Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Hi, folks. This is Dick Flax, joined as usual with Diraka at Larimer hall here on talking strategy, making history. And we are particularly happy and grateful for our guest today, who is Morris Isserman, one of the leading historians in this country of the american left, whose several books on the Communist Party now culminated, you might say, with a new book just out called Red's, subtitled Tragedy of American Communism. Welcome, Maurice, to Morris. Morris.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: MoRris thank you for having me, Dick.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: And Daraka, and we both read your book. I want to assure you of that and read it first and really urged me to make sure that I read it as soon as possible. So I've done that, and we've got a lot of things to talk about the book. But you have also been active, along with other people of, say, our generation, the older generation of left wing activists.
You've been speaking out in concern about direction of the DSA and related kinds of things. So that's been something we've been touching on periodically during our several episodes in the last few months. And so we definitely want to get some time to talk to about that. And in a way feeling that this book might have been part of your intention. And I'll ask you if this is the case as a kind of cautionary tale for the present or rising generations of activists on the left. Does that make sense?
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. And in fact, the book was suggested to me by an editor at Basic Books, where I published one of my earlier books on the history of the lift. If I had a hammer, which came out in the 1980s, I had written three books focused entirely or in part on the history of american communism, starting with which side were you on the American Communist Party during the Second World War, which came out in 1982. If I had a hammer, the death of the old left and the birth of the new Left came out in 1986 or seven. And my joint book about Dorothy Healey's life, variously called Dorothy Healy remembers and California reads, came out in 1990. And I also wrote some other books on the left, a biography of Michael Harrington, a history of the 1960s, which was not just about the left but certainly talked a lot about SDS.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: And I might add, which I war movement. And I might add, and I meant to say this earlier, that you've written three books, it seems, on mountaineering, which.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: I got around to about 2000, and I was thinking about a new book to do. And I at that point thought if I havent said it yet about the history of the left, im not going to say it and let me leave that for somebody younger. And so I turned to another great passion of mine, the history of mountaineering, starting with a book about himalayan fallen giants, then a book about american continental divide, and most recently a history of the US Armys 10th Mountain Division in the Second World War called Winter Armies. I wasn't writing about the left. I was keeping up with the history of it, reading what other people had to say. When I was approached by this editor from Basic, who said, look, this was probably about 2016 or so. And he said, look, there's this tremendous enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, who was not a communist and not even a member of DSA, but who was a democratic socialist. And it seems like young people in particular are his greatest fans and are getting interested in the history of the left. And there was another book that came out in the 1980s, about the time that my books came out by Vivian Gornick called the romance of american communism, and that was reprinted with a new introduction by Vivian. The editor said, how about trying a decades long narrative history of the Communist Party, which is not something I'd written before. I'd looked at World War two. I'd looked at the destalinization crisis in the mid 1950s. I'd look at Dorothy Healy's life, and particularly her leadership in Los Angeles county. But there were great swathes of this history, the 1920s, the 1960s, and thereafter, that I hadn't addressed before. And the last long narrative history by John Haynes came out in the 1990s, the early 1990s. So it'd been quite a while since anyone had taken a kind of big picture look at the overall history of the Communist Party. And so that's what I set out to do and write a history of the party that began in 1919 with the founding of the Communist Party of the United States of America, and look backwards to the debzian era and earlier radicalism, and then carrying the story forward all the way to 1991, which was the year that the Soviet Union collapsed, and also the year that a significant number of the existing membership of the Communist Party, about a third, all told of what was by then a fairly small organization, but left over differences about orthodoxy, about independence and so forth. And that seemed like a good concluding point. And so the result is reds, the tragedy of american communism, which was just published in June by basic Books. And in the back of my mind, in writing it was, I was writing it for a new generation not steeped in and not having any experience in these movements. I would be talking about, especially the labor movement, the foundation of the industrial unions in 1930s. They had no direct memory of McCarthyism and so on and so forth. So I wanted to write a book that. That would be accessible to readers, not just those on the left, but maybe in particular those on the left who wanted to know something about their antecedents. And in the back of my mind I was thinking, I've been a member of DSA since its founding in 19, 82, 40 odd years, and done a lot of stuff with young DSAers and speaking at youth conferences and so forth.
Maybe they'd be interested in reading it and have a study group or something. And wouldn't that be nice? So one of the ironies is that coincidental with the appearance of the publication of Reds? DSA had gone in and for several years had been heading in a direction that I no longer felt was either wise or that I could continue to support. So we parted ways just at the moment that the book came out.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: So let's talk about that later, but let's get a little bit into the substance of the book. And one way to capitalize it in my mind is what is the tragedy? That one way to look at the tragedy is the fact that in the 1930s the Communist Party and many of its members played a very important role in the building of a new stage of american labor movement which culminated in the formation of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organization, the creation of many powerful unions.
