EASTMAN AS A SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARY
Eastman propounded distinctive ideas about the ultimate meaning of socialism and about the methods of attaining it; and his goal shaped his means. He disdained utopia-building in politics ("this alluring pleasure of drawing up plans for new worlds") as much as system-building in philosophy. A revolutionary's first task was aligning himself with a social force; his second was planning for the immediate future. Ideal societies were poetic rather than scientific constructions. "The question of where we shall finally arrive is small compared to the question in what direction we shall go," Eastman asserted. Liberty and the corresponding equality of opportunity were directions rather than exact and specific destinations; "as for the 'ultimate solution,' we are not greatly concerned. Nothing is ultimate when you get to it." Planning for the post-revolutionary society was fatuous. "For every man may be confident that if the power he espouses comes into preponderance, programs will be there to serve it, brains will flock to him like blackbirds. He need not expend his brains in advance upon that.... Time will be more creative than our imaginations can be.... Our elaborate prospectus will be wrong by a billion to one probability."[20]
For Eastman, socialism meant liberty rather than other traditional socialist goals such as equality and fraternity. Equality was not only an impossible goal, given the hereditary nature of man, but would engender a drab uniformity that was the antithesis of life. Socialists demanded equality only because "the crass and rigid aristocracies of our money culture" distributed opportunities by chance rather than merit. "No artist ever longed to paint out all the contrast that variety of nature and adventure and reward gives rise to," he said. Spontaneity and play would depart from life "if all were toiling at a level to a common end. The taste for rivalry, the mettle of the race, is half the joy of action.... There is both inevitability and beauty in the fluent orders that would continually form and dissolve themselves in a free society at the bidding of nature."[21]
Brotherhood was likewise "as utopian a dream as it is unexciting." Socialism was more than the abolition of poverty and of all artificial barriers of nation, race, and caste that divided people from each other. If we make people free, "we need not hope that they will turn out brothers, or be found so much alike that they will all well-wish and love each other, and acrid taste, and distaste, and isolation, and ferocity, and arrogance, and sin be lost out of the world. 'Brotherhood' belongs in heaven; the dreams of the agitator are for this world." Both Eastman's distrust of elite reformers and his abhorrence of working-class passivity led him to suspect the ideal of brotherhood. "To feel brotherly, in a millennial sort of way, is a happy manner of passing the leisure time that one owes to the sweat and penury of others.... It is a quieting gospel, and tends to conserve the current rate of interest on capital."[22]
Eastman warned against righteousness, redolent of "the jealous God, of judgment day, and of damnation of everybody who was having more fun than the apostles" and of "that marvelously self-sacrificing passion to do for others" what they do not want--making them over in our own self-image. Eastman stressed individual liberty as the goal of socialism--a predilection that stemmed from his philosophical nominalism. Eastman believed that nations, classes, and most other groups were mere abstractions; only individuals existed. "The purpose of life is that it should be lived. It can be lived only by concrete individuals; and all concrete individuals are unique, and have unique problems of conduct to solve. And though a million solutions must be generally proposed and praised in order that each may choose the true and wise one for himself, they are all futile, these solutions, and the whole proposal to live life in wisdom or virtue is hypocritical, if men and women are not free to choose." Eastman propounded many arguments for women's suffrage, but his main point was that "a developed personality is a good that justifies itself. The purpose of life is that it be greatly lived, and it can be greatly lived only by great characters."[23]
Eastman did not conceive of freedom as merely an absence of constraint, as he claimed the anarchists did. He recognized that in a modern society of interdependent persons and highly structured production, liberty required organization and positive effort. Economic freedom, defined as workers' ownership and control of industry, must underpin genuine liberty; but it necessarily negated the individualistic freedom to do exactly as one pleased. In a statement presaging his later endorsement of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Eastman declared that
"the growth of social industry and capital" had engendered "the submission of the many to the few which resides not merely in the ownership but in the very operation of our wealth-producing mechanism." Individual liberty was no longer "a mere negation of external interference" but rather "a sweeping and audacious affirmation. We must organize this intricate gigantic engine so that it produces liberty as well as wealth. And organization, even of the most simple kind, requires at least a conditional authority."[24] Similarly, Eastman defended violence by strikers against scabs, dismissing claims that it infringed upon the individual liberties of those who would work. Workers properly quarantined jobs which were "propagators of indecency... a menace to the health, life, and motherhood" of the workers and "a starvation of body and spirit more lasting and more awful than the bubonic plague." Workers properly declared
that any man or woman who enters into those occupations and spreads that contagion is an enemy of their being and the being of their children. And they stand prepared to enforce that declaration by every power, whether consistent with the personal liberties of others or not, that is ready to their hands. They are employing exactly the right that every community employs when it delegates to a medical authority the power to infringe upon the personal liberty of men or women who contain the contagion of death. There is no principle of personal liberty which denies to a man, or a group of men, the right to defend their lives against destruction.[25]
Eastman, therefore, touted individual liberty as the great goal which Socialism advanced; yet he recognized that modern industrial conditions--specifically, the collectivization of production--required infringements on such liberty as a means of attaining it. However, as discussed above, Eastman distrusted government ownership of industry and the welfare state as new forms of slavery for the workers. The workers themselves, he believed, must organize collectively, overthrow capitalism, and appropriate the means of production. Ownership of industry would inexorably generate workers' control of the state.
Eastman's unusual combination of ideas--his stress on liberty, his positing of a plurality of social goods independent of class, and his view that the triumph of socialism was a matter of will rather than history's automatic result--raises a provocative question. If all human goods are not inevitably contained in the triumph of socialism--if feminism, birth control, racial equality, and literary freedom are distinct goods that must be achieved separately--the possibility exists that the workers might not want these goods. What if the victorious, newly liberated proletarians oppress blacks and women and throttle literature and art? Would collective ownership of the means of production necessarily translate into liberty for each individual worker, some of whom may adhere to values different from those of the majority? Classical Marxists avoided these problems by asserting that all oppressions resolved into issues of class and that socialism inevitably encompassed all other necessary changes: the workers, in liberating themselves, automatically liberated all of humanity. Socialist women and African-American socialists dissented from this view, and Eastman himself doubted it.
Eastman's severing of racial, gender and aesthetic issues from class also raised the possibility that the methods suitable for liberating the workers might not suffice for other groups. Marx had asserted that the proletariat would grow in size and in economic importance until it could seize the economy and the state through its own overwhelming power. But blacks would never become a majority or attain their goals without massive white support; likewise, women could not win either economic or political power without the consent of men. Workers, in other words, could at least theoretically achieve their revolution based solely on their own power, as Eastman advocated. This, indeed, was his concept of revolution--the conquest of power by an oppressed class. However, this form of victory was impossible for women or blacks, who must secure large numbers of allies in the very groups that oppress them. Again, traditional Marxists resolved this problem by reducing all issues of race and gender to those of class; women and blacks would be automatically liberated as blacks and as women, as well as in their capacity of workers, by proletarian revolution. Eastman doubted this.
This conundrum, combined with Eastman's occasional doubts about socialism's inevitability, led him to reinsert ethics into his scheme for social change. Eastman often attacked "the delusions of ethics" as fostering reform and uplift rather than class-conscious revolution. Labelling a human quality or action as good or evil, he declared, was "much the same thing"; it generated preaching for or against that quality or action rather than scientific understanding of it. "And preaching at human nature, preaching that never takes the scientific trouble to decide what is the origin and composition and actual potentiality of the traits preached at, may be said to have proven a complete failure." During the European bloodbath of World War I he declared that "if professional preachers and idealists "instead of trying to alter with exhortation the instinctive nature of man, had once sat down to determine what the unalterable facts of that nature are, and then tried to construct a world in which such a nature could function without disaster, European civilization might be in existence now." Marxism appealed to him precisely because it offered a mechanism of change that did not depend on ethics, preaching, altruism, or elite support. He revised Marxism in ways that seriously undercut that method of change, however, without recognizing the implications of his revisions. Eastman preached class struggle even while he propounded a profoundly ethical ideal of what society might be rather than what it inevitably would become. Marx's materialism structured his inevitability theory; but once Eastman made revolution a matter of will, he had somewhere to find room for ethics and altruism--or at least an expanded concept of self-interest that included justice, equality, and the full development of human personality. Eastman squared this circle by explicitly accounting for the ethical idealism of a rare minority even as he more insistently embraced economic determinism. "Never let any so-called Marxian tell you that the power of disinterested idealism is nothing, or is neglible," he emphasized. "Point to the life of Marx himself. All that his philosophy rejects is the alleged disinterest of those whose interests are really at stake."[26]
Eastman's concept of liberty, diversity, and the fulfillment of human personality as the goals of revolution directly generated his espousal of a wide array of non-class causes. It also determined his method and his personal relationship to the revolutionary movement. Like Emma Goldman, he urged that revolutionaries celebrate life and enjoy the revolution. Indeed, he regarded participation in the revolution as a part of the full life, exclaiming "the world is always worth saving.... But it isn't 'sacrifice' to help save it. It is self-expression. It's an interesting game, saving this world, and live people just can't kept out of it."[27] (Floyd Dell, facing twenty years in prison for his antiwar writings, echoed this pronouncement.) Viewing true ethics as the fulfillment rather than the throttling of human personality, Eastman opposed asceticism and self-sacrifice. "Man is now returning to his rights as an animal. He has now learned that morals is not meant for a scourge and a dry medicine, and that joy is its own reason." Eastman was a eudaemonist rather than a hedonist, believing that happiness, intensity of experience, and self-cultivation, rather than pleasure, are the most fulfilling goals of life. "There is no absolute value except life itself, the having of experiences," he insisted.[28] The fully developed personality found joy in all of life, in its sorrows and pains as well as its pleasures.
