The Zinn Reader (74 page)

The fundamentalists of politics—the Reagans and Bushes and Helmses—want to pull the strings of control tighter on the distribution of wealth and power and civil liberties. The fundamentalists of law, the Borks and Rehnquists, want to interpret the Constitution so as to put strict limits on the legal possibilities for social reform. The fundamentalists of education fear the possibilities inherent in the unique freedom of discussion that we find in higher education.

And so, under the guise of defending "the common culture" or "disinterested scholarship" or "Western civilization," they attack that freedom. They fear exactly what some of us hope for, that if students are given wider political choices in the classroom than they get in the polling booth or the workplace, they may become social rebels. They may join movements for racial or sexual equality, or against war, or, even more dangerous, work for what James Madison feared as he argued for a conservative Constitution: "an equal division of property." Let us hope so.

10

"
J
E
N
E
S
UIS
P
AS
M
ARXISTE"

For a long time I thought that there were important and useful ideas in Marxist philosophy and political economy that should be protected from the self-righteous cries on the right that "Marxism is dead," as well as from the arrogant assumptions of the commissars of various dictatorships that their monstrous regimes represented "Marxism." This piece was written for Z
Magazine,
June 1988, and reprinted in my book
Failure to Quit
(Common Courage Press, 1993).

Not long ago, someone referred to me publicly as a "Marxist professor." In fact, two people did. One was a spokesperson for "Accuracy in Academia," worried that there were "five thousand Marxist faculty members" in the United States (which diminished my importance, but also my loneliness). The other was a former student I encountered on a shuttle to New York, a fellow traveler. I felt a bit honored. A "Marxist" means a tough guy (making up for the pillowy connotation of "professor"), a person of formidable politics, someone not to be trifled with, someone who knows the difference between absolute and relative surplus value, and what is commodity fetishism, and refuses to buy it.

I was also a bit taken aback (a position which yoga practitioners understand well, and which is good for you about once a day). Did "Marxist" suggest that I kept a tiny statue of Lenin in my drawer and rubbed his head to discover what policy to follow to intensify the contradictions in the imperialist camp, or what songs to sing if we were sent away to such a camp?

Also, I remembered that famous statement of Marx: "Je ne suis pas Marxiste." I always wondered why Marx, an English-speaking German who had studied Greek for his doctoral dissertation, would make such an important statement in French. But I am confident that he did make it, and I think I know what brought it on. After Marx and his wife Jenny had moved to London, where they lost three of their six children to illness and lived in squalor for many years, they were often visited by a young German refugee named Pieper. This guy was a total "noodnik" (there are "noodniks" all along the political spectrum stationed ten feet apart, but there is a special Left Noodnik, hired by the police, to drive revolutionaries batty). Pieper (I swear, I did not make him up) hovered around Marx gasping with admiration, once offered to translate
Das Kapital
into English, which he could barely speak, and kept organizing Karl Marx Clubs, exasperating Marx more and more by insisting that every word Marx uttered was holy. And one day Marx caused Pieper to have a severe abdominal cramp when he said to him: "Thanks for inviting me to speak to your Karl Marx Club. But I can't. I'm not a Marxist."

That was a high point in Marx's life, and also a good starting point for considering Marx's ideas seriously without becoming a Pieper (or a Stalin, or a Kim II Sung, or any born-again Marxist who argues that every word in Volumes One, Two, and Three, and especially in the
Grundrisse,
is unquestionably true). Because it seems to me (risking that this may lead to my inclusion in the second edition of Norman Podhoretz's
Register of Marxists, Living or Dead),
Marx had some very useful thoughts.

For instance, we find in Marx's short but powerful
Theses on Feuerbach
the idea that philosophers, who always considered their job was to interpret the world, should now set about changing it, in their writings, and in their lives.

Marx set a good example himself. While history has treated him as a sedentary scholar, spending all his time in the library of the British Museum, Marx was a tireless activist all his life. He was expelled from Germany, from Belgium, from France, was arrested and put on trial in Cologne.

Exiled to London, he kept his ties with revolutionary movements all over the world. The poverty-ridden flats that he and Jenny Marx and their children occupied became busy centers of political activity, gathering places for political refugees from the continent.

