Or, A Short Account Of My Life Online
FINDING OUT ABOUT the real lives of those who might have been heroes to us is frequently a disillusioning thing. Composers, musicians, writers, actors, their real lives are frequently entirely different from the public relations line. What we know of the show biz folk are often little more than the stuff lies are made from. Over and over again when I looked deeper than the PR and the ideological hagiographical presentation of heroes of the left, I wish I'd known what they were really like before I went to the bother of believing they were more admirable than they were. The influence on my thinking and maybe action from my idiotically misplaced admiration for them has certainly not generally been good.
I can take four of those as a unit, the four singers who made up the legendary black-listed pop-folk group of the late 1940s and 50s, The Weavers, especially the guy who I grew up seeing presented as St. Pete Seeger. Learning about his and his associates in the previous legendary Almanac Singers carrying the American-Stalinist line of appeasement with Nazism during the months of the idiotic Hitler-Stalin pact pretty well put a permanent dent in the halos of ol' Pete and Lee Hayes and the even the more legendary Woody Guthrie, who, whatever else can be said of him, was a great songwriter.
I have come, more and more, the more I look into the history of American Communism which such folk were associated with, if not card carrying members of, to see it as a combination of active and totally ineffective agents for Leninism, then Stalinism - with the disappointed fans of Trotsky in the mix. I think the most notable impact of communism and its associated figures impact on reality was in its bumbling tripping up and hampering of any real left, here and in many other countries. In all, they were a blight on the real struggle against the Constitution and for egalitarian democracy, economic justice, a decent, sustainable life, the real agenda of the real left. There is something of a lesson in that, the former Trots, the neo-conservatives were such masters in that discrediting effort of the egalitarian-democratic, the real left.
I think the habits if not active links between Soviet, now Russian dictators and the American secular left are, in fact, still on display in things like that Green Party line of Putin appeasement I posted the other day, a line taken up by someone I once respected in a similar way, dear old Noam Chomsky. That they, in the end, turn out to have a similar line on that as Republican-fascism of the Trumpian variety doesn't surprise me nearly as much as it once would have. There were so many of the old commies of the 1920s onward who did what the neo-con ex-Trots did, once their hero was murdered by Stalin's agents in Mexico and there was no prospect of him gaining power, turning full on Republican-fascist. Knee-jerk accusation of the United States to shift blame from, first Soviet, now Putonian crimes and violence, is one of the hall marks of the idiotically counter-productive secular lefties. If there is one thing that egalitarian democratic Americans, and those who would like to be that, will not accept it is blaming even the extremely imperfect union that is the United States for the crimes of foreign dictators.
One of those early figures to take what was mapped as a sharp turn right into corporate fascism but was really only a baby step away from Marxism was Max Eastman, the brother of Crystal Eastman, one of the founders of the ACLU, who went from what was considered the far left to Nazional Review style hackery. He was, more than anything, an ideological atheist who broke with his good buddy the trust-fund Stalinist Corliss Lamont over the Stalin show-trials of their fellow commies.
In his letter breaking with Corliss Lamont Eastman didn't much mention the millions already murdered under Communist rule (he uses that putrid objectifying of the human population, "the masses") something well and accurately reported in the West, he lamented their fellow commies who, if they had had power, would likely have run up a staggering body count of their own, many of them had helped Lenin and Stalin amass theirs. Over and over again, I've found that to be the case with disaffected communists and, to some extent anarchists who often seem to have no more of a reverence for the lives of the underclass and minorities than the most brutal of capitalists. Eastman's lament was based in their common cause which was not justice but promoting materialism and atheism, probably with atheism placed first. He proclaimed himself still a great admirer of Lamont's magnum opus, his Columbia Doctoral Dissertation arguing against the possibility of life after death. Someday I might go into my radically updated opinion of his advisor, John Dewey. He was also Max Eastman's advisor at Columbia.
I recall hearing one of those dear old, well-spoken, well-off, college-credentialed commies who left the American Communist Party after Khrushchev admitted the crimes of Stalin - crimes which had been well known and documented for more than two decades before as she remained a Communist - what had attracted her to it to start with. After thinking for a while the best she came up with is that she wanted "a more rational politics." Facing the mountains of corpses amassed by Lenin and her former hero Stalin, that's the best she could come up with as an explanation. Hearing that was one of the landmarks in seeing through the secular left.
