The various uses of scary quotations

A classic from the days when the "reds" were Communists, not Republicans

It's not often for me that a Bush speech inspires some actual reflection. But something keeps nagging me about the conservative fondness for the idea that the Bad Guys of History somehow expose their secret evilness in writing and that if you just read the appropriate passages you've discovered the inner workings of their dangerous minds.

It made me think of what we can safely say is an obscure book, Toward Soviet America (1932) by William Z. Foster. Foster was one of the leaders of the US Communist Party (CP) for decades. In 1932, he was their Presidential candidate and got a million or so votes, the CP's highwater mark in its history for electoral influence in the United States. In 1961, some conservative group republished it, and it actually got more circulation in that version than the original ever did. If the current Wikipedia entry is correct, the House Un-American Activities Committe (HUAC) published it themselves.

It contains passages of purple prose like, "The capitalist class, like an insatiable blood-sucker, hangs to the body of the toiling masses and can be dislodged only by force." (p. 130) That one has a certain so-bad-it's-good kitschy literary quality about it. Or, "The Negro masses will make the very best fighters for the revolution." (p. 225) I'm sure that scared a few white folks in 1961 who thought integration of the public schools would be the end of civilization.

That was an example of this conservative thing about discovering the hidden truth. The idea in the 1961 republication was to show the secret Real Goal of the Commies. Because by then, what was left of the CP had stopped using some of the, uh, less mainstream formulations of 1932.

But there's something a little odd in this notion. If the point was to show how sneaky and devious the conniving Communists were, why should we think that what they published in 1932 was the true story? It could be seen as kind of a "testimony against interest", I guess.

But mainly, for rightwingers to be obsessing over this little book in 1961, when the influence of the CP was all but non-existent, was just an excercise in "fear itself".

Still, as a period piece, Foster's book has its own historical value. His first chapter is a general indictment of capitalism. It includes this prediction:

One day, despite the disbelief of the capitalists and of their still more cynical Social Fascist lackeys, the American workers will demonstrate that they, like the Russians, have the intelligence, courage and organization to carry through the revolution. The American capitalist class, like that of other countries, is living on the brink of a volcano which, sooner than it dreams, is going to explode. George Bernard Shaw is right: the time will surely come when the victorious toilers will build a monument to Lenin in New York. (p. 67)

I'm pretty sure there was never a monument erected to Lenin in New York.

The 1932 edition, without conservative commentary

That "Social Fascist" phrase comes from the position of the Soviet-led Communist International (Comintern) at the time which rejected cooperation with Social Democratic (Socialist) parties, on the theory that the "general crisis of capitalism" represented by the Great Depression would bring more support to Communist Parties that took very uncompromising stands.

Since the Socialist Party was also a minor force in American politics, I'm guessing that this book's passages about Social Fascism would have sounded like gibberish to most Americans then. But Foster was targeting the segment of the public that did have some familiarity with the labor movement and radical parties.

In Sinclair Lewis' wonderful 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here, there is a Communist character who constantly argues with a Socialist character. They keep it up until they are both shipped to the same concentration camp, where they continue to blame each other's party for things having gotten to that state.

The second chapter praises the Soviet Union as a model to be emulated. While the USSR wasn't terribly popular among Americans generally in 1932 - the US still didn't have diplomatic relations with the USSR - his praise for Soviet economic achievements didn't sound quite so hollow as they do to a reader today. The details of virtually everything in the history of the Soviet Union are subject to dispute. But it was widely perceived in the rest of the world that the USSR was avoiding the devastating effects of the Great Depression.

The Russian workers and peasants, it is true, are still poor. This poverty is their heritage from Czarism and capitalism. But with control of the industries and the land, with capitalist exploitation and robbery stopped, with rapidly developing Socialist industries and farms, they have the solid basis for such a prosperity as no working class in the world has ever even remotely approached. The rapidity with which this prosperity will develop and its great depth and breadth will soon astound the world. Capitalists everywhere understand this. They sense the revolutionizing effect it will have upon the millions of workers in their countries who, in the growing crisis of the capitalist system, are falling deeper and deeper into poverty and starvation. This is the basic reason why the capitalists are redoubling their efforts to develop war against the Soviet Union. (p. 108)

Whatever the price paid by the Soviet people, the USSR did manage to industrialize itself at a very rapid pace.