Eastman felt that his apotheosis of freedom and effervescent living made converts as well as sense. Radicals should not confront opponents with a "satchel full of statistics" and abstract arguments but rather "show them in a sympathetic way that there is more fun for them, as well as for humanity in general, in the new direction. Give them an hour's exercise in liking something else--that is worth all the proofs and refutations in the world." Agitators and propagandists could not dissuade people from beliefs they cherished. Opinions were "an expression primarily of a human wish"; if people want to agree with us, they will. Arguments for liberty, Eastman thought, are "particularly adapted to this more persuasive kind of propaganda." For liberty did not demand the reform of "any given person's tastes or likings.... It merely demands that these should not be erected into a dogma, and inflicted as morality or law upon everybody else.... [It recognizes] that each one of us has a unique problem of life to solve, and he or she must be made free to solve it in her own unique way."[29]
Eastman's philosophy of life found its most complete expression in Enjoyment of Poetry, for he felt that all people should live poetically, whether or not they read or wrote verse. The poet, who was but a connoisseur of life, embraced "every impress of the existing world... all things that ever presented themselves to the apprehension of a man.... We are attracted to all vivid realization whatsoever, as though we were the blessed gods who, having made the world, were satisfied that it was good in every part." The poetic "live variously as well as vividly in the present" and "welcome all living qualities and perfect them." They will not confine and deaden themselves within the confines of a single love, however important it may be; nor will they become preoccupied with any practical concerns to the exclusion of experiencing life fully. "Not variety alone, but idleness in variety pertains to the poetic life.... Realization is a flower of leisure and does not blossom quickly."[30]
Eastman has been criticized for this attitude by many authors. Yet the doctrine that laughter, good times, free love, and skepticism are incompatible with revolution begs the question of what kind of revolution we desire. It implicitly assumes that a fanatical band of ascetics, ready to immolate themselves and anyone else upon the altar of Socialism, is the only proper model of a revolutionary. But Eastman wanted a revolutionary movement "that belongs to us," and he demanded that the people who fight the revolution, and not abstract History, should define (and endlessly refine and expand) the revolution's goals and methods.[31] The proletariat--in which Eastman somewhat expansively included all those who work for a living--might indeed have an "Historic Task"; but that task was not the fulfillment of a reified blueprint mandated by Historic Necessity, but the forging of a revolution and a revolutionary culture after its own taste.
The ultra-left condemnation of Eastman as a bourgeois bohemian is contradictory and absurd. Few authors question a revolutionary's right to combine a satisfying personal life with revolutionary activity, except when the revolutionary's concept of personal life is unconventional. Critics seldom attack rebels who have traditional personal lives. All but strict Leninists concede that party leaders such as Hillquit, Debs, or Berger--much less rank and file workers--can pursue mundane goals such as family, career, and often enough a home and garden, while simultaneously fomenting revolution. Conventional marriages and families are tacitly accepted while free liaisons are considered frivolous and unrevolutionary; careers are validated but a bohemian repudiation of careers in favor of art is seen as lacking seriousness; a taste for middlebrow novels and conventional amusements is not questioned, but advocating and forging a new culture evokes suspicion. Indeed, Eastman's close friend Floyd Dell was condemned as a frivolous, unrevolutionary bohemian when he practiced free love and avoided a lucrative career, only to be castigaged as "selling out" and becoming a bourgeois conservative when he settled down, married, and became a professional writer. Eastman, Dell, and Reed (among other Masses and Liberator editors) felt that all individuals should live as fully as possible in the present, rather than awaiting the revolution, even as they risked their freedom and their lives for that revolution. This is an idea that profoundly affects the revolution's course and nature.
Eastman believed that he had as much a right as anyone else to create the life he sought, to the extent possible, before the revolution. The revolution was part of the poetic life; but if the revolution were all there was to life, it would throttle poetry and every good thing. When he published a book of purely personal poems amidst the upheavals of 1918, he justified himself in a characteristic passage:
It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather than my sense of the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it. That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies, and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided being there. I have found that rather in individual experience, and in those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both camps. And life is what I love. And although I love life for all men and women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the cruel system of these times, I love it also for myself. And its essence--the essence of life--is variety and specific depth. It cannot be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle. Therefore I have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest friends for some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has never entered even so deeply as it might into those tempests of social change that are coloring our thoughts today.[32]
Despite his eudaemonism--or perhaps because of it--Eastman repeatedly risked his life, reputation, and freedom in the cause of revolution over the course of many decades. His comrades at The Masses did likewise, as did Emma Goldman, who shared many of his values and ideals. Enjoyment of life and even of the revolution was manifestly compatible with sincere and steadfast dedication.
Eastman's gospel of freedom and self-expression did encounter severe problems, however, even if not those posited by carpers on the left. Even before American entry into World War I, The Masses encountered persecution by government agents, magazine distributors, and even the nation of Canada. Eastman had hoped that "the propaganda of freedom" would win converts because it asked not that any individual change his or her inclinations or personalities, but only that he "cease announcing his own spontaenous inclinatons as the type and exemplar of angelic virtue, and demanding that everybody else be like him."[33] Far from viewing freedom as innocuous, however, many Americans viciously attacked lifestyles and opinions which diverged from their own. Basing their own identities on moral absolutes of race, gender, nationality, religion, and sexual propriety, conventional workers hated radicals as implicitly threatening their cherished communities and individual selves. Widespread popular enthusiasm for the war and for the pogroms, lynchings, and repression that accompanied it, confronted Eastman with a serious problem that most American radicals ultimately face: explaining and responding to the vitriol and hatred which which workers often regard them. Who is to blame--the capitalists, the workers, or human nature? On the one hand, Eastman said that "the ruling class of the United States is more intolerant, more ruthless and brutal, more inconsiderate of the rights of men and of families... less tempered in its tyranny by any drop of mercy or reverence for the person of the dreamer and the prophet, than any ruling-class in the world outside of Japan." On the other hand, after barely escaping a lynch mob in Fargo, North Dakota, he railed against the average American. He complained that "a mob of many thousands of representative American men and women twice attempted to lynch their own elected mayor," who was protecting a black prisoner; these many thousands of "average Americans... burned their own Court House, set fire to it on all sides, in order to smoke out the little lonely company of peculiar individuals inside who were still insisting on 'due process of law.'" The events in Fargo so embittered Eastman that he speculated that Americans were innately more brutal and selfish than other peoples. Americans, he said, were descended from individuals who abandoned their communities and settled in a new world, people who possessed "the aggressive, masculine virtues and vices" rather than those "of the more preserving and sympathetic side of our nature." Although all races were essentially alike, Americans comprised the most asocial members of each group, or their descendants. Charles W. Wood, a longtime Masses contributor, similarly warned Art Young that if he were murdered by a patriot, "the people would applaud--the people you have loved and pitied and fought for all your life." Wood feared "just the plain folk; kind, sentimental, fun-loving folk, like the boys who tried to hang Eastman out in Fargo, or those who have been terrorizing Socialist meetings in New York." Even Eugene Debs, usually the soul of kindliness, denounced his Terre Haute neighbors as "cowardly curs" who would lynch political opponents only in the secrecy of darkness.[34]
The war, the Red Scare, and the anti-black of 1917-1920 revealed a weakness in Eastman's emphasis on "the gospel of freedom." Eastman had believed that arguments stressing human liberation from the constraints imposed by class, race, and gender would appeal to Americans because such arguments did not demand that Americans change their own habits or beliefs, merely respect those of others. However, Eastman discovered that culturally and economically insecure people often fanatically and unquestioningly embrace their own cultural identities and impose them on others. The insecure must believe that their own path is not only the best way, but the only right or acceptable one. "Others" who worship alien gods or embrace strange customs and values threaten this self-defining conceit, and must therefore be squelched or eradicated. Eastman recognized that "all nations at all times have found indispensable to their spiritual ease and well-being a standard universal scapegoat, upon whom they could dump the sins and the damned-up hatreds of the day, and go on their way rejoicing." Although he at times equated Marxism with the simplistic belief that people usually act in their own economic self-interest, he occasionally interpreted Marxism as stating that class relations shape all of culture. If this is true, then people may often act against their economic self-interest in favor of deeply-embedded cultural values created or reinforced by class society. The workers, therefore, may scapegoat precisely those who foster working-class liberation and vent the hatreds and resentments caused by their status as exploited workers upon radicals seeking their betterment. Ironically, conservative workers often view radicals as self-righteous, uplifting reformers who impose their values upon others--the very meddling, unctuous reformer that Eastman himself abhorred. The capitalists, of course, encourage this. When Eastman claimed that the unemployed "have nothing to lose, not even their chains," he momentarily forget their most cherished possession, their cultural sense of who they are. In defense of this possession they will sacrifice everything and everyone else, and commit atrocities without number. As Emma Goldman recognized, those with only their chains to lose cling all the more tenaciously to them.[35]
The Masses addressed itself partly to revolutionary activists who debated theory, strategy, and tactics. Eastman considered a blend of pragmatism in ethics, eclecticism and skepticism in philosophy, and a scientific, experimental methodology, as one of his distinctive contributions to the revolutionary movement. He thought that intellectuals could greatly help insurgent workers if they eschewed their characteristic vices of sentimentality, reformism, and dogmatism, and instead practiced instrumental thinking. The Masses, according to the editorial policy which Eastman composed and displayed prominently on its masthead, was "directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found" and dedicated to "a search for the true causes."[36]
Eastman was also an advocate of scientific socialism. By science he did not mean a body of fixed, eternal truths, but rather "experimental knowledge--a free investigation of the developing facts, and a continuous re-testing of the theories, which pertain to the end we have in view." Thus Eastman began his rethinking of socialist assumptions in the light of World War I with a sardonic comment referring to the reactions of other theorists. "It is not very scientific to denounce a fact for refusing to come under your hypothesis," he said. "It is wiser to scrutinize the fact with a view to remodelling, if necessary, the hypothesis." Eastman considered almost all knowledge as tentative--in part because the mind, emotions, and personality of the human subject entered into any perception. He considered scientific "facts" to be metaphors much like poetic ones; whereas poetry represented an effort to see reality as it was, science pursued specific ends, and therefore altered and idealized reality. This directly contradicted the conventional view, and implied that science was not in any sense equivalent to truth. Eastman said that "we seek for an objective and eternal truth, but nothing is eternally true except the variety of opinions."[37]
Marxism, therefore, was a hypothesis to be tested and applied in experience. Marx had indicated how persons individually and collecively selfish could create a world that benefitted everyone. Far from idealizing human nature, Marx built his method upon an assumption of univeral egoism. The concept of class struggle was "a suggestion that seemed practical.... a solution of the problem of how to move toward an ideally free and just society when human beings, by and large, are more interested in their own advancement than in freedom and justice. This man Marx seemed to offer a scheme for attaining the ideal based on the very facts which make it otherwise unattainable." Marxism was scientific in that it was a means towards an end, that of social transformation. "Socialism differs from all reform movements exactly in this, that it names a method by which a new society can be engendered, even taking human nature at its worst."[38]
Eastman's concept of science included almost every field of human knowledge. "The Masses Bookshop", an important part of every issue, advertised literature, social science, philosophy, science, and anything else of interest to a modern intellectual. Revering the individual skeptics of previous ages, Eastman nonetheless exulted that the awakener and liberator in his age was not an individual but the collective endeavor of science. He integrated Freud and Darwin into Marxism, and even modified and appropriated Nietzsche for the revolutionary cause. When asked what books would most benefit socialists, he recommended books on psychology, evolution, anthropology, and related topics, while excluding socialist tracts and tomes. He also insisted that science could be employed for any purpose; it had no predetermined social role. Nor was literature worthy of total dedication. "What you need is not literature but science," he told Masses readers. In the coming century, "scientific technique" would display "literary moralism" as a dominant force. A poet himself, Eastman declared that "there is other work to be done by those whose goal is social liberty, than agitate and converse and write beautiful literature and poems of love and anarchy. Either we will bend this patient, sharp-eyed and dogged-moving monster, Science, to our high purposes of life, or others will use him for death and tyranny. For he is the sovereign instrument of all great and lasting change."[39]
This concept of science as an open-ended process of pragmatic experimentation rather than a fixed body of conclusions shaped Eastman's theory and practice of revolution. Eastman disdained total world-systems in philosophy, the air-tight weltanschauung that left no room for contingency, doubt, or new knowledge. In this spirit, The Masses neither explained every human problem by reference to class, or hoped that proletarian revolution would abolish every oppression. Eastman considered feminism, birth control, literary freedom, black liberation, and other issues as separate and distinct from the class struggle, even if their advocates could by an act of will unite them. "Sex equality is a question by itself," he said. "Socialism does not include it.... The question of sex equality, the economic, social, political independence of woman stands by itself, parallel and equal in importance to any other question of the day. The awakening and liberation of woman is a revolution in the very process of life. It is not an event in any class or an issue between classes. It is an issue for all humanity." Prison reform was, after feminism, that "which is most interesting to a revolutionist. For it stands, a little more than any great reform does, apart from the issue between capital and labor. It can be in some measure accomplished without rectifying the distribution of wealth; and, rectifying the distribution of wealth will not accomplish it."[40] This stance was a major improvement upon the usual socialist position, which viewed other social movements as subsidiary causes automatically included in proletarian revolution, and thus unworthy of sustained thought and effort.