In the years when much of the unselected literature, magazines, essays, etc. of the secular left have come to be readily available online, I have come to find pretty much everything about the old American secular left obviously wrong-headed at best, quite repugnant quite typically. When viewed without some ideologically motivated filtering, in their century and counting history of politics they proved themselves to be idiots who never had a lick of political success - American voters are smarter than to think that Soviet Dictatorship, later Chinese dictatorship, which achieved numbers of murders, oppression and enslavement on the Hitler level, was preferable to our own handicapped struggle for democracy.
The Greens, mentioned here the other day, elevated the Putin-Mike Flynn dinner companion, Jill Stein, to help give us the neo-Stalinist asset Trump. I'd like to know if there was any foreign money involved in that Green campaign. We are lucky that they didn't help Republican-fascists reimpose him on us or deliver the recently conducted election to them. I will guarantee you that they will try to play the spoiler again, probably in the next presidential cycle. If not, I will retract.
If, as it appears now, the Republicans take the House of Representatives, that is due to the Roberts Court allowing Republican-fascist gerrymandering to thwart the will of the majority of voters, the majority of American voters are not as stupid as the secular left or the corrupted American political system. I haven't closely followed the activities of any Green candidates for the House, if there were any, but a number of never could win "independent" candidates on the ballot may have played a similar role. If there was ever a time when we didn't need that kind of idiotic ballot access such as 1970s style "liberals" in Maine imposed on us, it is now. Splitting the opposition to fascism is one of the fascists greatest assets, one which the secular left has specialized in.
The secular left in America has never been much of anything but counterproductive, the longer I look into the actual (generally all too temporary) successes of American democracy, the less it can be attributed to secularist ideologues, least of all ideological materialists, atheists and those who assert a line of scientism. Most of the time any genuine egalitarian-democraic leftists have associated themselves with those often university and small-media centered ideologues it has not been good for the progress of the real left. The real left has had to deal with the burden of that association at the same time they have had to struggle for the progress which is their only real purpose to exist against political-economic gangsters. The long diversion into sympathy for those dear old commies because the gangster-fascists were mean to them was sympathy for Stalinists and, as such, sympathy badly spent. Though it is a stupid habit that might be related to what I suspect keeps many an ACLU style liberal awake at night, the fear that somewhere, somehow, a liberal is saying mean things about Nazis, fascists and the American indigenous version of that, white supremacists. I really have come to despise the ACLU.
The way you get notice and esteem on the secular left is generally through promoting yourself as an extreme devotee and "fighter" for some abstract, theoretical line of bilge. Declaring yourself the most lefty in the room, such as the Leninist agents of Communism did in destroying the most successful leftist party in American history, the old Socialist Party in Chicago in 1919* and as the Maoists did, even as the mass murder of the Cultural Revolution was at its deadliest, about forty-five years later when the SDS was similarly wrecked. That is how you make a name for yourself in secular lefty politics. Achievement of actual good for the lives of actual people and other living creatures is notably sparse for the secular left and, as they have never much reformed themselves in order to put that first, something they don't much care about. That would be because they REALLY don't care about that.
The values of the secular left aren't especially admirable. For example the promotion of addictive substances has about as weird a place in the culture of the left as could be imagined. Alcohol, tobacco and drugs are weirdly associated with the secular left, perhaps because more than being like the real left, they are more a weird combination of libertarianism attached to some of the worst of oppressive governments. Maybe that's not so surprising considering things like the Soviet promotion of alcoholism, the better to control the inebriated masses, something that I understand Putin has brought back in a big way. Getting back to the Weavers, that movie they made of their last appearance, which was sort of a benefit for Lee Hayes who was in bad health, an amputee in a wheel-chair, as I recall, started with Darlin' Cory - I believe they had collectively said that was their favorite folksong, if my memory serves - a song presenting moon-shining and the violence associated with it in a positive light, in a kind of low-brow glamor. And that is typical of that, often college based, folky crap, associating the secular left with drinkin' and hell raisin', mostly from a perpetually adolescent male point of view and of the perpetually adolescent gals who like that kind of thing. And that would be because that has always been such a reliable venue in the pursuit of economic justice and equality.
