By "occam"
[Please see original post and comments: HERE [1]]
The Communist Party (CPUSA) recently donated their extensive archives to NYU's Tamiment Library, a radical history archive. With their archives now housed at NYU, the CPUSA is renovating and renting out their 8-story building on W. 23rd St to commercial tenants -- potentially generating millions of dollars in annual income.
It's an open secret that the CPUSA plays a leadership role in various left-liberal organizations (most recently, UFPJ) out of all proportion to their actual membership size or political influence. What is (and what should be) their role in larger movements? Do they have any accountability to those movements?
NOTE: I'm not an expert and short on time, so some of what I write below will be incomplete. Hopefully people can add information in comments. Please let's have a solidly political discussion of the PRESENT, not a rehashing of decades-old grudges. Thanks.
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As reported last weekend in the New York Times, the Communist Party USA recently donated their extensive archives to NYU's Tamiment Library:
"The cache contains decades of party history including founding documents, secret code words, stacks of personal letters, smuggled directives from Moscow, Lenin buttons, photographs and stern commands about how good party members should behave (no charity work, for instance, to distract them from their revolutionary duties).
"By offering such an inside view, the archives have the potential to revise assumptions on both the left and the right about one of the most contentious subjects in American history, in addition to filling out the story of progressive politics, the labor movement and the civil rights struggles."
-- Source: http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F70811FD3C540C738EDDAA0894DF404482
Obviously, the archive is a treasure trove for scholars of all perspectives. It includes Joe Hill's handwritten will, the entire photo archive from the Daily Worker, tens of thousands of books, correspondence from and to party leaders, films of Woody Guthrie performing, and a ton more, dating back to the 1920s. The value to scholars (professional and amateur) of such an archive is immense.
That's the CPUSA's past, and anyone interested in it would be well served to spend a few hours at Tamiment Library (it's open to the public!). Of more immediate interest to me, however, is the question of the CPUSA's present and future.
Until the collapse of the USSR, the party was sustained by Soviet money: somewhere between $2 & $3 million per year in the 1980s. Since then, it has been kept afloat by donations, bequests, and by renting out the first two floors of its Chelsea building to commercial tenants. Now, with its archives housed at NYU, the party plans to consolidate its operations (leaders' offices, the People's Weekly World production facilities) to the top two floors of 235 W. 23rd St, and rent out the bottom six floors.
Commercial rents in Chelsea average $75 per square foot. Even a conservative estimate would say that 2,000 square feet of commercial offices across the street from the Chelsea Hotel could generate $100,000 per floor, per month. Multiply that by 6 floors, then by 12 months, and you're talking serious money. (If I am being unrealistic in my educated guess here, please correct me).
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Why does this matter? Well, with a declining membership of a few hundred people, the CPUSA is largely politically irrelevant, but controls significant resources. It is able to pay its members and leaders (I believe there are around 15 full-time staff), some of whom -- most significantly Judith LeBlanc, current co-chair of United for Peace and Justice. Its influence and ideology (by now basically liberal Democratic) extend far beyond its natural power and constituency.
Does any other left organization have comparable resources? Did (or does) the CPUSA make any efforts to share its resources with other organizations? What is its role in larger social movements -- and what should it be? And, hell, what would you do with an eight-story building in Chelsea?
I don't have answers to any of these questions and I'm running out of time.... Hopefully this will kick-start some discussion. There was a recent comment thread about the CPUSA's political line being wretched, but I wrote this to steer the discussion more towards activist resources than theoretical debates....