Eastman, of course, did relate sexism, racism, the criminalization birth control, and other evils to the class struggle in manifold ways; he simply denied that all forms of oppression and prejudice stemmed exclusively from capitalism. "Racial animosity the world over is animosity against an economic rival," he said; although we harbor "a survived impulse of suspicion against a man of alien traits," we downplay such suspicion when it is not exacerbated by a real or imagined clash of interests." Similarly, Eastman argued that revolutionaries should support birth control as a necessity in any society, whether based on class oppression or not; but he also related it to the contemporary class struggle. "An unskilled worker is never free, but an unskilled worker with a large family of half-starving children cannot even fight for freedom. That for us is the connection between birth-control and the working-class struggle."[41]
Although some of Eastman's subsequent critics have complained that he did not sufficiently unify his various causes under an overarching rubric, it was precisely his relating a diversity of causes--in a magazine, in a free-spirited movement, in life, and hopefully in the future society--that constituted one of his major contributions to the revolutionary movement. Like Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, The Masses and The Liberator incorporated the views and needs of women, blacks, and other suppressed groups on an equal basis with the necessities of class struggle. That Eastman did not unite them in one grandiose theory that made all evils follow inevitably from one cause, enhanced rather than diluted his revolutionary theory. Unified theories often falsify reality and subordinate all causes to the one deemed primary. Moreover, while always insisting on the partial autonomy of other liberation movements, Eastman increasingly stressed class war as the most important mechanism of change after American entry into World War I, the Red Scare, and the Bolshevik Revolution.
It is true that Eastman did not delve as deeply into the complicated relations between the different forms of oppression as his intellectual successors, the cultural Marxists, have done. Sophisticated Marxists have perceived many subtle interactions between gender, race, nationality, and class. They have viewed reality as a complicated field of multifaceted relationships in which there is no "base" and no "superstructure," but only a field of interlocking causes. The causal nexus appears as one big blur, rather like an electron field; there is no gender and no race aside from class, and no class undelimited by gender and race. Eastman too often contented himself with asserting the separateness of causes he nevertheless related on an intellectual as well as an activist level. In particular, his interpretation of Marxism as stating that most people act in their own economic interests deflected his attention from the more profound issue: how ruling-class economic power translates into cultural power and shapes the entire society, often leading workers to act against their own interests and for those of their masters. This is the problem of hegemony, upon which Eastman only barely and occasionally touched. Unlike the satirical "Mr. Block" cartoons of the IWW press, which reflected the IWW's intimate knowledge of the backward consciousness of most workers, cartoons in The Masses (and even more, The Liberator) usually idealized workers and the working class. But despite these shortcomings, Eastman did begin the necessary process of broadening Marxism, inaugurating the first inchoate gropings towards a more positive integration of gender, race, and class, and of diverse modern thinkers. This confrontation with American realities, with its potential for mobilizing women and people of color upon the basis of their specific needs and identites, was contribution enough for one person in one decade.
Critics have also claimed that Eastman (and many other Americans) simplified and distorted Freud as they appropriated him for their own ends. In particular, Eastman is accused of regarding repression as merely debilitating rather than as a necessity of civilization and of claiming that unconscious desires were the root of much evil; this allegedly generated the excessively optimistic belief that merely removing inhibitions or uncovering the unconscious could transform society, culture, and the individual.[42] Other critics imply that Freudianism is incompatible with Marxism. Eastman, however, realized that Freud could sometimes bolster Socialism and the economic interpretation of reality even if he sometimes undermined them. Discussing Rockefeller's religiosity, Eastman said that he might indeed be a sincere idealist, one of those who "carefully guarded their personal privilege and source of income against every accident. The larger part of our mind is unconscious, and it knows how to take care of these emotions. We agonize over misfortunes of others, but our agony quite automatically forgets to get around to the real point at which, by sacrificing our own power, we can relieve them.... I gladly acknowledge that [Rockefeller] defends his self-interested despotism with those abstract ideals in entire childlike ignorance of what motives control him." It was, therefore, all the more important that disinterested critics reveal his true motives--perhaps even to himself. In such cases, the new science of psychology could help Marxists uncover the genuine motivations that underlay rhetoric and pretense. On another occasion, however, having received a book claiming that Martin Luther rebelled out of uncontrolled lust, masturbation, and neurorsis, he ironically commented that it was "rather shocking to one piously reared in the economic interpretation of the Reformation."[43]
Although Eastman extolled Freudianism as a science which, like Marxism, penetrated beneath shams and shibboleths into the wellsprings of human motivation, he never regarded it as anything other than a hypothesis that must be verified by experience. Moreover, he could cheerfully remind his critics that even the greatest thinkers should not be learned by rote or mechanically applied, but creatively appropriated by persons possessing their own goals and values. Eastman's applications of Freud have the same virtues and same vices as his inclusion of feminist and racial issues in the revolutionary movement: he was a pioneer who began a necessary project, and, almost inevitably, occasionally erred when addressing specific issues. His concept of science as the application of continually discovered truths to shifting problems hardly allows for the possibility of arriving at specific insights that remain unchanged over time.
Nevertheless, Eastman was among the first Marxists to recognize that human nature, however flexible and variable it may be, includes irrational needs, unacknowledged desires, and a whole range of impulses that cannot be subsumed under any rational calculation of economic interest. The Marxism of Eastman's day was based on the classical bourgeois economic assumption that Economic Man would act in his self-interest once it was pointed out to him (either by others in his plight who had already perceived their common interest, or by relatively disinterested intellectuals). Yet the entire socialist enterprise would be unnecessary if this were true. Oppressed groups cling to inherited identities based on race, gender, religion, and nationality while repudiating class consciousness. People are cultural beings who usually perceive their self-interest in non-economic terms bound up in their values and self-identities even when those identities contradict their economic interests. Freud and the subsequent research of empirical psychologists can inform discussions of hegemony and the broader issue of why subordinate groups so often idealize and obey authority.
Eastman also revised Marx for his purposes. He considered science as intelligence directed towards an end; it therefore informed idealism. Philosophers, poets, and revolutionaries should not formulate yet another philosophy of life or draw the blueprints for utopia, but rather discern which emergent force would embody their hopes and achieve their objectives. The scientific idealist understood the motives and social forces driving proposed changes "and knows just where to place his help." Marx believed that he embodied the science of his day, which valued predictive ability. But Eastman believed that Marx's most important prediction, that proletarian revolution was inevitable, was but "a rationalization of his wish." Whole new sciences had been discovered since Marx's day. Contemporary Marxists must "recompose this system in the light of a truer conception of the nature of science.... We must alter and remodel what he wrote, and make of it, and what else our recent science offers, a doctrine that shall clearly have the nature of hypothesis, of method for proceeding toward our end. A technique of progress" rather than abstract and eternal truths about the nature of reality, "is what today demands." Moreover, "what we want is not a prediction, but a method of progress. We do not want to know what to watch, we want to know what to do"--what social forces the abstract idealist should aid. Marx himself had exemplified this approach; despite his pretense to objectivity, "his passion breaks through on every chapter, and his most impersonal conclusions point to action every time. He prophecies a social revolution, but he rarely fails to tell you, if you want that revolution, what to do."[44]
Eastman demanded that revolutionaries sometimes help fulfill bourgeois programs, such as women's suffrage or capitalist tendencies towards a world federation. Speaking of the latter, Eastman claimed that utilizing capitalist as well as proletarian energies obeyed "the dictates of the Economic Interpretation of History" because both classes had an interest in survival. "Let us admit that we are here dealing with a hope that is not social revolutionary in any sense." World federation "may logically come before anything like a social revolution is accomplished. But logical or not, let us not block the progress of our hopes, out of respect to a major premise."[45]
Because of his concept of science as experimental progress towards a goal rather than a literal description of reality, Eastman rejected one of the central dogmas of Second International Marxism, that of socialism's inevitable triumph. Practically, this doctrine fostered the policy of "revolutionary waiting" by an "inheritor party"; socialists must merely amass the gathering proletarian forces and await the revolution.[46] That revolutionists may have have unique opportunities that will not recur, that they should take advantage of events to advance their program or seize power, was anathema. "Revolutionary waiting" was a passive policy which inculcated obedience, conservatism, and a feeling that, if only the party was kept functioning, power would fall into its hands automatically. Thus, when Eastman proposed that socialist intellectuals analyze the disposition of social forces and place their energies where they would do the most good, he was, while perhaps congruent with Marx, actually contradicting much Socialist party ideology and practice.
