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🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡️ — President Trump is seemingly likening the war against Iran to a "punitive expedition."

🌹 🇺🇸 🛠 Democratic Socialists of America: The sometimes overlooked stories of members of the Communist Party USA have lessons to teach the U.S. Left

Celebrating Red Lives

On an unseasonably cold May 21, the backroom of the Takoma Park Busboys and Poets warmed to a rendition of “Come On In This House.” DC Labor Chorus founder Elise Bryant and socialist scholar Kurt Stand introduced Jay Schaffner, editor of Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950–2000). Chris Townsend, a union member and leader for 47 years, also shared his experience with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) during the panel discussion. In Red Lives’ three volumes, fifty writers who were (or still are) CPUSA members reclaim a half-century of party activities overlooked by the U.S. Left. In this first volume, they illuminate what it was like to grow up in the party, what drew them to it, and why they stayed.

For Schaffner, the CPUSA was proof that “something else was possible in this world” beyond the capitalist grind. Communists earned this proof as they worked and organized in factories, in their hometowns, or across the country. Townsend recounted his move to Tampa to search for work, only to be swept up into organizing a wall-to-wall unit for the Amalgamated Transit Union with other Communists. He also related a revelatory experience from the 1980s. Townsend and his comrades had been sent to Moscow in a party delegation. Townsend was their elected chair that day; they planned to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. There, they learned that New York Governor Mario Cuomo had come with his delegation to do the same. Townsend shared his 1987 photograph of Cuomo in Red Square. But, as communists, the CPUSA delegation had the right to go first. The moment proved that — Townsend paused — “In a socialist system, workers meant something.”

Townsend, Stand, and Schaffner shared how they had learned about communism or labor radicalism within the stultifying atmosphere of McCarthyism. For some, it was in moments of realization and radicalization sent out over the shortwave by Radio Moscow. For others, through books by Marx and Lenin, hidden in closets or paper bags by their parents. Reds, actor-director Warren Beatty’s film dramatization of Ten Days That Shook the World, was a touchstone for communist organizers. In the CPUSA, they found multiracial camaraderie and a place in a larger movement for justice and against capitalism.

But the work the CPUSA did in the second half of the 20th century has not inspired similar appreciation beyond scattered moments, such as the CPUSA’s role in the campaign to free Angela Davis in the early ’70s. As Schaffner explained, “Most histories of the CPUSA end in 1955.” Many New Left historians of the ’60s and ’70s had built their movement’s reputation by trying to bury the CPUSA’s. Works like Vivian Gornick’s 1977 The Romance of American Communism glorify the CPUSA’s organizing at its peak in the ’30s and ’40s.

https://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2026/07/07/celebrating-red-lives/

🔼 🇺🇸 🛢 Crude oil prices surge +7.3% to above $76/barrel after Yemeni Houthi militants attack a Saudi airport.

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