Before you pick up on that, it was said sarcastically. Perhaps it is related to their elevation of the material to be a replacement for God (thus the "atom" symbol so many atheists have adopted as their mascot) in so far as alcoholics have put the alcohol molecule as their higher power that controls their lives and determines their actions, the thing they sacrifice themselves to. Other denominations of addicts put other molecules in the same place. It makes a perverted kind of sense.
Some longtime readers may have been puzzled by my frequent mention of the Eugene O'Neill play The Iceman Cometh but I really do believe it is probably the best meditation on the futility and defective nature of the secular left ever made, either as an artistic expression or, in fact, of any expository treatment of it. That it takes place among a bunch of alcoholics in a flea bag bar is appropriate. That the lefties are all either in a state of alcoholic dementia or bitterly cynical apostates who mix in with those who have had no ideals higher than those of a pimp or the hell raisin' good-time guy, the much anticipated drummer Hickey who, unlike them, has successfully held down a job as a traveling salesman.
The amount of the play taken up with issues of the left, whether through the disillusioned anarchist, Larry, Don, the son of his once lover and, perhaps his son, and the alcoholic anarchist periodical editor Hugo, that is certainly the primary focus of the work. It is, I think, O'Neill's honest evaluation of the old-line secular left. He was, for a time, part of that left and personally knew many of whose pre-WWII heroes held to be legends by the idiot secular lefties even today. I first noticed the aptness of the play as a microcosm of the American secular left during the hey-day of the lefty blogs during the new atheism fad of the 00's. Some of them were, fifteen years ago, turning into that kind of virtual tavern, a louche salon with all the comforts of home. The cynicism was the same and dominated. There might not have been ready liquor provided by the proprietor to keep your thinking down but you could BYOB. There was the collective repetition of the litanies of the faith, the effortless citation of common received "wisdom," obeisance to the totems of club membership, the foolishness of which was obvious from its futility in reality and there was the excitement of the in-group ganging up on someone who tried to insert a different idea into the discussion.
That secular left achieved nothing except attaching themselves to the real left, trying to gain the upper hand and discrediting the real thing. That has been, actually, the strategy of those lefts from the 1900s onward, it is what killed the most successful party of the left, as mentioned above, it thwarted the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, etc. Look at the idiotic exercise, the Left Forum, that continues year after year doing the same things and promising the suckers that it's, somehow, going to work this time for more than half a century (if you count the Socialist Scholars Conference it grew out of). How many wasted decades and centuries does it take to face the fact that it is not only discreditable, it is permanently discredited.
The real left cannot grow out of materialism and atheism because those will always destroy what a real left has to start from, definite moral positions that are not only non-negotiable, they have to be held as a durable and certain structure of truths. Neither science nor mathematics nor logic can touch that reality, you have to choose it as a firm and unshakable belief. That we are all of us, despite appearances, equal and the possessors of equal rights given to us by God, that those rights include a right to not only the minimum of sustenance to keep us in constant desperation and insecurity but enough to sustain us in a decent life. That the environment that all life depends on must be protected so as to have it sustain us. That there are real and bad consequences for any of us as individuals and as a society for not doing those things, if not personally, for us on Earth, then eventually in a way that we will experience. That what we do for the least among us will determine our futures. And a lot of others that could be listed here. No real left of any good will comes from any other basis.
The misplacement of Marxism on the left of the idiotic old-style graph of political identity on the basis of what they claimed they were going to do with the money is the kind of thing that happens when you are a materialist reductionist who believes the modernist superstition that simple mathematical equations are an oracle of how reality is really structured. The idea was that Nazism on one end and Marxism on the other end, pivoting on the "center" made it all balance, so it must be real. Marx may have mouthed some good slogans in The Communist Manifesto that made it seem like he was really and truly a champion of the rights of workers, and he may have been sincere in that, but he really had no belief that egalitarian democracy would be possible. He believed in the clearly wrong belief that reality was mechanical, that we were simply cogs and springs in a machine that would work itself out to whatever it was going to end up being. The habit of believing you are working for the benefit of "the masses" ignores the reality that there is no "mass" that is separable from the individuals you imagine it out of.
