Revolution on Our Mind: Two Hundred Fifty Years Since the Declaration of Independence

Next year will mark 250 years since the “official” date assigned to the rebellion against British sovereignty in its North American colony, popularly known as the “American Revolution.” In early July of 1776, a number of prominent figures and leaders of colonial resistance to the authority of the English Crown met in the port city of one of the English colonies and signed a resolution and an audacious document declaring independence. The impressively crafted and innovative document drew an administrative and military response from English authorities in both London and the colonies and forced the colonies to plan their next defiant move. If Philadelphia was the cradle of the revolution, the Declaration of Independence was its founding document.

As with past celebrations of the revolution, there will be reenactments, speeches, and other self-congratulatory virtue-signaling. Politicians will compete to ascribe their own views to the founding principles. Every opportunity will be taken to commercialize the event from Ken Burns’ calculated-to-be-unchallenging televised take (already underway!) on the colonial uprising to meaningless flyovers of outdoor events and endless volleys of fireworks.

Anniversaries, like next year’s, understandably bring out a reconsideration, a reevaluation, and a renewed search for the meaning of the widely regarded event. And given the fractures in US politics, the conclusions will be contested between diverse perspectives and hostile ideologies. For many, if not most, the US is at a crossroads and understanding its past is likely a crucial determinant of the way forward.

One must begin with the account of the revolution foisted on young minds in the mandatory American History classes of the US public high schools. While these courses may stop short of the extreme fabulism of Founding Father sainthood, they reproduce the mythology of the liberation of a “discovered” land marching through history as a virtuous exception to the greed and malice of the old world and a benevolent friend to those seeking to escape oppression and backwardness. Unfortunately, these classes too often stamp an indelible, lingering impression on those who suffer this miseducation.

The venerated writers, Charles and Mary Beard, in their now-neglected 1927 classic, The Rise of American Civilization, sharply dismiss the crudest contending myths:

The oldest hypothesis, born of the conflict on American soil, is the consecrated story of school textbooks: the Revolution was an indignant uprising of a virtuous people, who loved orderly and progressive government, against the cruel, unnatural, and unconstitutional acts of King George III. From this same conflict arose, on the other side, the Tory interpretation: the War for Independence was a violent outcome of lawless efforts on the part of bucolic clowns, led by briefless pettifoggers and smuggling merchants, to evade wise and moderate laws broadly conceived in the interest of the English-speaking empire. Such were the authentic canons of early creeds.

With the flow of time appeared some doubts about the finality of both these verdicts. 

The Beards, like many others, especially those in the Marxist tradition, understood the role of both class and economic interests in the unfolding of the revolution. Their work joins with the account of the equally underappreciated Marxist scholar, Herbert Morais, in stressing the importance of English mercantilism in generating the contradiction between England and its colonies. In The Struggle for American Freedom (1944), Morais recognizes the tension between merchants and manufacturers in England and the New World, especially in New England:

While the southern provinces could be made to fit into the English mercantile system, the New England colonies could not. The simple reason for this was that they produced practically nothing which the mother country wanted. Their farm products-- wheat, rye, barley, and oats-- were like those in England. Their fisheries served only to draw away profits from English fishermen and to hamper the growth of the English fishing fleet. The rapidly developing industries of New England acted as a direct threat to the prosperity of English manufacturers who considered the colonies an outlet for their goods. New England shipping drained off English seamen and competed with English traders for the commerce of the West Indies, the Wine Islands, and the Mediterranean.

While the southern colonies did indeed enjoy strong trade with the “motherland” -- tobacco, indigo, rice-- their perpetual debt to English financiers gave reason to coalesce with Northern resistance. 

For Morais, this contradiction-- especially in the shadow of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688-- soured “imperial-colonial relations”:

English control over America was extended by converting proprietary and corporate colonies into royal provinces, a move which was obviously dictated by the mercantilistic interests of the English ruling classes. In all of the royal colonies dual power existed: the governor representing the external authority and the colonial assembly the internal. Throughout the provincial period (1689-1763), these two forces struggled for supremacy, the fundamental issue at stake being: Who was to rule over America? 

Is Morais likening the period of dual power in the colonies to the dual power between the Soviets and the Duma before the 1917 October Revolution in Russia? Is he suggesting that economic friction between two class hierarchies-- one in England, one over three thousand miles away-- led to an unsustainable dual power, resolved by revolution?

For Morais, the colonial agency for this struggle for power came from two class bases: the aggrieved “merchant and planter classes” and the working classes-- farmers, mechanics, artisans, and day laborers. These classes united under the banner of revolution, but pursued two distinct struggles: “...the struggle for self-government and national independence and the struggle among the American people themselves for a more democratic order.”