Communists were in the leadership of a number of important unions coming out of that period, and at the same time was a cultural development that swept much of american culture that was called by the party people the Popular Front. Michael Denning has written a book some years ago called the Cultural Front on that period in which he really celebrates that period as an enormous, fascinating, promising time in which the working class as such and the real dynamics of american history and life were finally being openly discussed, talked about, criticized, portrayed in art and so on. And communists were important part of that whole development. And then everything collapses because, and you trace it from the Soviethe Stalin's pact with Hitler, non aggression pact in 1939, the party, the way I would look at it, abandoned or walked away from its role as an anti fascist builder of a common front to a very peculiar moment in which they were equating Hitler and Roosevelt in a way, publicly. And then another switch when the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany. Back to support, back to the more of the popular front idea. But by then the party had lost a great deal of credibility and communists individually had lost a great deal of credibility. That's the. There's a lot more to the story. But the basic point is that I'm trying to bring out is that the tragedy was. Here's a movement that attracted a lot of very creative, effective organizers, and then it all went smash because of the party line and the way it was torturously formulated and reformulated totally in subservience to what they thought the soviet line or soviet policy was. Is that a good basic capsulization of the heart of the tragedy or exemplifies it?
[00:10:39] Speaker B: That exemplifies it. But the tragedy was ongoing. The tragedy preceded that. If you look at the heart of classical tragedy and shakespearean tragedy occurs when the outcome is not what the protagonist intended, is at odds with, or sometimes even the antithesis of what the protagonist intended. And it's not just chance, it's not just misfortune, it's not random. It's almost always a result of some fatal flaw within the chief actor, the protagonist in the play or a movie or a novel or whatever. And I think similarly, the tragedy was built into american communism from its earliest days, and it just repeated itself over and over again.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Specifically, what was built in. That was the fatal flaw. How would you define that?
[00:11:39] Speaker B: I'd call it the leninist temptation, the belief that somehow individuals can collectively shape history, if only they're disciplined enough, if only they can follow orders, if only they study the science of revolution as laid down by the founders of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, but also Leon Trotsky for a while, until he became a renegade in the eyes of orthodox communists and others, and Stalin, who led the Soviet Union for the longest period, for the quarter of a century.
That was there at the beginning. Let me step back. In the preface to the book, I talk about five principal contradictions. I see that the history of the communist party requiring us to apply F. Scott Fitzgerald's measure of intelligence, which is the idea, the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time and continue to function. And readers of my book are going to have to do that. I ask them to do that over and over again. I talk about these contradictions, and the one that got picked up by every reviewer of the book thus far is I say that the communist party attracted egalitarian idealists, and it bred authoritarian zealots. And what that means, what it doesn't mean, not everybody who joined the party was an egalitarian idealist, and not everybody who joined the party turned into an authoritarian zealot. But there was a conflict there, a contradiction between the very good, admirable, idealistic, small d democratic ideas that brought people into the communist movement and the vehicle into which they entered, in which those ideals were subverted, were turned to other ends. And one of the results was that the Communist Party, throughout its history, was a revolving door. There may have been a half a million american communists between 1919 and 1991, but there was never more than 75,000 or so adult communists and some more in the young Communist League or other youth affiliates at one time. And that's because so many people joined and decided after a week, a month, a year that this wasn't for them, that this wasn't fulfilling their ideals. And they left. And they didn't leave noisily when some crunched at moment that, oh, some terrible thing has happened, and I can no longer be a communist. But they grew disaffected and they just quietly departed.
[00:14:32] Speaker A: One of the key leninist principles of organization, I guess he called democratic centralism. And to me, that's maybe one way of capsulizing the fatal flaw.
How is that defined in the party? What does that mean, that phrase?
[00:14:54] Speaker B: Well, we have to look back at the challenges that Lenin's Bolsheviks, which russian word for majority, and it comes out of a split in the socialist movement in Russia before the revolution, where Lenin's faction won a particular vote.
You could not simply operate in the open in Tsarist Russia. You'd be arrested, and if you weren't killed, sent off to Siberia in exile.
It was not a parliamentary democracy. You couldn't emulate the German Social democratic party in those pre war years where the german socialists won a third of the delegates to the Reichstag, to the german parliament.