Agriculture was another story. To put it mildly, the following specimen of historical analysis has not held up well:

IF SOCIALISM proceeds with great speed in industry, it goes still faster in agriculture. The vast development of the productive forces and the reorganization generally that is taking place with almost lightning speed in Russian agriculture is something altogether new in the world. During the 30 days from Jan. 20 to Feb. 20, 1930, one-third of all the peasants entered the collective farms in the monster organization campaign, raising the total of collectivized homesteads from 4,300,000 to 14,000,000 at one stroke. Anna Louise Strong thus describes this tremendous movement: "Can one give a smooth account of an earthquake? The storm of collectivization that I found on the Lower Volga in late November, 1929, was as elemental as an earthquake, as a tidal wave, as a whirlwind."

Agriculture was always the Achilles heel of the Soviet economy. John Kenneth Galbraith described matters at that time as follows in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

The effects of the Great Depression spread, and they spread around the world. The richer the country, the more advanced its industry, the worse, in general, the slump. Only Russia was untouched, although this was not an unqualified case for the Soviet system. The time had come for that further stage of the revolution that Lenin saw to be necessary so agriculture was being collectivized. This stage was infinitely more bloody than the first. What was called suffering in the West would have seemed like a miracle of economic affluence in Russia. Stalin himself was later to tell Churchill that these years were the most painful of his life. When Stalin was pained by the pain of others, it was pain indeed.

Foster's praise for Soviet policies on religion was sure to raise the hackles of even very reform-minded American voters:

In the U.S.S.R., as part of the general cultural revolution, religion is being liquidated. Religion, which Marx called, "the opium of the people," has been a basic part of every system of exploitation that has afflicted humanity chattel slavery, feudalism, capitalism. It has sanctified every war and every tyrant, no matter how murderous and reactionary. Its glib phrases about morality, brotherly love and immortality are the covers behind which the most terrible deeds in history have been done. Religion is the sworn enemy of liberty, education, science.

Such a monstrous system of dupery and exploitation is totally foreign to a Socialist society; firstly, because there is no exploited class to be demoralized by religion; secondly, because its childish tissue of superstition is impossible in a society founded upon Marxian materialism; and thirdly, because its slavish moral system is out of place, the new Communist moral code developing naturally upon the basis of the new modes of production and exchange.(p. 118)

It's worth noting that Soviet policies on religion were at least partly due to the particular role played by the Russian Orthodox hierarchy in support of the Czar and his system. European anticlericalism in general arose in a context very different from the situation of church in the United States. The same was true in Latin America.

In theory, a Marxist government would have no reason to discriminate against religion or religious individuals as such. Marx's own suggestion on a programmatic statement on freedom of religion in his 1875 Kritik des Gothaer Programms (Critique of the Gotha Program) is somewhat ambigious, though memorable:

Wollte man zu dieser Zeit des Kulturkampfes dem Liberalismus seine alten Stichworte zu Gemüt führen, so konnte es doch nur in dieser Form geschehen: Jeder muß seine religiöse wie seine leibliche Notdurft verrichten können, ohne daß die Polizei ihre Nase hineinsteckt. Aber die Arbeiterpartei mußte doch bei dieser Gelegenheit ihr Bewußtsein darüber aussprechen, daß die bürgerliche „Gewissensfreiheit" nichts ist außer der Duldung aller möglichen Sorten religiöser Gewissensfreiheit, und daß sie vielmehr die Gewissen vom religiösen Spuk zu befreien strebt. Man beliebt aber das „bürgerliche" Niveau nicht zu überschreiten.

[Everyone should be able to attend his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in. But the Workers' party ought, at any rate in this connection, to have expressed its awareness of the fact that bourgeois "freedom of conscience" is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part it endeavours rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion. But one chooses not to transgress the "bourgeois" level.]

Since neoconservatives owe an important part of their intellectual perspective to Troskyism, it's interesting to note Foster's 1932 position on that strain of Marxist thought:

The capitalist arguments that "it is impossible" also found their echoes within the Communist party of the Soviet Union, where they reflected the despair of the defeated and declining capitalist remnants in the U.S.S.R. Their outspoken representative was Trotzky. He formulated theories that it was impossible to build Socialism in one country that first the world revolution was necessary; that the Party was degenerating and surrendering to a rapid growth of capitalist elements in city and country; that the Socialist industry development was destined to go on in a declining curve of new production; that the Soviet Union had abandoned the world revolution, etc. The logic of his position would have led to the precipitation of abortive and fatal Communist revolts abroad and disastrous civil war at home against the great middle masses of peasants. All this would have surely defeated the revolution. (pp. 125-6)

Here was Foster's explanation of a key Marxist-Leninist concept:

The dictatorship of the proletariat, unlike the capitalist dictatorship, makes no pretenses of being an all-class democracy, a democracy of both exploiters and exploited. It is frankly a democracy - of the toiling masses, directed against the exploiters. Its freedom is only for useful producers, not for social parasites. Lenin, writing before the Russian revolution, says: "Together with an immense expansion of democracy for the first time becoming democracy of the poor, democracy of the people and not democracy of the rich folk - the dictatorship of the proletariat will produce a whole series of restrictions of liberty in the case of the oppressors, exploiters and capitalists." (p. 134)

The third chapter is devoted to explaining why mainstream attempts to fix the problems of the system were failing and doomed to fail:

The fact is that American capitalism, like world capitalism in general, is rotten at the heart. The present great economic world crisis began in the United States. (p. 153)

Actually, it began with the collapse of the Creditanstalt in Vienna, but that's another story.

It's interesting to see the section on capitalist planning. Though he derides this whole concept as a fascist tendency, something like this is actually what major capitalist economies adopted, in the form of the New Deal in the US and with social-democratic approaches in Europe:

Capitalist "planning" is a step still further into State capitalism. The capitalist government, as the instrument of the ruling class, always has as its main function the furtherance of capitalist industry and the increase of profits at the expense of the workers, and it more and more directly intervenes in industry, hut never was this intervention so direct and far-reaching as the capitalist "planners" now propose. The movement for capitalist "planning" is an effort to hasten the process of monopolization with still more vigorous aid of the government. It also tends in the general direction of Fascism. (p. 163)

He treats his readers to more explanation of "Social Fascism":

Throughout the capitalist world the trend of the exploiters is towards Fascism; that is, to push through their offensive against the working class by policies of extreme demagogy and violence. The speed of the development of Fascism and the forms that it takes in the various countries depend upon the extent to which the capitalist crisis has progressed. Fascism develops along two main channels; that is, open Fascism and Social Fascism. (p. 173)

He did have a talent for the purple prose:

The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. (p. 189)

Here he reflects the Comintern position on conditions in Germany. A position that turned out to be a huge miscalculation.

In Germany the Social Fascist leaders [he means the Social Democratic Party, the SPD] are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of "the lesser evil.' With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a "lesser evil" than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers' rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means. (p. 191)

I don't believe I've ever encountered the word "fasciszation" before. But he wasn't entirely wrong about the Bruening government. During the last couple of years of the Weimar Republic (1930-32), Germany was operating as a semi-democracy.

The SPD's support for Hindenburg as President also didn't work out so well. But it was a far more sensible choice in 1932 than Foster makes it sound here. And his argument that the SPD saw the Communists as a greater danger than the Nazis is just not correct. The Communists in Germany (KPD) were refusing to cooperate with the SPD because the KPD was gambling that if Hitler came to power that revulsion against him would be so strong that they could take power in a German version of the Bolshevik Revolution. It didn't work out that way.

The following passage gives a hint of how loosely the term "fascist" was used at that time. And not only by the CP. I suspect that's part of the reason why "fascist" has lost all meaning in the normal American political vocabulary to the point that it just means "bad", e.g., "Islamofascism".

Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely "radical," containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. (p. 194)

In the fourth chapter, "The Revolutionary Way Out of the Crisis", he included several parts that surely still disturbed HUAC and their admirers in 1961.

Although the CP never attempted any kind of violent insurrection, Foster's 1932 program was pretty explicit on his view that the revolution he was advocating could only be achieved through violence:

The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.

It is the historical task of the proletariat to put a last end to war. Nevertheless, the working class cannot itself come into power without civil war. This is not due to the choice of the toilers ; it is because the ruling class will never permit itself to be ousted without such a fight. "Force," says Marx, "is the midwife of every old society when it is pregnant with the new one ; force is the instrument and the means by which social movements hack their way through and break up the fossilized political forms." (p. 213-4)

To put this in some historical context, Foster's 1932 book was directed toward the segment of the labor movement that were militant enough and politicized enough to find the Communists an attractive alternative. And anyone who was involved in union organizing in those days knew they could wind up having to deal with hostile cops, National Guard, gun thugs or mobsters. That's just the way things were. For his target audience, the point he makes in those two paragraphs probably seemed very obvious.

The situation in Germany teaches the same lessons. The German bourgeoisie, fearing the revolution, are developing Fascism to drown it in blood. The Reichstag is only a democratic sham to hide the almost naked Fascist dictatorship. (p. 216)

Uh, no. The Weimar democracy in 1932 was in sad shape. But by the summer of 1933, they really did have a "naked Fascist dictatorship".