Eastman's concept of the Socialist party, as of Marxism, was instrumental, pragmatic, and fluid. Addressing those who avoided the Socialist party because of quibbles about its doctrine or practice, Eastman reminded them that joining a revolutionary organization "isn't a question of choosing the Absolute. It's a question of seizing any instrument and all the instruments that will be of help toward the end you have in view.... For those who have courage and the self-dependence it is possible now, for the first time in history, to dismiss the Absolute in whatever form in may appear, and use all things, and all ideas too, as instruments and lights merely, for the responsible endeavors of man." The SP was merely a temporary instrument of a larger purpose and may well find itself superseded: "a revolutionary movement that didn't give birth to a new organization with a new idea every few years would be inferitle and dead. It would certainly never give birth to a revolution." But too many socialists considered their party as a church, an infallible instrument of salvation. Dogmatism was "the chief fault of the party. Scientific thinking requires the power to suspend judgment, and that power has habitually been renounced as an automatic part of the act of becoming a party-member.... Clap the creed over any new fact that arises, and if the fact will not fit under the creed, shut your eyes and jaw it under. This manner of employing the mind cannot be called thinking. I call it theological automatism, and I have no doubt it is the leading cause of the failure of the Socialist party progress."[47]
The party should not only eschew dogma and adopt instrumental thinking, however; it must recruit members upon the basis of action rather than theory. "Having released himself from a dogmatic fixation upon his doctrine, [the socialist] will have to learn to subordinate doctrine altogether in his recruiting activities. Even a live and pliant scientific hypothesis is not the nucleus around which a political party can be formed. A political party ought to represent, not a certain kind of knowledge, but a certain economic interest. It ought to take in all the people who agree in wanting something concrete and immediate. The American Socialist party includes only people who agree in understanding something remote and ultimate. It is not a party of the working-class; it is a party of the theory of the working-class. This fatal weakness is accentuated by the fact that the theory is of European origin, and all its terminology and catch-words are alien to our people.... You cannot build an effectual fighting group around it. Theoretic thinking is too unusual--thinking is too universally subordinated to immediate interests, for such a group to grow great and have a direct impact upon history. It will remain merely an organ of special education."[48]
Eastman therefore advocated that the Socialists put their weight behind bourgeois reforms (such as Wilson's international federation) if those reforms advanced the cause of socialism or preserved the conditions necessary for socialist agitation; that the party accept members of non-socialist groups, such as the Non-Partisan League; that it vigorously support the IWW and repeal its own prohibition on sabotage and other illegal acts; and that it address issues of importance to women, blacks, and the middle class. Marxists, he said, should continuously update and revise their theory into an activist, fighting philosophy, of concrete use in the actual struggles of life. In this he adumbrated the concept of an activist organization later fitfully embodied in the Communist party. Since the 1960's radicals have generally participated in every struggle for human liberation, however "bourgeois" or "reformist," while seeking to inject a radical consciousness into them. Radicals strive to make the participants in issue-oriented and particularistic social movements aware of the connection between their oppression and that of others, and between their oppression and the economic and social system within which they live. They teach activists working for black, women's, or gay liberation that they cannot be fully free as long as the means of production are owned and controlled by a tiny proportion of the population and that economic freedom must underlie every other form of human liberation.
Although Eastman championed pragmatism in tactics and eclecticism in philosophy, he insisted that class struggle was the scientific method of social change and largely determined a person's ethical ideals. "Karl Marx was the only idealist who ever took the science of economics seriously," he said. "That science is based upon the assumption that in the big average every man acts in the economic interest of himself and his family.... This being true, then the only way you can effect a substantial change in the production and consumption of wealth is by lining up the people whose economic interests go in the direction of that change. When you get then lined up, you will find the people whose economic interests go in the other direction lined up against them, and you will have a Class Struggle. If your side wins you will have a Revolution, and go down to glory as the defenders of human liberty"; if you lose, the winners "will call you materialistic, incendiary, enemies of Christianity and democratic brotherhood.... But remember this--you suffer, as suffered the martyrs of astonomy and physics, for your faith in true knowledge. Your eyes are unveiled of the delusions of ethics as theirs were unveiled of the delusions of theology. You know the truth" that only revolution by the oppressed class will produce "liberty and equality."[49]
Middle-class reformers and democratic idealists denied "the hard and biting fact that economic self-interest is a dominating force in all history. They still live in a world in which fundamental democratic progress comes by telling, and persuading, and showing how, and propagating reasonable opinions, and better social feeling. This is not the real world. The real world is a world in which privilege can only be uprooted by power." Democratic progress was achieved only by disreputable struggle by the dispossessed against a nobility "whose power is property and whose armor is respectability."[50] Intellectual idealists grouped around The New Republic harbored "a utopian conception of reality" that denied this truth:
It requires a hard head--perhaps a little hardness in the heart--to live and nourish hopes upon such a reality. But that is the reality of science.... Facing this reality, THE MASSES rests its great hope of democracy in agitation and organization of the lower classes, rather than in telling the upper classes, who do not want democracy, how they might get it, if they would only be entirely practical and consent to go very slowly step-by-step. We of THE MASSES would like to assemble the power that will do something; they of the New Republic are satisfied to instruct the power that won't.[51]
Class struggle was a scientific method that did not imply or encourage hatred. "The class struggle is a conflict of human interests that are simply natural," Eastman said. "It is not bad men against good men. It is not smart against stupid men.... Some of the best people in the land are on the owning side." Most combatants on both sides were "just plain, ordinary, common, back-parlor folks like J.P. Morgan, looking out for their family interests the best way they can, and loving to be a power in the community." The accidents of birth rather than moral qualities determined our stance; workers, people born without property, would emulate Morgan if offered the chance. "The doctrine of the class struggle is flatly opposed to class hate. It is a calm and loving acknowledgment that our problems arise out of a conflict of interests which are inevitable and all right-all right on both sides."[52] Although Socialists did not hate capitalists, they must wage relentless war against them, eschewing reform and compromise. "We do not wish to make peace.... between capital and labor at the current general rate of exploitation. Peace betwen capital and labor at just that rate is the dearest wish of capital."[53]
Eastman became editor of The Masses amidst the bitter dispute between the IWW and the SP over the relative importance of industrial versus political action. The IWW favored union organization, strikes, and militant tactics such as sabotage at the point of production while rejecting electoral politics as a meaningless charade; the SP, touting party organization and voting, necessarily repudiated illegal methods. In tune with his pragmatic and electic bent, Eastman believed that the two organizations should work in tandem rather than dogmatizing about the precise mechanism of class-conscious revolution or the exact shape of the future society. Yet from the beginning he agreed with the IWW (and with SP radicals such as Eugene Debs) that politics merely reflected economics. Revolutionists, he believed, would ultimately win upon the field of industrial organization. These views presaged his later support for the Bolshevik revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In his maiden editorial in The Masses Eastman adroitly combined economic with political action. The struggle between capital and labor was "the big, ominous conflict in this country today.... Above it, like froth on a cataract, dances a political contest among a handful of wealthy sporting gentlemen.... The people get the privilege of sitting on the bleachers, and suffering the illusion of a real contest. They like it. Everybody likes it. American politics is essentially a sport.... Politics and Baseball are the most popular sports in America." However, the "struggle in bitterness for the substance of life" was in deadly earnest. "The great struggle of life, rumors of which continually rumble beneath all this mere fun and frolic, will be found moving steadily closer into the central arena. A few more years of starvation strikes, armed intimidations, murders, murder trials, labor injunctions, dynamite courts, free speech fights--a few more years, and this tumult upon the field of industry will break into that field which has been so long dedicated to recreation, and those who are still left on the bleachers will see a political conflict that is worth the price of admission." This statement acknowledged the primacy of the underlying economic conflict while also calling the political battleground "the central arena." The SP injected class conflict into the political realm while the capitalist parties (especially the reformist Progressive party) maneuvered to exclude it; therefore every vote for SP candidate Eugene Debs was "a vote for revolutionary Socialism and the working-class struggle."[54]
Eastman declared that the interneicine squabbling between the IWW and the SP expressed "the dogmatic mode of thinking." Direct action meant strikes, including a nation-wide class strike; political action entailed class conscious voting, possibly leading to "a complete expropriation of capitalists by an unpropertied majority.... So far from being opposed to teach other, political action and direct action always have, and always will accompany each other.... Both are correct methods.... The incorrect method is that of the man who adopts one, and then spends his time and energy denouncing the other." Neither industrial nor political action was intrinsically superior; "now one and now the other is more important. All these questions of method are to be answered differently at different times, at different places, in different circumstances. They are forever new questions, arising in new conditions, and depending for a correct answer upon our exercise of a free and intelligent judgment. Therefore, the one thing continually important is to keep our judgment free. Tie up to no dogma whatever."[55]
Eastman, therefore, seemingly occupied the middle ground, exclaiming that "we shall never have a united revolutionary movement" until IWW and SP partisans "grow up." Both sides were "right when they affirm" and "wrong when they deny."[56] However, believing that economic organization at the point of production necessarily preceded and undergirded political triumph, Eastman in fact tilted towards the IWW. Indeed, on this crucial point his philosophy closely resembled that of both Daniel De Leon, the Socialist Labor party leader who had helped form the IWW but had been in effect expelled in 1908, and Eugene Debs, both of whom privileged economic over political organization.