Herbert Aptheker, a Marxist historian and admirer of Morais, writing in The American Revolution 1763-1783 (1960) accepted Morais’ two struggles, and added a third current: 

The American Revolution was the result of the interpenetration of three currents: the fundamental conflict of interest between the rulers of the colonizing power and the vast majority of the colonists [Morais’ struggle for national independence]; the class stratification within the colonies themselves and the resulting class struggles that marked colonial history which almost always found the British imperial power as a bulwark of the reactionary or the conservative interests in such struggles [Morais’ struggle for a more democratic order]; and the developing sense of American nationality, transcending class lines, which resulted from the varied origins of the colonies’ peoples, their physical separation from England, the different fauna and flora and climate of their surroundings, their different problems and interests, their own developing culture and psychology and even language, their common history, and from their own experience of common hostility-- varying in degree and place and time--- towards the powers-that-be in England.

Aptheker’s third current assumes a more fully developed “American” identity than evidence permits. Many historians note that inhabitants of the colonies maintained a closer identification with their specific colony-- Massachusetts, Virginia, etc.-- than with the entire largely English-speaking North American project. Moreover, nearly all concede that the population was divided deeply between Patriots, neutrals, and Tories (Richard Bell calculates that roughly 40% of colonists were Patriots, 40% were indifferent, and 20% Tories, in his excellent The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (2025)). With these divisions, the revolutionary era was hardly fertile soil for a widely accepted national identity.

In fact, Aptheker may be confusing cause with effect; the revolution created a national identity, rather than being the cause of it.

Aptheker reminds us that V.I. Lenin, in his Letter to American Workers (1918) famously wrote that:

The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world. [my emphasis]

The highlighted area is often cited without reference to Lenin’s comparison with the mindless, bloody clashes of empires, fought not over any liberatory cause, but from personal or ruling-class interest. It is sometimes overlooked that Lenin goes on to laud with equal or greater enthusiasm “...the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!”. It reminds us that Lenin always ascribes “revolutionary significance” in the context of time and place. The “greatness” of the American Revolution draws its greatness from the context of an original, successful, and unlikely national liberation. Yes, it is a national liberation tarnished by the original sin of aboriginal displacement and genocide and stained by the national embrace of chattel slavery.

For some, the “greatness” of the American Revolution is a challenging reach. Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, comparing the US colonial revolution with the French Revolution, observes in his Echoes of the Marseillaise (1990): 

Indeed, the comparatively modest international influence of the American Revolution itself-- must strike the observer. As a model for changing social and political systems it was absorbed, as it were, and replaced by the French Revolution, partly because reformers or revolutionaries in European societies could recognize themselves more readily in the ancien régime of France than in the free colonists and slave-holders of North America. Also, the French Revolution saw itself, far more than the American had, as a global phenomenon, the model and pioneer of the world’s destiny.

Some might point to Hobsbawm’s reference to “reformers or revolutionaries in European societies” as reflecting a narrow Eurocentric view of the impact of the US revolution, noting that a vastly influential Asian revolutionary like Ho Chi Minh cited the Declaration of Independence as enormously influential to the Vietnamese struggle for independence. Moreover, Richard Bell’s recent book-- cited above-- argues persuasively that the revolution’s reach was global and profound:

…winning independence required a world war in all but in name. What began as a domestic dispute over taxes, trading rights, and home rule soon metastasized into something much bigger and broader, pulling in enslaved people as well as Native people and French and Spanish speakers living along the length of the Mississippi River. And it kept expanding outward, reverberating across every habitable continent and spreading tumult, uncertainty, and opportunity in all directions.

Marxist William Z. Foster would largely agree, though he would place the US revolution in the context of a long period of “hemispheric revolution,” stretching for about sixty years: “The several national political upheavals constituted one general hemispheric revolution. Taken together, they were by far the broadest revolutionary movement the world had known up to that period.”

For Foster, in his Outline Political History of the Americas (1951), “The heart of this great movement was a revolutionary attack against the feudal system. It was the broad all-American bourgeois, i.e., capitalist, revolution.”

The broad hemispheric revolution may be made to fit revolutions against feudal relations to some extent, if we view Spanish and Portuguese domination as imposing the mother countries’ feudal system on their colonies. But surely England was not imposing feudalism on its colonies, since both the 1640 revolution and the so-called “glorious” revolution of 1688 had liberated England from nearly all but the ceremonial grip of feudal absolutism. And the quasi-feudal slavocracy of the Southern states was left largely untouched by the rebellion against England. 

