Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  “When the revolution comes, what’s going to happen to all the people who oppose it? That’s probably going to be, what? Ninety percent?”

  Bob’s eyelids dropped and he looked at me with a cold squint and leaned back on the arm of the couch as he took a long drag on his cigarette. “They’ll have to be eliminated,” he said matter-of-factly, with a wave of his hand.

  I protested, but the conversation turned to other problems that would arise when the revolution happened, or logistics required in bringing it about. The insanity, the cruelty, the utter self-righteous and blind inhumanity struck me and I knew then that eventually the two of us would part ways. But at the same time I found bob’s perspective, while insane, in other ways well reasoned, even if I wondered about some of his assumptions. The utopia would be realized, he had no doubt at all. It was part of the “law of historical development.” Those who were unable to meet the challenges of the future would be disposed of to allow room for the “New Man (sic)” of communism.

  I found what I thought to be more humane and reasonable perspectives among the Liberation theologians and their advocates whose books I read. I found Fr. Camilo Torre’s view reassuring: “I have given myself to the Revolution out of love for my neighbor.”4 I felt about bob the way I began to feel about all the secular political activists I met who were struggling against the economic inequality created by capitalism that the socialists, communists, and anarchists were attempting to resolve. As Jose Miranda put it, “ultimately the Marxists have been doing us (Christians) a favor by propagating the idea of communism in our absence—our culpable absence.”5 I was grateful to bob for having demolished my absolutist pacifism and for having shown me a way into the secular Left that I had yet to explore, but I often found myself shocked and disturbed by what I considered to be his more extreme views—and behavior. In the honeymoon period, bob served the purpose of challenging a house that was still predominantly Christian not only to give his Taoist views a hearing, which we did without hesitation, finding in Lao Tzu a very sympathetic and credible teacher, but also to look more closely at ideas current on the secular Marxist, and Leninist, left.

  Meanwhile, I deepened relations with Christian leftists and ex-Christian leftists. Among the former was Marc Batko, who introduced me to an entirely different current that flowed into the river that was carrying me away. Marc, a Jewish convert to Christianity, had a particular interest in the German theology of Jurgen Moltmann and other disciples of Ernst Bloch. While I found the translations difficult reading (Marc never quite got them into English) they inspired me to investigate an entirely different moment of Anabaptist history.

  Ernst Bloch was a Jewish Marxist atheist of the Frankfurt School who, oddly enough, inspired a generation of German Christian theologians with his writings on the utopian vision of Marx, proposing the “principle of hope” as a meeting point for revolutionaries and Christians. Bloch’s first book was called The Spirit of Utopia (1918) and it was followed by Thomas Müntzer as a Theologian of Revolution.

  Thomas Müntzer was a contemporary of Martin Luther who started out as an ally in the Reformation, but his contact with the spiritualist Zwickau Prophets led him to advocate for deeper changes than Luther felt comfortable advocating. Müntzer became popular among the peasant class and his agitational sermons caused consternation among the princes, nobility, and his old ally, Martin Luther. Part of the so-called “Radical Reformation,” which included the Anabaptists and an array of other spiritualists, prophetic, and apocalyptic movements, Müntzer was a principal organizer of the disastrous 1525 German Peasant War that ended with the armies of the nobility slaughtering thousands of peasants and then capturing, and executing, Müntzer himself.

  Luther had played what many (including myself) considered to have been a shameful role in the slaughter of what he called “the murderous and plundering hordes of the peasants.” Luther was unequivocal in his opposition, directing in detail to the princes and their armies as to how the peasants should be treated: “They should be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, secretly and openly, by everybody who can do it, just as one must kill a mad dog!” He went on to recommend, “dear gentlemen, hearken here, save there, stab, knock, strangle them at will, and if thou diest, thou art blessed; no better death canst thou ever attain.”6

  Müntzer was written off as a madman and a fanatic for centuries until he was “rediscovered” by Friedrich Engels who saw in him the precursor of modern communism. Ironically, Thomas Müntzer, the revolutionary Christian mystic, eventually became intrumentalized by the German Democratic Republic, part of the Communist movement that went so far to destroy religion that it sent many believers to the death camps of Siberia to be rid of the “plague.”7

  I discovered Christians for Socialism (CFS), a national organization with a very strong Northern California branch. In September 1981 I went to a gathering in Vallejo with Dave Smith, expecting to see people pounding the pulpit and calling for revolution in the name of Jesus. Instead it was a sedate group of nuns, one very friendly and gentle Presbyterian minister named Joe Hardegree, a quiet couple from Tracy, and a few other pretty average-looking people. There was a potluck and discussion about God’s “preferential option for the poor” and the need to build a socialist movement to redistribute the wealth of the country and the world and we brainstormed a Christian Socialist creed.