True, many of his writings were impossibly abstract (especially those on political economy; my poor head at the age of nineteen swam, or rather drowned, with ground rent and differential rent, the falling rate of profit and the organic composition of capital). But he departed from that constantly to confront the events of his time, to write about the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, rebellion in India, the Civil War in the United States.

The manuscripts he wrote at the age of twenty-five while an exile in Paris (where he hung out in cafes with Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin, Heine, Stirner), often dismissed by hard-line fundamentalists as "immature," contain some of his most profound ideas. His critique of capitalism in those
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
did not need any mathematical proofs of "surplus value." It simply stated (but did not state it simply) that the capitalist system violates whatever it means to be human. The industrial system Marx saw developing in Europe not only robbed them of the product of their work, it estranged working people from their own creative possibilities, from one another as human beings, from the beauties of nature, from their own true selves. They lived out their lives not according to their own inner needs, but according to the necessities of survival.

This estrangement from self and others, this alienation from all that was human, could not be overcome by an intellectual effort, by something in the mind. What was needed was a fundamental, revolutionary change in society, to create the conditions—a short workday, a rational use of the earth's natural wealth and people's natural talents, a just distribution of the fruits of human labor, a new social consciousness—for the flowering of human potential, for a leap into freedom as it had never been experienced in history.

Marx understood how difficult it was to achieve this, because, no matter how "revolutionary" we are, the weight of tradition, habit, the accumulated mis-education of generations, "weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."

Marx understood politics. He saw that behind political conflicts were questions of class: who gets what. Behind benign bubbles of togetherness (U^the people.
..our
country..
.national
security), the powerful and the wealthy would legislate on their own behalf. He noted (in
The Eighteenth Brumaire,
a biting, brilliant analysis of the Napoleonic seizure of power after the 1848 Revolution in France) how a modern constitution could proclaim absolute rights, which were then limited by marginal notes (he might have been predicting the tortured constructions of the First Amendment in our own Constitution), reflecting the reality of domination by one class over another regardless of the written word.

He saw religion, not just negatively as "the opium of the people," but positively as "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions." This helps us understand the mass appeal of the religious charlatans of the television screen, as well as the work of Liberation Theology in joining the soulfulness of religion to the energy of revolutionary movements in miserably poor countries.

Marx was often wrong, often dogmatic, often a "Marxist." He was sometimes too accepting of imperial domination as "progressive," a way of bringing capitalism faster to the third world, and therefore hastening, he thought, the road to socialism. (But he staunchly supported the rebellions of the Irish, the Poles, the Indians, the Chinese, against colonial control.)

He was too insistent that the industrial working class must be the agent of revolution, and that this must happen first in the advanced capitalist countries. He was unnecessarily dense in his economic analyses (too much education in German universities, maybe) when his clear, simple insight into exploitation was enough: that no matter how valuable were the things workers produced, those who controlled the economy could pay them as little as they liked, and enrich themselves with the difference.

Personally, Marx was sometimes charming, generous, self-sacrificing; at other times arrogant, obnoxious, abusive. He loved his wife and children, and they clearly adored him, but he also may have fathered the son of their German housekeeper, Lenchen.

The anarchist Bakunin, his rival in the International Workingmen's Association, said of Marx: "I very much admired him for his knowledge and for his passionate and earnest devotion to the cause of the proletariat. But...our temperaments did not harmonize. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right. I called him vain, treacherous, and morose, and I was right." Marx's daughter Eleanor, on the other hand, called her father "...the cheeriest, gayest soul that ever breathed, a man brimming over with humor..."

He epitomized his own warning, that people, however advanced in their thinking, were weighted down by the limitations of their time. Still, Marx gave us acute insights, inspiring visions. I can't imagine Marx being pleased with the "socialism" of the Soviet Union. He would have been a dissident in Moscow, I like to think. His idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was the Paris Commune of 1871, where endless argument in the streets and halls of the city gave it the vitality of a grass-roots democracy, where overbearing officials could be immediately booted out of office by popular vote, where the wages of government leaders could not exceed that of ordinary workers, where the guillotine was destroyed as a symbol of capital punishment. Marx once wrote in the
New York Tribune
that he did not see how capital punishment could be justified "in a society glorying in its civilization."

