Pub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1464786
D. Hanglberger
“Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts,”Marcus Garvey, the creator, heart, and soul of the prodigiously successful Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), warned his followers in July 1925. From his jail cell in the Atlanta penitentiary—having been sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly having used the mail to defraud—he urged that the “Negro should keep shy of Communism or the Worker’s party of America.” Those groups, he judged, are “more dangerous to the Negro’s welfare than any other group at present.” Statements such as these and clashes such as the one in 1930 in which Alfred Levy, a Black communist, was killed in a dispute with Garveyites in Harlem, gave Garvey and Garveyism (his variety of Black nationalism) the reputation of having been “particularly anti-Communist.” In 1967, Harold Cruse portrayed the New Negro era after World War I as an ideological battlefield. “Garvey Nationalism, Black Socialism, Black Communism, Black trade unionism, Black civil rightsism [...] were at each other’s political throats.” “It is a fact,” Cruse reinforced this view of enmity between the Black Left and Garvey, “that [A. Philip] Randolph’s Messenger writers were implacable enemies of the Garvey movement.” This perception of Garvey as a staunch anti-Communist prevailed and was reiterated by various scholars in the following decades into the twenty-first century. Tony Martin in his study on the Garvey movement set the scene as one of strict antagonism. In spite of “continuous onslaughts from communists” (and others), Martin writes, Garvey nevertheless managed to
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Pub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1464302
F. Jacob
Many anarchists had believed in the Russian Revolution, but the realities of Bolshevist rule would bitterly frustrate them. The German anarchist Augustin Souchy (1892– 1984), retrospectively evaluating the events of 1917, remarked that “the great passion ... electrified us all.” It was in Russia where Souchy and others believed to have witnessed the rise of the “sun of freedom.” Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), another famous German anarchist, shared this opinion: “The Russian Revolution released Europe from the terrible spell of a gruesome hypnosis” by an autocratic rule that suppressed the masses. The anarchist reactions were predominantly euphoric in the beginning, but the struggle between Anarchism and Marxist Bolshevism would soon break out and destroy all hopes about the initial changes that were expected in 1917. One of those who witnessed the developments in Russia was Emma Goldman (1869–1940). Although the famous Russian-American anarchist—who, to quote historian Oz Frankel, “has assumed a unique position in American politics and culture”—had defended the Russian Revolution against all criticism in the United States, she found her own hopes and beliefs betrayed by the realities of Bolshevism after her deportation to Russia in the aftermath of the Palmer Raids. Her aspirations turned into frustration, and Goldman would become one of the fiercest enemies of Russian Bolshevism and the corruption of the ideas of the Russian Revolution. The present article will discuss this transformative process and demonstrate how and why Goldman’s perception of contemporary Russia changed. First, her defense of the revolution while she was still in the United States will be retraced. The second part will deal with her criticism of the Bolshevization of the revolutionary ideals in the years after “Red October.” The article will focus on Goldman’s writings and correspondence in the years after her Russian experience to show that “Red Emma” used every chance she could to criticize the new system established by Lenin and his companions, even if she often faced problems in finding an audience receptive to her criticism.
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Pub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1464827
Riccardo Altieri
Paul Fr€olich (1884–1953) was among the most important politicians in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later in the Communist Party of Germany Opposition (KPDO) and the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAPD). His 1939 biography of Rosa Luxemburg (1871– 1919) also confirms his importance to historical scholarship, as the three volumes he edited about Luxemburg’s estate reflect his own position within communist history. In his early days as a communist, Fr€olich was ideologically similar to his former idol Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). The two men met for the first time at the Kienthal Conference in 1916, and Fr€olich followed Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ policies in the following years. On the eve of the National Socialist “seizure of power,” Fr€olich praised Lenin’s policies in the immediate aftermath of the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Fr€olich’s exile in European countries, time in prison, time in a concentration camp, exiles in Czechoslovakia and France, and emigration from Europe changed nothing for him at the time. Only after he and his future wife Rosi Wolfstein (1888–1987) were exiled to New York in
Paul Fr€olich（1884–1953）是德国共产党（KPD）以及后来的德国共产党反对党（KPDO）和德国社会主义工人党（SAPD）中最重要的政治家之一。他1939年的罗莎·卢森堡传记（1871-1919）也证实了他对历史学术的重要性，因为他编辑的关于卢森堡遗产的三卷本反映了他自己在共产主义历史中的地位。在他作为共产主义者的早期，奥利奇神父在意识形态上与他的前偶像弗拉基米尔·列宁（1870-1924）相似。两人在1916年的基恩塔尔会议上首次会面，奥尔奇神父在随后的几年里遵循了列宁和布尔什维克的政策。在国家社会主义者“夺权”前夕，奥利奇神父赞扬了列宁在1917年俄罗斯十月革命后的政策。奥利奇神父流亡欧洲国家、入狱、集中营、流亡捷克斯洛伐克和法国，以及从欧洲移民，在当时对他来说没有什么改变。直到他和他未来的妻子罗西·沃尔夫斯坦（1888-1987）于年被流放到纽约后