You couldn't publish your newspaper openly, you couldn't organize labor unions openly. And so you were forced, all the factions were forced into an underground existence. The difference with the Bolsheviks from their chief rivals within the socialist movement, the Mensheviks, which meant minority, is that the Mensheviks didn't like that. They wanted to function like a western european social democratic party, whereas the Bolsheviks under Lenin decided that this was the way to go. And not just in Tsarist Russia, but once they came to power, they would continue to function as the sole party allowed to function, and they would try and build a worldwide movement based on the so called lessons of the russian revolution of 1917, that these were universally applicable and that there was no other road to socialism than the one that had been taken by the Bolsheviks under Lenin in 1917.
It was also, there was a strong determinist strain in pre World War one socialism worldwide. The german social democrats kept gaining strength and they thought that this was an irreversible trend. You find that even in the United States, where socialism was a fairly vibrant movement, but much smaller. Under Eugene Debs, his vote increased dramatically as presidential candidate between 1900 when he first ran, and 1912 when he got a million votes, which was 6% of the total. And in some states, not states you would expect, but Oklahoma, he moved into double digits. And so it seemed like there was going to be this gradual, automatic, regular progress towards socialism. And then one day you'd have the majority and you raise the red flag and socialism would have arrived first. World War totally destroyed that determinist strain in the socialist movement, didn't totally destroy it, but for many people that came away disillusioned, that's just not going to happen. And here's Lenin leading a revolution in a country where you'd least expect it. It's not a highly developed capitalist economy or industrial nation. It's largely an agricultural peasant nation.
But through, it seemed, sheer willpower, a small group.
There were 24,000 bolsheviks at the start of 1917. And 1917 they're in power over an empire that represented 150 million people and a 6th of the world's surface. And so if only you have the will to power and you study the science of what came to be called Marxism Leninism and you have this organizational structure that the Bolsheviks pioneered, the democratic Socialist Communist Party of Great Britain, of Germany, of France, of Indochina, of China, and of the United States, then you're given this magical power to change history. This is a voluntarist political scientist would call it a voluntarist approach to social change. Yeah, things look bad, we're a tiny minority, but as long as we stay true to our beliefs and our leaders and our organization, then we can overturn these seemingly impossible odds, just as Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in 1917. That's the leninist temptation.
[00:19:34] Speaker C: And if we're not, and if. Sorry, Dick, if it's not happening, if the revolution isn't happening, then it's a failure to correctly apply the doctrine.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Exactly. So you're constantly measuring yourself. Are you a true follower of Lenin or later of Stalin?
[00:19:53] Speaker A: The thing that you haven't said is that this turned out to be a very hierarchical organization, even though the word democratic was in the phrase democratic centralism, meaning that the wisdom was greatest at the very top. And the very top, once Stalin was running the Soviet Union, was Stalin. And then the soviet party was the dominant source of wisdom over the international communist movement. And then within the US, it was the top leadership of the party who had the greatest wisdom and the people at the base were. Their discipline was measured by the degree to which they could implement the party line no matter what their own personal feelings might have been. In fact, you're even more disciplined if you suppress your personal feelings and carry out the line. Am I getting it?
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And many dedicated revolutionaries at the time predicted this. Rosa Luxemburg, who certainly was as far to the left and as committed to the revolution as Lenin said, you're going to wind up with all centralism and no democracy. And that's exactly what happened.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: And we'll maybe get back to this for now, is that there are people now, young activists, who think democratic centralism is the right way to go. And that's why I'm putting a lot of emphasis on what is.
[00:21:33] Speaker C: Well, it's worse than that. If I can.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead.
[00:21:36] Speaker C: Please do get a word in edgewise here.
And I have a lot to say, but I think actually working backwards from what Dick just said is the best way to get your thoughts on some stuff. So right now, the democratic socialists of America, which is an organization that all three of us have been members of Orlando, active in at some point. It was at exactly one of those youth section conferences where you came to give a workshop on socialist history that we first met. Really, I don't know, 30 years ago.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: Okay, I'd forgotten that, but. Hello again.
[00:22:11] Speaker C: Exactly. No, it's fine. And.
Yeah, and I think that was at Hamilton.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Oh, that one, yeah. In the 1990s.
[00:22:20] Speaker C: Yeah. So that's when I was active in the youth section. But right now there's a majority on the national board of DSA who are communists. And there are a bunch of open factions that are very dominant in some of the larger chapters who are communists.
