Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 What are the, the stakes in these interesing battles in the past? Like, why should anybody care about them? Well, it's, it's precisely so that we don't make the same mistakes over and over again. And it's painful as hell to watch young people discover this a hundred year old political tradition and repeat mistakes that were identified and like problems that were identified a hundred years ago. Hello, hello. And welcome back to Talking Strategy Making History. I'm Draka and I'm here, uh, with the esteemed, uh, professor Dick Flax, uh, along with, uh, P Huel, who is our, our producer, is gonna be joining us, uh, for the discussion tonight, peppering us with some questions, keep us, uh, grounded as we continue down a potential rabbit hole of talking about isms and big ideas, uh, and socialism, and how many, you know, Carl Marxs can fit on the head of a pin.
Speaker 0 00:01:11 So, yeah, today we're gonna be talking about socialist politics that are not democratic. Um, you know, very often you'll hear myself probably Dick, uh, you know, Bernie Sanders. Other people will say that they are a Democratic socialist. Well, you know, what is, what is the opposite of that? And, uh, you know, a lot of people who got, uh, interested in socialist ideas through, uh, occupy and the Sanders movement, the Sanders campaign, like, uh, like our friend p who's just talking about that, um, you know, then got really hungry for more information about what is this socialism stuff, uh, looking on the internet, you know, reading books, um, checking out, uh, existing organizations. Um, and sometimes that has, I think, gone a little bit awry. I think like, as with all kinds of internet assembled, uh, philosophies. Um, and so I, I think about, uh, someone I know that I'll call, uh, star Trek Will, he's actually semi-famous on the internet as Star Trek will.
Speaker 0 00:02:21 Um, and this is a guy who I knew, uh, when I was in graduate school at uc, Santa Barbara. He was an undergraduate and he was the president, uh, for a year or so of the U C S B campus Democrats. And I remember meeting him and talking to him then, and, uh, you know, he was like a pretty mainstream, uh, uh, uh, you know, maybe progressive leaning, uh, Democrat and interested in electing Democrats and beating Republicans, et cetera. We kept in touch over the years, and he was really, uh, excited and about the, the Sanders campaign, um, and also a, a really big Star Trek nerd, like a huge treky, which I just, I deeply respect. Um, I respect fandoms and respect, uh, people taking 'em seriously. I'm a mild treky, nothing like this guy. Um, so we would talk about Star Trek and talk about socialism, and he made the, you know, very good, I think common, uh, connections between the utopian, uh, aspects of Star Trek as a, as a, as a universe, as a work of art and, um, thoughts about the future of humanity and how it could be different and non-capitalist and all of that completely wholesome stuff.
Speaker 0 00:03:39 Um, and then, like, I didn't talk to him for a few minutes, and then I started to see these posts on Facebook that were like mad at the movie 1917, because it didn't mention the Russian Revolution, which is the most important event that had happened in human history. And as I started to try to engage with him, and then I, I realized that he was in, I don't remember the, which one, but one of these, you know, communist micros sects, um, and outselling newspapers and selling books and, uh, you know, just, yeah. And then it was like, Hey, communism, it's communism that is like Star Trek. Um, and, uh, just started posting lots of memes that combined, you know, star star ships and Vulcans and hammers and sickles and so forth. Um, and I, I think that's sad. I think we sort of like lost someone who was interested in thinking about politics in a more radical way, in a more, more, uh, visionary way than we're usually taught to in this, in this country.
Speaker 0 00:04:51 And then like, skipped overall of that too. Um, just saying, uh, and believing really absurd things about the state of the world and democracy and what those things mean. Um, so it's for Star Trek Will, and I think there's a lot of them out there, a lot of other Star Trek wills who, um, uh, you know, have, uh, inspired this, uh, sort of new slang term for authoritarian left discs that they're tanks. Um, and, you know, this podcast is about making the left, pushing the left to be more strategic, you know, both thinking long term, but also thinking in ways about deliverable victories and, um, building infrastructure, et cetera, all of those things. And this season we're asking, you know, to what extent socialism as a set of ideas or a tradition can help us think strategically if that's possible. Can there be a strategic American socialism, um, of some kind?
Speaker 0 00:05:57 Do, do we even care? Those are the kinds of questions that we're asking. And, um, and if there's, if there's any organization in the US I think you'd agree, Dick, um, that could be a home for a strategic grounded American socialism. It would be dsa. Yeah. Um, which we're both members of not very act not active, but we're members of, and dsa, it seems very much rid by internal conflicts and, um, toxic behavior and bad politics and so forth. And it seems to me like the, the root of the problem is that the, frankly, there, there are a bunch of, it's a democratic socialist organization, but there are a bunch of people in it who are not democratic socialists. They're communists to be frank. And so, let me throw out as a, as a starting point, um, uh, Dick, for getting your thoughts about this and, and getting this conversation started. Let me throw out as a, as a sort of thesis, like I think that a, a socialist politics that could be, you know, uh, vibrant and participatory and and popular and relevant in the United States has to be anti-communist. Um, what do you think, what do you think about that? Well,
Speaker 1 00:07:15 I feel glad to be able to have the opportunity to, to get into this. It's, uh, it's kind of, um, touchy stuff, sensitive stuff in a way, uh, on the left, uh, and always has been. But it's deeply, uh, what you're saying is deeply part of the experience that I personally have. Uh, because my parents were, uh, communist party members. And by the way, they never admitted that to me. They, cuz they, I grew up at the time of McCarthy and the communist practice was to refuse to answer a question about their personal beliefs in front of the government. But people like my parents extended that to, to their own family. I mean, it's not, I'm being a little facetious, of course, they didn't deny that they were members of the party. And I've written, uh, with my wife a memoir called Making History, making glimpses, how Two Red Diaper Babies found each other and Discovered America.