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Pub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1463743
J. Barrett
The Bolshevik Revolution marked an enormous expansion of possibilities welcomed not only by revolutionaries in the United States and around the world, but also by millions of common people who saw it as a chance to create a better world. Given what happened in the years since the Revolution, however, and particularly the effects of Soviet influence on the prospects for radicalism in the United States, it is vital to consider what went wrong in the relationship between the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) and the international movement. For all of the problems caused by the particular nature of the relationship between the American and the Soviet parties, being part of an international socialist movement was not necessarily a liability. I note some cases where directions from the Communist International (Comintern) actually worked to the advantage of the CPUSA. More importantly, with the increasingly transnational character of capitalism and the spread of fascism from the 1920s through the period of World War II, some form of international organizing was essential. The problem had to do with the particularmodel followed by the Comintern and the decisive influence of the Soviet party in that organization. Often considered a historical basket case, the CPUSA had considerable potential at various points in its history. Its failure was not inevitable and so it is important for both political and scholarly reasons to understand its ultimate failure. To fully explain this, we would need to consider far more factors than I can develop here.Whether one considers the Communist Party a vast conspiracy or a legitimate movement, there is no doubt that government and employer repression greatly weakened the organization in the post–World War I and post–World War II Red Scares. By the end of the 1920s, for example, 38,000 immigrants, including many radicals, had been deported. The significance of this loss was vital in amovement populated largely by immigrants. Offices were raided, newspapers seized, activists imprisoned, thousands of union members expelled. Again, in the period from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, close surveillance, a series of political trials, and numerous deportations of immigrant members hobbled the party’s efforts. Likewise, very
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Pub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1464869
V. Vukadinović
Russian-born American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is one of the most important contributors to political thought in the US. However, contrary to her long-lasting popularity historiographical research on the polarizing writer has not taken shape until the last decade. “The mere mention of Ayn Rand’s name in academic circles can evoke smirks and a rolling of the eyes,” summarizes Chris Matthew Sciabarra such defensive demeanor in his study The Russian Radical: “Most often she is dismissed, without discussion, as a reactionary, a propagandist, or a pop-fiction writer with a cult following. The fact that her work appeals to the young seems proof that her ideas are immature or simplistic.” Such hasty yet prevailing conclusions – repeatedly affirmed by distorting accounts that, by now, even attribute a destructive force of global proportions to the name Ayn Rand – have long prevented the scholarly engagement with a body of work that also, among other aspects, belongs to the history of communism and anti-communism in the United States. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in 1905, Alisa Rosenbaum had witnessed the October Revolution as a young girl, and had spent the first years of the Soviet reign studying at Petrograd State University. At the age of 21, she had the opportunity to visit relatives abroad, upon which she never returned. After her arrival in the US in 1926, she took the pen name Ayn Rand. She began a stunning literary career, which eventually lead to the publication of her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, published in 1943 and 1957 respectively. Both of them sold several million copies each, and obtained the status of “stubborn bestsellerdom” in the US, because the writer “had a grip on some key components of the national fantasy life, not least because the novels were her fantasy life too,” as Judith Wilt once remarked. Because of her fiction’s recurring theme–individualism–and due to her political activities and involvements, Ayn Rand is usually considered to be a foremost anti-communist author. In the 1940s, she was close to activists on the political right who fought against a socialist
出生于俄罗斯的美国小说家和哲学家Ayn Rand（1905–1982）是美国政治思想的最重要贡献者之一。然而，与她长期受欢迎相反，对这位两极分化的作家的史学研究直到最近十年才形成。Chris Matthew Sciabarra在他的研究《俄罗斯激进派》中总结道：“学术界一提到Ayn Rand的名字，就会引起人们的假笑和翻白眼。”“大多数时候，她被认为是反动派、宣传家或有狂热追随者的流行小说作家，而没有经过讨论。她的作品吸引年轻人的事实似乎证明了她的想法是不成熟或简单的，甚至将一种全球规模的破坏力归因于Ayn Rand这个名字——长期以来一直阻止学术界参与一系列同样属于美国共产主义和反共历史的工作。Alisa Rosenbaum 1905年出生于一个中产阶级犹太家庭，小时候目睹了十月革命，并在苏联统治的头几年就读于彼得格勒州立大学。21岁时，她有机会去国外探亲，但她再也没有回来。1926年抵达美国后，她取了一个笔名Ayn Rand。她开始了令人惊叹的文学生涯，最终出版了小说《源泉》和《阿特拉斯耸耸肩》，分别于1943年和1957年出版。正如朱迪斯·威尔特（Judith Wilt）曾经说过的那样，这两部小说各卖出了数百万册，并在美国获得了“顽固的畅销书”的地位，因为作者“掌握了国家幻想生活的一些关键组成部分，尤其是因为这些小说也是她的幻想生活”。由于小说中反复出现的主题——个人主义——以及她的政治活动和参与，艾恩·兰德通常被认为是最重要的反共作家。在20世纪40年代，她与反对社会主义者的政治右翼活动家关系密切
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Pub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1467702
Michael A. Meeropol
“Doubtless if that [Greenglass] testimony were disregarded, the convictions could not stand.” (Opinion of the US Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg)Eth...