Perhaps Foster meant to take the US revolution as a rebellion against the vestiges of feudalism-- the imperious reign of the monarch, George III-- existing in a country well on its way toward bourgeois domination. Or maybe Foster saw the frequent royal granting of vast tracts of land to favored absentees or expatriates as an expression of feudal grants, though they did not result in classic feudal manorial relations. 

Leftist historian, Greg Grandin, would agree that the rebellion in the North American colonies had an impact far beyond that sliver of coastline: “And so Spain joined France [in supporting the colonial cause] escalating a provincial rebellion into an imperial world war: Charles and Louis against George.” In his ambitious and insightful America, América: A New History of the New World, Grandin shows that the “hemispherical revolutions” while sharing much, also differed radically in their fundamental assumptions. In the English-speaking North, there was a privileged sense of destiny, of self-righteousness, while the Southern rebellion sought dignity and independence. Grandin expressed the difference through the voices of leading intellectuals:

Compare… Venezuela’s independence manifesto… to [the] Declaration of Independence. History barely gets a tug from Jefferson. All is nature, freed from the burden of society. All the New World’s evils are placed at the feet of King George. The original settlers and their heirs who claimed the land and drove off its original inhabitants did no wrong. They only suffered wrongs. For John Adams, North America was “not a conquered, but discovered country.”

In contrast, [for Jefferson’s Venezuelan counterparts], the New World wasn’t discovered, but “conquered.” They knew that America was a stolen continent. The Conquest hovers over their independence manifesto, an event so vile it set the course for centuries of human events.

How these differences play out over a century of conflict, mistrust, and intervention between North and South is the subject of Grandin’s 2025 book, where he recounts their different trajectories-- framed by discovery or conquest-- and how those differing ideas shaped the world.

We gain much in understanding the historical limitations of the US rebellion by comparing its foundations with that of the other national liberation movements in the Americas.

Important Left historian, Gerald Horne, casts further shade over the eighteenth-century uprising by declaring it not a revolution, but a counter-revolution against the anticipated outlawing of slavery in England. Horne’s provocative thesis in The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014) argues that the avowed high-minded principles of the revolution’s elites were overshadowed by the interests of the slaveholding planters (the majority of the Declaration’s signers were slave-owners). While indisputable evidence of the so-called Founding Fathers’ ultimate motivation would be hard to come by, their material interests are certainly relevant. By reminding us of those slaveholding interests, Horne is rendering a service, just as Charles Beard did with his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), by serving as a reminder of the racial and class interests of the revolution’s leaders and the Constitution's authors. Yet both limit the meaning of the revolution and the Constitution to those narrow interests and deny the role of the broader masses on determining the revolution’s fate and impact.

Arguably the most well-known left account of the revolution is found in Howard Zinn’s widely influential A People's History of the United States (1980). Zinn-- an active participant in the post-Red Scare US New Left-- takes a radically different tactic from Horne and others influenced by Marx. For Zinn, elites were constantly seeking to tame, to restrain, to channel the direction of energized masses away from revolution, away from decisive action. Drawing from the history-from-below school of historical studies and adhering to the 1960s student-left ideology of radical democracy, he stresses the spontaneity and self-motivation of common folk. One might say that his analysis of 1776 foretells the Occupy movement of our time:

Mechanics were demanding political democracy in the colonial cities: open meetings of representative assemblies, public galleries in the legislative halls, and the publishing of roll-call votes, so that the constituents could check on representatives. They wanted open-air meetings where the population could participate in making policy, more equitable taxes, price controls, and the election of mechanics and other ordinary people to government posts.

Rebellion is natural and instinctive for Zinn, as he experienced it with 1960s youth. The danger is perceived as conservative elements, elites, authoritarians, fear-mongers, or others obstructing the wave of spontaneous social change. It is an appealing, though romantic view, and one that continues to seduce many who obstinately resist the necessity of planning and organization in social change. 

For each interpretation of the US revolution discussed here and many others unmentioned, there are sets of particular circumstances-- like those of Zinn-- that shaped that interpretation to a greater or lesser extent. Each writer wrote at a time and place that shaped how they would think about the revolution. 

Charles and Mary Beard's thinking was undoubtedly influenced by their knowledge of populist risings of the late nineteenth century that brought class questions to the fore. They looked at the revolution through that lens.

Hobsbawm’s negative view of the significance of the US revolution came at a time of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe that surely added to his growing skepticism about revolutionary change. Only the iconic French Revolution remained of historic significance to him.

Aptheker, writing with the popular front to his back and facing a hell of McCarthyite red-baiting and repression, understandably stressed the political innovations of the US revolution, especially its rejection of official oppression and its call for liberty.

For Grandin, his long engagement supporting solidarity movements with Central and South America unsurprisingly influenced his circumspection regarding the US revolution.