Speaker 1 00:08:20 And the, uh, subtitle is the key one for right here. Uh, we both came from that kind of background. Mickey, my, uh, dear departed wife, she, she was the daughter of, uh, first generat of immigrants. And her mother was a teenager during the Russian Revolution. Um, and, uh, identified still to the very end of her life, the Bolick, uh, mother of Mickey with that revolution, not, not necessarily with whatever was particularly happening in the Soviet Union, but with the Revolution. So in the mid fifties when I was in college, uh, learning about the profound critiques of, of the Communist Party and of the Soviet Union, uh, but not only in college, but as someone voraciously interested in politics on the one hand, but also my parents being fired from the New York City school system because they, uh, because they were alleged to be communists, uh, even though their records as teachers were exemplary.
Speaker 1 00:09:34 And this was the dual, uh, situation that I had to wrestle with as a, as a growing person by. But fortunately for that struggle, internal struggle in my part long comes Chris Jev, head of the Soviet Union, gives a famous speech denouncing the crimes of Joseph Stalin. And basically, um, uh, opening the door to all the criticisms, which the party communist party had denied all along the head of the Soviet Union was saying, were fundamentally true. Uh, and that, um, was a great relief to me because it allowed, uh, voicing and opening up of a real discussion about, you know, what, what kind of left do we want? And what, what were the failures not only of the the party being repressed by McCarthyism, but its own, uh, failures to be what it promised to be. Uh, and trying to figure all that out.
Speaker 1 00:10:44 By the way, one of the, uh, things Christ said at that speech was that Stalin had virtually killed most of the people who led the Russian Revolution, which is a startling fact. And what part of why it's startling is not only cuz that was a horrible crime, but because the followers of communism, instead of acknowledging and seeing what Stalin had represented, denied that there was any discontinuity between Stalin and the claims of the Russian Revolution, when in fact he wiped out the people who, uh, were trying to support those claims. At the same time that the communist movement was really almost hegemonic in the United States in on the left was the continuing, uh, socialist movement embodied in the Socialist Party. People like Norman Thomas was the best known figure from that party. The Socialist Party in, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, uh, eventually became quite critical, if not opposed to the Russian Revolution, or, or most of the Socialist party probably did.
Speaker 1 00:12:07 And then there were other parties that were followers of Leon Trotsky, who had helped make the Russian Revolution, uh, had been an a, uh, a partner of Lennon and the other revolutionaries, and then Stalin, uh, forced Trotsky out of the Soviet Union and, and, and basically based his dictatorial rule on the eradication of the Tross movement, or people who alleged to be that in the thirties. Anyway, I'm opening up a lot of strands of history here. So that, that the fact that there were these socialist parties attacking the Soviet Union and in some cases denying that the Soviet Union was socialist at all. Uh, and, uh, in fact, I think to Norman Thomas sometimes referred to Stalin Stalinism or the Stalin Soviet Union as red fascism. And so there's a tremendous amount of hostility between communists and socialists in the thirties and and into the forties and communist socialists and trotskyists, all of this warfare, uh, within the left, um, even though from a broad popular point of view, that you did have a growing labor movement, much of that period, and other movements that went far beyond these particular parties. But they were important in stimulating them.
Speaker 1 00:13:45 So, uh, the new generation that I'm part of are the children of that, that era, the children of the people who were the socialists and communists of the thirties and forties. And there was a yearning on the part of some of us for a way of being on the left that was free of all this warfare of all of this, um, you know, internal fighting that was so destructive to be able to transcend that somehow. And we could imagine what we came to call a new left. And to make a long story short, at Port Huron in Michigan in 1962, that this discussion of a new left was probably articulated not for the first time, but in such a group of people, what is a new left and what should it be? And one of the key points about the people who organized that conference in Port Huron, which included Al Haber, who was considered like the founder of the New Left sds, um, he wrote, and I remember reading this before going to Port Huron, that we have to have in an organization, all the children of the old left, including children of Communist party members and children of Socialist party members together, and liberals, people without those kind of, um, sectarian identifications should also be welcomed, should be an embracing organization of young people who identified with what, with the idea of a new, of a new social order based on full democracy.
Speaker 1 00:15:35 That was really the way that these vocabulary distinctions were, were experimented with, we're not gonna talk about socialism, we're gonna talk about radical democracy, participatory democracy, and socialist vision is part of that, but it isn't, uh, we, we we're thinking of an American version of that. And, um, that was the positive, uh, the, the kernel of the positive vision. And in the Port Huron Convention, this is really getting back to your initial question about anti-communism. So the there SDS had existed as an organization prior to the Port Huon. It was a, the youth wing, or the student wing of a very old left organization called the League for Industrial Democracy, founded in 1905 by a distinguished group of people like Walter Lipman and Jack London, uh, and young, young socialists of the early 20th century and the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which is a very ridiculous name.
Speaker 1 00:16:51 By the time we talking in the early sixties, the, the students involved in it. They changed the name simply to keep the organization going. That was all before Port Huron. But what they kept was a membership card that you were supposed to sign when you got joined the organization. And the membership card stated that I do not follow any totalitarian, uh, principles. It may have even said, I am not, um, a supporter of the Soviet of Soviet communism, but probably it was broader than that. And it wasn't people like Mickey and me that read Diaper babies at Port Huron who moved to strike that language from the, from the membership card. It was prob probably Tom Hayden, who was, uh, the president of sds, was elected there, president at that point, who was the author of Port Huran, who had no history as being in, in a left wing cultural background growing up and other people there.
Speaker 1 00:18:03 And the point was that Oath was exclusionary. Um, and it was psychologically for, uh, red diaper babies in, in other words, there were other organizations such as the SANE Nuclear Policy Committee, SANE had a student wing, uh, in the early sixties that insisted on having an anti-communist, uh, oath as a condition of membership. Um, and the Student Peace Union had similar, a similar measure, and the American Students for Democratic Action, which was a student wing of the ada, the Americans for Democratic Action, they had a similar, uh, deliberately exclusionary, exclusionary, uh, uh, statement as a condition of membership. And that part of what being a new left was to get rid of such statements. And I think with the argument, the kind of moral argument is people should be judged not on their label, what labels can be given to them, but on the basis of their actual being, their actual activity, their actual performance, their actual behavior.