[00:22:41] Speaker B: Right. And it's not red baiting to call them that because they call themselves that. The Marxist, they're communists marxist unity group. If you go to their website, there's a hammer and sickle and they say, we're communists. Red Star is a little more diffident about it. But Red Star, where they get that from, Red Star over China, they look to the Chinese Communist Party and People's Republic of China as their models. So, yeah, there's a majority of several factions. There's other factions that feed into that who are not democratic socialists.
[00:23:14] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: And have never been democratic socialists and who would not have been welcome in DSA. You don't have democratic socialist caucuses within communist organizations. Similarly, it seems logical you should not have communist caucuses self defined communist caucuses in groups calling themselves democratic socialists. Exactly.
[00:23:38] Speaker C: And so there are a lot of.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Now, one of the things that attracted me to DSA joined DESOC, democratic Socialist organizing committee the year before, precisely because it was going to merge with the new american movement, a movement that came out of the new left, which is where I began my political journey.
And one of the things attracting me was having gone through the crack up of sds in the late 1960s, which we can talk about, where everybody was suddenly a revolutionary communist, everybody in the leadership, not necessarily in the rank and file, and that managed to blow the whole organization of 100,000, was suddenly reduced to a tiny fragment underground in the weather, underground. In the course of six months. One of the things that attracted me to DSA was it wasn't going to have any of that nonsense. It laid equal stress on the two descriptors in its title. It was democratic, small d, democratic, and it was socialist. And it didn't see a way, want to find a way to be one without the other.
[00:24:41] Speaker C: Right. And that was a position that was hard won by the individuals that founded DSA. Right. Over years of struggle and conflict and crisis and so forth. As you document in your work, I think.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: Really? Yeah. Michael Harrington had been a member of a very sectarian ultra left group in the 1950s and went through his own political journey and came out with a kind of classically democratic socialist perspective.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: One point about.
[00:25:16] Speaker C: Let me make.
[00:25:17] Speaker A: No, no, I'm going to make this point because I think it's part of what we need to get on the table. It's that the idea of democracy not only is a fundamental moral value, but it's a practical necessity in a organized effort for social change. And why I say that is because to me, the experience of the organizers on the ground, in the field, in the labor movement, in the communities, in the actual daily life of America, needs to be the experience that is drawn upon for the organization's direction. And if it's the. But the communist democratic centralism is the exact opposite, that wisdom is at the top and that the top in the.
[00:26:10] Speaker C: Past, in scripture, yes.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: And the people at the top are the least connected to ordinary life in the society that we're in. So democracy is a necessary tool by democracy, meaning that people at the base of the organization who are in the world need to have the sense that their perceptions, their ideas have validity and can be part of the operation of the organization, fundamentally part of it.
And so the idea that there's something more scientific about Leninism is ridiculous. It's the opposite of anything that you'd understand if you were a scientist studying social organization and how it should operate. I don't know if I'm making sense.
[00:27:04] Speaker C: No, that's an absolutely incisive critique of this, like, mythology around scientific socialism. I think that's totally right. But I want to get the present moment a little more clear for listeners.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:27:19] Speaker C: Because.
So there are people in DSA who are really excellent organizers and who. Right. When I was in leadership of DSA, we were really in a doldrums period, both because of what was going on in american politics in the nineties and because of, like, our own and the leadership's own, just, like, inability to think of things to do that were really very useful. And the new generation of leaders in DSA, people who have been more, have experienced the explosive growth of the organization since 2016. Like, there's a bunch of people out there who are responsible for forcing DSA into the electoral arena for real in the way that we just theorized about it and talked about how it needed to be done. They've been part of a movement that's put democratic socialists in office.
Then because of the toxicity and fucked up things were talking about, the organization itself starts to attack its own elected officials, etcetera. Right? But they are reeling from this takeover of the national organization.
Theres this conflict between the New York chapter, which is the largest, and a kind of power center for this more pragmatic and small d, democratic part of the organization, and the national organization. And I'm in dialogue with some of them, have been having conversations with some of them about, like, what went wrong, how could this have been avoided, et cetera. And this is where the timeliness of your book, I think, is so important in demystifying this part of american radical history, because, and Dick might get mad at me for saying this, but the historiography about the American Communist Party for a long time was really emphasizing these positives, the positives, the objective positives, like the good works that communists were doing in the world and so forth, and really not reckoning with its destructive character. And all of the things that you bring up in your book, where we had the romance of american communism being rereadental as, like, a handbook, it was really important to have this book come out to be like, oh, whoa, no, there's negative lessons to be learned here. So all of that is to say is to ask this question, how is it that without the Soviet Union, without the common turn, without the sort of direct control over the organization, that you document so well that we have both in sds, like right after your book ends and now again in DSA, organizations be wrecked by people organized in invoking, labeling themselves as communists like. It seems stochastic. It seems like it has an independent life and pops up. Why does that keep happening? And how do we keep it from wrecking more crucial organizations and alliances of the left?