And Horne’s reinterpretation came amidst growing frustration with officially tolerated, if not encouraged, violence and murder of Black people. Its coincidence with the Black Lives Matter movement gave it greater relevance. And undoubtedly, it gave inspiration to the New York Times 1619 Project, which commanded attention in the struggle against racism.  

Whether we like it or not, next year's orgy of celebration will conjure a myriad of interpretations of the “American Revolution” with a myriad of claims about their significance for today. The entire political spectrum will offer lessons of the revolution for those seeking an exit from the profound crises of this moment. In reality, much can be learned from a study of the period, making participation in the discussion worthwhile and necessary.

In that regard, consider the observations of the then-Soviet scholar, Vladimir Sogrin. In Founding Fathers of the United States (1988), he wrote:

The historical situation, the unique natural conditions and geographical position were propitious for the development of the progressive social system in the United States. It emerged as a bourgeois state, bypassing all the preceding socio-historical formations, so that American capitalism did not have to destroy feudal foundations, a process which took other countries scores and even hundreds of years to complete. This enabled the bourgeois socio-economic system to advance with seven-league strides, and speeded up the establishment in the country of republican and other progressive principles inscribed on the banner of the Enlightenment…

Acknowledgement of the progressive nature of the transformations effected by the American Revolution and the American Republic gives no grounds for their idealization. American liberal historians’ attempts to prove that an “empire of reason”, which the European enlighteners dreamed about, was established in North America under the impact of the revolution is to me an example of an apologetic interpretation. The ideals of the Enlightenment were by far not realized, like, for instance, its fundamental principle of equal legal and political rights for all, as it did not embrace the blacks, Indians, women and indigent white men…

The US War of Independence ushered in, rather than completed, the era of bourgeois revolutions in North America.

We should ponder whether today--nearly two hundred and fifty years later-- the US is ripe for another revolution, a revolution that would take us well beyond the revolution conjured by the fifty-six lawyers, merchants, planters, and elites who gave us the original Declaration. May the next one be for independence from capitalism. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Two Marxisms?

Google knows that I have an abiding interest in Marxism. Consequently, I receive frequent links to articles that Google’s algorithms select as popular or influential. Consistently, at the top of the list, are articles by or about the irrepressible Slavoj Žižek. Žižek has mastered the tricks of a public intellectual-- entertaining, pompous, outrageous, calculatedly obscure, and mannered. The disheveled pose and the beard add to a near caricature of the European professor gifting the world with big ideas embedded deeply in layers of obscurantism-- a sure-fire way to appear profound. And a sure-fire way to advance one’s commercial entertainment value.

Close followers of the “master” even post videos of Žižek devouring hot dogs-- one in each hand! He is currently cashing in on a public debate with a right-wing gas-bag counterpart which reportedly brings in obscene prices for tickets. Marxism as entrepreneurship.

Žižek is one of the latest iterations of a long line of largely European academics who build modest public celebrity from an identification with Marxism or the Marxist tradition. From Sartre and existentialism through structuralism, postmodernism, post-essentialism, post-Fordism, and identarian politics, academics have appropriated pieces of the Marxist tradition and claimed to rethink that tradition, while keeping a measured, safe distance from any Marxist movement. They are Marxists when it brings an audience, but seldom answer the call to action.

The curious thing about this intellectual Marxism, this parlor, dilettante Marxism is that it is never all in; it is Marxism with grave reservations. Marxism is fine if it’s the “early” Marx, the “humanist” Marx, the “Hegelian” Marx, the Marx of the Grundrisse, the Marx without Engels, the Marx without the working class, the Marx before Bolshevism, or before Communism. Understandably, if you want to be the next big Marx-whisperer, you must separate yourself from the pack, you must rethink Marxism, rediscover the “real” Marx, locate where Marx got it wrong.

Previous generations of well-meaning, but class-befuddled university students have been seduced by “radical” thinkers who offer a taste of rebellion in a sexy academic package. Student book packs carried unread, but fashionable books by authors like Marcuse, Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Laclau, Mouffe, Foucault, Derrida, Negri, and Hardt-- authors who shared common features of exotic, provocative book titles and impenetrable prose. Books that promised much, but delivered murk.

With a new generation of radically minded youth looking for alternatives to capitalism and curious about socialism, it is inevitable that many are looking toward Marx. And where do they turn?

A Yale professor unabashedly offers a handy primer, featured in the hip Jacobin Magazine, entitled How to be a Marxist. Professor Samuel Moyn is currently the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence. Apparently, Moyn feels no unease with holding a chair endowed by one of the country’s most notorious anti-Communist, anti-Marxist publishers, while offering a guidebook to Marxism.

