Gus Hall

Don't let him look you in the eye

Gus Hall (1910–2000) was, for much of his life, the leader of the Communist Party USA, exhibiting the triumph, within his own mind, of hope over adversity. He stood for president four times, but failed to raise many votes; obviously the fault of false consciousness stopping the dumb proles from seeing the gospel light.

He organised the "Little Steel" strike which failed to achieve its aims but ended in a number of deaths. In 1948, he was charged with sedition under the Smith Act. He was bailed out of jail while he appealed his case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court; when they ruled against him, he attempted to defect to the Soviet Union, but failed and spent five years in Leavenworth Penitentiary.

During the 1980s, the Glasnost years, he held fast to his anti-revisionist Marxist–Leninist position, thus becoming increasingly out of step with the infusion of reality washing through the communist establishment at that time.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, fresh documentation came to light about the Soviet Union's involvement with the party, thus removing any ambiguity about its status as a Soviet foreign-ops apparatus. The Soviet subsidies to the party totaled over $40 million, quite a bit of which ended up at the people's democratic stud farm (prop. Gus Hall).

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