[00:30:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it does seem there's this kind of endless cycle, and I don't believe in historical cycles. In every historical period is different. But there are some commonalities that are worth pointing to. DSA was a small organization under 10,000 for most of its existence. It was a virtuous organization.
I liked it. There were interesting conversations within it. It was founded at, like, the worst possible moment to create a new organization on the left in the midst of the Reagan revolution. And the succeeding decades were not very favorable either. So it was a placeholder. It kept an idea alive. It had a New York City office. It had a newsletter, democratic left. It had some people in Congress, like Ron Dellums, Major Owens. It had base in the labor movement staff, at least, which is basically what the Communist Party had at its heyday. It continually, and you probably know this, no people who left from the youth affiliate, which was small but lively and went into the labor movement, did very good work there. So it was playing a role, but it was not very visible. Along comes Bernie Sanders in 2016, and he not a member of DSA, certainly not a communist. But he says, I'm a democratic socialist. Small D. Small s, democratic socialist. And people go google democratic socialism. They like Bernie Sanders says, and so they google it. And what pops up? But this small organization, DSA, and so suddenly, an organization of 6000, begins to grow into an organization of tens of thousands. And then, as you say, other talented people like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is drawn to this growing organization, and she's elected to Congress in 2018, and Jamal Bowman is elected to Congress and Corey Bush. And suddenly you have an organization that is still small. It peaks at about 90,000. And I think it's significantly smaller now, but it's punching above its weight. And so all kinds of people pour into it with no previous experience on the left, or at least in the socialist left. But there are also hundreds of people who pour into it who have a lot of experience on the left and who are not young idealists but are hardened faction fighters, cadre from other failed organizations that didn't. You know, DSA was always the largest socialist organization of the eighties. And nineties and early two thousands with its 6000 or 8000 members because these other groups had 300 members or something. So they could never, under their own banner, under their own red banner, attract more than a handful. But they learned all these really useful skills, how to take over other organizations, go to every meeting, show up early, stay to the end, don't compromise and so forth. And they grew to have an inordinate influence quickly within DSA which had been relatively faction free and relatively uncontroversial within people at different views. Should we emphasize working in the democratic party or emphasize working in the labor movement? But those had been friendly disagreements. And all of a sudden you have caucuses, factions arising with names like Marxist Unity Group and Red Star and so forth. And their business is creating discord and putting themselves forward as the only ones who have this grasp of what is to be done in this historical moment. And everybody else should really be discarded or should keep their mouths shut. So you have an organization today where effectively there are several thousand people organized in these various caucuses. And at the last national convention they gained a majority on the ruling national political committee, the NPC. And then you have tens of thousands of other people who are members in name only. They pay dues, they get the democratic left newsletter. But they have no effective way of participating in an organization that really doesn't want them to participate except on the terms of the ruling caucuses. So that is democratic centralism with a vengeance.
And that's the state of DSA at the moment. Now for me, I lived this because I was a member of a group that Dick flacks and others started in the early 1960s. That in its Port Huron statement defined itself as a democratic small d democratic organization seeking to build a left with real intellectual skills and not taking a side in the cold War, certainly not with the Soviet Union or not uncritically with the United States. That was going to be above all that. And then in the mid 1960s, because of the Vietnam War and other factors, suddenly tens of thousands of young people poured in and suddenly the old guard dick flacks and others are pushed to the side and new leaders who know how to take over organizations show up early, stay late and so forth took it over. And again you have an organization in that case that was bigger than, say, at its height it was a hundred thousand or so, pretty loosely affiliated, but chapters across the country and it's reduced to rubble in a matter of six months by these would be leninist leaders.
[00:36:19] Speaker A: It wasn't just there was a little more to it. I think in that last stage, which was that this maoist party called the Progressive Labor Party was the spearhead of that kind of infiltration.
To counter that, the non PL leadership of SDS formed various counter factions that tried to prove that they were more revolutionary than the Maoist, as if that was the issue.
The thousands of people at the base probably had very little awareness and interest in all of that fighting. The beauty of SDs, if there was any at the end, was it was so decentralized that it didn't really matter in terms of individual campus activism that stemmed from SDS, what was happening at this national level, at least it didn't matter until it finally did. It did matter finally. But the biggest mobilization of students of anyone in american history happened after Kent state killings. Millions of students went on strike for weeks.
