At the sidelines with comrade Keracher

The Proletarian Party of America (PPA), led by John Keracher, was a curious double of the Communist Party USA. I never understood why they insisted on having their own little organization. Personality issues? Money issues? The PPA was a kind of "Communist SLP", concentrating mostly on propaganda and Marxist theory, rather than on action.

I have in my possession the April 1948 issue of "Proletarian News". 1948 was a turning point in history. It marks the definite start of the Cold War in Europe, with the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Communist election defeat in Italy. Poland was already in the Soviet orbit. Charles De Gaulle was temporarily out of the picture in France (he would stage a dramatic comeback a few years later). The United States, under Truman, had launched the Marshall Plan, while persecuting suspected Communists at the home front. All these events are reflected in "Proletarian News". The PPA uncritically supported Soviet Communism, for instance by claiming that a "revolution" had taken place in Czechoslovakia, that power was in the hand of "the workers" and their "soviets", etc. Jan Masaryk's purported suicide is blamed on the West. The source? Communist leader Gottwald! The PPA hoped for a Communist election victory in Italy, and sharply attacked De Gaulle.

Otherwise, my issue of "Proletarian News" feels very heavy and propagandist. While it mentions real world events, such as union struggles, the HUAC or the Marshall plan, they are never followed by calls to actionally *do* something. Instead, Keracher and his comrades take the opportunity to expound on general Marxist truths: unions can't abolish capitalism, the capitalist system is always crisis-ridden, every bourgeois state is a police state, etc.

The magazine gives a very serious, but also frankly boring, impression. Perhaps its rhetoric was more "radical" and "orthodox" than that of the CPUSA, which often attempted to portray itself in a "democratic" manner, but in the end, it seems that the PPA was simply a Stalinist or Stalinoid sect, cheering on the "world Communist movement" from the sidelines...