Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology

  first, with simple tools, people had to live cooperatively, in a kind of primitive communism.

  How this gave way to the first class divisions, as agriculture developed, and it became

  possible for people to produce a surplus beyond their needs, and, therefore, to be exploited

  by lords who took the land as their private domain. And how this feudalism, with the further

  development of agriculture, of trade, of money as medium of exchange, of commerce, of

  cities, and of manufactures, had to make way for a new form of social organization—

  capitalism—with strong national governments to subsidize the capitalist corporations and

  promote investments, and maintain law and order, so that the system could move ahead,

  despite the misery of the working people, without rebel ion.

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  Then came the inspiring message of the Manifesto's sweeping treatment of history: like al previous societies, capitalism was becoming outmoded. It had done a superb job in building

  up the forces of production, in developing technology and workers' skil s, and in producing

  huge amounts of goods. But it had created an economy it could not control, that went into

  periodic crises, and the competition among capitalist nations led repeatedly to wars. The

  economy was now international, complex, and social; it was irrational to have it owned and control ed by individual capitalists or corporations. The ownership should now be social, to

  match the reality. The system should be internationalized to match the reality that national

  boundaries were only hampering progress and provoking wars.

  Workers, drawn together by their common grievances, more and more exploited, would see

  al this. They would see that what they thought was eternal, the rules of capitalism, the

  ideas, the political forms, were temporary, had once come into existence, would one day

  come to an end. They would see that the family had been distorted by capitalism and by

  money and that women had been treated as instruments to produce children. They would

  organize to change the system, would renounce national hatred and build a new

  international, cooperative order. "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but

  your chains."

  The working class, the proletariat, would one day overthrow the capitalist system, and

  organize a socialist society, which, after a transition period of "dictatorship of the

  proletariat," would do away with the instruments of the state, the police, and the army.

  There would be no class conflict requiring this force. Production would be organized

  rational y, its products distributed according to people's needs. There would be no need to

  work more than a few hours a day, and people would be free to live their lives as human

  beings should. It would be the real beginning of human history. Everything that came

  before was prelude.

  This was the message of the Manifesto.

  Years after I started reading the words of Marx, I came across the Economic and Philosophic

  Manuscripts. He had written this five years before the Manifesto, when he was twenty-five and living in Paris and first developing his radical ideas. These manuscripts were never

  published during his lifetime. When they final y appeared, in the 1930s, the Soviet Union

  dismissed them as Marx's "immature" writings. In fact, the Manuscripts, as I read them, seemed to me among the most profound of Marx's writings.

  In them, Marx discusses how labor, under capitalism, is "alienated," "estranged" from the laborer himself. That is, "the worker's activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self." Indeed, how many people work at what they real y want

  to do? Some scientists, artists, some skil ed workers, some professionals. But most people

  are not free to choose their line of work. Economic necessity forces them into it. So it is

  "alienated labor."

  Furthermore, most workers produce things or commodities for sale that they did not choose

  to produce and that belong to someone else—the capitalist who employed them. Workers

  are thus alienated from the product of their labor.

  As they work under modern industrial conditions, the atmosphere is not of cooperation, but

  competition, not association, but isolation. Workers are, therefore, alienated from one

  another. And, brought together in cities and factories, they are alienated from nature.

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  Marx saw a communist society as changing al that. He wrote in the Manuscripts that communism is "the complete return of man to himself as a social being, a human being… .

  This communism … equals humanism … . It is the genuine resolution of the conflict between

  man and nature and between man and man."

  (Marx's ideas on labor and capital are not outrageously radical. They are shared by many

  people who are far from Marxism in many ways. For instance, in 1981, Pope John Paul II

  issued a papal encyclical On Human Work, in which he said the Church believed in

  ownership and private property, but that "Christian tradition has never upheld this right as

  absolute and untouchable… . The right to private property is subordinated to the right to

  common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.)"19

  The ideas of Marx and Engels are profound in their analysis of modern society, inspiring in

  their vision of a future, truly human way to live. The Soviet Union, the first revolution to

  claim a Marxist heritage, has violated that vision, has given socialism a bad name, which it

  does not deserve. Marxism became there an ideology, an orthodoxy of the left, a fixed

  package of ideas. It was not subject to criticism. It would be interpreted by the experts of

  the Party, as religious fundamentalists saw the Bible as interpreted by the experts of the

  Church.