  We formed a Christian socialist study group and of the books we read I remember being particularly impressed by José Miranda’s book, Communism in the Bible, and wishing his work would get a fair hearing in US churches. Both he and Geevarghese Mar Osthathios, the late senior Bishop of the Indian Orthodox Church in Kerala and author of Theology of a Classless Society demonstrated that both communism and a classless society were the bottom-line Christian positions on economics and social structures for the church and, by extension, society. The “world turned upside-down” that Winstanley the Digger and so many Christians before and after him foresaw was a vision reawakened in the 1980s and it inspired a few of us in Berkeley.

  But we knew we were few. The mainstream Christian Church, after a brief opening in the late 1960s, showed signs of going with the mainstream secular culture as it took a right turn under Ronald Reagan. The sense of isolation I often felt helped me understand bob rivera’s loner approach to politics, and it also gave me a real empathy for Garry Lambrev whose religious and political community had gone out in an apocalyptic fury. Dorothee Sölle expressed our feelings well in an article published in Radical Religion about that time. She wrote of “the dilemma of being Christians without a church and socialists without a party.” But our marginalization was powerful, she said, reminding us “It is not the center from which liberation will come. It comes from the periphery. Christ was not born in the palace of Herod but in the stable. He did not grow up in the center of Jewish culture among the power elite but in the backwaters of Galilee.”8

  And our little “cell” of Christian socialists was going to become more isolated still. Sometime in 1982 the national office of CFS was closed down, as the director explained, due to “burnout.” The Northern California branch made several valiant attempts to first relocate the national office to the Bay Area (the offer was refused) and then to keep the local branch going. All attempts failed and within a year or two of my joining the organization, it ceased to exist.

  Caught up in a millenarian mania, I plotted ways to get the word out. I’d initially bought a proof press with my friend Julie Holcomb, but politics separated us and she went on to take the proof press and become a master hand-press printer. I had a vision to save the world so I started learning to print on a mimeograph machine, but never managed to get it to function well enough to print more than a dozen or so semi-legible sheets. I quickly disposed of the machine and several of us in Calhoun House began looking for alternatives. We had no resources: as a house we fed ourselves mostly by dumpster diving. But we had faith and a vision so we began compiling and editing articles for a small magazine we hop
ed to eventually print down in the basement.

  My ex-wife Karen and I were giving our relationship “one last try” and she joined in the project, offering to contribute her skills as a printer. We finally found a printing press advertised for $75 and when a few of us went to look at it we found it under a tarp next to a garage, the image for a flyer for a demonstration for the 1976 UFW grape boycott still on the blanket. We took this as a clear sign we had to buy this movement press, and I didn’t even try to bargain with the seller.

  The printing press, in as bad shape as it was, seemed to be no problem for Dave Smith to fix and the challenge even excited him. Dave and I set to work, using rubber bands and pieces of pipe to replace springs and missing handles, and he sewed elastic bands together to make a conveyor table. It took weeks of hard work to get the machine running, and a month or two of long days working to print the forty-eight-page magazine. We had to raise the press up on a platform in the basement because the periodic winter rain would flood the area where we worked, and we often had to walk through two or three inches of water to reach our workstation. We solved that problem by making a path with milk crates to the platform holding the press. Bob rivera threw in his energy as art director, accompanied by my ex-wife Karen, and while Dave and I worked trying to fix the press, to get it, and keep it, running, bob and Karen spent the next several months of winter laying out the magazine.

  Called The Second Coming, the editorial line was “Evangelical Marxist” since we were all former or current Evangelicals, with the exception, of course, of bob. The issue included solidarity statements with Nicaragua, articles by Dorothee Sölle that Marc had translated (and all of us had taken turns attempting to get them into English), poetry from the Rosa Luxemburg/Dorothy Day Cultural Brigade, and others, and it ended with the statement from the Christians for Socialism Vallejo meeting. “Towards a Christian Socialist Creed” affirmed, among other things, “that change is the result of the linking of the variety of our gifts and struggles in a non-hierarchical sharing” and that “the world and all its wealth belongs to everyone, that we are stewards of the resources within our reach and that the means of production cannot be owned by any individual but should be administered collectively by those who labor.”

  The centerfold was perhaps the most controversial part of the magazine. It was a series of four illustrations by the Nicaraguan artist Cerezo Barreto and the first one was innocent enough: Jesus, with the dove descending on him and his Father’s hands reaching down to him as his own great hands protect little black children. That, however, was followed by a giant Uncle Sam with a blood-stained napkin around his neck, devouring handfuls of black and brown people. That was followed by a Nicaraguan pietá and the sequence ended with the giant Uncle Sam menacingly towering vampire-like as if preparing to pounce on a Sandinista demonstration above which was held a banner in Spanish saying “The children of Sandino neither sell out nor surrender.”

  Needless to say, we gained few, if any, converts or supporters and the fact that we were supporting the revolutionary cause of the Sandinistas, a cause that had been won by force of arms, put us at greater odds with the pacifist Anabaptist and Evangelical community in Berkeley, the only community likely to be otherwise sympathetic.

