Comrade Michael Laski strikes it rich

"I talk to you at all only as a calculated risk. Of course your function is to gather information for the intelligence services...And yet there's a definite advantage to me in talking to you. Because of one fact: these interviews provide a public record of my existence."
--Michael Laski to Joan Didion


In the 1960's in the United States there was a bewildering variety of left-wing sects, most of them tiny. One of them was a Los Angeles-based Maoist group called the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist). Like most such sects, it spent much of its time polemicizing against those with politics seemingly close to its own--it insisted that the Progressive Labor Party, probably the best-known Maoist group in the US at the time, was soft on Trotskyism and "modern revisionism". https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/red-flag-us/rf-1-3.pdf

A guide to "anti-revisionist" movements of the 1960's describes it as follows:

"The C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.) was born in Los Angeles during the 1965 Watts riots out of a split in the local POC [the "Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in the United States"--see http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1956-1960/index.htm for background]. It published a newspaper, the *People's Voice* and a theoretical journal, *Red Flag* from 1965 to 1968. In 1968, the Party underwent a split, with both successor organization's keeping the C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.) name. One, under Arnold Hoffman, continued to publish the *People's Voice.* The other, headed by Michael Laski, began publishing a new newspaper, *The New Worker* in 1969. That same year, the Laski group merged with the Proletarian Revolutionary Party in New York, led by Jonathan Leake, a former anarchist turned Maoist, who had been active in the Resurgence Youth Movement, which was founded in September 1964 as the youth section of the Anarchist Federation to which Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky belonged. Both C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)s appear to have disappeared by 1971. After the demise of the Laski C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.), the former members of the Proletarian Revolutionary Party and others reconstituted themselves as the Marxist-Leninist Party. These C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)s should not be confused with the C.P.U.S.A. (M-L) founded by the Marxist-Leninist Organizing Committee (M.L.O.C.) in 1978 nor with the C.P. (Marxist-Leninist) created by the October League in 1977." http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1960-1970/index.htm

The C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)'s General Secretary, Michael (or "M. I.") Laski, however, was saved from the total obscurity in which most 1960's sectarians now repose (whether alive or dead); he got interviewed by Joan Didion, who did a 1967 *Saturday Evening Post* article on him called "Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)." (It was later reprinted in Didion's anthology of reports on California in the 1960's entitled *Slouching Towards Bethlehem*; the piece on Laski is available in its entirety at
http://books.google.com/books?id=_pgrUFe9Fh8C&pg=PA61)

Didion, of course, did not share Laski's politics. She had voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 (and would later say that despite her dislike of what she considered the pseudo-conservatism of Reagan, "Had Goldwater remained the same age and continued running, I would have voted for him in every election thereafter."
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/didion/excerpt.html). Yet in a peculiar way she could empathize with Laski and the way he counted up the few dollars his comrades had made by selling pamphlets in a "ceremony as formal as a gathering of the Morgan partners": "I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments: I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History."

What Didion could not know at the time was that Laski and the CPUSA (M-L) would within a couple of years succumb to yet another opiate of the people: gambling. Apparently, Laski went to Las Vegas and bet the party's entire income on the roulette wheel--and lost. (At least that is the story given in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laski and by Australian labor historian Breet Evans in "A revolution you can bet on" http://inside.org.au/a-revolution-you-can-bet-on/ The *People's Voice* article "New Developments on Expulsion of Renegade M. I. Laski from the C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)" does not specifically mention such an incident but does claim that he had "defaulted the Communist Party U.S.A. (Marxist-Leninist) of $1,000 which belonged to the Party..." http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1960-1970/laskiexpulsion2.htm)

OK: Here's my what-if. I don't know whether Laski actually did bet the party's treasury in Vegas. But let's say that he did *and won.* And kept winning. And winning. And winning. Until by the time the night is over, the C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.) is the richest left-wing organization in US history. (I'm assuming Laski really is doing it for the party, not for himself.) Gus Hall's Moscow gold is pitiful next to Michael Laski's Vegas gold.

What then? Obviously, money can't do everything for a political organization. If your ideas are too out of the mainstream, it is doubtful that all the money in the world will make them popular. But our POD here is in the late 1960's when there does seem to be a considerable potential for far-left groups, especially on campus. Under those circumstances, money can definitely help...
 

cpip

Gone Fishin'
I have absolutely no idea -- not my period -- but I just want to say this is a fascinating what if.
 
I have absolutely no idea -- not my period -- but I just want to say this is a fascinating what if.
This is pretty much my reaction to a lot of David T's threads - I usually don't know enough to comment but he keeps coming up with fascinating little facts or potential points of divergence.
 
Hmmm. Something I have heard is that the balkanization of the American far-left lost it converts, since people looked at the 5 parties trying to drum up support on their campus and decided none of them would be able to gather enough of a critical mass to get anywhere...

So maybe more money means more advertising, allowing Laski's party to drown out the other parties in a geographical area. I'm not sure what a reasonably large marxist party in California would really change though...

fasquardon
 
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