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OK, first, yes, come by and see me when you are in the Bay Area, the Holt Labor Library is open Mon-Fri, 9am to 4pm. We have *tons* of stuff including The Militant and the People's World going to back to when Hoover was President. Among other things. The question was a legitimate one asked by Red Arnie. The question on the CP during it's formative years and, comparisons with, say, the SWP later, are, however silly and a-historical. There is no comparison. The CP did build fractions in targeted industries. They didn't do it by sending in people, however. They did it by *recruiting workers* in industry. They recruited whole fractions that way. In some cases, such as in Maritime, the Profintern took an early position that communists should dominate the maritime trades internationally. This is detailed somewhat in Jan Valient's "Out of the Night" (1940). There are other references to this in various other accounts of the period. I also personally knew one of the Comintern's US organizers in Maritime who noted that the Maritime fractions in the US were "specialized" and not like other fractions. So they did send people in this way as well. But even here it was the organizing ability of the CPers and their anti-racism that helped recruit, most notably in the NMU. But by and large they used regional organizers to go to factories or use union organizers to do "dual recruitment", not unlike the way the Socialists did it prior to and during WWI. Workers basically "just joined". I might add this applies to the Trotskyists as well. With the success, for example, of the organizing drive among truckers in Minneapolis in 1934, the Trotskyists parlayed that into the first area wide contract in IBT history, the Central Conference of Teamsters. Where the Teamsters organized locals, a branch of the Communist League and later the SWP was sure to follow, so that the SWP had IBT branches in places like Fargo, ND, Lawrence and Witchita, KS, and so on. So actual 'colonization' wasn't what the CP was about (or other left groups). That was a "60's thing" and became the dominent way of organizing in factories by the far left (including the CP) into the 1970s and early 1980s. Some groups, most notably in the anti-Revisionist strain, often did quite well in this regard and recruited out of it. David ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