Moyn’s How to… presumption to guide the unknowing to Marxism is neither justified nor explained. Nonetheless, he feels confident to recommend two recently deceased academics, Moishe Postone and Erik Olin Wright (along with the still living Perry Anderson), as representing the last of “...the generation of great intellectuals whose 1960s experiences led them to adopt a lifework of recovering and reimagining Marxism.”

I confess that his choice of Moishe Postone had me baffled. Should I be embarrassed to say that I had never known Professor Postone’s work or known him to be a Marxist? When I found a YouTube interview with the esteemed Professor Postone, I quickly discovered that he emphatically and without reservation denies being a Marxist. Further, Postone contends that most of what we call Marxism was written by Frederick Engels. Postone concedes that Engels was “really a good guy,” but Engels never properly understood Marx. Postone, on the other hand, does. And his Marx does not “glorify” the industrial working class.

I am, however, familiar with the other alleged exemplar of a “great intellectual” devotion to Marxism, Erik Olin Wright. Wright was a long-standing, prominent member of the so-called “Analytic Marxism” school. Wright, like the other members of this intellectual movement, attempted to place Marxism on a “legitimate” foundation, where legitimacy was earned by subjecting Marxism to the rigors of conventional Anglo-American social science. The conceit that Anglo-American social science is without flaws or that it has nothing to learn from Marx’s method is never questioned with this clique. But to Wright’s credit, he struggled mightily to grasp the concept of social class.

In order “to save the Left from going down various cul-de-sacs again,” Professor Moyn offers the latest book of his “brilliant colleague,” Martin Hägglund. Moyn assures us that “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom is an excellent place to start for those who want to energize the theory of socialism, or even build their own theory of a Marxist variant of it.”

It takes only a brief moment to see that Martin Hägglund and his admiring colleague are taking us down other cul-de-sacs, ones trod by many earlier generations. Hägglund’s journey would revisit existentialism, Hegel, and Christian traditions in search of the elusive “meaning of life.” Though many of us thought that Marx offered a profoundly informed analysis of social change and social justice, Moyn/Hägglund, following Postone, bring forward “the ultimate questions anyone must ask: what work should I do? How should I spend my finite time?” Accumulating capital contrasts, they submit, with “maximizing... each individual’s free time to spend as she pleases…”

Thus, the struggle for emancipation, in this rethinking of Marxism, is not the emancipation of the working class, but the wresting of freely disposable time from the grip of work. The professors concede that this struggle is far easier for academics than for “the wretched of the earth.”

“And finally,” Moyn concludes, “there is Hägglund’s proposal that Marxists can ditch communism — which in any event Marx described vaguely — in favor of democracy. It is not totally clear what Hägglund means by democracy, something which neither Marx himself nor many Marxists have chosen to pursue theoretically.” So Hägglund distills “Marxism” into a rejection of Communism and an embrace of a vague “democracy.” I would have to agree with Moyn: “Indeed, it is remarkable how little of what most people have thought Marxist theory was about make it into Hägglund’s ...attempt to restart it for our time.” Apparently, the now revealed secret of becoming a Marxist is to discard Marx.

Like many self-proclaimed “Marxists” who came before Postone, Hägglund, and Moyn, their intent seems to be to defang Marxism more than it is promote it.

Dangerous Ideas

The naked truth is that Marxism-- from the time of Marx’s censorship and multiple expulsions from different countries-- is a dangerous idea. Marx’s inability to secure academic appointments and his constant surveillance and harassment by authorities proved to be a harbinger of the fate of nearly all authentic Marxist intellectuals. Capitalism does not endow those who advocate the undoing of capitalism with academic honor or celebrity. And those “Marxists” who do rise to academic acclaim, who get lucrative book deals, who enjoy media exposure, seldom present much of a threat to the system.

It is a telling fact that, though history has produced many “organic” Marxists, Marxists with roots in the working class and in movements challenging capitalism, their contributions seldom populate the bibliographies of university professors, unless to deride. University employment is rarely available to purveyors of dangerous ideas or the advocacy of a version of Marx that calls for revolutionary change.

A Marxist historian like the late Herbert Aptheker, who did more than any other intellectual to challenge the twisted Birth of a Nation/Gone With The Wind depiction of the benign South and its heroic defense of a noble way of life, could not find work in US universities. Indeed, it took a free speech movement to get him to be permitted to speak at all on US campuses. His books have disappeared from circulation and few students of African American history are exposed to his contributions.