Speaker 1 00:19:20 Uh, and when, so when SDS adopted this, removed that oath, um, the League for Industrial Democracy, uh, immediate, there were members of the, uh, there were socialist IOLs, young people, socialist League, uh, members who were at Port Huron, and they went back to New York and told the League for Industrial Democracy leadership, including Mike Harrington, founder of the gsa, that, uh, this had happened at Port Huron. That the, that the, that the convention had, uh, become, uh, well, Harrington used to use the term sta that was the idea that they were conveying back in New York to the L I and C L I D, uh, fired Tom Hayden, who was on the paid staff of SDS and Al Haber, who was on the paid staff, uh, and tried to, uh, and did change the locks on the office so that the, um, SDS people could not enter the office and then had a hearing.
Speaker 1 00:20:36 And I, uh, by that time, those of us who'd been elected to the leadership of, of, uh, sds, the new organization, were it all come to New York to discuss this crisis that our parent organization was basically firing our leadership and declaring us illegitimate. And, and we listened to the, um, hearing you might say, between my Harrington and other l i leaders and Hayden and Haber, and at that point Mike Harrington, who, who later became a good friend of mine. So it's not that I'm condemning him for all time, but at this moment. And he himself has regretted a lot of what happened at this point in his history. Uh, he regretted it later, but he was saying, we don't, it was established since 1941 or whatever the year was, 1940, that we do not have a place in the left for communist or people who apologize for communist or people who are sympathetic to communist or STAs. And you are going down that road. And, um, that oath that you, or whatever they called it, that statement that you amended or eliminated is crucial for keeping these people out of our, out of the left. And so he was very much of the view at that point. I think that there really was an illegitimate left, uh, that had to be killed, that had to be erased if the left itself was to have any future.
Speaker 1 00:22:27 And the funniest thing in that dialogue was, uh, that I remember is, um, is he said, for example, you, he says to Haber, you, you communicated with an organization called the Japanese Committee a against the Antia and HBO Committee, a he said, a repeatedly peace organization in Japan, but that's a Soviet front organization. They don't condemn Soviet nuclear testing. They condemn American nuclear testing, but not Russian nuclear testing. So Al says, well, don't you wanna know what we communicated to them? And Harrington says, no, you are not to communicate with them. So Haber said, well, we communicated with them that we didn't wanna communicate with them because they were Soviet front organization. That's what we communicated with them, which was a moment of, you know, I think that embarrassed Michael because it was clearly he was, he was going overboard with this line. But I'm telling you this because of how formative this was in my own, trying to figure out how to deal with this question. I could go on and on because in a whole book about this. But, uh, but, but let me stop with that. So
Speaker 2 00:23:47 Yeah, this is, this is, uh, I'm the producer and happy to be part of your conversation today. And I appreciate that whirlwind history. And I wanna tie it back to what has set up for us at the beginning, um, which was a strategic question for us now about, um, when, with, with the, the, the new new left or whatever we call it today, um, is experiencing a lot of the same fracturing. Um, and a lot of the same kinds of folks who DKA described, who I've seen in my time in DSA when I went to the convention, um, who, you know, were went from being inspired by, um, uh, by Bernie's politics to, to, yeah. Uh, even being anti-democratic or, um, or just like accelerationist, like, yeah, like let's just burn it all down. Um, some very anti strategic stuff. Um, it, it's a lot to take in.
Speaker 2 00:24:51 I, I guess I'm just really curious, um, because I think a lot of people don't even know their history that well. I think that's part of why a lot of people That's right. Take on these labels and, you know, some people maybe just trying to be edgy or maybe some people, you know, are, are looking for the next revolution. And, um, I'm kind of curious, when you all were assembling when there was this, uh, air of the Red Scare, you know, the McCarthyism, um, inside the left, I mean, it was, it was, it was about, um, rejecting the mistakes of the past and, and, um, like what, what can we really learn about that? Like, what, what's the big takeaway from what, what you just shared, Dick?
Speaker 1 00:25:38 I'll speak personally rather than what everybody might have learned. Uh, I came to, and maybe because I'm a sociologist, this was foregrounded for me that one of the fundamental, uh, har uh, horrors and harms of the communist movement was, was Leninism. And by that I mean something pretty specific, the kind of organization that a party or a, an activist, a community should be, should have. And Lenon in the midst of Soviet of Russian revolutionary period is saying, we need an organization that, um, has a professional, full-time revolutionary leadership that is capable of absorbing, of under, of analyzing, absorbing the, uh, society and what he called a scientific fashion. In other words, by taking Marxism as a, uh, very, uh, disciplined theoretical structure for analyzing the, uh, situation. And that, um, that leadership should be able to debate and discuss strategy. But once a, a conclusion is reached, party discipline is crucial, meaning even if you were in disagreement, you will now accept the decision.
Speaker 1 00:27:23 And it wasn't necessarily a majority decision in the party as a whole. It was a decision that had to be made from above. We call this democratic centralism Leonard did where some or communist did, but the Democratic is pretty hard to find. Uh, and the idea, kind of amazing idea was that it's a hierarchical military style conception of wisdom, namely that the, the most wisdom is at the very top, namely Stalin. And then each party in each country, top leaders were the most wise. Therefore, uh, they could, you could have a party discussion, but the leader had the power to summarize the discussion and what conclusion could be drawn from it. That's part of what Democratic centralism represented. So, and then once adopted, the party membership had to fall in line. A party line is what people should espouse no matter what their private feelings might have been, no matter what their conviction, that maybe there's an error being made, those, uh, dissents or alternative views were silenced.