I should mention here that German Nazism was commonly referred to then and later as "fascism", as the same basic type of government as Mussolini practiced in Italy. Among scholars who seriously study this stuff, there is a surprising variety of opinion on just which regimes qualify as fascist. Some believe that the National Socialist (Nazi) dictatorship in Germany was distinct enough that it should be put in its own category rather than lumped with other "fascist" regimes.

Communist Party Presidential candidate William Z. Foster, 1932

The extent to which German capitalists supported Hitler's movement is also something that is still studied and debated at some length. While Foster's statement there is more-or-less true, it's not like the German chambers of commerce had a convention and voted to support a Nazi takeover. Most of them would probably have preferred some stodgy conservative. But few representatives of German Big Business were active members of the anti-Nazi Wiederstand (resistance) in later years, either.

One of the distinctive things about the CP was that they did give a great deal of emphasis, then and later, to what they called "the Negro question":

The Negroes also constitute a great potentially revolutionary force. Comprising about 12,000,000, they are the poorest of the poor. They are made up of the most impoverished farmers, the lowest paid workers in the industries and in domestic service. They are the most bitterly exploited and persecuted element of the whole population. There is no section which has to confront such terrible economic, political, and social conditions. At his every turn the Negro faces a system of the rankest discrimination and exploitation. His outrageous position in society is a blazing indictment and exposure of the sham American capitalist democracy. (p. 224)

The following was largely day-dreaming in the American context as a practical matter:

In measuring the potential forces for and against the revolution, naturally the question of the role to be played by the army and navy is one of fundamental importance; for, in the final showdown, it is upon them that the bourgeoisie relies to maintain its control. If it loses the armed forces, then all is lost. Here, certainly, the revolution will recruit powerful forces, with fatal effects to capitalism. The armed forces are not impervious to Communism simply because they have patriotic propaganda dinned into their ears and are subjected to a rigid discipline. The great bulk of these forces originate in proletarian or farmer families and they eventually respond to the sufferings and miseries of their close relatives. Especially is all this true of conscript armies. Besides, they have their own deep grievances in the service. Experience teaches that such worker-peasant forces are very unreliable for the bourgeoisie. (p. 228)

Foster outlined the major policy points that the CP was emphasizing at that time as follows:

1. UNEMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL INSURANCE AT THE EXPENSE OF THE STATE AND EMPLOYERS.
2. Against Hoover's wage-cutting policy.
3. Emergency relief, without restrictions by the government and banks, for the poor farmers, exemption of poor farmers from taxes, and from forced collection of debts.
4. Equal rights for the Negroes, and self-determination for the Black Belt.
5. Against capitalist terror; against all forms of suppression of the political rights of the workers.
6. Against imperialist war; for defense of the Chinese people and of the Soviet Union. (pp. 247-8)

Again, "capitalist terror" would have had immediate meaning for labor activists at the time. But it's pretty doubtful how many peole were especially concerned with "defense of the Chinese people and of the Soviet Union".

He also called for equal pay for women:

The Party makes special demands for women workers, including equal pay with men, special protection in industry, maternity insurance, etc., and it incorporates them in its immediate program in given struggles. For the ex-service men it demands the full payment of the bonus ; for those now in the army and navy service better wages, food, housing, etc. It demands the repeal of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act.(p. 251)

The "special protection" notion for women has largely been discarded these days. But when the Equal Rights Amendment was first adopted by the Republican Party in 1944, New Dealers and labor activists suspected it of being some business attempt to disadvantage female workers by removing such special protections.

The final chapter was devoted to Foster's vision for the "Soviet States of America". Given our current experience with crassly partisan justice at the national level, this point really does not sound that appealing:

The Soviet court system will be simple, speedy and direct. The judges, chosen by the corresponding Soviets, will be responsible to them. The Supreme Court, instead of being dictatorial and virtually legislative, as in the United States, will be purely juridical and entirely under the control of the C.E.C. The civil and criminal codes will be simplified, the aim being to proceed directly and quickly to a correct decision. In the acute stages of the revolutionary struggle special courts to fight the counter-revolution will probably be necessary. The pest of lawyers will be abolished. The courts will be class-courts, definitely warring against the class enemies of the toilers. They will make no hypocrisy like capitalist courts, which, while pretending to deal out equal justice to all classes, in reality are instruments of the capitalist State for the repression and exploitation of the toiling masses. (p. 273)

To clarify, he proceeds directly to explain:

The American Soviet government will be the dictatorship of the proletariat. (p. 273)

And Foster didn't really envision a competitive party system:

