(FORTUNE Magazine) – A big problem for professional redbaiters like the present writer is the acknowledged paucity of present Communists, especially here in the U.S.A. Also not helping matters is the widely held view that Gus Hall of the CPUSA is now less newsworthy than, say, Lenora B. Fulani of the New Alliance Party. Rejecting this defeatist perspective, Keeping Up will now defiantly wallow in a certain amount of red-related news you have not been getting from the mainstream media.

-- Angela's Exit. Arguably the most famous Communist in America, Angela Davis once received the Lenin Peace Prize, twice ran for Vice President of the U.S. on the party ticket, and once (1988) was invited to Dartmouth as featured speaker at a celebration of the college's 15th anniversary of coeducation. Yet she was purged last December, for ''factionalism'' and ''right opportunism,'' after suddenly discovering that the CP was not democratic. -- Other Departures. Angela was not alone in reaching this deviant conclusion. Altogether, about 850 members signed an ''initiative'' asking for democracy in the party and guardedly complaining about the cult of personality around Gus Hall. (''Cultism'' is unacceptable in ''leading bodies.'') All complainers were removed from leadership positions, and in the ensuing pandemonium, perhaps one-third of the party resigned. By the time the dust had settled, it was established that the party, which long claimed 20,000 or so members, actually had some 2,500 -- before the resignations. -- Moola from Moscow. It's a scandal in Russia, and may even lead to the prosecution of Gorbachev, but the revelations are still being ignored by much of the American media. The news is that right up until 1990, Gorbachev was still authorizing payments of state funds to Communist parties around the world, including around $2 million a year to Gus (who got it via KGB couriers and signed personally). An interesting question is whether anybody can now think of a reason not to prosecute the party for failing to register as a foreign agent. -- The great lockout. Can it be? One feels a certain dizziness. After decades in this business, the present writer suddenly finds himself addressing a controversy in which he sides with the CPUSA. It concerns the union status of the party members working for its newspaper, the People's Weekly World. Out of commitment to the cause or something, they had never asked for a union contract. But then the party locked them out of the newspaper's offices, rewrote the editors' account of the internal struggle, and later fired them all.

Evidencing a certain amount of weakness in the sequitur department, the idealistic scriveners submitted a long letter to the entire party membership complaining that the rewrite was tantamount to censorship and would therefore have been opposed by Lenin. Pitiable, eh? They also got the Newspaper Guild of New York to file an unfair-labor-pract ice charge on their behalf to the National Labor Relations Board, which is investigating the case as we write. As a big fan of private property, we have trouble understanding why the lockout might have been illegal. To be sure, it could be fun to hear Gus defending it.