I think a far more realistic graph of political identity might have materialist determinism on one end and the belief that we are all endowed with equal and inalienable rights on a place far from materialism on a line that might extend past that point on in that direction to infinity. There is a reason that the modern mass-murdering regimes have had a pretense of being scientific, "National socialism is nothing but applied biology," the scientific pretensions of Marxism, etc. Their shared materialism, even as they are held to be opposites on that absurd graph of political identity is too noticeable to not be implicated in what they produce. The people who made those ideologies up weren't stupid, though those who powered themselves to the top in a way that might have pleased a Nietzsche and did, in fact, please the Fabian George Bernard Shaw, like Hitler and Stalin might have been mighty vulgar and not the greatest of readers. The observed history and most notable characteristics of Marxism and its ideological allies, mass murder, oppression, terror, etc. puts those squarely next to Nazism and not that distant from capitalism at its worst. There is a reason it was so easy for the KGB man, Putin to take that little step into something more akin to Nazism than social democracy. The academic, intellectual Marxists who never noticed the destruction of intellectualism that comes with materialism are dolts.
Speaking of which, since "socialism" is a word so twisted and distorted that it was adopted both by the Stalinists and the Nazis, creepy entities such as Fabianism, as well as some genuine egalitarian democrats, it's probably a word that should be scrapped and a better definition of economic justice found for true egalitarian democrats. I think the word got saddled with so much crap that it broke its back. Even where that association has not discredited it, the use of it to mean entirely different things makes it dangerously problematic and, in referring to the real effort for egalitarian democracy based on good will, some other word should be used.
The same is true for "democracy" which needs to be replaced with something that hasn't been used by the likes of the Soviet satellite dictatorships, the Kim regime in North Korea, slavery-supported, misogynistic, oligarchic systems (such as the original democracy of ancient Athens) and myriad other anti-egalitarian despotic regimes.
And "republic" has similar problems with it. We need a more accurate and specific vocabulary for the thinking of the egalitarian democratic left, we need it as badly as we do the definitive rejection of the secular, materialist-atheist-scientistic old left. Words designed to not only jettison old associations with the old terms but much of the actual ideological baggage of those, as well. The ideological baggage is what earned those terms everything from disrepute to dangerous inspecificity in what they mean.
* I think the charge that those who were in control of the Socialist Party at the time were underhanded (Louis Boudin complained they were "crooks" before he very quickly decided the others were lunatics) in how they tried to deal with the John Reed camp putsch to take it over for Leninism is unfair because they were hardly dealing with people who were honest about what they were doing.
Those who do politics frequently find that the rules and regulations get gamed and hijacked in that way, the American Constitution certainly as been by corporate fascists, billionaires, millionaires here and those foreign billionaire gangsters and dictators which the Roberts Court empowered in Citizens United. It was easy for them to do it because the thing was rigged against equality and democracy from the start. The Supreme Court is largely comprised of those who game the system for generally bad ends. As can be seen in their use of even something as good as the 14th Amendment is susceptible to their studied, blatant dishonesty about its history. The brief period after World War Two, when the world saw, on full display, the horrors of military distatorship, fascism and Nazism, when the Warren court tried to game the Constitution for better ends, sometimes disastriously foolish in what they did, was a brief and long over abberation.
I don't blame people who break the rules to protect things from really bad people who have no good intentions. I blame the really bad people for making that a necessity. How do you judge when it is all right to do that? By the intentions and their actions in trying to achieve them AND BY THE RESULTS. Given that the rules are so bent and broken as done by the worst of those in the judiciary, I don't think the real left can usefully volunteer to be hampered by the rules in ways our opponents, either on the gangster right or the gangster "left" don't feel restrained by. And don't for a second believe that they are anything but the adversaries of equality, economic justice and real democracy. I think being governed by solid, absolute moral stands is a far bigger problem for secular politics of a materialist sort because, in the end, materialism has no immutable goal and so nothing higher than the rules as written or temporarily imagined. Anyone who "just wants an even playing field" is too little invested in equality and justice to trust. That is one of the reasons I have come to distrust things like the "civil liberties" lawyers.
You have to want more than that kind of technical, evil enabling "equality". The Republican-fascist right wants more than that, it wants power and the power to steal everything and to prevent egalitarian democracy. We know for a fact that they will do anything to get it, from the Brooks Bros. Supreme Court putsch that put George W. Bush in power to the actions of the sanctimonious James Comey and lies published by the New York Times and the free press got us Trump and the violent fascists who tried to keep him in power. Compared to that the desire to want equality, economic justice, democracy is well worth breaking the rules for. Those goals are higher than man made rules, if you don't believe that, to hold that as determining your course of conduct, you have surrendered to the gangsters.