Speaker 1 00:28:56 So it, it really is a military organization, and it's claimed to be a vanguard. This is really part of the, what's horrible about it. This is where the working class leadership rests. And when you think about it, the idea that the most, that a hierarchy of wisdom might exist, well, the people at the top, the people who ran the communist Party had the least contact with social reality of anyone in the party. They were the least removed, you know, the most removed from ordinary life, from working class circumstances. Whereas the people at the base who were in the communities and unions on the ground, they had the wisdom of their own experience, but they were not by the parties so-called scientific structure. Uh, they were not able to have the commanding voice at all. They had to defer. And there's another mechanism, I speaking as a social psychologist. If you came, if you had doubts about any of this, and you had any, let's say you were a school teacher, therefore having a white collar, relatively privileged middle class position, you were in encouraged to feel that the reason for your doubts was your own privileged class position. You didn't understand. You couldn't because you were, had that relative privilege. So it's a way for the disciplinary me mechanisms of the party to be turned inward. I am
Speaker 0 00:30:41 What you're describing is a cult.
Speaker 1 00:30:44 It is a cult. But, but, but, well, I have to say, but because the experience was that the people who really were out in the field didn't follow these rules in their own work,
Speaker 0 00:30:58 Except when they did. And sometimes when they didn't, they were purged. So, I'm sorry, I've been listening to the, to the rosy picture of I'm
Speaker 1 00:31:07 American,
Speaker 0 00:31:07 I'm, you were being way overly rosy. And, and the fact is that while we're talking about so and so, you know, not being at the center of the left or alienated because they're a member of the Communist Party, like what is communism doing during that period? Like, what is it to be a communist who dissents, what is it to be a citizen in a country run by a communist government? And that's what anti, anti-communism obscures. Like, you know, we say like, yeah, that's bad. It's okay. But someone who defends it denies it, or justifies it, is a legitimate partner and should be part of this, our political space. And we should defend them, not just their civil liberties, which we should always, we should defend the civil liberties of all kinds of people, of course, but not just defend their civil liberties, like defend the legitimacy of their, like that it's okay for them to be communist, and we should welcome them in spaces, et cetera.
Speaker 0 00:32:12 And like what happened to sds after removing those restrictions and moving to this position within five years, it was overrun and destroyed by communists. What happened to Cru Chev after he made this speech and said, Hey, like, Stalin killed millions of people. We turned, uh, our state into a, a personality cult. There's that word again. Like, he be all of these very important, you know, uh, uh, revelations as they were called, nevermind, that these were not secrets. Like people knew this, but the communist movement around the world did everything they could to suppress the knowledge of what Stalin was doing, um, in plain sight. Like, like totally gaslighting everyone else in the left and about to, to hide atrocities of a global and historic scale, mind blowing scale. And so Crue comes out and says, Hey, this was bad. Let's do something else. Within a few years he's purged and replaced.
Speaker 0 00:33:20 And so it, I leninism to me, I think you're totally right to like, let's call, you know, let's, let's name it, it is, it's the, it's leadism, which is the foundation of what came to be known as communism, as distinct from socialism as a political movement. Um, and it is in its fundamental outlook, it is anti-democratic. It's vanguards, as you say, it believes that it ha that the party gets a revealed truth. That is the true working class politics, regardless of whether that's shared by the actually existing working class, which has created this vocabulary of you can attack people for, not have, for having bourgeois politics versus working class politics. But that again, has nothing to do with actual bourgeois or working class people. These are all bourgeois people having this argument after all, usually, right? It's about this revealed truth that came to us now in scripture by a bunch of dead men and, and Leninism.
Speaker 0 00:34:25 Yeah, it metastasized it, it changed. There was the Sin Soviet split. So there was a moist version of Leninism, um, that became popular, uh, particularly in parts of the new left in the United States. But man, it's like, it's like you look back and you see that every time an organization adopts Leninism as an outlook, it becomes dysfunctional, undemocratic, uh, like it takes positions to justify some kind of horrific violations of human rights. Um, and so in my mind, in, in terms of theory and practice, Lennon took Marxism and socialism. And even though he was saying he was making it scientific, he actually turned it into a religion. Yeah. He actually made it a religion, and Yes. Yeah. And then within this religion, you know, anybody is, anybody who studies religions knows, like the line between a religion, a destructive religion, and a cult, uh, is are, are gradations.
Speaker 0 00:35:28 And so I I, my big thesis about this, his, you know, is at the end of the day, Marxism Leninism is a cultic space in which there have been a ton of cults. And the lucky people are stuck in a cult where they just sell newspapers for a while, or they end up having a bad line about the Soviet Union or this or that. The unlucky people end up where one of those cults takes over their government, and then they're in prison, and then in gulags or murdered. And, and, and the effects of this are so poisonous. Look at the terrible takes on the war, the invasion of Ukraine that you see out there. The what about anytime you try to criticize any other country in the world, wow, us and imperialism and blah, blah, all of that. The legacy is in thelens cults bullshit in the American left.
Speaker 0 00:36:23 And when I look back at myself growing up, I very much grew up in a space where this attitude of you have, you can't be anti-communist because that's like helping the right wing in some way. And we have to obscure the lines between being a socialist and a communist, and we're all kind of in the same space. I, I, that was like taken for granted. And I think is, um, it just led to terrible politics and, and it hasn't been worth it at all. Um, fast forwarding all the way to today, it's not worth it to tolerate a cult in our midst.