Anybody who talks about "the power of the ballot"--if he really means a power to deprive the ruling class of the capital--is talking nonsense. A revolutionary vote would be nothing but a shower of confetti, if it were not backed up by an economic force. And the followers of Marx will be the first to say so.... The reason Socialist politics never accomplished anything revolutionary is that there has not yet been a revolutionary power behind it. Just as soon as you deliver the power on the economic field, the party will deliver results on the political field. No sooner, no later.[57]
The ballot was "ineffectual for great changes unless there is economic power behind it." Like Debs, Eastman occasionally warned that "there is danger to the Socialist party when it sends a man to Congress"; elected representatives might become mired in mere reformism and forget "the class struggle and the economic interpretation of history."[58]
Despite his pragmatic eclecticism, Eastman demanded revolution--"a change effected through a conquest of power by the lower classes"--while repudiating reform, "a change effected through concessions made by those who hold the power." Mediation, negotiation, "impartial" boards, the "public interest," and other such shibboleths only disguised class rule under benevolent forms and rhetoric. "Impartial" boards and mediators would unhesitantly side with the capitalists "because the capitalistic habit of thought prevails throughout society, and the very concept of justice in the mind of a supposedly impartial judge is a capitalistic concept," including the right of owners of property to live off the labor of others. The "public" representative on the "impartial" committees was invariably "one of the chief bulwarks of capitalism," a disinterested, idealistic, thoughtful person "who represents not merely capitalism, but capitalism idealized, capitalism hallowed by its religion." Seemingly wise and benevolent, the public representative inveigled and swindled the workers when raw, overt capitalism could not crush them. "And to overthrow him you will have to do more than organize trade unions; you will have to do more than perfect a political machine; you will have to build up and popularize a new idealism and a new religion" and "become a little fanatical" about distinction between reform and revolution. "What labor wins through the intercession of capitalist idealism is no true step in the conquest of power. But what labor wins with its own force against capital and capitalistic justice, no matter if it be the tiniest concession in wages or hours of labor, is a genuine advance in the social revolution."[59]
Eastman often defined revolution as any action which increased the proportion of wealth appropriated by the workers--increases that necessarily came at the expense of capital. Reform, on the other hand, entailed changes which benefitted both classes. Many reforms directly benefitted capitalists by placating rebellious workers and improving their health and thus their productivity. "The power behind Reform is capital." Intelligent farmers provided their draft animal with sufficient food, medical care, and shelter. "Philanthrophy is the best efficiency," Eastman said; [60]
Eastman regarded the middle-class reformists of the Progressive party as both furthering and threatening the SP's program of class-conscious revolution. The Progressives fostered government regulation and even ownership of key industries, which would pave the way for working-class appropriation of the trusts; however, government ownership under capitalism was a mere sop that would solidify capitalist control, defuse discontent by marginally improving the condition of the workers, and masquerade as true Socialism. "The trusts that own the government" would foster "government ownership of the trusts" for their own self-preservation; government regulation, ownership, and labor legislation constituted "the next step in the evolution of capitalism."[61]
Eastman exclaimed that "the more government ownership [the Progressives] introduce, the better we like it; the more labor legislation, the better we like it--only provided there is enough clear thought and independent volition in the Socialist movement to keep clear the issue between us." The Progressive party was the SP's chief enemy because it advanced many of the immediate demands present in the SP's own platform; "some of its future members are in our own ranks." Socialists must encourage such reformists to leave the SP and must fight so hard for Socialism "that nobody will ever be in the slighest degree confused about the difference between us."[62] Eastman proclaimed:
We intend a social revolution, to be accomplished by a class-conscious struggle against capital and privilege. They intend a social amelioration to be accomplished by the enlightened self-interest of the privileged, combined with a little altruism and a great deal of altruistic oratory. Essentially they represent the enlightened self-interest of capitalists. We represent the enlightened self-interest of the workers, and the fight goes on.[63]
Roosevelt's Bull Moose party would "swallow up every member of the Socialist Party" who conflated "working-class revolution and the evolution of state ownership and industrial efficiency within the capitalist class." This "will be the best thing that ever happened to Socialism in America. It will purge the Socialist party of sympathizers. And if those of us who are left will only stand up to our faith with courage and with clear heads, we will have a line drawn in this country between the party of the people and the parties of the people's money, sixty-five times as quick as we would have if the Bull Moose had never come out of the woods."[64] Eastman the pragmatist and opponent of dogmatism and sectarianism, therefore, endorsed a pure, revolutionary party which fostered economic revolution and repudiated reform. He therefore presaged his later endorsement of the Bolshevik revolutions abroad and the Communist party at home.
Eastman believed that reforms often enslaved, degraded, or pacified workers. Government ownership destroyed unions because public employees were denied the right to strike. Benevolent reformers, endlessly extolled in the capitalist press, offered workers baubles that distracted them from self-activity and the urgent tasks of revolution. However, Eastman urged that workers accept whatever reforms and concessions capitalists offered. His contradictory pronouncements on the minimum wage for female workers indicates his dilemma. At one point he denounced the minimum wage as "probably the meanest conception the reform spirit ever gave birth to" because enactment would soothe the consciences of the exploiters and the general public. The proposed minimum wage could not support a worker in decency, but would enable capitalists to blame women for their poverty. "If I were a girl working all day and suffering the imposition of a living wage in a rich country, I trust I would be either a prostitute or a thief," Eastman exclaimed. However, he later hailed Oregon's mimimum wage for women as vastly improving their welfare and facilitating social revolution. Similarly, Eastman excoriated capitalist mass murder and oppression but sometimes welcomed particularly egregious atrocities as radicalizing workers. When the Supreme Court devastated unions labor in the infamous Danbury Hatters' case, Eastman hailed "the decision that makes boycotts illegal. It will only drive home the folly of just laws in an unjust society. It will throw the animus of labor against an unjust society. It will demonstrate the class struggle. It will make Gompers sick. It will drive yet more of those men under him who mean business, into the camp of the open rebels."[65]
Eastman's comments on Germany's advanced welfare state epitomized his dilemma and that of the revolutionary left. Otto von Bismark had enacted labor and social legislation as a means of throttling German socialism. German capitalists also used repression and unfair election laws, but recognized that providing for the material welfare of their workers was sound business practice. By causing workers to find their salvation in the state rather than their own self-activity, it also yielded political benefits for the exploiters. During World War I Eastman warned that the enlightened capitalism of Germany threated world revolution. "The ruling caste in Germany have known how not only to preach the theory of well-being in a disciplined state--every ruling caste has done that--but they have been wise enough actually to produce a little of the well-being," he said. "And that is the triumph they are celebrating now. The masses of the people are better off in Germany than they are anywhere else." Germany's welfare state raised productive and docile workers who willingly followed their exploiters into imperialistic war. "Care for your people if you want them to fight," Eastman said. "Care for them if you want them to work. It pays. That is a policy of German culture that will become the common heritage of the world, whatever way the war goes." This policy threatened "the lovers of real liberty in all countries." If American capitalists similarly provided for their workers the proletariat might "accept a liberty that was merely political form and historic emotion"; and America's boasted freedom would then "become as insubstantial in its way" as Germany's illusory, yet endlessly touted, metaphysical and spiritual freedom.[66]
Eastman discussed reform and revolution amidst a left\right conflict within the Socialist party. During the heyday of The Masses, the left wing opposed inclusion of immediate demands in party platforms, declaring that such reforms were bourgeois palliatives that facilitated co-optation by reformers, downplayed the class struggle, and risked the loss of Socialist party identity. Eugene Debs, the party's most popular leader and usual presidential candidate, scorned "vote catching" tactics that emphasized non-Socialist reforms as a tactic to expand the party's base even as he staunchly supported the liberation struggles of disfranchised African Americans and women.[67] Debs and other radicals deemed such "vote catching" counterproductive because bourgeois parties (such as Roosevelt's Progressives or Wilson's Democrats) could appropriate such reforms and thus lure away those specious and temporary Socialist voters upon whom the party would have become dependent. Many leftists assumed that anyone who understood socialism would vote for the party repeatedly until it triumphed, regardless of local or immediate issues; the party could not win or lose "real socialist" votes because of its immediate demands. But even if an emphasis on immediate demands attracted votes, the radicals maintained, it would trick workers into voting for the Socialist party for non-Socialist reasons. Debs and the radicals wanted the workers to consciously understand socialism and desire it, not vote for it because they wanted something else.[68] In their view the working class, lacking the property that had undergirded the dominance of previous ruling classes, could win only through conscious understanding and class-conscious organization. The more electorally-oriented right wing, however, maintained that immediate demands would attract votes and that Socialists could gradually enact their program through specific legislation.[69]
Eastman often sided with the left. He bitterly assailed reform as incompatible with revolution, and once reiterated the familiar complaint that the Socialist party was at risk when its candidates actually won office.[70] Yet some of Eastman's other ideas undermined this approach. Eastman believed that people support revolutionary change not because of rational, intellectual argument or ethical preachments, but because they desire practical aims fostered by radical organizations. If this is true, then the seemingly radical Debsian idea in fact misunderstood the mechanism by which people are persuaded of new points of view and enticed into voting for a new party. Eastman was correct when he said that people would vote socialist not out of agreement with doctrine, but out of desire to achieve a concrete goal in the present. If the capitalist parties endorsed the SP's immediate program in an attempt to co-opt or out-bid the SP, could not the Socialists simply intensify their demands? Debs's policy, which mirrored the SPD's policy of isolation and intransigent opposition, was based on a preaching-and-conversion model of the transition to socialism, an appeal to abstract understanding rather than concrete wish. As commentators on the SPD have remarked, this policy is profoundly conservative in effect. It does not directly engage society or challenge it over immediate problems, use specific issues as springboards for galvanizing, educating and radicalizing the masses, or change popular understandings through action and participation. Instead, it seeks to mobilize the workers upon the basis of abstract doctrine. No party, however, can assume power by converting the majority to a totally different concept of society. A revolutionary party must partly create that society in embryo, enlisting people on the basis of felt needs and demonstrating that better arrangements are possible by involving workers in the actual construction of the new society. Immediate reformist demands, seen as a type of mobilizing action, can be functionally more radical than a self-isolating, intransigent opposition. Building a counterculture that directly engages mainstream institutions, as the IWW attempted, is also activist and radical. The main divide, as Eastman himself realized by the early 1920s, was between those who want to do something here and now, and those who merely preach and prepare for some future time when action will be possible.
Eastman's desire to directly engage the workers upon the basis of concrete programs unavoidably touched upon a problem inherent in socialist politics, and which was aggravated in the United States by federalism, winner-take-all elections, and the two-party system. The problem, as formulated by Max Weber, consists of relating specific reforms and ultimate ends, following an "ethic of responsibility" aimed at concrete and realistic improvements rather than an "ethic of ultimate ends" which eschews involvement in favor of preserving one's own integrity and purity.[71] How can radicals confront the pressing issues of the day if their party is so small it has scant chance of winning--or if, as in Germany and the United States, it faces an electoral system that renders victory impossible? Long after Max Eastman's heyday, the tiny remnants of the Socialist party would conclude that it could serve the working class best by working as an educational and pressure group within the Democratic party. According to this theory and policy, a social-democratic workers' party did indeed exist in the United States, but as a faction within the Democratic party.[72]
One aspect of Eastman's thought led, however inchoately, in this direction. Eastman flirted with Woodrow Wilson in 1916 (John Reed actually voted for him) on the grounds that civil liberties would end, and socialist agitation become impossible, if America entered World War I--a prediction that proved only too accurate. Eastman, while voting for the Socialist candidate, issued a statement in support of Wilson, thus evoking the understandable wrath of the party faithful, who were not placated by Eastman's somewhat disingenious explanation.[73]
Eastman reconciled his subordination of immediate demands with his insistence on practical action by differentiating between reforms benefitting everyone and those helping labor at the expense of capital. Only the latter were socialistic. Eastman thought that many of the specific demands enunciated in the Socialist party platform were a potpourri unrelated to any distinct class interest and based on a delusory belief in a general interest. "If the Socialist Party would lay off its theoretical complacence, subordinate its religion of the Co-operative Commonwealth, and unify its platform under the working-principle that all changes which can clearly be proven to benefit labor at the expense of capital are socialistic, it might crystalize around itself a major part of the exploited classes," he said.[74] More importantly, Eastman, like Debs, always privileged industrial over political action, believing that the organization of workers into class-conscious, revolutionary industrial unions trumped electioneering. This underlay Eastman's insistence that the Socialist party should support the IWW and even, where appropriate, the AFL. Eastman also advocated vigorous support of reforms not directly related to class, such as feminism, birth control, and prison reform.