  As I read Marx, I was struck by his essential humanism. He was misrepresented in the press

  and in much of American culture as a theoretician of violence and dictatorship. But it

  seemed clear to me that this was not true to Marx's writings. In one of his articles for the

  New York Daily Tribune Marx criticized capital punishment:

  Is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system

  that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a

  lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?20

  The Soviet Union, China, and other nations cal ing themselves "Marxist" and yet practicing capital punishment should be embarrassed by this statement.

  If I can put in one word what has always infuriated me in any person, any group, any

  movement, or any nation, it is: bul ying. This was the essence of fascism, the stormtroopers smashing the windows of Jewish storekeepers; in this country, police using their clubs on

  people walking picket lines or peaceful y demonstrating; the bul ying by white racists of

  black children going to school; abroad, the bul ying by powerful nations of weaker ones,

  whether Italy invading Ethiopia, the Nazis invading Czechoslovakia, the United States

  destroying Vietnam, or the Soviet Union smashing the Hungarian rebel ion.

  When I recognized that quality in the Soviet state, I knew that the ideal of socialism had

  been betrayed. The betrayal started early, with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the second

  1917 Revolution. The Soviets, the local councils of soldiers, sailors, peasants, and workers,

  in which such lively democratic discussions had taken place, were disbanded and replaced

  by the ru
le of the Communist party.

  While the tone of Lenin's book, State and Revolution, which appeared in 1917, was anti-

  statist and libertarian, that same year Lenin, at the head of the new government, began the

  centralization of power in the Communist party and the suppression of al opposition. The

  revolution against tsarist Russia, for "peace, bread, and land," a genuine popular revolt involving masses of people, grassroots committees, and local Soviets, became transformed

  into elitist rule.21

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  Maxim Gorky, the great Russian writer, had welcomed and supported the revolution against the tsar in March 1917. But when the Bolsheviks took power in November, Gorky almost

  immediately saw that they were determined to wipe out any opposition and suppress any

  criticism. He observed the imprisonment of a number of socialist leaders who disagreed with

  the Bolsheviks.

  Two months after the Bolsheviks took power, in January 1918, they dissolved the

  Constituent Assembly, which had been elected by popular vote and which included

  representatives from the various anti-tsarist parties. Gorky was indignant. He became

  absolutely furious when workers who demonstrated peaceful y in Petrograd against the

  dissolution of the Constituent Assembly were shot down in the streets by government

  soldiers.

  He wrote in the newspaper that he edited in Petrograd, Novaya Zhizn (New Life) that the

  Constituent Assembly represented the century-long Russian dream of democracy. "Rivers of

  blood have been spil ed on the sacrificial altar of this sacred idea, and now the 'People's

  Commissars' have given orders to shoot the democracy which demonstrated in honor of this

  idea." Gorky recal ed the failed 1905 Revolution:

  On January 9, 1905, when the downtrodden, il -treated soldiers were firing

  into unarmed and peaceful crowds of workers by order of the Tsarist regime,

  intel ectuals and workers ran up to the soldiers—the unwil ing murderers—and

  shouted point-blank in their faces: "What are you doing, damn you? Who are

  you kil ing? Don't you see they are your brothers, they are unarmed, they

  bear no malice toward you, they are going to the Tsar to beg his attention to

  their needs… . Come to your senses, what are you doing, idiots!"22

  Gorky likened this to the shooting that had just taken place in front of the Constituent

  Assembly:

  And just as on January 9, 1905, people who had not lost their conscience and

  reason asked those who were shooting: "What are you doing, idiots? Aren't

  they your own people marching? You see there are red banners everywhere,

  and not a single poster hostile to the working class, not a single utterance

  hostile to you!"

  And—like the Tsarist soldiers—these murderers under orders answered:

  "We've got our orders! We've got our orders to shoot."

  (The scenes Gorky described seem like the ones that took place in Beijing, the capital of

  Communist China, in June 1989, when government troops fired at peaceful demonstrators

  for democracy, mostly students, kil ing hundreds of them, and bystanders cried out at

  them: "We are your brothers! Why are you shooting?")

  Around the same time, Gorky noted that of al the letters he received "the most interesting

  are those written by women." He commented on "the psychophysiology of a woman":

  As a being who incessantly replenishes the losses inflicted upon life by death

  and destruction, she must feel both more deeply and more acutely than I, a

  man, hatred and aversion for al that reinforces the work of death and

  destruction.