The leader of the revolution in all its stages is the Communist party. With its main base among the industrial workers, the Party makes a bloc with the revolutionary farmers and impoverished city petty bourgeoisie, drawing under its general leadership such revolutionary groups and organizations as these classes may have. Under the dictatorship all the capitalist parties Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Socialist, etc. will be liquidated, the Communist party functioning alone as the Party of the toiling masses. Likewise, will be dissolved all other organizations that are political props of the bourgeois rule, including chambers of commerce, employers' associations, rotary clubs, American Legion, Y.M.C.A., and such fraternal orders as the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Knights of Columbus, etc. (p. 275)

You can see how this might be alarming to those worried about the "Communist menace", even though it was never much of a "menace" in the United States.

Speaking of menaces, this is another bit of purple prose:

In reality, the capitalists, with their program of mass poverty, exploitation and war, are a menace to the human race. (p. 284)

Foster is known for having played a significant part in reviving the tradition of black nationalism. And the CP had a proposal in their program that probably sounded almost as weird and/or unlikely then as it does now to establish a "Negro nation" in the American South:

Accordingly, the right of self-determination will apply to Negroes in the American Soviet system. In the so-called Black Belt of the South, where the Negroes are in the majority, they will have the fullest right to govern themselves and also such white minorities as may live in this section. The same principle will apply to all the colonial and semi-colonial peoples now dominated by American imperialism in Cuba, the Philippines, Central and South America, etc. (p. 304)

Whatever positive karma the CP accumulated for itself in its criticisms of racism and racial discrimination was surely mitigated by its advocacy of a separate nation for African-Americans, because the concept conceded a lot to the advocates of racial segregation.

Tom Tancredo fans would still be able to get worked up over this one:

And logically, foreign-born workers, now denied the right to vote and ruthlessly deported, will enjoy the fullest rights of citizenship. (p. 304)

He does put in a mildly good word for religious freedom in this passage:

Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following; the schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society. Present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy.

The churches will remain free to continue their services, but their special tax and other privileges will be liquidated. Their buildings will revert to the State. Religious schools will be abolished and organized religious training for minors prohibited. Freedom will be established for anti-religious propaganda. (p. 316)

The Christian fundamentalist branch of the home schooling movement think that something like Foster's vision of public education has come to pass: revolutionary studies, teaching against patriotism, a National Department of Education. (Well, we do have one of those now.)

The following has also partly come to pass, though in the form of Rubert Murdoch and Timmy Russert than what Foster envisioned:

The press, the motion picture, the radio, the theatre, will be taken over by the government. They will be cleansed of their present trash of sex, crime, sensationalism and general babbitry, and developed into institutions of real education and art; into purveyors of the interesting, dramatic, and amusing in life. The press will, through workers' correspondents on the Russian lines, become the actual voice of the people, not simply the forum of professional writers. (p. 317)

And, in the too-good-to-be-true category:

In the new Russian prisons, for example, the prisoners have the right to marry and to live with their families; they are taught useful trades and are paid full union wages for their work; there are no guards or walls or bars; the discipline is organized entirely by the prisoners themselves. The prisoners are also allowed freely to visit their friends in other towns. (p. 322)

Ron Paul fans would presumably be propelled into spasms of teeth-gnashing by reading something like this:

A Communist world will be a unified, organized world. The economic system will be one great organization, based upon the principle of planning now dawning in the U.S.S.R. The American Soviet government will be an important section in this world organization. In such a society there will be no tariffs or the many other barriers erected by capitalism against a free world interchange of goods. The raw material supplies of the world will be at the disposition of the peoples of the world. Politically, the world will be organized. (p. 326)

More samples of Fosterian purple prose:

There will be no place for the present narrow patriotism, the bigoted nationalist chauvinism that serves so well the capitalist warmakers. (p. 327)

The world capitalist system is in decay. All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot save it. Its general crisis deepens; the masses develop revolutionary consciousness ; the international revolutionary storm forces gather. Capitalism, it is true, makes a strong and stubborn resistance. The advance of the revolution is difficult, its pace is slow, and it varies from country to country, but its direction is sure and its movement irresistible. Under the leadership of the Communist International the toilers of the world are organizing to put a final end to the long, long ages of ignorance and slavery, of which capitalist imperialism is the last stage, and to begin building a prosperous and intelligent society commensurate with the levels to which social knowledge and production possibilities have reached. (p. 343)

That paragraph is his conclusion, so I'll conclude here as well.

Tags: age of uncertainty, john kenneth galbraith, karl marx, marxism, toward soviet america, william z foster