The essential qualities of Eastman's radicalism thus included a pragmatic concept of truth and an experimental concept of science; a skeptical aversion to dogma and fanaticism; humor; a love of poetry and philosophy; and a determination to make social revolution into an instrument for personal fulfillment. One might expect these characteristics to make Eastman a somewhat tepid radical, prone to compromise and moderation. Yet instead they enabled Eastman to transcend the shibboleths of capitalist society as trenchantly as he did the dogmas of socialism. His very tendency to evaluate actions by their results rather than on the basis of abstract ideals and conventional slogans predisposed him to a most intransigent and thoroughgoing radicalism. One example of this was his preference for class war over international war.
International war, he noted in January 1914, was celebrated in song and poetry and glorified by resplendent ideals such as patriotism and national honor. Eastman's evaluation was different. "For myself, I do not think international wars are quite so beautiful. I do not think they are in fact wars between nations--between beautiful abstract ideas. They are more usually wars between the dominant business interests of two sections of the earth, and those fine glamours of Patriotism and National Honor and Glory are only the silken vestures in which Business has to dress itself before its slaughterings on so large a scale will appear properly ceremonious." Nations were unreal abstractions that "do not exist except in the mouths and minds of those who name them. What really exists is the people, and they exist individually, and individually they have no quarrel with each other."[75]
Class war, however, was "a war that is morally necessary, a war that has a great prize in view, human liberty, namely, and the right to live and bear children.... A class war is not beautiful. It does not trail after it the glamours of poetry and art. It is not aristocratic, not noble in the feudal character of that word. It is, indeed... a stern, desperate, dirty, inglorious, and therefore supremely heroic struggle toward a real end." American society, however, reflected the interests and ideals of its owners. "We send our moral warriors [strike leaders and advocates of sabotage] to jail, but our aesthetic murderers and advocates of murder we extol and send up to the legislature." Eastman concluded: "Let us have peace--but if there shall be war, let it be war not of nation against nation, but of men against men, struggling for some real end."[76]
Until American entry into World War I moderated his pronouncements on the issue, Eastman (like Debs) independently approximated the Leninist position that socialists should turn the imperialist war into a civil war. "We are not advocates of violence," he said in January 1917, "but as between two current misfortunes we much prefer domestic to international violence. For in domestic violence it usually happens that some definite benefit is being fought for, and not infrequently the fighting holds a possibility of gaining the benefit." Eastman insisted that "such deliberation about ends and means is, in fact, the distinguishing feature of moral conduct."[77]
A theoretical endorsement of revolution, however strident, is often more palatable to the ruling elites than support of lesser violence that is actually occurring. Yet Eastman distinguished himself from many socialists by his energetic support of sabotage, illegal direct action, and even violence when committed by workers, blacks, or suffragists. Immediately after the Lexington Avenue explosion, where a bomb intended for Rockefeller killed four persons, Eastman spoke at the founding meeting of a workers' defense organization. Revolutionary proletarians convinced that capitalism was immoral, he said, would sometimes flout capitalist law "created for the defense of property holders." Therefore, the workers' defense organization would defend not only the innocent but also "men whose offenses against law have been deliberately committed in the interest of the social revolution." Eastman proclaimed that the meeting he addressed was the first in the United States "for the defense of crimes." He did not advocate illegal acts, but recognized that "working people in their struggle" would violate the law "with high motives and in the interests of the democracy of the future"; the defense committee would protect workers "whether innocent or guilty," accused of industrial and political crimes.[78]
Indeed, one of Eastman's first public pronouncement as a socialist concerned the Socialist party's amendment to its constitution that mandated expulsion of any member who advocated "crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation." In a letter to the New York Call, Eastman noted the irony of the situation. Party leaders favored condemnation of such tactics because such a condemnation would win votes among workers and the middle class alike. Yet such an interdict, issued in the name of opportunism, was actually an exercise in "extreme dogmatism" worthy "of a conclave of Methodist ministers." Eastman's pragmatism validated all methods that advanced the cause of revolution; it asserted that the efficacy of any particular method depended on circumstances and could not be endorsed or condemned on general principles. Eastman's concept of science as hypothesis led him to desire vigorous debate and a wide spectrum of opinion within the party. Therefore, while he supported the program and policy of the Socialist party, "I also advocate sabotage and violence as having been, and as likely to be in the future upon many occasions, excellent tactics in the fight of an oppressed class against its oppressors. Is there not liberality or room enough in the Socialist party for this opinion?"[79] In The Masses, Eastman extolled "sabotage performed morally--i.e., performed with deliberate estimation of its significance and results." Indeed, he drew the logical conclusion from the labor theory of value: any property the workers destroyed belonged to them, not to their capitalist masters, who had merely stolen it from the workers.[80]
Eastman applied his realistic, pragmatic, and skeptical mode of analysis to the various kinds of industrial violence. He judged actions by their actual effects rather than their ideological, legal, or abstract ethical justifications. Eastman and other Masses contributors often asserted that the capitalist system was based on the routine murder and torture of workers--not only those gunned down during strikes, but the far larger number worked to death under horrible conditions and denied the necessities of life. And conditions in America's mines, factories, and tenant farms fully justified this analysis. Fully one-third of the textile workers at the Lawrence, Massachusetts, mills, the site of a major IWW strike in 1912, died before they were 25 years old; many children died within two or three years of starting work. Yet conditions and pay in Lawrence were considerably better than those in southern mills and in many other industries. The Commission on Industrial Relations, an official U.S. government investigating body, concluded in 1915 that millions of Americans were dying deaths of slow torture because of preventable malnutrition, exposure, and disease.[81] An editorial in The Masses charged that "In present-day civilization we accept the fact that every building constructed is raised at the cost of so many human lives. We accept the fact that the steel which comes to its construction has been made out of suffering and death in the steel mills.... We go on wearing the cloth whose manufacture is killing the children." According to conventional morality, "it is permissible to destroy life, as the employers of labor destroy it. But it is wrong to destroy property, or to advocate its destruction, even for the saving of life." Law and order meant simply "that the destruction of property must stop and the destruction of life go on as before."[82]
Eastman's statements concerning the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times in 1910 illustrate his views on industrial violence. The incident arose out of endemic conditions. Workers who resisted corporate mass murder and torture routinely suffered severe repression at the hands of employers and the state. They were gunned down, beaten, jailed, and starved into submission; they confronted judicial injunctions, citizen vigilantes, company police (often deputized by the government), the armed forces of the local, state, and federal governments, and a lying and hostile press. The Structural Iron Workers had for many years successfully resisted an employer offensive that destroyed every other union in the industry, substantially increasing their wages in the process. Their winning tactic was the systematic dynamiting of over a hundred nonunion construction sites. A blast at the homicidally antiunion Los Angeles Times in 1910 accidentally killed 20 workers and resulted in massive government and employer-generated hysteria, the prosecution and conviction of virtually of the entire leadership of the Structural Iron Workers, and a decisive set-back for the labor and socialist movements.[83] The trial of the McNamara brothers for this dynamiting precipitated the debate within the Socialist party about sabotage and violence that ultimately caused its rupture with the IWW.
Eastman acknowledged the dynamiting's pernicious consequences for labor. After detailing the tactics employed against the Structural Iron Workers, however, he asked a pertinent question. "If the Steel Trust is determined to fight the emancipation of its workers by every means that money, and fraud, and the control of government provides, how do you expect its workers to fight the Steel Trust?" Eastman, like many socialists, declared that a combination of class-conscious voting and industrial organization would be more effectual in the long run than violence, and would constitute "the power that will yet free the workers of the world. It will take more time, more money, more ingenuity and close counsel, to plant the idea of class solidarity in the mind of every worker in the Steel Industry than it would to plant dynamite under a thousand of its factories, but you can do it."[84]
Yet Eastman also recognized a key fact ignored by many socialists: workers are not merely members of a class, but real individuals who must somehow live in the here-and-now, before the revolution. Thus, while somewhat disingenuously disclaiming any intent to defend the dynamiters, he asserted that "They had the courage to be criminals in the defense of their union, which is their life, and they defended it for the time being effectually." Class conscious voting and union organizing were long-term projects "which could not have done what dynamite and self-sacrifice did for the Structural Iron workers just in that crisis." Thus Eastman exhorted his readers that "if you will stand with [the dynamiters] and for them as your brothers, whether you think they went wrong or not, you can make this event not the end of a secret conspiracy, but the beginning of an open revolutionary agitation that will strike into the very heart of capitalism in this country."[85] He defended the dynamiters because, looking beyond the slogans of reformist socialists as well as capitalists, he perceived the real-life dilemmas of actual persons caught in a real and intractable dilemma. Class struggle was a present reality for Eastman, not an abstract slogan applicable at some indeterminate future date.
