The United States are the contemporary fortress of capitalistic economic dominance and liberal ideological hegemony with the latter having been achieved by way of successful silencing of the oppositional voices. Such struggle for ideological domination reached extreme levels during the Cold War era. One of the casualties of the anti-communist crusade was a once very prominent and important tradition of the Left radicalism and its fight for the marginalized and oppressed social groups. In the thesis, I set out to analyze the "lost decades" of the political Left's activities, with special emphasis on the decade of the Great Depression which witnessed the rise of the Communist Party of the United States of America. I begin with an outline of the emergence of radical thought and action in the USA; the first labor and women's trade unions and parties; and then continue with a more thorough elaboration of CPUSA's pioneering role in organizing women, Blacks, and the unemployed, and in the early civil rights movement. I trace the origins of American "exceptionalism" in the economic conditions of rapid industrialization and subsequent predominance of the capitalist mode of production, which gave a strong impetus to the postwar anticommunism and indirectly influenced the myopic and anachronistic division of women's movements into waves, which I later on problematize as an unsuitable metaphor for the categorization of women's movements. Cultural production was also a crucial part of the CPUSA's strategy to win over workers for the socialist cause, which is why I examine in more detail the literary policies and achievements of the Left in the 1930s, particularly in the field of proletarian literature and the works of women writers from the same period - predominantly Tillie Olsen and her novel Yonnondio - From the Thirties.
|