Speaker 2 00:36:59 Can we get back to that? But I wanted to ask, cause of what I'm hearing, Dick, from, from the days of sds, when this, um, clause went away and it was tended to be more welcoming, and let's all work together, we're all lefties, we can figure this out. Was that sort of the spirit of it? Because I feel like that's what's happening today. And we're not, we're not trying to like, exclude anyone. You know, when I was in dsa, we weren't, we weren't like checking what people's beliefs were at the door. And boy, like, you go to the convention and you see a lot of, um, a lot of ideas on display about what's right to do and what's strategic, but nobody's, I mean, I, I'm really here eager to hear more, um, because it sounds like a really, um, important strategic distinction here. But it also sounds, I don't know, like we need to, it sounds it's not just sectarianism that you, you're not, you're not promoting like, let's be sectarian for the, for the hell of it. Cause I'm Right, you're saying there's, there's something really important here about, about who's at the table.
Speaker 1 00:38:07 Well, yeah, no, right. And, and we were naive, I'm, I'll speak myself very much naive. In the first part of the, in the first years of sts, we assumed that the power of our democratic vision, the coherence and value of it would be, uh, understood by, uh, anyone who joined. And we didn't expect, we, we didn't have any media coverage for the first couple of years of our existence. And then, you know, small amounts of coverage appear. And then suddenly we have this mass march in Washington, the first big demonstration against the Vietnam War and all the big weekly magazines, life and look, and Saturday evening posts had huge spreads about this SDS with huge, beautiful pictures of the mass march and so forth. No one had ever heard of this before. And suddenly everyone in America's heard about it. This is before the, this is the magazines were the most important.
Speaker 1 00:39:22 They before, you know, mass television coverage, uh, in spreading that kind of news. So suddenly SDS is getting hundreds and hundreds of applications, and we wanna start a chapter. And these just the first time it took three years before, uh, we were seeing people wanting to join sds, who none of us had ever met. In fact, somebody wrote, um, that the people who were young who came into SDS after that period, probably many of them had never met a sane SDS leader. Or they, they met, they met, uh, all kinds of people who, who had their own idea of what SDS was. So the naive part was we had no structure or mechanism for schooling. Anyone who joined SDS in what this was all about, life Magazine told them what it was about. Um, and then so what happened? So, wait, so what Dr. Draka alluded to is that at some point, a malice party called the Progressive Labor Party, which had been a split off from the old cp, uh, but was very malice.
Speaker 1 00:40:36 They came to the idea that they should join sds, PL members should enjoy, join sds, and they had their own agenda within SDS that they fully and coherently intended to advance with whatever means were necessary at that point. And they didn't need many means because we were so unprepared for that kind of invasion that there was no real, they, they could take over cha. I mean, after all, it's, take a chapter at Harvard, at that time, there were like 400 members of SDS at Harvard, let's say. Huge. But it had no real structure. And so if a group of PL oriented people wanna take over the chapter, it wasn't hard. And that then happened in a lot of schools. Uh, and they were able to, um, and the, and the old leadership of sds, and I'm one of them backed off, we said, fuck this, I don't wanna be, uh, in this organization anymore.
Speaker 1 00:41:45 I don't want these kind of fights. I'm not a student anymore. Anyway, um, and begin to give, give up on this. But, but not what we had never done. And this is maybe the big lesson, one takeaway from this is figure out how to make very clear what our principles were to make very clear that we wanted members who understood those principles, that if you want it to be a member of sds, uh, you ought to do the following self schooling things, or you, there ought to be a process in a chapter to enable new members to understand, especially when this threat of invasion was, was happening. So the then leaders of sds who are not progressive labor, how are they gonna fight the invasion by declaring themselves more communists than the progressive labor by, um, kind of insane declarations of revolutionary fervor? It wasn't, it wasn't exactly le it was, that's what I, when I said late SDS members never met sane SDS leaders because, you know, someone like Bernadine Dorn could get up at a national meeting of SDS and say, you know, something favorable of the Manson murders, you know, and, um, this was considered endorsement of armed struggle.
Speaker 1 00:43:13 And, and, you know, it was truly an insane period. But my understanding of the behavior of people, uh, was triggered by the pl invasion, and the feeling was the only way to fight them was to prove we are the true revolutionaries rather than the, these pl people.
Speaker 2 00:43:34 So it became like an arms race, sort of, of like, who's the
Speaker 1 00:43:38 Race of craziness?
Speaker 2 00:43:39 It's the most revolutionary. And, and then a literal
Speaker 1 00:43:42 One. Yeah. Well, there were, yeah. And, um, yes, and then weatherman did decide they were going underground in arms struggle. And you attribute, I don't know if I would attribute all of that at all to progressive labor. That's not how someone like Bernadine Dorn explains. She says, we were crazy. So what made them crazy? She says, maybe self servingly a bit. Well, it was the time that was absolutely crazy. So we responded, um, with this craziness, uh, my, I, where I'll go with her on that is we're talking about very young people who, who were desperately morally desperate, who had been in nonviolent, uh, struggles, you know, as pacifists who had seen poverty not only in, in this country, but worked with poor people in other, in Latin America who had, who were feeling this war was escalating. Uh, and this country might be turning, uh, you know, toward, you know, a kind of fascism.
Speaker 1 00:44:47 And so their desperation, this, this is an account you could make, uh, especially if you were in the leadership. So if you were in the SDS office in Chicago, and you experienced, uh, uh, occasions when military force was out there in the streets surrounding the headquarters, or when people were being indicted, you know, for various things, uh, or, or, and there was, you know, a lot of FBI influence internally that might have exacerbated. So how to explain all that insanity, this whole books about this. But the point for our conversation here is one of the triggers was this, I call it malice, Leninist penetration and invasion with the purpose not of advancing sds, but of advancing other than sds in this kind of, uh, uh, parasitic takeover. That's how they do. I had some old friends in, in PL who I said, why the hell are you doing this?
