Monday, October 12, 2015

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (46)

Discovering  that Marvin, a culturally straight-looking white guy in his mid-to-late 20's, was a "closet communist" who considered himself a revolutionary communist in his politics, was a treat--at first.
But after a few weeks of discussing each other's take on U.S. capitalist society in the 1970's and the 1970's U.S. left, however, I realized that--besides not being that sympathetic to the freak/hip left/yippies' insurgent counter-culture--Marvin's conception of revolutionary leftism had led him to be a 1970's member of Lyndon Larouche/Lynn Marcus's Labor Committee/Labor Party sect.

During the 1970's, LaRouche's Labor Committee/Labor Party sect was then presenting itself as a revolutionary communist political alternative to all the other U.S. Left groups and sects, which it characterized as a non-revolutionary "swamp left"; and it apparently viewed the Communist Party USA [CPUSA] group as its main competitor for potential organization recruits and new members in the 1970's. And for this reason, Labor Committee/Labor Party members somehow then felt justified in staging physically violent attacks on CPUSA members to disrupt CPUSA group meetings, as part of its "Operation Mop-Up campaign to establish Labor Committee/Labor Party/Lyndon LaRouche leadership and control of the 1970's insurgent U.S. Left.

Naturally, I rejected the "Operation Mop-Up" politics of the group that Marvin did political work with at night and on weekends, when not being a 9-to-5 wage-slave at the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.]--where his wage day job involved helping to especially book the C.I.E.E. charter plane flights between New York City and Paris that were being reserved mainly for French students--under the supervision of a jolly white woman, who seemed to be in her 50's, who spoke French fluently, like a native of France; and who spoke English with a French accent.

Also, having personally observed the negative and disruptive political role that Lynn Marcus/Lyndon LaRouche's Labor Committee members had played around Columbia University's campus in the months following the April and May 1968 Columbia student rebellion--in opposition to Columbia SDS's New Left activists and the Black Panther Party--there was little chance that I would be won over to Marvin's strange brand of leftism. No matter how hard he might try to recruit me, once he discovered that I was the only other office worker at C.I.E.E. who probably understood the leftist wavelength he was on intellectually and philosophically at that time.