  Yes, Gorky said, this was idealism, but

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  I find that social idealism is most necessary precisely in an era of revolution…

  . Without the participation of this idealism, a revolution—and al of life—would

  turn into a dry, arithmetical problem of distributing material wealth, a

  problem the solution of which demands blind cruelty and streams of blood, a

  problem which, arousing savage instincts, kil s man's social spirit, as we shal

  see in our time.23

  Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (who was executed by the German police

  after an abortive revolution in 1919) admired the Bolsheviks' seizure of power in 1917. But

  she criticized the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly. She published a pamphlet, against

  the advice of some of her comrades, who said it would play into the hands of counter-

  revolutionaries. This has been the standard excuse given for the failure of revolutionaries to

  honestly criticize what they see as evil in revolutionary movements: "It wil play into the

  hands of… ." Luxemburg wrote,

  Socialism, by its very nature, cannot be dictated, introduced by command… .

  Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and

  assembly, without a free exchange of opinions, life dies out in every public

  institution and only bureaucracy remains active.24

  Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, American anarchists who were deported from the

  United States to their native Russia for opposing World War I, became observers of the

  early years of the Bolshevik regime, from 1919 to 1921, and were soon disil usioned with

  what they saw. The culmination of their despair at the betrayal of revolutionary ideals was

  the shooting down of the sailors who revolted at Kronstadt, outside Leningrad, asking that

  the revolution meet their needs. Trotsky and Lenin supervised the operation, and Goldman

  and Berkman left the Soviet Union in disgust.

  The extent of Stalin's crimes was final y admitted, three years after his death, when Nikita

  Khrushchev shook the several thousand delegates to the Twentieth Congress of the

  Communist party, by giving the bloody details of Stalin's murders of his own revolutionary

  col eagues. In the Khrushchev era, some reforms took place in the Soviet Union. Censorship

  of the foreign press stopped. Many political prisoners were set free. But repression

  persisted, the atmosphere of the police state was stil evident. Dissident writers and

  speakers were put in prison or given psychiatric examinations, pronounced psychotic, and

  put into mental institutions. A news item from Moscow in late 1086:

  Anatoly T. Marchenko, one of the best known Soviet political dissidents, has

  died in prison, his wife learned here today. He was 48 years old.

  Mr. Marchenko had spent more than 20 years of his life in prisons, labor

  camps and internal exile. He died in the prison at Chistopol, in the Tatar

  republic, while serving a 10-year term for "anti-Soviet agitation and

  propaganda."25

  A recognition of the terrible things that have happened in the Soviet Union should not lead

  us—as it has done to certain ex-Communists—to rush from one pole of fanaticism to

  another, to embrace the anticommunism of the U.S. government, to justify its wars, its

  control over other countries, its buildup of a genocidal nuclear arsenal at the expense of the

  American taxpayer, at the cost of poverty, sickness, and homelessness for tens of mil ions

  of Americans.

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  It was precisely such a rush from one hysterical end of the spectrum to another that led some people, indignant at the cruelties of capitalism, the bul ying of smal countries by the

  imperial powers, to adopt the Soviet Union uncritical y as the representative of social
ism, of

  the future. My own refusal to adopt either Soviet socialism or American capitalism as

  models of justice and freedom led me, while participating in the movements of the sixties,

  to read more and more about the philosophy of anarchism.

  Anarchists, I discovered, did not believe in anarchy as it is usual y denned—disorder,

  disorganization, chaos, confusion, and everyone doing as they like. On the contrary, they

  believed that society should be organized in a thousand different ways, that people had to

  cooperate in work and in play, to create a good society. But, anarchists insisted, any

  organization must avoid hierarchy and command from the top; it must be democratic,

  consensual, reaching decisions through constant discussion and argument.

  What attracted me to anarchism was its rejection of any bul ying authority—the authority of

  the state, of the church, or of the employer. Anarchism believes that if we can create an

  egalitarian society without extremes of poverty and wealth and join hands across al

  national boundaries, we wil not need police forces, prisons, armies, or war, because the

  underlying causes of these wil be gone.

  Anarchists are ferocious critics of al governments, whether capitalist or "socialist." They believe governments natural y tend to authoritarianism and think that we can have a society

  of self-governing, cooperative communities, linked together in ways that wil avoid a central

  bureaucracy, yet get things done on a national and international scale.

  This is, of course, a Utopian idea; it has existed nowhere, at least not for long. There have

  been moments in history when something approaching true democracy existed. One of

  those was the Paris Commune of 1871, when Parisians were involved in daily meetings,

  discussing every subject under the sun, trying to come to conclusions without governmental

  force.

  Another such moment was the period of six months or so at the start of the Spanish Civil

  War, when certain parts of Spain were in the hands of anarchist groups. One of those places

  was Barcelona, where George Orwel , wounded in the Spanish war, visited in December

  1936. He was astonished by what he saw:

  When one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something