of the Marxist family of political parties in the Unites States, the Communist Party U.S.A.
Communist Party USA claimed a membership of 100,000 in 1939 and maintained a membership of over 50,000 until the 1950s.
His citation is for an article in that .... um.... resource, Wikipedia. As an ongoing Wikipedia refusenik I don't buy their figures as definitive but looking at the article, it is useful for my purposes. So, just for this post, I will suspend my rule of never using Wikipedia.
100, 000 Communists, at its peak, seventy five years ago, could be compared to which religious denominations had 100,000 or more members that year. I can't find that information online in the limited amount of time I have this morning but I did find this.
The official count of denominations increased from 186 in 1906 to 256 in 1936, when the Census Bureau stopped counting them. Although the number of denominations at the end of the century is not known, it included about eighty denominations with more than 60,000 members each. Seventy percent of the U.S. population belonged to a religious organization in 1998, up from 41 percent in the early years of the century.
At the end of the century, eight of every ten Americans were Christian, one adhered to another religion, and one had no religious preference. The nonChristians included Jews, Buddhists, and a rapidly growing number of Muslims
When you realize that some of those "about eighty denominations with more than 60,000 members each" included those who counted their members in the tens of millions, the Catholics, the mainstream protestant churches - the decline of which is the largest catastrophe for the active, effective left in the post-war period - and even some denominations you probably haven't ever heard of, it sort of puts the claims of the Communist Party in a very sobering context.
Especially, if you want to use that Wikipedia article, when you consider the decline in Communist Party membership.
Its estimated membership in 1996 was between 4,000 and 5,000.
Reading that, I realized that in all of the many people I have known who bought the self-pitying whining of Communists at their persecution (their greatest accomplishment is their victimization) and defenders of them, no more than a tiny handful have actually been members of the party or even claimed to be communists. Of those who have declared themselves to be communists who I've known, most of them were not members of any party.
As to the current conditions of the party, today, you can read the pathetic tale presented in the Wiki article. It is revealingly abbreviated in this sentence.
At its 30th Convention in June 2014, the CPUSA officially dropped Marxism-Leninism from its revised Constitution. While the group continues to uphold Marx, Engels and Lenin in its constitution, its official ideology is now scientific socialism.
Imagine the reaction if a Christian denomination officially dropped Jesus and Paul from its self-definition.
Which brings me to how that article is useful to make my point about the utter and absolute joke that all of those "leftist" parties and their members have been in gaining political office and changing laws for the better.
Here's a list of just the parties, according to faith tradition, given in the article.
MARXIST
Communist Party U.S.A.
Socialist Labor Party
MARXIST-LENINIST
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Party for Socialism and Liberation
Progressive Labor Party
Revolutionary Communist Party
Workers World Party
TROTSKYIST
Freedom Socialist Party
Socialist Action
Socialist Workers Party [With fewer than one thousand members in 1996, the Socialist Worker's Party (SWP) was the second largest Marxist-Leninist party in the United States.]
Solidarity
Spartacist League
Workers International League
SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST
Social Democrats, USA
Democratic Socialists of America
Socialist Party USA
Socialist Alternative
ANARCHIST AND ANARCO-SYNDICALIST
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
Food Not Bombs
Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC)
Bring the Ruckus
Phoenix Anarchist Coalition
Local to Global Justic
IndyMediaWorkers Solidarity Alliance
Area Radical Reading Group of Hartford (ARRGH!)\
Anarchist Black Cross
Federation of Revolutionary Anarchist Collectives (FRAC)
Anarchist Communitarian Network
Anarchist People of Color
Atlantic Anarchist Circle
Great Plains Anarchist Network
Revolutionary Anti-authoritarians of Color (RACE)
South East Anarchist Network
How many of those have you even heard of before?
If all of those, combined, have, in any year, had had a membership that exceeded the membership of just one of the liberal mainstream Protestant Churches, I would be very surprised. And many of those I've even heard of have spent more of their time attacking each other over their ideological orthodoxy or conformity than any religious sects I'm aware of. They have produced nothing positive, they have produced damage to the real left. Other than the Socialists, who actually elected two or so members of Congress more than ninety years ago, I don't know of any who have ever elected anyone to an office on more than the local level. I'd be curious if anyone can name such office holders. Oh, and, as I've also written about a number of times, that's something they share with the Green Party in the United States.
The left has been led to tolerate the counter-productive, destructive, presence of these, often, anti-democratic groups out of misplaced feelings of pity for them.
In many cases the insane violence of the anarchists, the devotion to some of the worst mass murderers and dictatorships in history, the Communists, even them actually being paid agents of those foreign dictatorships - as I was disgusted to read had been proved in the case of Gus Hall - have been used to damage the real left. I think the present day neo-atheists, many of them with an actual tie with these groups through the Stalinist trustifarian and promoter of atheism Corliss Lamont, is just a continuation of this idiocy. The frequent claims that religion is in decline and that the future is atheist is pretty much the idiotic claim of every one of those ideological cults only replacing their anarchist - Marxist - communist - Leninist - Trotskyist - Stalinist - etc. future with atheist pie in the sky. It will never come, if our species continues, Christianity, liberal Christianity, will be a major force long, long after every single one of their cults is a forgotten footnote in a never consulted book or website.
I don't think the left will get anywhere with the dead weight of these idiots as a burden on us. If the "left" won't give them up, reject their historical baggage and legacy, a real left will have to rise based on successful role models based in actual liberal faith.
Before I even got to the end of your post, I had written one of my own using your link to the statistical study of religion in American life.
ReplyDeleteThen I finished your post, and realized we are running, again, on pretty much the same lines of thought.