  Ronald Reagan had decided to go on an anti-communist offensive, declaring the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” Many socialists and communists I knew agreed with that assessment, but we also saw the US as no less evil an empire. The anti-nuclear movement burgeoned under Reagan: he ended up being its best organizer. We seemed to be ever closer to nuclear war as well as intervention in Central America. Meanwhile, the entire culture seemed to be veering off toward the right in politics as well as in ethics and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority seemed to have captured the attention of Christians in Middle America. The entire political scenario, domestic and international, looked bleak, except for Central America where revolutionary insurgencies offered some hope for alternatives in a bipolar world, or so we thought. I expressed my sense of doom in a journal entry in late 1981:

  I watch my hands turn to ash.

  I hear the cry of billions.

  The stars roll up like a scroll

  into the glowing darkness.

  A black silk shroud

  for a can of Del Monte corn.

  A coffin for a box of Kelloggs

  Sugar Frosted Flakes.

  The Pepsi generation degenerates

  into a carbonated corpse.

  Capital and competition

  are the whores in every bed,

  the idols of every altar;

  icons of these gods reside

  in every mind,

  in the eye of every heart

  and each tv screen of the soul.

  I watch my legs melt away.

  The waste of autos fills my lungs.

  My veins pump pesticides and preservatives.

  The little I have left is a shriek.

  And I screw my lips into a smile

  to meet my dead friends at a party

  where we’ll spend the evening re-

  membering what it was like

  to be alive.

  I was obsessed with activist politics, and I could tell even bob was beginning to worry about me. He suggested I take a break and gave me a copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery to read. I didn’t read it. I had more important things to read than what I thought to be the obtuse, elitist and a-political poetry of Ashbery. I couldn’t understand why bob would push such material on me. But he was worried, and trying to cool me down with some post-modern cold water. That was how worried he appeared to be.

  I didn’t have it in me to worry about myself. I could only think that I needed to act against the great injustice of the world somehow, the great insanity that had even engulfed the church. And I was sure that if we could raise our voices and speak out it would somehow make a difference. It had worked with the prophets of Israel, hadn’t it? Or had it?

  Chapter Five: The Sandinista Revolution: y un Paso Atrás

  In fact, our little Evangelical-Marxist magazine had been largely ignored. Our little group of activists, and the little groups of activists dispersed around the country were all being ignored. There were more important things going on for North Americans, and television told them what they were. Everyone knew who J. R. Ewing was; millions followed Dallas on television. Hardly anyone knew which side the US was on in Nicaragua or El Salvador—or even where those countries were. Moreover, they didn’t seem to care much, either. That was the reality behind the world of television the country lived in.

  The Cold War began to explode in the Central American Isthmus after the July 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. The Monroe Doctrine, which had conceived of, and supported, a major role of the US in the affairs of its neighbors for the previous 150 years, suddenly was called into question as civil and guerrilla wars, with the backing of Cuba (and therefore, the Soviet Union), savaged the region. At the time the situation was understood in stark black-and-white, Cold War terms—and for many, it still is. In those days I saw the Sandinista Revolution as a distinctly new breed of socialism that departed from Soviet orthodoxy by welcoming Christians and others into the process, something the mainstream press couldn’t quite grasp. Only years later did I understand the Central American civil or guerrilla wars of those years in their greater complexity. At the time I held a legitimate, but limited, view of the situation: that the imper­ial power of the US was seeking to destroy national liberation movements, and I couldn’t be a neutral observer. By the very fact that I was a North American and US citizen, I had an obligation to oppose US government support and involvement in the bloodshed.

  The spirit of the Sandinista Revolution of Nicaragua was expressed in the popular slogan of those days: “Between Christianity and Revolution there is no contradiction.” Christians filled posts at all levels of the Sandinista Government of Reconstruction: from the Ministers down to the base. I think the religious sensibility
that permeated the revolutionary current had a humanizing effect on the process itself. The Sandinistas abolished the death penalty on taking power and avoided what would have been a certain bloodbath in the process. After the struggle that ended in victory for the FSLN on July 19, 1979, utopia seemed within reach in Nicaragua. The government of reconstruction called on the people to help clear the rubble and rebuild. What they began to rebuild were clinics, day-care centers, hospitals, schools, and cooperatives that formed on expropriated lands of the ex-dictator Somoza and his family.

  Certainly the country was governed by a guerrilla group organized, as was usually the case, along “democratic centralist” lines—with perhaps more emphasis on the “centralist” than the “democratic.” Nevertheless, many of us hoped the nine-man junta would ensure that there would be at least a degree of consensual decision-making at the executive level of government, while the people at the base, who had come into their own as a revolutionary class, were clear they would no longer tolerate dictators. Indeed, in the final days of the revolutionary struggle the people of the neighborhoods became their own “vanguard,” though I wouldn’t know that or what it meant until many years later.

  I took a Spanish class at Vista Community College but a half semester into it I could wait no longer. I dropped out of my first semester of Spanish and started preparing for my trip to Nicaragua. I was determined to join the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front, FSLN) and fight to defend the Revolution. Months after the ink had dried on the pages of The Second Coming and the pages were collated and stapled, I left for Nicaragua, taking a drive-away car to Houston and flying from there.