This was after SDS really had fallen apart. And that leads me to this point, which is maybe part of the problem, is the continuing interest in having an organization that functions like a party, that has a particular set of policies, that has a central strategy, that not necessarily highly disciplined, but certainly has that kind of coherence as a center of leadership.
I question that as a form of organization that can work for social change. The movements are much more loosely organized. Not, and they have many more ephemeral organizations, some more longstanding. But organizations are swimming in the tide of a movement, and the movement has thousands of people, millions, maybe, who are carrying its messages in their own networks, in their own communities, not necessarily dependent on any national organization for their direction at this point. So that's not. Maybe there's something needs to. There needs to be more coherence than that. But I think that the persistent problem that you and Diraka are pointing to, given the SDS, then the ending of that, and then the crisis of DSA, it has something to do, maybe not entirely, with just this idea that an organization in itself that's national and that claims to lead a national movement of change is not the way to go.
[00:39:23] Speaker C: Wait, I want to push back on that because it's. You use the word party in an interesting way. I just want to clarify. When you're like, I don't like the party as an organizational form. You mean the party like a leninist party? No, I mean the Vanguard party.
[00:39:39] Speaker A: Like even DSA. I was. I loved when it didn't tell me what I had to do.
[00:39:44] Speaker C: But you're not. I'm just saying you're not meaning political party in exactly. In this political science sense of, like, the electoral aspect.
[00:39:52] Speaker B: Right.
[00:39:53] Speaker C: Okay, so I just.
And I agree with that. Two large.
[00:39:58] Speaker A: I just.
[00:39:58] Speaker C: 80, 90%. I agree with that. But the, but it can't be that. Like, we can't have any national organizations with, like, an ideological. A general ideological thrust to them without having communist wreck it. Like, it's just, we can't just. It just seems like we have to be able to organ. We have to be able to bring things to a higher level, a state level, a national level of organization, and be able to get along and have some kind of pluralism and good will and so forth.
We need to do that in order to win big social changes in the United States. And if what you're saying is anytime you do that, it's just like communists are going to wreck it, that's.
[00:40:40] Speaker B: Yeah, it seems. If I can say something here. Yeah, please. I agree with Diraka, and I place myself in a radical tradition that is nothing, just a marxist and certainly not a leninist tradition or not just a socialist tradition. Going back to the 19th century, the abolitionist movement, which contributed to perhaps the greatest single social change.
Abolition of slavery, which freed four and a half million enslaved African Americans and also was the greatest confiscation of property in american history because most of the capital, more capital was invested in the ownership of slaves than in all of the North's factories and railroads and banks and what have you. Before the civil war, this was a tremendous social transformation. And at the heart of at least creating a sense before the civil war that something had to be done about slavery. And perhaps electing someone to the White House who was at least committed to restricting the expansion of slavery came out of the organized abolition movement, which involved hundreds of thousands of Americans. And this is in a time when the american population was about 30 million, and they could only organize in half the country because they weren't allowed to organize in the slave south. But every little northern town and every big city would have an abolitionist organization, the abolitionist press, William Lloyd Garrison's liberator. And it was not centralized. They didn't give orders, but they certainly inspired activism. And then one of the. After the war, another of the great social transformations, political revolutions was the enfranchisement of women. And again, the women's movement was very definitely organized on a national level by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and other women who came out of the abolition movement and who created a national movement that could also operate at the state level. And again, they weren't issuing orders, but they were inspiring millions of women and male supporters around the country to take on this challenge, which eventually resulted in the passage of the women's suffrage amendment in 1920 and the enfranchisement of, of women.
I don't think there's anything necessarily antithetical between having a national organization and fighting for significant social change. I think the two are linked. It's just what kind of organization you build.
[00:43:25] Speaker A: I don't think we're disagreeing because both of those examples, there wasn't a single national organization that coordinated. It was an organized movement. That is absolutely my point, that movements are organized, but they're organized below the observable levels. There's network built in. There's partial organizations that have certain niches within a larger movement. There's new organizations that form and old ones that persist. And it looks very messy, but it's organized. You're absolutely right. And that's what I think, people.
I don't know how much discourse there is within left wing training of organizers on this question of how are movements actually organized? It's very complicated. People need to pay attention that in a way that maybe in some part of sociology, there's been some work on this, but not enough to understand how the organizations actually function when movements really take off.