Perhaps the most precious heritage of Marx's thought is his internationalism, his hostility to the national state, his insistence that ordinary people have no nation they must obey and give their lives for in war, that we are all linked to one another across the globe as human beings. This is not only a direct challenge to modern capitalist nationalism, with its ugly evocations of hatred for "the enemy" abroad, and its false creation of a common interest for all within certain artificial borders. It is also a rejection of the narrow nationalism of contemporary "Marxist" states, whether the Soviet Union, or China, or any of the others.

Marx had something important to say not only as a critic of capitalism, but as a warning to revolutionaries, who, he wrote in
The German Ideology,
had better revolutionize themselves if they intended to do that to society. He offered an antidote to the dogmatists, the hard-liners, the Piepers, the Stalins, the commissars, the "Marxists." He said: "Nothing human is alien to me."

That seems a good beginning for changing the world.

11

J
ACK
L
ONDON'S
T
HE
I
RON
H
EEL

I first encountered Jack London as a writer of adventure stories, when I was a teen-ager. After I became interested in political ideas, and learned that he was a Socialist and that he had written a political novel,
The Iron Heel,
I rushed to read it. Years later I was asked to write an introduction to a new edition of the book (Bantam, 1971), and this gave me an opportunity to review Jack London's life and to read the book once more.

Jack London climbed, sailed, stormed through forty years of life, all ending in the torment of sickness, and the calculated swallowing of a large dose of morphine tablets. Tired, he lowered himself into death, like the hero of his autobiographical novel,
Martin Eden.

He had come out of the slums of San Francisco, the child of an unwed woman who held seances, and whose lover, a scholarly lecturer on astrology, denied he had fathered her son. By the time he was fifteen he had been a newsboy, worked in a cannery, begun to read hungrily the books of the Oakland Public Library, become a sailor and a fisherman, found a mistress, and was drinking heavily.

Before he was twenty-one, he had worked in a jute mill and laundry, hoboed the railroads to the East Coast, been clubbed by a policeman on the streets of New York, been arrested for vagrancy in Niagara Falls, watched men beaten and tortured in jail, joined the Socialist Party, pirated oysters in San Francisco Bay, read Flaubert, Tolstoy, Melville, and the Communist Manifesto, shot rapids and climbed mountains in the Klondike gold rush, preached socialism in the Alaskan gold camps in the winter of 1896, sailed 2,000 miles back through the Bering Sea, and sold his first adventure stories to magazines.

At thirty-one, he had written twenty books, married twice, run for mayor of Oakland on the Socialist ticket, covered the Russo-Japanese War, sailed to Hawaii and Polynesia, made huge sums of money, and spent every dollar. The books and stories that made him world-famous were of the sea, of dogs, of men in loving combat with the wilderness, the snows, the night.

Around 1906, Jack London set out on his great socialist novel,
The Iron Heel.
Also at this time, he wrote about his own past: "I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and charnel-house of our civilization...I shall say only that the things I saw there gave me a terrible scare."

That terror, along with the vision of a socialist world and the brotherhood of man, he poured into the fantasy-realism of
The Iron Heel.
The imagination that had led people everywhere to devour his adventure stories now produced bizarre political conjurings: The First and Second Revolts, the Chicago Commune, The Mercenaries and the Frisco Reds, the Philomaths and the Valkyries, the Oligarchy, and the People of the Abyss.

If we take
The Iron Heel
as a premonition of the future—to bemuse us, fascinate us, frighten us—we will be deceived. It is the
present
that haunts a serious spinner of futuristic tales, and so it did Jack London. He uses the future to entice us out of the constricting corridors of here and now, far enough so that we can look back and see more clearly what is happening. He uses the love of Avis Cunningham for the remarkable Ernest Everhard to draw us into empathy with an undeniably arrogant but also undeniably attractive man who leads a socialist revolution in the United States.