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Pub Date : 2018-03-28DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1446577
S. Moazeni
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Pub Date : 2018-03-28DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1443664
Geoffrey Jacques
Near the end of this rollicking, uneven, newly discovered novel, the Ethiopian envoy Lij Tekla Alamaya says to Gloria Kendall, his new romantic interest, that it’s “better to be the individual slave of love than to be the mindless slave of a movement” (247). This is just one of many remarks of its kind in Amiable with Big Teeth, by Claude McKay, and the sentence appears at a point in the novel where both Kendall and Alamaya have just gone through a process of unmasking in a narrative that is full of masquerades and unmasking, all in the service of repeatedly unmasking the Comintern and its politics, as those politics related to the African American community and the Ethiopian Crisis of 1935. As such, the “mindless slave of a movement,” a common enough trope of anti-Communist fiction, appears here in a kind of masking of its own, as this comic tale focuses less on social movements or fleshed-out fictional characters, and more on a set of ideas that were animating both national and African American discourse during the years in which this novel was written. This book is something of a literary phenomenon. Then-Columbia graduate student JeanChristophe Cloutier discovered it while he worked as an archivist in the Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library at the university. The manuscript was found among the papers of Samuel Roth, a smalltime publisher and pornographer who would serve prison time for his efforts. How the manuscript came to be among Roth’s papers is something of a mystery, Cloutier informs us, in an introduction to the book that he and Columbia University English Professor Brent Hayes Edwards co-wrote. In a 2013 article he published on the novel, Cloutier also contextualizes Amiable with Big Teeth’s place both within McKay’s own life and work, and within the literary and political situation that prevailed while the novel was being written. McKay’s own relationship with the Communist movement was complex. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the U.S. early-1920s left, as an editor of the Liberator magazine; his most famous public association with the Communist movement was his speech as an unofficial delegate to the 4 Congress of the Communist International, and his involvement in the movement lasted for several years after that. Meanwhile, he had become one of the leading participants in the Harlem Renaissance, with his poems, especially “If We Must Die,” and his novels, beginning with Home to Harlem, serving as major expressions of what was also known as the “New Negro” movement. He spent several years abroad, and by the time he returned to the United States in 1934, he had become a stanch anti-Communist critic. Amiable with Big Teeth focuses on the movement that emerged in the wake of the 1935 Italian Fascist invasion of Ethiopia, and tells the story of two organizations that were competing to channel protest energies in opposition to the invasion. On the one hand, there is the all-black Hands to Ethiopia, headed by Pablo Peixota,
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Pub Date : 2018-03-08DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1427962
Deborah A. Gerson
In 1972 I applied to graduate school and wrote an application essay that indicated I would explore my mother’s (Sophie Melvin Gerson) move from labor organizer and activist, to wife and mother. Steeped in the very particular – and limited – consciousness of early women’s liberation, I accepted an all too simple narrative of Sophie’s life: a narrative of a gendered loss of agency and activity. Fortunately, I never wrote that Master’s thesis, but rather went on to research and write about The Families Committee of Smith Act Defendants. About 20 years later, I was sitting in a Kings County (Brooklyn) courthouse at a guardianship hearing for both my parents, who were in their nineties and increasingly frail in both mind and body. My father (Si Gerson) turned to the judge and asked him, “Do you know why we’re here?” The judge, quizzical and curious, awaited further elucidation. Si began a rambling, but very familiar to me, explanation. We were in Brooklyn because Pete Cacchione, New York’s first Communist councilman, had died while in office, and Simon W. Gerson was picked by the CPUSA to replace him. While Si never got to serve as City Councilman and the electoral reforms known as proportional representation that allowed left and minority party candidates to get elected were shortly eliminated, the Gerson family was in Brooklyn—for good. So the narrative centers on Si’s political trajectory and the story of Sophie – labor militant and youthful organizer – is subsumed. In 1948, when the family moved to Brooklyn, Sophie was wife, mother of two children, and homemaker for a household that included Si’s elderly and frail mother, Helen. While Si’s political and logistical trajectory were realized within the Communist Party, Sophie had to find and develop arenas for action feasible within the constraints of childrearing and homemaking, helpmate to her husband “in leadership,” and the political landscape of a Jewish and Italian Catholic neighborhood.