Despite his pragmatic evaluation of an action based on its effects, Eastman often praised violence even when it had little effect other than demonstrating the fighting spirit of the workers. He arrived in Ludlow, Colorado, in the spring of 1914, shortly after the national guard had burned and machine-gunned the tent colony that housed the wives and children of striking miners. Eastman said that the most bloodless person would find joy in the rampage of destruction which the enraged miners visited upon the machinery that represented the operating capital of the mines: "It is no retribution, it is no remedy, but it proves that the power and the courage of action is here."[86] Similarly, Eastman extolled a man who, having attempted to blow up a New York subway in protest against the intolerable working conditions there, said "I would gladly give my life for 14,000 men." Eastman doubted "that at this time and place he could actually help those 14,000 strikers, and their struggling wives and families, by this act of violence." Even so, his "thoughtful incendiarism" far outranked the patriotic blather of ministers of the gospel who advocated mass slaughter for "the honor of the flag."[87] Similarly, Eastman praised terrorists abroad and at home, "men and women whom the sight of hunger and oppression has driven to offer up their life's blood in one supreme act of protest." The Masses did once imply that bombs were the agent provocateur's tool, and Eastman sometimes criticized assassination not on abstract ethical grounds but for practical reasons: "it is the old-fashioned method, the method of praise-and-blame" that achieved little.[88]
Eastman justified violence not only by workers but by suffragists, prisoners, and blacks. Discussing white atrocities against blacks in Georgia, he recommended that the blacks organize and retaliate along the lines of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and drive the whites out. "We view the possibility of some concentrated horrors in the South with calmness, because we believe there will be less innocent blood and less misery spread over the history of the next century, if the black citizens arise and demand respect in the name of power, than there will be if they continue to be niggers, and accept the counsels of those of their own race who advise them to be niggers." White charity, pity, or uplift endowments could do nothing for African Americans, Eastman said, until blacks arose and liberated themselves.[89] He similarly extolled English suffragists who destroyed property, thus suffering "the renunciation of social respect, of dignity, of property, of health, and even of life, by the best women of the land in the highest cause they can set before them." Eastman said that prison riots were salutory even when the reforms they evoked might have been granted by a benevolent warden. Without "an arrogant demand for even a better justice than [reformers] so benevolently hand down.... without both pride and power from below, neither the system, nor the spirit of the system, will ever be completely changed."[90]
In general, then, Eastman supported endeavors of oppressed groups for self-emancipation. Even when he was critical of the tone or content of some of the radicals' pronouncements he gave their activities wide coverage and supported them in their fights with established authorities. His pragmatism, skepticism, and lack of dogma made him not only an ecumenical and pluralistic radical, but an ultra-left one. Eastman's unique blend of qualities and values defined his radicalism rather than limiting it. His pragmatism and skepticism, and his ability to see through official pronouncements and to see official moralities for what they were, far from moderating his radicalism, intensified it. His skeptical intelligence led him to enunciate values and to apply them consistently and relentlessly, whatever the consequences and conclusions, with no obeisances to "common sense," conventional notions, or respectable opinion. His love of life, far from causing him to shrink from controversy or danger, incited him to risk imprisonment and even death because he demanded the same fullness of life for others as he wanted for himself.
For Eastman, socialism meant liberty rather than other traditional socialist goals such as equality and fraternity. Equality was not only an impossible goal, given the hereditary nature of man, but would engender a drab uniformity that was the antithesis of life. Socialists demanded equality only because "the crass and rigid aristocracies of our money culture" distributed opportunities by chance rather than merit. "No artist ever longed to paint out all the contrast that variety of nature and adventure and reward gives rise to," he said. Spontaneity and play would depart from life "if all were toiling at a level to a common end. The taste for rivalry, the mettle of the race, is half the joy of action.... There is both inevitability and beauty in the fluent orders that would continually form and dissolve themselves in a free society at the bidding of nature."[21]
Brotherhood was likewise "as utopian a dream as it is unexciting." Socialism was more than the abolition of poverty and of all artificial barriers of nation, race, and caste that divided people from each other. If we make people free, "we need not hope that they will turn out brothers, or be found so much alike that they will all well-wish and love each other, and acrid taste, and distaste, and isolation, and ferocity, and arrogance, and sin be lost out of the world. 'Brotherhood' belongs in heaven; the dreams of the agitator are for this world." Both Eastman's distrust of elite reformers and his abhorrence of working-class passivity led him to suspect the ideal of brotherhood. "To feel brotherly, in a millennial sort of way, is a happy manner of passing the leisure time that one owes to the sweat and penury of others.... It is a quieting gospel, and tends to conserve the current rate of interest on capital."[22]
Eastman warned against righteousness, redolent of "the jealous God, of judgment day, and of damnation of everybody who was having more fun than the apostles" and of "that marvelously self-sacrificing passion to do for others" what they do not want--making them over in our own self-image. Eastman stressed individual liberty as the goal of socialism--a predilection that stemmed from his philosophical nominalism. Eastman believed that nations, classes, and most other groups were mere abstractions; only individuals existed. "The purpose of life is that it should be lived. It can be lived only by concrete individuals; and all concrete individuals are unique, and have unique problems of conduct to solve. And though a million solutions must be generally proposed and praised in order that each may choose the true and wise one for himself, they are all futile, these solutions, and the whole proposal to live life in wisdom or virtue is hypocritical, if men and women are not free to choose." Eastman propounded many arguments for women's suffrage, but his main point was that "a developed personality is a good that justifies itself. The purpose of life is that it be greatly lived, and it can be greatly lived only by great characters."[23]
Eastman did not conceive of freedom as merely an absence of constraint, as he claimed the anarchists did. He recognized that in a modern society of interdependent persons and highly structured production, liberty required organization and positive effort. Economic freedom, defined as workers' ownership and control of industry, must underpin genuine liberty; but it necessarily negated the individualistic freedom to do exactly as one pleased. In a statement presaging his later endorsement of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Eastman declared that
"the growth of social industry and capital" had engendered "the submission of the many to the few which resides not merely in the ownership but in the very operation of our wealth-producing mechanism." Individual liberty was no longer "a mere negation of external interference" but rather "a sweeping and audacious affirmation. We must organize this intricate gigantic engine so that it produces liberty as well as wealth. And organization, even of the most simple kind, requires at least a conditional authority."[24] Similarly, Eastman defended violence by strikers against scabs, dismissing claims that it infringed upon the individual liberties of those who would work. Workers properly quarantined jobs which were "propagators of indecency... a menace to the health, life, and motherhood" of the workers and "a starvation of body and spirit more lasting and more awful than the bubonic plague." Workers properly declared
that any man or woman who enters into those occupations and spreads that contagion is an enemy of their being and the being of their children. And they stand prepared to enforce that declaration by every power, whether consistent with the personal liberties of others or not, that is ready to their hands. They are employing exactly the right that every community employs when it delegates to a medical authority the power to infringe upon the personal liberty of men or women who contain the contagion of death. There is no principle of personal liberty which denies to a man, or a group of men, the right to defend their lives against destruction.[25]
Eastman, therefore, touted individual liberty as the great goal which Socialism advanced; yet he recognized that modern industrial conditions--specifically, the collectivization of production--required infringements on such liberty as a means of attaining it. However, as discussed above, Eastman distrusted government ownership of industry and the welfare state as new forms of slavery for the workers. The workers themselves, he believed, must organize collectively, overthrow capitalism, and appropriate the means of production. Ownership of industry would inexorably generate workers' control of the state.
Eastman's unusual combination of ideas--his stress on liberty, his positing of a plurality of social goods independent of class, and his view that the triumph of socialism was a matter of will rather than history's automatic result--raises a provocative question. If all human goods are not inevitably contained in the triumph of socialism--if feminism, birth control, racial equality, and literary freedom are distinct goods that must be achieved separately--the possibility exists that the workers might not want these goods. What if the victorious, newly liberated proletarians oppress blacks and women and throttle literature and art? Would collective ownership of the means of production necessarily translate into liberty for each individual worker, some of whom may adhere to values different from those of the majority? Classical Marxists avoided these problems by asserting that all oppressions resolved into issues of class and that socialism inevitably encompassed all other necessary changes: the workers, in liberating themselves, automatically liberated all of humanity. Socialist women and African-American socialists dissented from this view, and Eastman himself doubted it.
Eastman's severing of racial, gender and aesthetic issues from class also raised the possibility that the methods suitable for liberating the workers might not suffice for other groups. Marx had asserted that the proletariat would grow in size and in economic importance until it could seize the economy and the state through its own overwhelming power. But blacks would never become a majority or attain their goals without massive white support; likewise, women could not win either economic or political power without the consent of men. Workers, in other words, could at least theoretically achieve their revolution based solely on their own power, as Eastman advocated. This, indeed, was his concept of revolution--the conquest of power by an oppressed class. However, this form of victory was impossible for women or blacks, who must secure large numbers of allies in the very groups that oppress them. Again, traditional Marxists resolved this problem by reducing all issues of race and gender to those of class; women and blacks would be automatically liberated as blacks and as women, as well as in their capacity of workers, by proletarian revolution. Eastman doubted this.
This conundrum, combined with Eastman's occasional doubts about socialism's inevitability, led him to reinsert ethics into his scheme for social change. Eastman often attacked "the delusions of ethics" as fostering reform and uplift rather than class-conscious revolution. Labelling a human quality or action as good or evil, he declared, was "much the same thing"; it generated preaching for or against that quality or action rather than scientific understanding of it. "And preaching at human nature, preaching that never takes the scientific trouble to decide what is the origin and composition and actual potentiality of the traits preached at, may be said to have proven a complete failure." During the European bloodbath of World War I he declared that "if professional preachers and idealists "instead of trying to alter with exhortation the instinctive nature of man, had once sat down to determine what the unalterable facts of that nature are, and then tried to construct a world in which such a nature could function without disaster, European civilization might be in existence now." Marxism appealed to him precisely because it offered a mechanism of change that did not depend on ethics, preaching, altruism, or elite support. He revised Marxism in ways that seriously undercut that method of change, however, without recognizing the implications of his revisions. Eastman preached class struggle even while he propounded a profoundly ethical ideal of what society might be rather than what it inevitably would become. Marx's materialism structured his inevitability theory; but once Eastman made revolution a matter of will, he had somewhere to find room for ethics and altruism--or at least an expanded concept of self-interest that included justice, equality, and the full development of human personality. Eastman squared this circle by explicitly accounting for the ethical idealism of a rare minority even as he more insistently embraced economic determinism. "Never let any so-called Marxian tell you that the power of disinterested idealism is nothing, or is neglible," he emphasized. "Point to the life of Marx himself. All that his philosophy rejects is the alleged disinterest of those whose interests are really at stake."[26]
Eastman's concept of liberty, diversity, and the fulfillment of human personality as the goals of revolution directly generated his espousal of a wide array of non-class causes. It also determined his method and his personal relationship to the revolutionary movement. Like Emma Goldman, he urged that revolutionaries celebrate life and enjoy the revolution. Indeed, he regarded participation in the revolution as a part of the full life, exclaiming "the world is always worth saving.... But it isn't 'sacrifice' to help save it. It is self-expression. It's an interesting game, saving this world, and live people just can't kept out of it."[27] (Floyd Dell, facing twenty years in prison for his antiwar writings, echoed this pronouncement.) Viewing true ethics as the fulfillment rather than the throttling of human personality, Eastman opposed asceticism and self-sacrifice. "Man is now returning to his rights as an animal. He has now learned that morals is not meant for a scourge and a dry medicine, and that joy is its own reason." Eastman was a eudaemonist rather than a hedonist, believing that happiness, intensity of experience, and self-cultivation, rather than pleasure, are the most fulfilling goals of life. "There is no absolute value except life itself, the having of experiences," he insisted.[28] The fully developed personality found joy in all of life, in its sorrows and pains as well as its pleasures.
