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The annual homecoming at St. Francis Xavier University had communist flavour this year when Sam Webb returned for his first homecoming since graduating in 1967. National chair of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Webb spoke to a standing-room-only audience of 90‑plus students and faculty on September 26. The theme of the meeting was "Last Dance for Bush: Peace, Justice and the 2008 Elections, A Communist Viewpoint." The departments of history and political science co‑sponsored the event.
Many in the audience were curious to learn how Webb made the transition to becoming a communist activist after spending four years immersed in the conservative and Catholic environment that characterized St. FX in the 1960s.
"I wasn't very politically conscious at the time," said Webb, who earned a degree in economics and was a starting forward on the basketball team. "For me," he said, "the transition took another three or four years after leaving St. FX."
Webb credited his Catholic upbringing in a working class Maine family with instilling in him a strong sense of right and wrong, but it took more to connect his moral sense with a critique of capitalist injustices.
Webb encountered Marxist theory as a graduate student pursuing his MA in economics at the University of Connecticut. It was timely, for as he recalls the political landscape was heaving in the USA.
"All hell was breaking loose," said Webb. Student opposition to the Vietnam War was peaking. Student strikes, mass protests, and draft resistance permeated the atmosphere. It was clear that the system was in crisis, but what was the alternative?
"I started to read Marxism voraciously," he explained. This included all three volumes of Capital by Karl Marx. That reading began to help Webb make sense of the political struggles unfolding in the USA and around the world, but so did his exposure to the repressive machinery of the state. Webb recalled going to New Haven for a demonstration in solidarity with Black Panther members who were on trial.
"It was like entering a war zone," he said, with police and National Guard everywhere with tanks, armoured vehicles, weapons and teargas.
All the same, Webb did not immediately join the communist movement. His first venture into struggling for an alternative to capitalism was to help form a commune in the countryside. But eventually, he concluded that change required fighting the system and replacing it with socialism, rather than simply opting out.
Webb linked the struggles of the 1960s with contemporary struggles to defeat the ultra‑right agenda of the Bush administration. The White House is now captive to the extremist right‑wing agenda of neo‑conservatives in the USA; their goal is achieve world domination, and they are prepared to achieve this by using force, said Webb.
"The war in Iraq is a piece of a much larger picture, a bigger prize," he pointed out. But the dangers have also magnified. "I can't think of a more reckless administration. Bush intends to prosecute this war until he leaves the presidency."
"September 11 created the political atmosphere to ramp up the administration's policy of global dominance," he argued.
Now the question is: what policy will follow Bush's departure?
"Neo‑liberalism and capitalistic policies have left a lot of wreckage across the world," the result of exploitation of working people by big business and the fierce repression of those who resist. Now Webb says the indictment against capitalism has to include the destruction of a liveable environment on the planet.
"Global warming is the pre‑eminent problem of the 21st century," he said, urging students to make this issue a priority. "There is a real immediacy about this, we need to take action." Otherwise, Webb warned, there might be a world to change at all.
The USA has now had 27 years of unbroken domination by the extreme right in the Republican Party - either through control of the presidency or Congress. So Webb and his party see the immediate goal as breaking this pattern and helping to elect a Democrat as president and working for a progressive majority in the Congress.
At the same time, Webb has no illusions about the Democrats. However, he insists that the first step towards more fundamental change is pulling politics in the USA back from policies that threaten the world with destruction.
