by Howard Zinn
Their reaction approaches hysteria: "With a few notable exceptions, our most prestigious liberal arts colleges and universities have installed the entire radical menu at the center of their humanities curriculum," says Roger Kimball in his book Tenured Radicals. The shrillness of such alarms is never proportionate to the size of the radical threat. But the Establishment takes no chances. Thus J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy saw imminent danger of communist control of the U.S. government; protectors of "the canon" see "tenured radicals" taking over higher education. The axes then get sharpened.
Yes, some of us radicals have somehow managed to get tenure. But far from dominating higher education, we remain a carefully watched minority. Some of us may continue to speak and write and teach as we like, but we have seen the axe fall countless times on colleagues less lucky. And who can deny the chilling effect this has had on other faculty, with or without tenure, who have censored themselves rather than risk a loss of promotion, a lower salary, a nonrenewal of contract, a denial of tenure?
Perhaps, after all, Boston University cannot be considered typical, having had for 20 years probably the most authoritarian, the most politically watchful university president in the country. But although it is hard to match John Silber as an educational tyrant, he can be considered (I base this on spending some time at other universities) not a departure from the norm, but an exaggeration of it.
Have we had freedom of expression at Boston University?
A handful of radical teachers, in a faculty of over a thousand, was enough to have John Silber go into fits over our presence on campus, just as certain observers of higher education are now getting apoplectic over what they see as radical dominance nationwide. These are ludicrous fantasies, but they lead to attacks on the freedom of expression of those faculty who manage to overcome that prudent self-control so prominent among academics. At Boston it must have been such fantasies that led Silber to determinedly destroy the faculty union, which was a minor threat to his control over faculty. He handled appointments and tenure with the very political criteria that his conservative educational companions so loudly decry. In at least seven cases that I know of, where the candidates were politically undesirable by Silber's standards, he ignored overwhelming faculty recommendations and refused them tenure.
Did I have freedom of expression in my classroom? I did, because I followed Aldous Huxley's advise: "Liberties are not given; they are taken." But it was obviously infuriating to John Silber that every semester 400 students signed up to take my courses, whether it was "Law and Justice in America" or "An Introduction to Political Theory." And so he did what is often done in the academy; he engaged in petty harassments—withholding salary raises, denying teaching assistants. He also threatened to fire me (and four other members of the union) when we held our classes on the street rather than cross the picket lines of striking secretaries.
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
"Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste"
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.
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p; 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...nationalsecurity), 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
Jack London's The Iron Heel
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.