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Pub Date : 2018-02-27DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1438010
Robert M. Zecker
As Antonio Gramsci and others have noted, all the way back to Karl Marx himself, cultural institutions very often are employed to buttress the socioeconomic elite and a society’s status quo. Schools, literature, popular songs and other cultural productions are often employed to inculcate lessons that society is just and those who are in political and economic command are there because they earned it or that the social order is “natural.” However, this hegemony, Gramsci recognized, was imperfect and in constant need of shoring up–or tearing down if one believed wealth has been unfairly appropriated or maldistributed. In moments of crisis the same cultural productions—plays, schools, musical groups and camps—are deployed by adherents of social movements to harness discontent to imagine that another world is possible. As sociologists of social movements recognize, so too, activists quickly realized that they had to “weave together a moral, cognitive and emotional package of attitudes” if they were to win converts. “Cognitive liberation,” James M. Jasper argues, “is probably more important for its bundle of emotions than for any ‘objective’ information about odds of success. ‘Liberation’ implies heady emotions that ‘cognitive’ then denies.” Ann Swidler too argues that social movements are often most effective when they transpose group allegiances and cultural symbols into new causes. While during the Depression, Communist Party USA (CP) activists offered lengthy and intricate expositions on Marxism at their rallies, heavy on the cognitive, they didn’t slight the emancipatory appeal to emotions and fun, either. Education and entertainment mixed at Workers’ Halls. Leftwing rallies also employed ethnic singing societies and theater troupes to preach a new gospel of Marxism via cultural institutions with which Jewish, Italian and Slavic workers were familiar. During the early twentieth century, radical immigrants made plenty of room for dancing while advancing the revolution. As Michael Denning notes, after the New Deal took hold in the 1930s, a “laboring” of popular culture developed in which working-class agendas and themes flourished in theater, art, literature and music. What’s less frequently noticed,
正如安东尼奥·葛兰西(Antonio Gramsci)和其他人所指出的，一直追溯到卡尔·马克思(Karl Marx)本人，文化机构经常被用来支持社会经济精英和社会现状。学校、文学作品、流行歌曲和其他文化产品经常被用来灌输这样的观念:社会是公正的，那些在政治和经济上发号施令的人在那里是因为他们挣来的，或者社会秩序是“自然的”。然而，葛兰西认识到，这种霸权是不完美的，如果一个人认为财富被不公平地占用或分配不当，就需要不断地支持——或者拆除。在危机时刻，同样的文化产品——戏剧、学校、音乐团体和营地——被社会运动的追随者用来驾驭不满情绪，想象另一个世界是可能的。正如社会运动的社会学家所认识到的那样，积极分子很快意识到，如果他们想赢得皈依者，他们必须“把道德、认知和情感的态度组合在一起”。“认知解放，”詹姆斯·m·贾斯帕(James M. Jasper)认为，“可能更重要的是它所包含的一系列情感，而不是任何关于成功几率的‘客观’信息。”‘解放’意味着‘认知’会否认的兴奋情绪。”安·斯威德勒也认为，当社会运动将群体忠诚和文化符号转化为新的事业时，往往是最有效的。在大萧条时期，美国共产党(CP)的积极分子在他们的集会上对马克思主义进行了冗长而复杂的阐述，着重于认知，他们也没有忽视对情感和乐趣的解放诉求。在工人会堂里，教育和娱乐混合在一起。左翼集会还聘请了少数民族的歌唱协会和剧团，通过犹太人、意大利人和斯拉夫人所熟悉的文化机构，宣扬马克思主义的新福音。在二十世纪早期，激进的移民在推进革命的同时为舞蹈创造了充足的空间。正如迈克尔·丹宁(Michael Denning)所指出的，在20世纪30年代新政确立之后，流行文化的“劳动”发展起来，工人阶级的议程和主题在戏剧、艺术、文学和音乐中蓬勃发展。很少被注意到的是，
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