No one has created a history of the US labor movement to rival the late Marxist Phillip Foner’s 10-volume History of the Labor Movement in the US. Foner’s 5-volume The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass reestablished Douglass as a preeminent figure in the abolition of slavery in the US. An historically Black university, Lincoln University, courageously hired Foner after years of blacklisting. Sadly, today, his works are largely ignored in fields where he pioneered.

The serious contributions of many other US Marxist intellectuals can be found in back issues of publications like Science and Society, Political Affairs, Masses, Masses and Mainstream, and Freedomways resting on out-of-the-way library shelves gathering dust, diminished by McCarthyism, blacklists, scholarly cowardice, and blatant anti-Communism.

The doors and public discourse of the academy and the mass media have equally been shut to working class Marxists (unless they renounce their views!). Despite his leading of working class movements and his writing prolifically, Marxist William Z. Foster’s works on organizing, labor strategy and tactics, and political economy are largely forgotten, unless they reappear as someone else’s thinking. Other key Marxist figures responsible for and interpreting some of labor’s finest moments such as Len De Caux and Wyndham Mortimer are denied membership in the club.

Similarly, Marxist pioneers in the Black and women’s equality movements like Benjamin Davis, William Patterson, and Claudia Jones are neither hailed as such nor offered as examples of “How to be a Marxist.” 

Marxist political economist Victor Perlo's work in identifying the highest reaches of finance capital and the economics of racism are curiously missing from any relevant academic conversation.

What these Marxists all share is an activist political life in the US Communist Party, a proud badge, but one denigrated by most US intellectuals.

The best writing of the venerable Monthly Review magazine suffers the same marginalization. Its founders were threatening enough to be victimized by the Red scare. And co-founder Paul Sweezy, a serious Marxist political economist, never was enthusiastically welcomed into academic circles.

Today, Michael Parenti is the most dangerous Marxist intellectual in the US. I know this because despite countless books, videos, and speaking engagements, despite an uncompromising commitment to a Marxist interpretation of history and current events, despite a profound, but reasoned hatred of capitalism, and despite an admirably approachable style and manner with big ideas, he is otherwise unemployed by universities and denied access to all but the most left or marginal media.

Another impressive US Marxist scholar, Gerald Horne, though enjoying academic tenure, deserves to be studied by every “leftist” in the US for the integrity, accessibility, and quality of his work.

Authentic Marxism, as opposed to fashionable, trendy, or faddish Marxism, is relentless, aggressive, and inspiring of action. It diligently dissects the inner workings of the capitalist system. It is ruthless and unsparing in its rejection of capitalism. It challenges conventional thinking, making few friends in the capitalist press and rocking the gentility and collegiality of the staid liberalism of the academy. Marxism is not a career move, but a thankless commitment.

Real Marxists are necessarily outliers. Until the conditions for revolutionary changes ripen, they are often subjected to skepticism, disinterest, even derision and hostility. Marxist poseurs are allergic to political organizations, activism, and intellectual risk, while committed Marxists are compelled to seek and join movements for change; they are driven to serve Marx’s oft-quoted, seldom heeded eleventh thesis on Feurbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Scandalize my Name…

For the owners, publishers, and editors of the The New York Review of Books anti-Communism is still alive. The periodical occupies a unique, indispensable role in fostering and sustaining Cold War myths and legends.

The New York Review of Books has embraced rabid anti-Communism since its opportunistic birth in the midst of a newspaper strike. Founded by a cabal of virulent anti-Communists with identifiable links to the CIA through The Paris Review and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, NYRB maintains the posture of the popular intellectual journal for academics, high-brow book clubbers, and coffee shop leftists for over half a century. Seldom would an issue go by without an earnest petition signed by intellectual celebrities pointing to human rights concerns in some far-off land that was coincidentally (perhaps?) also in the crosshairs of the US State Department. To be sure, the NYRB would muster a measure of indignation over the most egregious US adventures, particularly when they threatened to blemish the US image as the New Jerusalem.

Even with the Cold War behind us, the NYRB maintains an active stable of virulent anti-Soviet writers, partly to hustle its back list of Cold War classics and obscure “dissident” scribblers, partly to pre-empt any serious anti-capitalist thought that might emerge shorn of Red-dread.

Paul Robeson on Trial

In a recent essay/book review (The Emperor Robeson, 2-08-18), the NYRB brought its Red-chopping hatchet to the legacy of Paul Robeson in a piece transparently ill-motivated and poisonous.

Paul Robeson was nothing if not an exceptional, courageous political figure who galvanized US racial and political affairs in mid-century. Yet NYRB assigned Simon Callow, a UK theater personality, to the writing task despite the fact that he reveals in an interview cited in Wikipedia that “I'm not really an activist, although I am aware that there are some political acts one can do that actually make a difference…” And his essay bears out this confession along with his embarrassing ignorance of US history and the dynamics of US politics.