Speaker 1 00:45:57 Why aren't you competing on the same ground? Let pl debate, you know, out in the open, uh, rather than taking over, uh, an organization that doesn't agree with your principle. But they didn't have an answer to that. But it nevertheless, that didn't stop them from, or some of them from doing this. Um, so I'm, I'm rehearsing this feeling some of the bitter emotions of that time, uh, while I'm telling you about it. So, uh, you know, you're absolutely right to, I mean, this, if this kind of penetration is happening in some scale, uh, in some place like esa, I think, you know, uh, it does make sense. But if you make a rule that says you can't join this, if you have this label that simply, uh, encourages, uh, or can encourage, um, deceitful uh, behavior. Yeah, well, so let's talk about that.
Speaker 0 00:46:53 Sure. But I don't, but I don't think it comes down just to that like, I think you can write a decent enough paragraph to keep communists out of an organization. I like, you know, be repetitive, you know, like, uh, explain, explain Democratic centralism ban that, uh, explain Marxism Leadism ban that, um, talk about in a positive sense about commitments to democracy, commitments to multi-party systems. It's not that hard. The, the, but the, the base is to get to pair's question, right? Of like what, um, sort of what is the, what, what are the, the stakes in these interesing battles in the past? Like, why should anybody care about them? Well, it's, it's precisely so that we don't make the same mistakes over and over again. And it's painful as hell to watch young people discover this a hundred year old political tradition and repeat mistakes that were identified and like problems that were identified a hundred years ago when we have people of say, Dick's generation in the left, that like churned through Marxism Leninism in some ways, right? Like when, and I watched it destroy movements, watched it do all these horrible things, abandon it, move on from it, et cetera. You know, when, when Dick is talking about how there are good people doing good work out in the community who happen to also be communists. That's true. It's also true. I would say that it's not their communism or their Marxism leninism that's, that's actually getting them to do the good work. Exactly. A
Speaker 1 00:48:38 Separate Exactly. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:48:40 But, so yes, there should always be room for those people as individuals to be like welcomed to stay in the movement and so forth. Like, people make mistakes. And the history of communism is one where it's like every few years there's some world historical event that shakes a bunch of communisms, and they, and they leave. And like, the more the Democratic left should always be welcoming of them. But there's a difference between saying like, we're not gonna hold it against you If you were a communist for a while and saying like, be a communist on our board. Is it really so crazy to say no, you can't be on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union and defend a country that will lock you away for saying anything like, you know, off script or verboten at any point. It's
Speaker 1 00:49:32 Just like, well, what if, what if there was a, uh, so suppose you had an ardent, uh, pro-Israel Zionist, who in many ways, some of the Zionist formulations and arguments resemble what I remember communists doing with respect to Soviet Union, namely denial of stuff, inventing, uh, scenarios of destruction, uh, and Israel being, you know, in danger, uh, but completely not willing to face the realities, uh, on the ground in that place. And, you know, the pro-Israel organizations go further. They, they will, part of the Zionist creed for them is to denounce people who support the Palestinian, uh, cause for example, who, who support bds, uh, boycott of Israel. And, um, but if, if, if there was a Zionist on my board of whatever it was, uh, uh, I wouldn't say that's a criti. We need to question that person's, um, credibility because they blind about Israel, you know, and Pete Seger, I mention him because he's talked about this, how ashamed he was of the fact that the, he wrote songs that were in line with the party line during the Nazi Soviet pack. Yeah. So, and he's, uh, you know, but my point about him is he was more than and above that he was able to independently, he wasn't a tool of a conspiracy. He was a thinking person. And many communists were who were
Speaker 0 00:51:26 Able to, he was a member of a
Speaker 1 00:51:28 Cult. Well, it's not just
Speaker 0 00:51:29 Good people. Like lots of good people join cults, and when they're in the cult, when they're in the cult, you don't, you don't indulge the membership
Speaker 1 00:51:36 Of the cult. He didn't think of it as a cult himself while he was,
Speaker 0 00:51:39 No one does, no one ever joins a cult ever,
Speaker 1 00:51:42 Because he wasn't acting. Look, this is the distinction I'm trying to make, DAC. So there's several points where we're scrambling here, I think, where we totally, uh, agree that measures should be taken, uh, to, um, to, uh, insulate or protect organizations, democratic organizations from anti-democratic invasions that are, that are quite possible to happen, and that seem to be happening. That's one point. Second, we're in agreement that young people need to understand how much a mistake the Vanguard Leninist Marxist Leninist view, which, which, which got credibility only because the BOLs won in, in the BOL revolution, not because anything that followed from that is a model for anybody. Uh, and, um, uh, we have, we, you know, we older people live through the history or who have, have understand it. We have every reason to try to make it very clear what's wrong with communism, why do we condemn it?
Speaker 1 00:52:56 Uh, why, why we wanna build a, that's we're in agreement with. So, but I'm trying to carve out a somewhat nuanced stance here, which is to recognize that people who, and you said this about yourself in a way, uh, you go through an experience where you come to believe strongly something, and, and the younger you are, the more likely you are to polarize immediately with people who, who disagree. And to say, you've got the right idea. Now you people don't understand. The rest of you are sellouts, you don't understand this. Um, i, I don't respect you for what you're saying. Those cult-like behaviors themselves don't necessarily characterize the people individually who are caught up in those structures, especially true of a mass, more or less mass party, like the Communist Party. My parents, I think my father had cultish feelings. My mother didn't ever seem to, if you want my own personal view of this, because my father never counted against, he didn't want to hear criticism of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1 00:54:14 And it really was, I I call it religious rather than cultish. It was like, I don't, I don't want to hear those things. It's not, not what I want to hear. And that didn't, if you knew my father in the, in the, in his people in this town knew him very well. He was a senior citizen activist. He was, uh, you know, very involved in civic life in this community. The fact that he had these religious, bizarre beliefs didn't in any way affect what he did, um, day to day in, in the world. And it, it's, you know, so I'm, I'm kind of calling for,
Speaker 0 00:54:54 So I think, so I would add a lesson for young people today is also to not to, to not hesitate to, to declare that you are against communism and, and if you're creating an ideological space, if what, so here's the thing is that your generation of the new left wasn't trying to argue for socialism. You weren't, you were like, we're not gonna use that term at all. We're gonna provide economic democracy and this, and participation in that. So, but if you are gonna go out and say, we should be for socialism, we should be socialists, you have to explain that you don't mean
Speaker 1 00:55:35 Absolutely. Like
Speaker 0 00:55:36 Gulag, right? Okay. So if you're gonna be a democratic socialist organization, it's not enough to have like vague bylaws about respecting democracy. You should say what you are against. And that means being against communism. The fact that it chokes in people's throat so much to say I'm anti-communist, I think is because of a lot of the things that you're, you've been saying to, um, just make sure that we never too badly judge people who were communists because they were heroes. And, and I, and I think that residue of, of anti anti-communism is still around in a, in a, in a sense. Like we should be unafraid to say, Hey, it's great that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn supported workers' rights and she put her life on the line to get people the right to organize. And she hated capitalism. And she stood up for women's access to, uh, a reproductive, you know, health and all of that.