But is Jack London's present also ours? Can the things he said about the United States in 1906 be applied to the nation in 1970? Have we not put behind us the wrongs of that older time, buried them under an avalanche of reforms and affluence? Have we not become a welfare state at home, a fearless defender of freedom abroad? In the Fifties, many Americans thought so.

At the start of the Seventies, however, there is a new mood. A fresh generation (of
radicals,
we begin to say, but there are too many of them to fit such a narrow definition) seems to have reached the conclusion that, aside from frills, tokens, gadgets, and rhetoric, all of which have proliferated in this century, the United States has not changed its basic characteristics: the rule of corporate wealth, the use of the big stick to bludgeon the discontented, both at home and abroad.

A formidable number of young people have lost their respect for the system, not because of books and lectures, but by observation and experience. As tiny children, they crawled under desks while sirens wailed in a preview of the atomic destruction of the earth. It seems now that they probably knew, with an intelligence far greater than that of teachers or parents or the country's leaders, how absurd it was to seek shelter under a wooden desk from the madness of governments armed with hydrogen bombs. By the time they grew up enough to read
Catch-22,
Yossarian's words shattered the cold war demonology of "them" and "us" and spoke to their childish wisdom: "The enemy is anybody who is going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."

This generation watched on television as blacks were beaten bloody by Southern policemen while the FBI, sworn to uphold "law and order," stood by taking notes. They watched while blacks stealing shoes from store windows were shot dead by Northern policemen, who were then exonerated by the courts. In their living rooms they saw American soldiers ravage Vietnamese villages, bombing, shooting, setting fire to ancestral homes, laying waste an entire country, all in the name of freedom and peace. They saw the leaders of the country hurling the bodies of thousands of Americans into the Asian pyre in a lust of national righteousness.

And when these same young people went out onto the streets and campuses to protest, they too were clubbed, and some were killed, all in the name of stopping "violence." The America of 1970 is, perhaps, more shrewd at covering its deeds with slogans, than was the America of 1906. But the iron heel comes down as before.

In Jack London's time (1914), National Guardsmen fired into the tents of striking miners at Ludlow, Colorado, and killed twenty-five of them. In the spring of 1970, National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of striking students in Ohio and killed four of them. The killing in Colorado was justified by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who owned the coal mines there, as the defense of "a great principle": the right to work in the mines. The killing in Ohio half a century later was justified also in the name of a principle: "law and order." No National Guardsmen were indicted in Colorado in 1914, but a strike leader was. No National Guardsmen were indicted in Ohio in 1970, but twenty-five demonstrators were.

In Jack London's time (1917, East St. Louis), a mob of civilians killed black men and women while the national government watched, claiming lack of jurisdiction. In our time (1964, Mississippi), two white and one black civil rights workers were killed by a mob including local law enforcement officers, while the national government stood by, claiming lack of jurisdiction.

Even those who live comfortably today in America live uncomfortably, on the crater's edge of violence: war, prisons, ghettos. The greatest violence comes not from protesters and revolutionaries but from governments. The greatest lawlessness is that of "law and order." Despite the tinsel of wealth and "progress" on all sides, what the workingman Ernest Everhard told the professor's daughter Avis Cunningham remains true: "Our boasted civilization is based upon blood, soaked in blood, and neither you nor I nor any of us can escape the scarlet stains."

The footnotes of
The Iron Heel,
supposedly written many centuries later to inform readers of what life was like in the early twentieth century, still cut deep to fundamental truths: "In those days, thievery was incredibly prevalent. Everybody stole property from everybody else. The lords of society stole legally, or else legalized their stealing, while the poorer classes stole illegally." In the America of 1970, petty thieves fill the jailsbut Congress and the President approve tax legislation enabling the oil companies to legally steal millions of dollars from the public.

The corporation lawyer speaks bluntly to Avis: "What's right got to do with it? You see all those books. All my reading and studying of them has taught me that law is one thing and right is another thing." And Avis' words to him might be addressed today to that whole army of professionals trained by a complex society: "Tell me, when one surrenders his personal feelings to his professional feelings, may not the action be defined as a sort of spiritual mayhem?"