Callow begins his essay seemingly determined to prove his inadequacy to the task: “When I was growing up in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, Paul Robeson was much in evidence… His name was haloed with the sort of respect accorded to few performers…” He then goes on at some length, heaping praise on Robeson. Then suddenly at “some point in the 1960s, he faded from our view…”

Whether Callow’s impressions are reflective of the UK experience is irrelevant. Surely, the important truth, the relevant fact, is that in Robeson’s country-- the US-- he was, throughout that time, a veritable non-person, the victim of a merciless witch hunt. To fail to acknowledge the fact that Robeson and his work were virtually unknown, were erased by the thought police, underscores Callow’s unfitness to discuss Robeson’s career. Indeed, members of the crowd that sought, at that time, to put lipstick on the ugly pig of racism and anti-Communism were soon to found the NYRB.

To say, as Callow does, that before the Cold War Robeson was “...lionized on both sides of the Atlantic...” is to display an unbelievable ignorance of the racial divide in the US. Robeson’s unequalled command of and success at multiple disciplines failed to spare him the indignities and inequalities that befell all African Americans in that era of US apartheid.

As for the post-World War II Red-scare, Callow simply ignores it as if it never occurred. Never mind the harassment, the surveillance, the denied careers, the confiscated passports, and the HUAC subpoenas that Robeson, like thousands of others, suffered from a hysterical, vicious anti-Communist witch hunt. For Callow, Robeson’s problems spring from a meeting granted by then President Truman in which Robeson had the audacity to make demands on his government. “From that moment on…” Callow tells us, “...the government moved to discredit Robeson at every turn…”

What a deft, nimble way to skirt the suffocating, life-denying effects of an entire era of unbridled racism and anti-Communism.

And, from Callow’s myopic perspective, Robeson’s campaign for peace and Cold War sanity resulted in “...universal approbation turned overnight into nearly universal condemnation.” For Callow, standing for peace against the tide of mindless conformity and mass panic is not the mark of courage and integrity, but a tragic career move.

In contrast to Paul Robeson’s life-long defiance of unjust power, Callow attributes a different approach to Robeson’s father, William: “But the lesson was clear: the only way out of poverty and humiliation was hard, hard work-- working harder than any white man would have to, to achieve a comparable result.” One waits futilely to read that this reality is precisely what son, Paul, was trying to correct.

Like so many of today’s belated, measured “admirers” of Paul Robeson, Callow cannot resist delving into Robeson’s sexual proclivities, an interest which bears relevance that frankly escapes me. Similarly, Callow raises the matter of Robeson’s mental health and his withdrawal from public life.

Rather than considering the toll that decades of selfless struggle and tenacious resistance might have taken on Robeson’s body and mind, as it did countless other victims of the Red Scare, Callow contrives different explanations. “Robeson, it is clear, knew that his dream was just that: that the reality was otherwise. But he had to maintain his faith, otherwise what else was there?” So, for Callow, Robeson’s bad faith was responsible for mental issues and ill health. It was not a medical condition, the emotional stress of racism, or the repression of his political views that explain his decline. Instead, it was the consequences of bad politics.

Paraphrasing the author of a book on Robeson that Callow favors, he speculates that Robeson’s physical and mental decline “may have directly stemmed from the desperate requests from Robeson’s Russian friends to help them get out of the nightmarish world they found themselves in.” We are asked to believe that a man who resisted every temptation of success, defied the racial insults of his time, and steadfastly defended his commitment to socialism was brought to his knees by anti-Soviet media rumors? Certainly, there is no evidence for this outlandish claim.

Again, using author Jeff Sparrow (No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson) as his mouthpiece, Callow reveals his “problem” with Robeson: “...Robeson’s endorsement of Stalin and Stalin’s successors, his refusal to acknowledge what had been done in Stalin’s name, is the tragedy of his life.” In other words, like Budd Schulberg’s fictional snitch in On the Waterfront, if Robeson had only denounced his class, ratted on his friends, and bent to authority, he could have been a “contender” for the respect of liberals and the blessings of bourgeois success. But since he didn’t, his life was “a pitiful spectacle.”

Thankfully, there are still many who draw inspiration from the “pitiful spectacle” of Paul Robeson’s extraordinary life.