It's amazing. Just look at what just happened with the Kamala Harris candidacy with this tremendous upsurge that seemed spontaneous. It was spontaneous, but it's based on organization. It's based on the fact that people already connected to each other. And those things just like lightning, those networks, those interconnections got ignited in an amazing way. And people were all very astounded. I am, by that. So that's what I'm trying to get at, which.
[00:45:12] Speaker C: And if I could. Yeah, I think another, well, just a point you make that I want to underline, and I think we'd all agree, is like, there's a humility that was baked into DSA from years of experience of being like, we're going to be like, yeah, maybe the socialist voice in a broader constellation of social movements and so forth. And at a certain point, people in DSA started to think about, we're going to be the vehicle to build socialism in America, and we want, like, our elected officials and everyone to follow our line and so forth. And that was a big rubber break from, I think, what. Yeah, Dick, I would like we, our vision has always been far more coalitional, majoritarian, and, yeah, humble about the role that an organization like DSA would play.
I wanted to touch on something which is a sort of animating principle of our podcast here and of Dick and I's friendship for the last several decades, which you documented, I think, so masterfully in if I had a hammer. It's one of the books I've recommended to people the most of any book.
It's a great read. And also this moment in the, what the left was like in the fifties and what happened as it transformed and the new movements arose in the sixties, I think, is just still under studied, underdeveloped. And for Dick and I, there's this far more personal or biographical aspect of it, that there was this literal bad set of interactions between Michael Harrington representing the old left, and Dick and his friends in DSA, and Tom Hayden and so forth.
[00:47:03] Speaker A: Right?
[00:47:04] Speaker C: There's this breakdown in that personal relationship, and then horrible things happen. The left just gets brutalized, the country moves to the right, and then decades later, these people come back together and are like, yeah, that fight, probably we didn't handle that well. And I think Dick and I both are still excavating lessons from that. And what appears to me is another sort of, like, repetition, right. Is DSA right now, it's going in a bad direction. There were some early on in, after October 7, some stupid things said and done by parts of the organization and another kind of rupture.
And people who lived through that first one, like going through it again. So I think dig and I both had this question, which is, how do we avoid looking back and seeing that there were good arguments on both sides of that fight back in the fifties and sixties. Right? Michael Harrington wasn't wrong about everything. Look what happened to SDS. But also the old left's just old man yells at cloud. Sort of inability to talk to folks was also a problem. How are we to avoid the same thing happening right now?
[00:48:24] Speaker B: Yeah. The thing about being a historian is that you're really good about predicting the past, but you're terrible at predicting the future. Yeah, fair enough.
And Mike Harrington is an interesting example because he came out of a fairly authoritarian corner of the left. It liked to think of itself as anti stalinist and above the flaws of that kind of a movement, but it in some ways still exemplified it. And what happened in 1962 at Port Huron is that the bad Michael Harrington came to the fore. Here were these young people, and I'm just quoting him or remembering what he said about it later. He was young people who just joined the movement, and he was impatient, and they didn't see the world the way he did in every respect. Actually, in many ways, they saw the world exactly the way he did, and he realized shortly after that blow up at Port Huron that he had been in the wrong, not about some of the things he was saying, but in the way that he said it. And he spent the next quarter century or so apologizing for it until Dick's comrade Steve Max said, mike, enough.
It's time to move on. So it's not an easy question.
And left leaders, and I think that's another thing, is we don't like the concept of leaders anymore.
Name me a leader of DSA now.
Who are these people who are running DSA? Nobody knows who they are. It used to be that there were people like Mike Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dorothy Healy in the leadership of DSA. And you could say, I'm a Mike Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich. Dorothy Healy, socialist and people would know what you were talking about.
I think there is a role for leadership. I think leaders have to. They can't be old men standing on the lawn shouting at clouds. Exactly how you train people, inspire people to be that kind of leader, I don't know. Eugene Debs was that kind of leader. Eugene Debs was a unifying figure in a socialist movement that included sewer socialist reformists and revolutionaries. And somehow debs could speak on some level to all of them. Up until the outbreak of the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, when that kind of leadership was no longer possible, that kind of organization was no longer possible.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: I think Dirak is worried about specifically generational divide that runs through that is evident now that you're. That the Harrington case was a prime example of perhaps back in those days. And Michael was unusual in that he, as you said, was wanting to mend those fences, reach out, reconnect. That's why I joined DSA. He called me on the phone.
I joined DESOC. He called me on the phone from miles away and said, I want to say how wrong I was then back in 62. And I want to invite you to be part of this new thing that we're trying to create that was very impressive to me. So that's a story of rectification, of generational divide. But so are you worried?
