Evil Dreams

 

John Gardner

John Gardner writes from the “Gardner Farm” in New York.

It is often supposed that utopianism springs from a benign impulse. Many Americans in the 20th century, socialists and Communists, had utopian expectations, and the consensus now seems to be that they were naive and misguided. Speaking generally, I would not disagree, but the impulse itself is more complex than it appears, and I think the following account of my unusual experience with utopians is instructive.

*****

In the mid 60s I used to drive from Vermont to Boston every two weeks to attend study classes of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), evening affairs where anywhere from three to a dozen people, party members, long-time sympathizers, and novices like me, were gathered. In a motel conference room Party pamphlets and booklets were arranged in a display: The Communist Manifesto, speeches by Daniel DeLeon, tracts with titles like “Socialism: 25 Questions and Answers.” We sat around a table, in turn reading aloud passages from a text, usually one of DeLeon’s four big speeches dating from the early years of the century, which the leader, Carl, a tall soft-spoken machinist would expatiate on unimaginatively for a few minutes. There was almost no discussion. A class lasted a couple of hours, and several sessions would be spent on one text.

I initiated the adjournment afterwards to a tavern where we would drink dark beer, eat pastrami sandwiches, and argue vociferously until, late in the night, I would climb back into my truck and head for home. Once away from the stultifying study class, the members I got to know were unpretentious people who belonged to a sort of old fashioned working class: mostly second-generation Americans, highly skilled-pattern makers, masons, printers, etc.--they were earnest, unworldly, often self-educated. The comrades reminded me of the members of some obscure, harmless sect; the words transparent, sincere, innocent occur to me now as I recall them, happy in their belief that if they could induce enough Americans to read their simple leaflets, why, the country (and the world) would be transformed into the peaceable Kingdom envisioned by Marx and DeLeon. I met many more members at the party celebrations--the Thanksgiving banquet, for instance, or the commemoration of the Paris Commune--held at some shabby hotel, which featured a speech by a party dignitary, and perhaps some amateurish entertainment. It was obvious then that one of the main functions of the SLP for the ordinary member was social, providing occasions for old friends to get together for a comfortable toast to the revolution. Once I sat at a cozy table with three generations of Carl’s family, including his pretty blond daughters who passed the hat during the collection, and his venerable parents, born in the old country. There was a certain naive charm about it all, but the overwhelming impression was of some state beyond senility, of a past long dead but unaccountably tottering about in the present. I did not realize it then, but I was very lucky: by encountering the SLP then, just before disaster overwhelmed it, I was granted the privilege of seeing a fragment of a significant past, of witnessing a small scale reenactment of the strange evolution of utopianism in the 20th century.

What was the SLP?

Founded in New York in 1876 from the embers of the First International, it was little more than an immigrant (mostly German) marching and chowder society until Daniel DeLeon, once a member of the Columbia Law School faculty, joined the party and became editor of its paper, a position he held from 1891 until his death in 1914. He was widely recognized, both here and abroad, where he led the SLP delegation at congresses of the Second International, as the leading American socialist (in an admittedly poor field). Within the limits of his quite literal belief in the teachings of Marx and Engels--he never saw the philosophical depths, not to speak of the problems and contradictions that lay just beneath the surface of the Marxist scheme--DeLeon was an intelligent man, a forceful writer and able controversialist. He realized that Marxist tactics had to be adapted to American conditions, so he developed the theory (that became and remained SLP dogma) that the party would operate politically, mustering the votes for socialism, while Socialist Industrial Unions (SIU) would provide the economic power to enforce the ballot’s mandate. The party itself would disband after it won a national election, and the SIUs would take over the factories, offices, etc. Each workplace would elect delegates to a congress, which in turn would elect delegates to a higher forum, and so on to the national level, where government would reside in a congress of industries which would confine itself, in Engel’s phrase, to the administration of things, thus abolishing the political state.

The SLP was most vital during DeLeon’s tenure, which happened to coincide with the heyday of American socialism, the period we think of as the Progressive Era. Its electoral appeal was always very limited: in 100 years of presidential elections, the SLP never got near one percent of the vote. But the party was actively involved in strikes; DeLeon was one of the founders of the original (1905-08, before it became an anarcho-syndicalist body) Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies); its press was widely read on the Left, and if other radicals dissented strongly from the SLP view (The Socialist Party of Debs--and later, Norman Thomas--was an SLP splinter) they respected DeLeon’s integrity.

The outstanding characteristic of the pre-1917 Left (which includes the much more popular Socialist Party of Eugene Debs) in the United States was its idealism. Reading the documents of the time, as well as the later memoirs, it is clear that Americans became socialists or socialist sympathizers because of its utopian vision, because they thought that it would dissolve present dissatisfactions in a glorious future.

