Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

activists, former Communist members - went into personal
'underground,' dropping out of all activity,
rebuilding lives in enclaves of suburban and urban obscurity.
" (6)
What was most telling is that for 4 years the
CPUSA structure went underground not to wage renewed
and heightened struggle, but to passively hide until full
bourgeois democracy returned. Their whole movement
surrendered and fell apart under the first pressure from
Washington. They never even faced any real repression.
When Russian Prime Minister Khruschev made his
disillusioning revelations about Stalin's rule at the 1956
20th Party Congress of the C.P.S.U., it was just "the icing
on the cake." Once a white workers vanguard and later a
mass party for reform within the oppressor nation, the
CPUSA had finally been reduced by U.S. imperialism to a
thoroughly house-broken and frightened remnant. From
70,000 members in 1947 the CPUSA evaporated down to
7,000 in 1957. Working class radicalism had effectively
ceased within the settler society, and its former main
organization had politically collapsed.
The capitalist newspaper headlines of that day
paid little attention to that phenomenon, however, The
media of the late 1940s and early 1950s was preoccupied
with the larger aspects of this same imperialist campaign to
whip up Euro-Amerikan society for the global confrontation
with communism. The bourgeoisie then demanded only
the most rigid, reactionary and monolithic outlook from
its settler followers. All had to fall in line. This McCafthyism
was aimed not so much at the bottom of settler
society but at the middle - at purging the ranks of
generals, educators, congressmen, diplomats, and so on.
All Government employees had to sign new loyalty oaths.
We must remember that the infamous U.S. Senator Joseph
McCarthy never harassed revolutionaries. His targets were
all U.S. Government employees and officials, from Army
officers to clerks. In a telling statement, the well-known
liberal journalist George Seldes wrote at the time:
"There is fear in Washington, not only among
Government employees but among the few remaining
liberals and democrats who hoped to salvage something in
the New Deal. There is fear in Hollywood ... There is fear
among writers, scientists, school teachers, among all who
are not part of the reactionary movement." (7)
So that McCarthyism reflected a power struggle
within the imperialist ranks between liberal and conservative
forces, as well as being part of the general move of
the Empire to tighten-up and prepare for world domination.
In no sense was this 1950s repressive campaign
directed at crushing some non-existent revolutionary upsurge
within settler society. At the same time - on fronts
of battle outside of Euro-Amerikan society - U.S. imperialism
was conducting the most bloody counterinsurgency
campaigns against the colonial peoples. This
had little to do with the CPUSA and the rest of the oppressor
nation "left."
3. The Case of Puerto Rico: Clearing the
Ground for Neo-Colonialism
It is generally known that U.S. imperialism chose
neo-colonialism as the main form for its expanding Empire
in the immediate post-WWII years. In 1946 the U.S.
Philippine colony was converted with much fanfare to the
supposedly independent "Republic of the Philippines" (to
this day occupied by major U.S. military bases). In 1951
the Puerto Rican colony was converted into a "Commonwealth"
with limited bourgeois self-government under
strict U.S. rule. What is less discussed is that neocolonialism
is no less terroristic than colonialism itself.
Neo-colonialism, after all, still requires the military suppression
and elimination of the revolutionary and national
democratic forces. Without this political sterilization after
WWII imperialism's local agents would not have been able
to do their job. This was true in the Mexicano-Chicano
Southwest, in the Philippines, and other occupied territories.
The 1950 U.S. counter-insurgency campaign in
Puerto Rico is a clear example of this. It also gives us a
compariscm to further illuminate the CPUSA by. By 1950
U.S. Imperialism had decided that its hold over Puerto
Rico would not be safe until the Nationalist Party was
finally wiped out. That year U.S. Secretary of War Louis
Johnson spent three days in Puerto Rico planning the
counter-insurgency campaign. The puppet Governor,
Munoz Marin, was told to arrest or kill the Nationalist
leaders. Police pressure on the revolutionaries increased.
Nationalist Party leader Don Albizu Campos was openly
threatened. U.S. Congressman Vito Marcantonio complained
on October 19, 1949:
"The home of Pedro Albizu Campos is surrounded
day and night by police patrols, police cars, and jeeps
with mounted machine guns. When Dr. Albizu Campos
walks along the streets of Sun Juan, he is closely followed
by four or five plainclothes policemen on foot, and a load
of fully armed policement in a car a few paces behind.
"Every shop he enters, every person to whom he
talks, is subsequently visited by representatives of the
police department. A reign of terror descends on the
luckless citizens of Puerto Rico who spend a few minutes
talking to Dr. Albizu Campos. " (8)
By late October of that year the colonial police had
begun a series of "incidents" - of ever more serious arrests
and raids against Nationalist Party activists on
various charges. Finally in one raid police and Nationalists
engaged in a firefight. Faced with certain annihilation
piece-meal by mounting police attacks, the Nationalists
130 took to arms in the Grito de Jayuya. On October 30, 1950