Surely McColl was one of the very best. And all of this political stuff would not even be worth mentioning, if McColl, Pete Seeger, and others had not put so much ideology into the songs they composed, and into the songs they chose to sing and in McColl's case, into his THEORIES, which are discussed at GREAT length on the indicated site. So that it is awfully difficult to understand where they were coming from without understanding the politics.

And yes, they all used very humanistic-sounding rhetoric, which surely reflected good motives and intentions. No American joined the C.P. in hope of making money from it. But good intentions not infrequently lead to bad consequences. And the old (and young) Stalinists I knew tended to be frighteningly closed-minded, and frighteningly nasty if they imagined you were in their way.