Speaker 0 00:56:36 That's all great. But she also defended a fucking dictatorship that was murdering people, lied about it, was ahi for it, and then left the United States to die in it. And that was bad. That was like not good. Yeah. And we shouldn't repeat that. Yeah. Okay. But, but we're not, but Dick, when we, if the, what's frustrating me is that if we can't use the term anti-communist, if we can't say that. In fact, the people that were afraid of letting the Communist party in the United States be hegemonic in the left, the people fighting that were actually, actually at a point, they weren't all just McCarthy and blah, blah, blah. Like we've, we have to rescue that full throated, leftist, anti-communism that like also just floated away in the 1960s.
Speaker 1 00:57:30 I, all I'm trying to do here is, is get a somewhat more nuanced, subtle su some of the subtleties that really matter. Why take, take my Carrington? I think if he were here, he'd say, yes, I was too imbued with anti-communism as a central obsession, and I did damage because of it. Uh, and somehow, I mean, that's, that's the,
Speaker 0 00:58:03 But
Speaker 1 00:58:03 Yeah. And, and that's
Speaker 0 00:58:05 What, but you're not ready to say, Hey, you're not ready to say, Hey, maybe we were a little soft on Marxism. And it literally exploded and wrecked our organization.
Speaker 1 00:58:14 I thought I was made, laid it out very much that we made a big mistake and not figuring out how to, um, in, you know, how to project what a membership in SDS would mean, uh, and, and why and how. I mean, the, in the SDS that was taken over by pl, we weren't, I wasn't there. I I had left it. Uh, the people who were arguing with the pl, as I said, took the absurd view that they should be more revolutionary than the, uh, than the malice. Uh, and many of those people are much saner now than they were then. So I guess, I guess part of what I'm feeling is the human story goes beyond episodes of craziness that I have experienced in various people. So the lay I I'm against, I'm a resistant to labeling. And if anti communism takes the form of guilt by association, like anyone who, I mean, I would say if you wanna have a principle of anti-communism in, in a place like dsa, it should include the following statement Marks thought communism meant, and then spell out what Marks thought.
Speaker 1 00:59:34 The communism that came into practice, real communism, practically existing communism, was the opposite of what Marx meant. So if you want to be a Marks communist, Carl Mark's Communist recognize that as a utopian vision that has nothing to do with what people who claim to be communists are. And I sometimes, when I taught this, I'd say, think of this in terms of Christianity too. What's the resemblance between Jesus and the church? Uh, and recognize that in history, many powerful organizations gain power and lose whatever moral framework they claim to be representing. Don't fall for that. Uh, is, is one of the lessons. Um, and I think those are persuasive ways of looking at it. I, uh, I don't know enough about the actual circumstances in DSA and whether these people are cultish or whether there, you know, we don't, how much do we understand about cults and how they form and what how they operate is another? Well, I've,
Speaker 0 01:00:49 I've been doing quite a bit of research about it actually. And I, and I should say on the, on the record that this, like thinking about Marxism Leninism as a cultish cultic space is not my original idea. I, I got it from Dennis Tourist and Tim Wolfer who wrote, uh, on the Edge, uh, which is a, a collection of, of studies of political cults of both the right and left. And they're the ones who really encapsulated that. And I discovered that this is very, and this is why I'm agitated about this and think it's relevant because I discovered this book, even though it's, it's, I think from the nineties and very, it's a very, like fla and book. I'm surprised I never came across it. But I was listening to, uh, an interview with, uh, a guy named, uh, am Gitz, who wrote, uh, uh, a very interesting book about, uh, Adrian Posadas.
Speaker 0 01:01:40 And he cult, his Trotskyist cult, which, you know, made, he, in some of his ramblings made some references to aliens and space travel and so forth. And so he got a kind of reputation as like the crazy alien trots, ski uhhuh <affirmative>. Now, his ideas have been not in any kind of detail reel, but, but the sort of memes of his ideas have resurfaced in the left, um, as a kind of caricature in a way and so forth. And so this guy wrote a book about like, who really was this guy? Turns out it, I mean, just like a TROs cult leader, very abusive of folks, and a, a hypocrite and a dirt bag. Um, and, and then he was wrestling with, well, is there something fundamental about like revolutionary Marxism? And, and, and, and Leninism that like leads itself to Cultiness? He, he responds to tourist and Wilford saying he, he doesn't think so, um, because he'd like to believe that you actually could do it, right?
