Caleb Maupin on dialectical materialism, the rise of Communist culture

Caleb's chats are the ideal tool for those who wish to acquire a solid understanding of contemporary history in an easy, accessible manner. In this episode Caleb discusses the importance of understanding the truths underscored by Dialectical Materialism, among which the fact that everything changes all the time, that NOTHING stays the same, not even from one second to the next, is central.  This means anything is possible, that the past, even the immediate past, does not need to rigidly determine the future. That A ≠ A. Caleb talks about the rise and fall of a communist culture from the late 1920s through the 1940s and the immediate postwar, when the standard of living began to rise for working families. Communist culture included unions, neighborhoods, theaters, children's camps (i.e., WO-CHI-CA camp⁽¹⁾), musical organizations, schools, and much more. The chat also dwells on how people's "high" events, highly romantic things they participated in—Vietnam war, the Great Depression,  the struggle for unionism, the McCarthy period and the fight against anti-communism—seem to freeze their perception of what is possible, providing them with a single lens to view history.

PRECIS: An informal chat with Caleb Maupin as guide to the multitude of news, lies, distortions, rumors, idiocies, hypocrisies, and ideologies that shape our world.

Addendum

⁽¹⁾ Wo-Chi-Ca camp was birthed in 1934 amidst World War II, McCarthyism, The Great Depression, and the Cold War. Wo-Chi-Camp is short for Workers Children’s Camp. It was an interracial co-educational summer vacation camp found in New Jersey.The emergence of this camp came from summer vacation homes designed for people with ties to the Communist Party. Originally, these spaces were inter-generational, but the adults began to realize that the youth needed their own summer community as well. In 1934, a New Jersey farmer and his wife donated 127 acres of land to start Camp Unity, the first interracial camp supported by the communist party in the United States. Camp Unity would then be called Workers Children’s Camp or Wo-Chi-Ca for short.

Paul Robeson at Camp WoChiCa

ca. 1942, Califon, New Jersey, USA — Young campers at the Workers’ Children’s Camp (Camp Wo-Chi-Ca) rally in support of U.S. forces in Europe. They hold a plaque urging the president to “extend his influence” toward opening a second front in the war against Nazi Germany. — Image by © Lucien Aigner/CORBIS