The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and the imposition of Leninism had a catastrophic effect upon the Socialist movement in the U.S. because, in the confrontation between pre-1917 socialists and Communists, the former were made to feel, could not help but feel, a lack of seriousness. They felt unmanned; their gestures and manifestoes, their ideas and actions all seemed, in the new climate, to be futile and inadequate, quite out of touch with the historical moment that seemed to belong to the new men who believed wholeheartedly in power and had no qualms about using it. The various groups and parties of the non-Communist Left drifted through the 1920s and into the 30s, splitting and merging, attaching themselves to this or that momentarily popular cause, but never again would they have the following they had before 1917. The non-Communist Left faded away and died, and all attempts to revive it have failed.

The SLP, however, did not die. It pursued a unique course, even a brilliant one--for the short term, (and that was more than 50 years--thanks to the instinct of its new leader (picked by DeLeon), Arnold Petersen. What he did was to move the SLP away from any significant involvement with the society around it, simultaneously maintaining the pretense that the party was a serious threat to the ruling class. Rejecting an invitation to join the new Communist International, the party began to curtail its activities, including labor struggles, concentrating instead on street corner leafleting and getting on the ballot in national elections. The clamorous present was stilled by analyzing it in words from the past, as Petersen shaped the party around a cult of DeLeon, now a mythic figure, a Wizard of Oz voice used to suppress dissent and to sanction Petersen’s increasingly autocratic rule. When I was reading the Weekly People in the 1960s, every issue featured one of DeLeon’s old editorials, complete with an engraving of the noble-browed, heavily bearded Daniel himself. His speeches and pamphlets (often musty controversies with long-forgotten antagonists) were endlessly cited and recited, just as our Boston study class had pored over them. The illusion of timeliness, the fiction that the party was intellectually engaged with contemporary events was maintained by discussions of those events, at the same time that the terms of the discussions removed everything to a safe, pre-1917 distance. The necessity for real action this day, for testing the party’s ideas in the current political market place was thus avoided, and the tranquility of the comrades was preserved.

This is not to suggest that all, or even most, of the SLP’s articulated positions during the years of Petersen’s reign (1914-69) were stupid or irrelevant. For instance, although the party was generally sympathetic to the Soviets (until 1939) on the supposition that in an impossible situation their hearts were in the right place, it was unremittingly hostile to the Communist Party USA, as it was to all other Lefty groups, regarding them as hopeless pretenders to the Marxist mantle, as phony revolutionaries whose real goal was to replace one ruling class by another--themselves. That the party was bitterly anti-Communist was a welcome relief, considering the antics of the rest of the Left, but its analysis of Communism was disappointingly shallow: the Bolsheviks had perverted Marxism and were now ruling in the names of men and ideals they had betrayed. Nothing could be more mistaken.

Remember that it was believed by most American Socialists before 1917 that the triumph of the revolution would immediately (or soon thereafter) usher in utopia:

The individual will voluntarily identify himself with the community, coercion will become unnecessary, the sources of conflict will disappear. --Leszek Kolakowski

Lenin’s State and Revolution, published in 1916, indicates that even he had rosy views on the matter. His whole career, however, both before and after the Bolshevik coup, shows that he was well prepared to pursue his goal relentlessly and over any obstacle. Once the Bolsheviks seized power, any vestiges of naive views they may have had were quickly dispelled by the realization that creating utopia meant coercion and control. Everything, including Stalin’s subsequent violence, followed from that. And in this, Lenin was being true to Marx, taking the Marxist goal seriously in a way that the less fanatic pre-1917 socialists never did. As Leszek Kolakowski, the eminent historian and analyst of Marxism explains:

The point is that Marx really, consistently, believed that human society would not be liberated without achieving unity. And, except for despotism, there is no other technique known to produce a unity of society; no other way of suppressing the tension between civil and political society but the suppression of civil society; no other means to remove the conflicts between the individual and “the whole” but the destruction of the individual . . .

To exercise such despotism requires power, so it is hardly surprising that the most salient feature of Leninism is its fixation on power. Lenin himself, dynamic and ruthless, sought power with extraordinary single-mindedness, craving it, not for its own sake, but in order to create the just society in Russia (and the world). In the juxtaposition of power and utopia, Leninism mocked the lack of worldliness of pre-1917 socialism and also revealed the most profound truth about utopianism: Leninism was the Marxist word made flesh, the translation of lofty words into facts on the ground, of dreams into reality. Utopianism in action demanded Leninism for the fulfillment of its program. The old utopian goal receded into a pro forma limbo, a distant article of faith but not of passion. That was reserved for the obsession with power. The pursuit of utopia became nothing more than a vehicle for the exercise of power. Inevitably this led to a subversive antagonism towards all other forms of authority that claimed men’s allegiance. Hence the new worldview of socialism lacked the sunny innocence of the past; it was (and is) bitter, rancorous, hard, extreme, and devious. Such was the Left that emerged in America from the events of 1917 in Russia.