Speaker 0 01:02:47 Like you could have a revolutionary movement that's Leninist and revolutionary, but isn't cultish. And I just like, listen to this and put my head in my hands of just like, this is awful that we would have to re reproduce this, uh, and stay on this treadmill. Um, because yeah, I think it, it, it, it's a, it's a set of ideas about how politics works, about the working class, about power, about the role of the party, about the role of, of all of it that was wrong a hundred years ago when it was proposed. And there's a hundred years of socialism and socialist development and mistakes and triumphs and and so forth that have nothing to do with it. And that's worthy of study and research and investment in, but we can't just for the sake of like feeling more pluralist or open or whatever, just be like, we're gonna tolerate this like cultish undemocratic garbage to like also take up air time. We just, let's just bury it and move on.
Speaker 1 01:03:46 Well, how do you, that's the question. Is it, how do you bury it?
Speaker 0 01:03:50 I mean, you start by being able to say like, I'm against Leninism and communism. That's not my politics. I mean, what's amazing is how vicious and sectarian and like non pluralist leftist will be about liberals, you know, it's like lib, you know, they'll, they're happy to tell you what's wrong. Fuck liberals, I'm not a liberal. I hate liberals. And I would hope that there's as much, if not more of liberalism influencing us than communism per se. I mean, like what? So if we're, if we're comfortable being, like we as the left are something different than liberalism per se, or at least it's, it's usual incarnations, like why the hell would we be afraid to say like, we're not communists and we're actually against that?
Speaker 1 01:04:39 Well, I don't, I mean, most of us are not afraid to say that, are we?
Speaker 0 01:04:44 Oh, people really are. And if you say you're an anticon, like people will be like, well, I'm not an anti-communist. I mean, I'm not a con. No, it really, this is a, i I, yeah. I wouldn't be this animated if it was <laugh> if I didn't see that this is like an actual
Speaker 1 01:04:58 I know, I understand. But I, I'm trying to,
Speaker 0 01:05:00 Or maybe I would, I mean, that's not necessarily true though, <laugh>. I hope so.
Speaker 1 01:05:03 You did. I guess, what about anti-communism as a word? I, I think I've been, maybe haven't made it completely clear that I don't like it because the way it has been used in my direct experience and I, you know, my parents lost their jobs because of the, it's this, this, uh, yeah, this, that's the problem with the term. It, it seems like a term, a weapon against the left, not just against communism, anti communism. If you, if you have a theory of communism that includes a kind of satanic force. And though people who don't appear to be, um, communists are secretly and really communist and you can tell by, uh, the fact that they wear their hair a certain way. Um, sure. And but that's what the fifties era anti-communism was like. It's a stat, if you go back and read what was said in the name of anti-communism in the mainstream of the fifties, you might be a, maybe you'll see where I'm coming from in terms of my resistance to the term McCarthy Nixon, they made their lives on the basis of being anti-communist, and it was all alive. Most, they weren't opposed to what we're saying about communism. They were post, they, they were using it as a rhetorical device to advance. Of course, huh.
Speaker 0 01:06:43 Yeah, of course. I know. But
Speaker 1 01:06:44 That's,
Speaker 0 01:06:45 Or anti-communist too. But, so it's anti-communism can't be the whole of your politics. And obviously, I mean, we could do a whole nother episode about the parts of the anti-communist left that went completely off the rails became rightists or supported the Right, yeah. Simply in coalition against communism. That's nuts too. I I, I'm not defending that, but, and we should talk about it and own it as a set of problems, uh, for sure, I guess. But I, I just see, feel like it's inescapable to also describe democratic socialism as fundamentally, you know, by extension anti-communist, especially since, like, as we say we're seeing with dsa, is that democratic socialism and the word democracy is fungible enough, you know, like the Democratic Republic of Korean and shit, that people who are fucking our can enter that organization and be like, well, I'm a democratic socialist too, or at least enough to be here. So it would've, I think Harrington hoped that using phrases like the Democratic left and democratic socialism, it signaled that enough. And I think it did for a long time, but since the big sectarian groups have died and people have sort of like exodus around into DSA after Bernie at all of that stuff, we can't, it's not enough.
Speaker 1 01:08:06 Right. Okay.
Speaker 0 01:08:08 But I, I still love you and I still think that the left, I still think the new left critique of the old left was like 80%. Right. This was just a thing. I think you got wrong. 80%, I would say 97 <laugh> maybe. I dunno. It's hard to quantify.
Speaker 2 01:08:23 So, so to wind down and bring it back to Star Trek Will at the beginning Yeah. Um, say, say, you know, you somehow got on the, uh, you got called up your, your speaker, you can speak to the convention, you know, star Trek Will is out there, you know, the communists are out there. Um, the, um, uh, just a lot of folks, a lot of, including a lot of young people who've taken on a lot of different labels, unburdened by the fact that there's no Soviet Union right now. Um, a lot of, well-meaning people who just want to fucking finally do something about capitalism. Um, I mean, what, what's the elevator pitch here? Say? Like, what do you say to all those people?
Speaker 0 01:09:08 Well, I always liked Harrington defining socialism as the extension of democracy into all aspects of social life. So putting democracy in the definition of socialism, but, uh, you know, and keeping it there. Um, so, you know, just really, really reinforcing that socialism without democracy is not what we're, it's not interesting. It's not, we don't give it's not what we're about. Um, and likewise, like, you know, democracy, political rights alone without economic democracy, like, we see what happens, right? It undermines itself. It's, it's contradictory. All of those, all of those things. So really making sure that those, the concepts of democracy and the kind and socialism as we see it are intertwined. And then, I don't know, man, try to use, actually use Star Trek, Laura to pull him back. Like nobody. I mean, the Federation isn't the Soviet Union. I mean, it's like fifties, sixties, Tehran social democracy, like world un lovey-dovey. It's not, yeah, he's just, he's mis analyzing the, the, the universe. I think.
Speaker 3 01:10:27 I think as I please. And this gives me pleasure. My conscience decrease the right I must treasurer My thoughts will not cater to decor. Dictator, no man. Canine Dega. Donkin in fry. No man Candy. I dekin in Fry.
