Long After The Collapse Of The Soviet Union, The Communist Party USA Lingers Along And Sells Some Interesting Baseball Caps & Things

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 following the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev by hardline Soviet Communists, world Communist organizations found themselves as political orphans as the political homeland of international Communism in the Soviet Union disappeared as a guiding force of direction or leadership. Instead it pretty much became a matter of survival and every man for himself for a dying movement of individual state organizations.

Today in 2006, where is the Communist Party USA? Besides being in a weak membership condition compared to the highpoint of strength right around the 1930's Great Depression, the organization only seems to champion just a few class concious causes, and only comes across as a organization a little to the left of many of more liberal Democratic Party activists.

On the CPUSA Website, the really brave can purchase baseball caps, T-Shirts, bumper stickers and other items with CPUSA slogans, emblems or Karl Marx images. But it seems like few would want to wear such items in a climate of wiretaps and other snooping into the private lives of Americans, where Uncle Sam may be listening at any time. Yet the strange flipside of this is that it was indeed the Bush Administration that appointed the Secretary of the Iraqi Communist Party to the transitional governing council of Iraq before a more permanent government was elected in Iraq.

This is a strange paradox. While the Soviet Union was viewed a great foe and Cold War adversary before 1991, today the U.S. has massive trade with Communist China and the Bush Administration appoints the Secretary Of Iraqi Communist Party to the transitional government council in Iraq.

Now that a Communist Soviet Union is no longer a threat, and the domino principle of Soviet backed guerilla wars undermining governments friendly to the U.S. seems to be no longer a threat, many world Communists are now content to be like the Chinese or Vietnamese and sell basketball shoes, tools, toys, housewares and everything else to the U.S. as born again capitalists, and the CPUSA, once the great fear of Senator Joseph McCarthy has been reduced down to a mere level of selling baseball and T-shirts with slogans or images few would dare wear in public.

From a position of a major rival ideology to the U.S., to a small-time T-shirt and baseball cap vender, few political movements have fallen quite as far as the one of the Communists. Or to make this more understandable to the more venture capitalistic: If world Communism was like a Wall Street stock, the value has fallen so low, that it is now like a "delisted issue".

The modern confrontation appears to be with radical Islam and the Western world, and this clash of cultures has a wildly unpredictable outcome that seems to lack the mutual fears and restraints of the old Cold War issues between the U.S. and former Soviet Union. And it seems like it will be a long time before the rival Al Qaeda organization will be only content to sell Osama Bin Laden T-shirts, rather than challenge the Western world in more overt and outrageous ways such as attempts to destroy the Western economies with attacks on Saudi Arabian oil supplies.

Once again the Western world is in for another long challenge.