Since Jack London's time, women have been given the right to vote, the election of senators has been transferred from the state legislatures to the public, and millions of blacks have joined the voting rolls. But the terse footnote in Chapter 5 of
The Iron Heel
still has the sound of truth: "Even as late as 1912 A.D., the great mass of the people still persisted in the belief that they ruled the country by virtue of their ballots. In reality, the country was ruled by what were called political machines."

Jack London's ultimate criticism of the capitalism of his day remains authentic: "In the face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged...criminally and selfishly mismanaged." Perhaps the comparison with the cave-man is not too absurd, considering what proportion of the world is still sick, hungry, miserable, bombed-out; and how even the middle classes are trapped in an environment of polluted air, poisoned water, adulterated food, walled-off communities, unsatisfying jobs, adding up to both psychic and material insecurity. With our enormous wealth in the United States we have built highways, motor cars, motels, office buildings, guns, bombs, planes; we have wasted our resources on things either nonessential or dangerous, when these great resources—rationally, humanely used—could make life warm and human for all. London's point still holds: the profit of corporations, not the needs of people, decides what is done with the country's natural wealth.

Still fresh in the memory of 1906 was the take-over of the Philippines by the U.S. Army, all in the name of saving them from someone else's control, and the crushing of the Filipino rebels who opposed the American occupation. Someone says to Ernest Everhard in a passage remarkably prophetic for Vietnam: "Why, you spoke of sending the militia to the Philippines. That is unconstitutional. The Constitution especially states that the militia cannot be sent out of the country." And he replies: "What's the Constitution got to do with it?"

In the Fifties, the consciousness of the brutality of Stalin's socialism was so acute and the memory of Naziism so bitter, as to make
The
Iron Heel
seem more a commentary on those two societies than on what seemed the more benign, if flawed, American system. Today, we are more aware that
all
powerful states, including the United States, waste the resources of their countrymen, prey on smaller nations, use "law and order" to maintain power and privilege, and crush the dissenting few while pacifying the majority with promises, slogans, and symbols of progress.

Yet, with all these remarkable perceptions,
The Iron Heel
stopped short of understanding certain things which we, a half century later, can see a bit more clearly. Jack London's vision is still inviting: "Let us not destroy those wonderful machines that produce efficiently and cheaply. Let us control them. Let us profit by their efficiency and cheapness. Let us run them for ourselves. That, gentlemen, is socialism..."

We know now that this prescription is not enough, if the "us" becomes a bureaucratic party substituting for the capitalist state. We will have to develop an "us" in which the control of the machinery is local, held by the people who work at it, and yet where all who are affected by the production—the consumer, other producers—have ways of expressing their desires. To establish cooperative control of production, combining the advantages of centralized efficiency with local controls in a complex, technologically advanced society, is an art demanding thought and experimentation.

We suspect now, too, that Jack London's prescription for change—an armed revolution—which seemed so natural in 1906, is inadequate, given such sophisticated controls as we have today in the United States. London swung swiftly from faith in the ballot box, which many Socialists of his day shared, to disillusionment with that and belief in armed rebellion. Thus, Ernest Everhard rushes from one to the other: "And in the day that we sweep to victory at the ballot-box, and you refuse to turn over to us the government we have constitutionally and peacefully captured, and you demand what we are going to do about it—in that day, I say, we shall answer you; and in roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine guns shall our answer be couched."

In the modern, powerful, industrial state both these tactics—voting and armed insurrection—are decoys. The ballot box, a tawdry token of democracy, enables shrewd, effective control in the mass society, by those on top. And armed revolution is so clearly suicidal against the power of the great national state, that we must suspect its advocates of being police agents—as in the abortive uprisings in
The Iron Heel.

There is another emerging truth which Jack London ignored, to which this generation is especially sensitive: that the mode of revolution helps determine its future course. A "revolution" accomplished by the ballot box perpetuates the notion that real change can come about by manipulating papers, rather than by people struggling to change their personal lives, their immediate relationships, their communities, their work. Revolutions by force of arms carry forward into the new society that ruthlessness which London himself depicts, and too readily accepts, in
The Iron Heel.
Perhaps we have learned enough in the past half century to begin to think of a novel approach to revolution.