Dirac and I have talked about this a lot. Part of the design of this little podcast is that we're two different generations and wanting definitely for that to be part of, to have a real dialogue and a real mutual connection rather than breaking, lecturing.
I vowed when I, in 62, I remember saying to myself, I never want to be what Michael Harrington is to us now. I never wanted in that position.
[00:52:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:30] Speaker A: So I don't know if you have any thoughts about that more.
[00:52:33] Speaker B: I don't see the division in DSA as primarily generational. I think there are tens of thousands of Gen Z and millennial socialists in DSA who are not represented by these tiny caucuses that have captured the organization.
I see it as a political divide. Now. DSA is not going to be your father's or your grandfather's DSA in the 21st century. It's going to have to reinvent itself. I think a democratic socialist movement is going to have to reinvent itself. It'll have more horizontality, the model of Black lives Matter, occupy Wall street, than the old DSA, and maybe less verticality. It'll develop its own notion of leadership. It'll develop its own blend of what today is called intersectionality, of coalitions, of organizing people around identity, but also common beliefs and so forth. So I'm not trying to make DSA. I'm not trying to make DSA anything because I quit last fall, after October 7. DSA, if it's going to survive, will have to reinvent itself. But it's not reinventing itself. It's simply copycatting the old leninist delusion, which never worked in this country, even when the communist party was at its greatest strength, 75,000 members and another 20,000 or so in the young Communist League at the end of the 1930s, in a country of 130 million. At the time, communist party was never going to come to power as an organization organized along leninist lines, subservient to the Soviet Union and with all its other flaws. So what is the 21st century left going to look like? I would like to have a genuinely democratic socialist emphasis on democratic emphasis on socialist organization, figure that out without being infiltrated and captured by people who don't share any of those values.
[00:54:54] Speaker C: Yeah, me too.
[00:54:55] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:54:56] Speaker C: But that's why I still talk to you.
Yeah. And that was why I didn't leave with the kind of, like, mini exodus that. Oh, and that's not a commentary about the jewishness of a lot of the votes at length, but, like, the little mini wave of folks that left in this recent year, many of whom are people like yourself who have had a tremendous intellectual impact on me, or Harold Myerson, who's been a friend and mentor forever.
I didn't leave because it just felt impotent, just like it's not doing anything. I'm not leaving to a new project, and me leaving doesn't.
[00:55:34] Speaker A: I'm not.
[00:55:35] Speaker C: Morris is from, and me leaving doesn't, like, make a wave or anything. So. But there are people in DSA. There are people outside of DSA. There are people in all kinds of movements. There are people like yourself who have this tremendous. Yeah. Intellectual and historical and educational legacy that is just so useful for everyone.
I want us to all. It's very kumbaya, but I like, I want us to be able to come together, come back together and not have it take as long as it did for Dick to. Or for Michael Harrington to reach out to Dick.
[00:56:09] Speaker A: Well, maybe we are together. Maybe this is it.
[00:56:13] Speaker C: But then I. Dick, I'm almost 50. That's the problem. Like, I'm like, we've.
[00:56:20] Speaker A: I'm almost 90, for fuck's sake.
[00:56:23] Speaker C: So that's what I mean. There's that other half century of experience out of folks that we need to be in working with. And, you know, you do an individually great job, Dick, of like, your entire life. You have young people you're working with interfacing. But on a structural level, I think we could do better with Morris's point about the. I think that's right. Like, the first step is to confront the political division and not let it be shorthanded into something else. That's very good point.
[00:56:51] Speaker A: So we reached the hourly point, which is a good point, to feel that we should bring things to a conclusion. And the conclusion would be to express our gratitude. Morris Esterman. My pleasure that you've done for the work that you've been doing and for the chance that you've given us to have this conversation, which, like all of our episodes, is inconclusive but raising questions for those who are attending to it.
[00:57:24] Speaker C: Because we haven't read enough Stalin.
[00:57:27] Speaker A: The book is called Reds. Morris Isserman is the author. The subtitle is the tragedy of american communism. Highly recommended and we both highly recommend. We didn't even begin to touch on a lot of the important points that and the interesting stories that you can find in it. And so we recommend it to everyone who wants to be thinking and working for transformative change at this point in history. Thank you, Morris.
[00:57:56] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. This has been fascinating. Really great.
[00:57:59] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:58:00] Speaker B: Are you now or have you ever been to a communist party?
100 things you should know about communism in the USA.
