"Seeing Red"

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Dies Declares CIO Is New Communist Party 8s the 4 JABPKA, Tex., May 18-Repre- nation for Conereas from this Test, America "Ail the ard the growing "aria; nounce his forthcoming retiremes' sertalive Martia Dies (D.. Tex.). Texas district place in history tie committeé jantagonisms and the processes di from Congress. Inrestigating na-American Activi. would late. "It til do down in Alstory es reaction now setting li • Whet three Asher Harer was a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. He is a retired longshoreman and a member of the Waterfront Writers and ArtIsts.

Seeing Red. A documentary film by Julia Reichert and Jim Klein.

In "Seeing Red," a documentary about American communists, 13 ex-members of the American Communist Party and two current members tell their stories in their own words. All 15 are veterans of the class struggles of the 1930s and 1940s.

They give the reasons they joined-to fight for the rights of workers, to fight fascism, to fight racial oppression.

They tell of their years in the party as activists. Two relate their experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Most speak of the impact of the McCarthy period witch-hunts and the stunning blow of the Khrushchev revelations, when they learned that their god, Stalin, had murdered not only Trotskyists but good and loyal Stalinists. The revelations were devastating.

Howard "Stretch" Johnson: "It took me 15 years to pull myself back together."

After the Khrushchev revelations the American CP lost 80 percent of its membership. Although a million people passed through its ranks since the 1930s, when it reached a height of 100,000 members, the party now numbers only a few thousand.

These 15 want their stories told. Rose Kryzak of Brooklyn, N.Y., still in the party, tells why she agreed to be interviewed: "If I die-why shouldn't there be a record? How could I have been so good when I was active and be so bad (now) when I tell people I'm a communist?"

And indeed, why not make the record? That is the question producers Julia Reichert and Jim Klein asked themselves. As a team they had already produced several films, including "Union Maids," which was nominated for an Academy Award as best documentary.

During the filming of "Union Maids" they had come in contact with several women who were communists in the '40s. The filmmakers were fascinated by the stories of these women. They decided to make a documentary about American communists with the object of undermining what they call "the great American taboo, communism," the taboo that stereotypes all communists, socialists, or any critic of capitalism as "treacherous agents of the international communist conspiracy" —scarcely human.

Reichert and Klein use still photos and film flashbacks to the early lives of those interviewed, interwoven skillfully with archival film footage of the 1930s and the music of folksinger Pete Seeger. There is a mass May Day parade organized by the CP, with marchers carrying-as in the USSR-huge pictures of Lenin and Stalin. There are shots of picket lines of unemployed, evicted Black sharecroppers camping along a highway, hunger marches, and film footage of a CP national convention held in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, when Earl Browder was the national leader, with 20,000 in attendance, singing the "Internationale."

It does seem that the 15 were selected quite carefully. No renegades. They are all proud of their past, and many still hold to the ideas that made them radicals under the impact of the Great Depression and the labor struggles of that time. They come across as a group of honest, dedicated fighters, humorous and quite lovable, pursuers of the American dream of justice and equality for all, who went along with the CP as far as they could and then (with two exceptions) lost faith-not in socialism but in the CP.

Howard "Stretch" Johnson, once a Harlem CP leader, says, "Don't call me an ex-communist! Call me an ex-cardcarrying member. I'm still a communist, but with a small "C."

Reichert and Klein realized that a film about American communists would be a "terribly difficult" project. Reichert told film critic Judy Stone (San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 5, 1984) that people sympathetic to the party would feel the film-makers were too critical ("the Communist Party does not like this film"); the democratic socialists would think the film should have a "more critical edge," more emphasis on the party's subservience to the Soviet Union and on its lack of internal democracy; and the "far left" would want the party criticized for being "too reformist and selling out the working class."

Reichert was right in her estimate of the CP's reaction. In the West Coast People's World of Feb. 4, 1984, film critic Pele de Lappe says "Seeing Red left him with a "sour aftertaste." He complains that current members of he CP-such as Angela Davis and Mickey Lima-were FILM REVIEW not interviewed, thus giving the film a "one-sided slant." He further complains that a fact sheet interview, expressing the premise of the director, stated that the CP collapsed "because of its ties with another country," and that "it had had influence over millions of people-and blew it and left us with nothing... [We had to] start from scratch in the '60s."