One Who Does

As if misunderstanding Robeson were not enough, Callow attacks a prominent scholar who does understand Robeson’s legacy. In contrast with his fawning review of the Sparrow book (“as different as chalk and cheese”), Callow demeans the contribution of one of the most gifted and thorough chroniclers of the page in history that included the life of Robeson. As a historian, Gerald Horne’s prodigious work stretches across books on such politically engaged Robeson contemporaries as WEB DuBois, Ben Davis, Ferdinand Smith, William Patterson, Shirley Graham DuBois, and John Howard Lawson. His writings explore the blacklist and The Civil Rights Congress, both keys to understanding Robeson and his time. In most cases, they represent the definitive histories of the subject.

But Callow prefers the shallow Sparrow account that substitutes the overused literary devices of “in search of../searching for...” to mask its limited scholarly ambition.

Callow is baffled by Horne’s Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary. Horne’s insistence that Robeson was a ‘revolutionary’ makes Callow apoplectic (“...page after page…”). But if Robeson was not an authentic, modern US revolutionary, then who was?

Callow cannot find a “clear picture of Robeson’s personality” in the Horne account, a conclusion that probably should not trouble Horne who seems more interested in history rather than psychology.

Callow’s sensibilities are especially offended by Horne’s depiction of the odious Winston Churchill, the man many believe to share responsibility for the WWI blood bath at Gallipoli and the two million deaths in the Bengal famine of 1943. It seems that Horne’s words for the short, chubby, Champagne and Cognac-loving prima donna-- “pudgy, cigar-chomping, alcohol-guzzling Tory” -- struck Callow’s ears as “vulgar.”

But Callow spews his own venomous insults: Horne’s book lacks “...articulate analysis, his account is numbing and bewildering in equal measure, like being addressed from a dysfunctional megaphone…”

Horne’s concluding endorsement of the relevance of Marx and Engels famous slogan-- Workers of the World, Unite! --really brings Callow’s rancor to a boil: “I’m sorry to break it to Mr. Horne, but he doesn’t. And it isn’t.”

We surely know which side of the barricades Simon Callow has chosen.

The Legacy

The legacy of Paul Robeson has been maintained for the four decades since his death by his comrades and allies of the left, principally the Communist left. Most of those who worked and fought alongside of him have also passed away. Yet a small, but dedicated group of a few academics and more political activists have continued to tell his story and defend his values against a torrent of hostility or a wall of silence. Through the decades, he has been forced out of the mainstream-- the history books and popular culture.

Of course, he was not alone in suffering anonymity for his Communist politics. Another giant who was brought down by Cold War Lilliputians, denigrated by hollow mediocrities, was African American Communist, Claudia Jones. Until recently, her powerful thinking on race, women’s rights, and socialism could only be found by those willing to search dusty corners of used book stores.

Perhaps no one promised to live and further Robeson’s legacy than the young writer Lorraine Hansberry, celebrated before her tragic death for her popular play, A Raisin in the Sun. Her work with Robeson and WEB DuBois on the paper, Freedom, brought her politics further in line with theirs: militant anti-racist, anti-imperialist, pro-socialist, Communist.

Forgotten by those who wish to portray her as a mere cultural critic, she famously called out Robert Kennedy’s elitist, patronizing posture in a meeting with Black civil rights leaders as enthusiastically recalled by James Baldwin.

Ignored by those who would like to see her as simply another civil rights reformer, her speech at a Monthly Review fundraiser, shortly before her death, resounds with revolutionary fervor:

If the present Negro revolt is to turn into a revolution, become sophisticated in the most advanced ideas abroad in the world, a leadership which will have had exposure to the great ideas and movements of our time, a Negro leadership which can throw off the blindness of parochialism and bathe the aspirations of the Negro people in the realism of the twentieth century, a leadership which has no illusion about the nature of our oppression and will no longer hesitate to condemn, not only the results of that oppression, but also the true and inescapable cause of it—which of course is the present organization of American society.

Today, there is a renewed interest in Robeson, Claudia Jones, and Lorraine Hansberry. Articles, books, and documentaries are appearing or are in the works. Some are offering ‘new’ perspectives on the lives of these extraordinary people, exploring aspects of their lives that show that their humanity perhaps reached further than previously thought. Yes, they were Communists, but they were not just Communists. Indeed, they belong to the world.

However, it would be a great tragedy if they were denied their conviction that capitalism-- the present organization of American society, in Hansberry’s words-- represented the foundation of other oppressions. It would be criminally dishonest if there were no acknowledgement that they were made enemies of the state precisely because they embraced socialism. For an African American, in racist, Cold War mid-century USA, the decision to embrace Communism was not taken lightly or frivolously. Robeson, Jones, and Hansberry knew exactly what that commitment meant to the forces of repression. And they risked it. They should be looked upon as people’s champions for their courage.

New researchers are welcome to explore other dimensions of the lives of these unbending fighters for social justice. But their authentic legacies are needed now more than ever.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com