The SLP, however, remained as it had been, a fly in amber, because of the insulating process I have already described. The party returned to what it had been in the early years (plus the DeLeon cult), a social club concealed from itself as much as from others by a facade of unchanging revolutionary bombast. During Petersen’s 55-year reign, the membership declined, mostly from normal attrition, from 5000 to 1000, but the contributions, duly listed on the back pages of the paper, rolled in steadily. The summer picnics were well-attended, the Paris Commune was celebrated, and three generations of Carl’s family happily toasted the coming millennium in a shabby Boston hotel. Without Petersen’s instinctive circling of the wagons, without his Argus-eyed vigilance against “disrupters,” there would have been none of this; the SLP would have died long ago, with the rest of the non-Communist Left. Petersen preserved the Party by ensconcing it in a crypt.

*****

I said earlier that a disaster overwhelmed the SLP; I was referring to the 60s, the era that began about l964. In the past, any member who dared object, however mildly, to the party’s withdrawal into social isolation, any comrade so foolhardy as to question, let alone criticize, the way the party was run, was immediately severely censured in an elaborate formal process, and if he did not at once recant, was expelled to join a long list of “disrupters,” shades on the other side of the Styx who had been unfaithful to DeLeon’s legacy. When the storm of the 60s broke over the party, Petersen might have been able, at the cost of some members, to steer the party as a whole clear of the maelstrom, except for the fact that there was a small educated elite among the membership, a few academics and engineers probably attracted by DeLeonism’s schematic rationalism. Since the party always needed articulate people as speakers during the election campaigns and as writers for its weekly paper, these comrades became well-known and respected throughout the SLP. They were the first ones to be roused by the 60s, and they were the least susceptible to Petersen’s discipline. The party leadership again and again put forth a sober analysis of the 60s ferment showing that it was not at all revolutionary in the sense that the SLP understood the term, but how could that view prevail in a wishful comrade’s mind against the daily media barrage? The party allowed leaflet distribution at demonstrations, but only at a distance sufficient to mark one as a non-demonstrator, but what if a comrade were invited to speak at an anti-war rally, to tell the assembled radicals the SLP message? Heady stuff and it was too much for Petersen’s repressive magic. There was a flood of resignations and expulsions, entire sections were disbanded, and by the early 70s the party was a wreck, virtually indistinguishable from any other rancorous Leftist group

The dissidents now free of the SLP and convinced that “the workers,” were thirsty for DeLeon’s message, so long withheld by Petersen and his toadies, were full of excitement and energy as they bustled about, forming groups, starting newsletters, and mobilizing fellow dropouts and old, SLP sympathizers across the country. The euphoria did not last. However much they lived in the contemporary world, their political life, the way they thought about politics and political action was antediluvian. They had been living in a pre-1917 time warp. Awakening into the light of the present day, they were quite unable to understand and articulate their predicament, although they sensed it: equipped with a body of ideas that had seemed appropriate before the Russian Revolution, they faced a world in which their beliefs--utopianism without power--were insipid and irrelevant. Having been taught for so long that the train of socialist history had been switched onto the wrong track, that Communism was the perversion of socialism, they could not admit that the Soviet “experiment” was in fact socialism’s fulfillment, the idea in practice. They could only sense, in a baffled way, that somehow the old dogmas that they had hoped to broadcast to a waiting working-class were really fly-blown relics, dull antiques that looked shabbier every time they took them out of moth balls. The comrades argued earnestly about how to spread the word, but these were desultory disputes; increasingly they found themselves quarreling bitterly over the substance of the ideas themselves. In truth, they did not know what to think. Some moved toward the hinterland of the radical Left, sympathetic to Communism without actually taking the veil, some hunkered down uneasily in the old DeLeonist mausoleum. Most simply dropped out, and in just a few years the movement disappeared. So Arnold Petersen had been wiser than his critics; once DeLeon’s ideas were released from the SLP crypt, like some fabled mummy they faded, shrank, and at last crumbled to dust.

*****

If Leninism is dead, if the long chain of thought that led from the Bastille to the storming of the Winter Palace has been discredited, utopianism continues to live on, waxing and waning with time and circumstance. Without the urge to power, it’s like the old SLP; an elaborate edifice of fantasy, significant only within the enchanted circle of the faithful, less than a handful of dust outside in the world. But whenever there is radical contempt for the quotidian, whenever power is sought to uplift and transform our lives, then the utopian impulse, far from being benign, is deeply misanthropic, repressive and coercive, driven by virulent zeal.     *