But what galls de Lappe most is that "Seeing Red" refers to the CP "only in the past tense." He insists that the CP is still "alive and well."

des, said here today that "it will one of th General Lester Cole, in the same issue of the People's World, calls "Seeing Red," "a cleverly made anti-communist film, so deceptively contrived that with its editing of important facts, leaving gaps that the uninitiated will not perceive, it can be quite beguiling and convincing."

Since the film deals only in passing with the sorry political history of the American CP and Stalinism in general, there certainly are many gaps.

Those interviewed speak about the lack of democracy, the demand for blind obedience, the bureaucratic centralism, the shock of the Khrushchev revelations in 1956. Khrushchev calls Stalin's methods "excesses." Rose Kryzak agrees. And he was a leader of the Russian Revolution."

Only one of those interviewed blamed Stalinism as such for the degeneration of the American CP. For the most part, those interviewed just do not understand what happened. Nor does Julia Reichert, evidently.

In a conversation reported in the San Francisco Bay Guardian of Jan. 18, 1984, film critic Bruce Dancis reports that Reichert agreed that Stalinism did give socialism "a bad name." She also agreed that the CP was extremely flawed" (by Stalinism) but she added, "I don't think ultimately it did hold back the cause of socialism." She couldn't be more wrong.

Let's start with the Spanish Civil War, 1936 to 1939, because in the film a surviving veteran of the Southern Front, which was led by the anarchists, tells how his group of 300 volunteers had only three guns. And so they were slaughtered.

Reichert, in her filmed commentary, tells how "the Republican army was outgunned and again and again outsupplied. They appealed again for help but no help came...England, France, and the United States stood by...[although] the Soviet Union repeatedly called for a mutual defense pact [against Hitler and Mussolini who were backing Franco]."

In 1939 Madrid fell to Franco's army. Why? The overwhelming majority of the Blames Reds DETROIT TIMES BERE For Detroit sport.

"oi" not orly frieese.

Spanish workers opposed Franco. A major reason was that the Soviet Union, under Stalin, had long since lost faith in the world working class. Instead, it put its faith in alliances with one or another section of imperialist nations-and CPs throughout the world followed suit.

In Spain Stalin let the Spanish revolution suffer defeat in order to demonstrate to England, France, and the United States that the Soviet Union would be a trustworthy ally in a mutual defense pact against fascism. Soviet ships entering Spanish ports were not attacked, yet the guns and ammunition arrive in driblets. And in areas where the fight was led by anarchists and Trotskymen on the Southern Front.

In Spain itself, a Stalinist-type purge of "enemies on the left," the anarchists and Trotskyists, was under way. The firing squads were decimating the Republican ranks while Franco knocked at Madrid's gates. And Spain is only one of many Stalinist-betrayed revolutions.

After the Spanish defeat, Stalin flip flopped again and signed the Stalin-Hitler pact. Now Hitler became "a peace-loving man." But this alliance didn't last either. On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and the American Stalinists became the most rabid supporters of the "war effort," helping to break strikes in order to prove their loyalty to American imperialism.

With regard to independent workers' political action, a labor party, the American CP gave that up in 1936, when it supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a smart capitalist politician. In the ensuing years the CP degenerated as a political current within the working class. Now it is little more than a left wing of the Democratic Party.

One more question should be raised Why does "Seeing Red" jump from the late 1950s to the anti-nuclear weapons movement in 1982? Was it because during the intervening years there was nothing of great interest to report?

The CP did not play a major role in the Black Freedom Now Movement or in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee that defended the Cuban Revolution. The Trotskyists did. The CP participated in the anti-Vietnam-War movement but did not have great influence, as did the Trotskyists in alliance with the student movement.

Since the 1940s the CP has played no important role in the American workers' struggles. So, if Reichert had wanted to go further than 1957, she would have found little of interest to report on the American scene.

Of course on the world scene, there have been the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, neither led by Stalinists. But there have also been the Stalinist invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979, and the attempt to crush Solidarity in Poland. The American CP was not responsible for the policies of the Stalinist leaders in the Kremlin, but it has gone along with all of them slavishly.

"Seeing Red" is a good film that does strike a blow against "the great American taboo." The producers can hardly be blamed for not dealing with aspects of political history they do not understand. And besides, they wanted to make a film that might possibly reach a mass audience. Let us hope that it does and that it will stimulate further study in the workers' and socialist movements in the United States.

cialist Action February 1984 11

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