1 MEMOIRS OF A LIFELONG COMMUNIST By Erwin Marquit Introduction The life that has led me to write this memoir began with my birth into a Communist family. Among other things, this circumstance gave rise to an unusually politicized childhood during the Great Depression. On the edge of adulthood, I participated in a Communist group of U.S. Army and Navy servicemen that, after secretly studying Lenin in Hawaii, led demonstrations of servicemen and women demanding demobilization when faced with potential involvement in the colonial wars at the end of World War II—demonstrations that took on world-wide scope in what came to be called the Great Mutiny of January 1946. As an open member of the Communist Party USA in the Hillel Foundation at the College of the City of New York (CCNY), I contributed to the involvement of the CCNY Hillel Foundation in a militant struggle against anti-Semitism and racial segregation at CCNY. This struggle was over the opposition of the national leadership of the Hillel Foundation and the B’nai B’rith Anti- Defamation League, and culminated in the largest student strike at a university up to the time of the Vietnam war. Graduation found me blacklisted from employment as an engineer and forced to interrupt studies for a doctoral degree at New York University by a “Loyalty Test” then required. In 1950, I left for Europe, where I remained for thirteen years, living in Poland from 1951 to 1963. There I worked as an editor at the Polish Radio, an engineer in an electrical factory, then a teaching assistant and adjunct at the University of Warsaw. As member of the Polish United Workers Party, I participated in the ideological struggles that arose in connection with the October 1956 Congress of the Polish United Workers Party. Upon completing doctoral studies with the degree of Doctor of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Warsaw in 1963, I returned to the United States. No less varied were my subsequent years in the United States, which involved targeting by the FBI’s “dirty tricks,” twice being forced to leave university positions, and successfully beating back an eight-year attempt by the administration of the University of Minnesota to force my withdrawal from the university because of my political, trade- union, and ideological activities as a member of the CPUSA and as its candidate for governor of Minnesota in 1974. My CPUSA membership and activities in the promotion of Marxist scholarship led to frequent trips abroad as a scholar and Communist, including international meetings, congresses, symposia, and other events organized by Communist Parties. My wife Doris and I spent some three years intermittently in research and teaching appointments in the German “The Demobilization Movement of January 1946” (Nature, Society and Thought, vol. 15, no. 1, [2002], 5-39)Democratic Republic, Poland, and the USSR. Because this history includes important moments in the history of the Communist movement, much of which is unpublished, my comrades, friends, and family members often suggested that I put it into writing. All living persons identified as members of the CPUSA, except those who have already publicly identified themselves as members in one form or another, were asked if they agreed to my identification of them as Communists. In the very few cases in which agreement was lacking, I have assigned to them other names, indicating such substitution an asterisk (*) following the name. I use the same asterisk for names assigned to people whose names I do not remember. Events during my lifetime have shown the necessity of continual correction of the world Communist movement’s incomplete application of the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Errors, but also heroic attempts and great accomplishments, have been made. The basic aim of this movement remains the noblest goal of all time. It is the elimination of the domination of the working class and other oppressed people by the owners of capital, and the liberation of human creativity to make our own glorious future.