Eastman felt that his apotheosis of freedom and effervescent living made converts as well as sense. Radicals should not confront opponents with a "satchel full of statistics" and abstract arguments but rather "show them in a sympathetic way that there is more fun for them, as well as for humanity in general, in the new direction. Give them an hour's exercise in liking something else--that is worth all the proofs and refutations in the world." Agitators and propagandists could not dissuade people from beliefs they cherished. Opinions were "an expression primarily of a human wish"; if people want to agree with us, they will. Arguments for liberty, Eastman thought, are "particularly adapted to this more persuasive kind of propaganda." For liberty did not demand the reform of "any given person's tastes or likings.... It merely demands that these should not be erected into a dogma, and inflicted as morality or law upon everybody else.... [It recognizes] that each one of us has a unique problem of life to solve, and he or she must be made free to solve it in her own unique way."[29]
Eastman's philosophy of life found its most complete expression in Enjoyment of Poetry, for he felt that all people should live poetically, whether or not they read or wrote verse. The poet, who was but a connoisseur of life, embraced "every impress of the existing world... all things that ever presented themselves to the apprehension of a man.... We are attracted to all vivid realization whatsoever, as though we were the blessed gods who, having made the world, were satisfied that it was good in every part." The poetic "live variously as well as vividly in the present" and "welcome all living qualities and perfect them." They will not confine and deaden themselves within the confines of a single love, however important it may be; nor will they become preoccupied with any practical concerns to the exclusion of experiencing life fully. "Not variety alone, but idleness in variety pertains to the poetic life.... Realization is a flower of leisure and does not blossom quickly."[30]
Eastman has been criticized for this attitude by many authors. Yet the doctrine that laughter, good times, free love, and skepticism are incompatible with revolution begs the question of what kind of revolution we desire. It implicitly assumes that a fanatical band of ascetics, ready to immolate themselves and anyone else upon the altar of Socialism, is the only proper model of a revolutionary. But Eastman wanted a revolutionary movement "that belongs to us," and he demanded that the people who fight the revolution, and not abstract History, should define (and endlessly refine and expand) the revolution's goals and methods.[31] The proletariat--in which Eastman somewhat expansively included all those who work for a living--might indeed have an "Historic Task"; but that task was not the fulfillment of a reified blueprint mandated by Historic Necessity, but the forging of a revolution and a revolutionary culture after its own taste.
The ultra-left condemnation of Eastman as a bourgeois bohemian is contradictory and absurd. Few authors question a revolutionary's right to combine a satisfying personal life with revolutionary activity, except when the revolutionary's concept of personal life is unconventional. Critics seldom attack rebels who have traditional personal lives. All but strict Leninists concede that party leaders such as Hillquit, Debs, or Berger--much less rank and file workers--can pursue mundane goals such as family, career, and often enough a home and garden, while simultaneously fomenting revolution. Conventional marriages and families are tacitly accepted while free liaisons are considered frivolous and unrevolutionary; careers are validated but a bohemian repudiation of careers in favor of art is seen as lacking seriousness; a taste for middlebrow novels and conventional amusements is not questioned, but advocating and forging a new culture evokes suspicion. Indeed, Eastman's close friend Floyd Dell was condemned as a frivolous, unrevolutionary bohemian when he practiced free love and avoided a lucrative career, only to be castigaged as "selling out" and becoming a bourgeois conservative when he settled down, married, and became a professional writer. Eastman, Dell, and Reed (among other Masses and Liberator editors) felt that all individuals should live as fully as possible in the present, rather than awaiting the revolution, even as they risked their freedom and their lives for that revolution. This is an idea that profoundly affects the revolution's course and nature.
Eastman believed that he had as much a right as anyone else to create the life he sought, to the extent possible, before the revolution. The revolution was part of the poetic life; but if the revolution were all there was to life, it would throttle poetry and every good thing. When he published a book of purely personal poems amidst the upheavals of 1918, he justified himself in a characteristic passage:
It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather than my sense of the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it. That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies, and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided being there. I have found that rather in individual experience, and in those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both camps. And life is what I love. And although I love life for all men and women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the cruel system of these times, I love it also for myself. And its essence--the essence of life--is variety and specific depth. It cannot be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle. Therefore I have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest friends for some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has never entered even so deeply as it might into those tempests of social change that are coloring our thoughts today.[32]
Despite his eudaemonism--or perhaps because of it--Eastman repeatedly risked his life, reputation, and freedom in the cause of revolution over the course of many decades. His comrades at The Masses did likewise, as did Emma Goldman, who shared many of his values and ideals. Enjoyment of life and even of the revolution was manifestly compatible with sincere and steadfast dedication.
Eastman's gospel of freedom and self-expression did encounter severe problems, however, even if not those posited by carpers on the left. Even before American entry into World War I, The Masses encountered persecution by government agents, magazine distributors, and even the nation of Canada. Eastman had hoped that "the propaganda of freedom" would win converts because it asked not that any individual change his or her inclinations or personalities, but only that he "cease announcing his own spontaenous inclinatons as the type and exemplar of angelic virtue, and demanding that everybody else be like him."[33] Far from viewing freedom as innocuous, however, many Americans viciously attacked lifestyles and opinions which diverged from their own. Basing their own identities on moral absolutes of race, gender, nationality, religion, and sexual propriety, conventional workers hated radicals as implicitly threatening their cherished communities and individual selves. Widespread popular enthusiasm for the war and for the pogroms, lynchings, and repression that accompanied it, confronted Eastman with a serious problem that most American radicals ultimately face: explaining and responding to the vitriol and hatred which which workers often regard them. Who is to blame--the capitalists, the workers, or human nature? On the one hand, Eastman said that "the ruling class of the United States is more intolerant, more ruthless and brutal, more inconsiderate of the rights of men and of families... less tempered in its tyranny by any drop of mercy or reverence for the person of the dreamer and the prophet, than any ruling-class in the world outside of Japan." On the other hand, after barely escaping a lynch mob in Fargo, North Dakota, he railed against the average American. He complained that "a mob of many thousands of representative American men and women twice attempted to lynch their own elected mayor," who was protecting a black prisoner; these many thousands of "average Americans... burned their own Court House, set fire to it on all sides, in order to smoke out the little lonely company of peculiar individuals inside who were still insisting on 'due process of law.'" The events in Fargo so embittered Eastman that he speculated that Americans were innately more brutal and selfish than other peoples. Americans, he said, were descended from individuals who abandoned their communities and settled in a new world, people who possessed "the aggressive, masculine virtues and vices" rather than those "of the more preserving and sympathetic side of our nature." Although all races were essentially alike, Americans comprised the most asocial members of each group, or their descendants. Charles W. Wood, a longtime Masses contributor, similarly warned Art Young that if he were murdered by a patriot, "the people would applaud--the people you have loved and pitied and fought for all your life." Wood feared "just the plain folk; kind, sentimental, fun-loving folk, like the boys who tried to hang Eastman out in Fargo, or those who have been terrorizing Socialist meetings in New York." Even Eugene Debs, usually the soul of kindliness, denounced his Terre Haute neighbors as "cowardly curs" who would lynch political opponents only in the secrecy of darkness.[34]
The war, the Red Scare, and the anti-black of 1917-1920 revealed a weakness in Eastman's emphasis on "the gospel of freedom." Eastman had believed that arguments stressing human liberation from the constraints imposed by class, race, and gender would appeal to Americans because such arguments did not demand that Americans change their own habits or beliefs, merely respect those of others. However, Eastman discovered that culturally and economically insecure people often fanatically and unquestioningly embrace their own cultural identities and impose them on others. The insecure must believe that their own path is not only the best way, but the only right or acceptable one. "Others" who worship alien gods or embrace strange customs and values threaten this self-defining conceit, and must therefore be squelched or eradicated. Eastman recognized that "all nations at all times have found indispensable to their spiritual ease and well-being a standard universal scapegoat, upon whom they could dump the sins and the damned-up hatreds of the day, and go on their way rejoicing." Although he at times equated Marxism with the simplistic belief that people usually act in their own economic self-interest, he occasionally interpreted Marxism as stating that class relations shape all of culture. If this is true, then people may often act against their economic self-interest in favor of deeply-embedded cultural values created or reinforced by class society. The workers, therefore, may scapegoat precisely those who foster working-class liberation and vent the hatreds and resentments caused by their status as exploited workers upon radicals seeking their betterment. Ironically, conservative workers often view radicals as self-righteous, uplifting reformers who impose their values upon others--the very meddling, unctuous reformer that Eastman himself abhorred. The capitalists, of course, encourage this. When Eastman claimed that the unemployed "have nothing to lose, not even their chains," he momentarily forget their most cherished possession, their cultural sense of who they are. In defense of this possession they will sacrifice everything and everyone else, and commit atrocities without number. As Emma Goldman recognized, those with only their chains to lose cling all the more tenaciously to them.[35]
The Masses addressed itself partly to revolutionary activists who debated theory, strategy, and tactics. Eastman considered a blend of pragmatism in ethics, eclecticism and skepticism in philosophy, and a scientific, experimental methodology, as one of his distinctive contributions to the revolutionary movement. He thought that intellectuals could greatly help insurgent workers if they eschewed their characteristic vices of sentimentality, reformism, and dogmatism, and instead practiced instrumental thinking. The Masses, according to the editorial policy which Eastman composed and displayed prominently on its masthead, was "directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found" and dedicated to "a search for the true causes."[36]
Eastman was also an advocate of scientific socialism. By science he did not mean a body of fixed, eternal truths, but rather "experimental knowledge--a free investigation of the developing facts, and a continuous re-testing of the theories, which pertain to the end we have in view." Thus Eastman began his rethinking of socialist assumptions in the light of World War I with a sardonic comment referring to the reactions of other theorists. "It is not very scientific to denounce a fact for refusing to come under your hypothesis," he said. "It is wiser to scrutinize the fact with a view to remodelling, if necessary, the hypothesis." Eastman considered almost all knowledge as tentative--in part because the mind, emotions, and personality of the human subject entered into any perception. He considered scientific "facts" to be metaphors much like poetic ones; whereas poetry represented an effort to see reality as it was, science pursued specific ends, and therefore altered and idealized reality. This directly contradicted the conventional view, and implied that science was not in any sense equivalent to truth. Eastman said that "we seek for an objective and eternal truth, but nothing is eternally true except the variety of opinions."[37]
Marxism, therefore, was a hypothesis to be tested and applied in experience. Marx had indicated how persons individually and collecively selfish could create a world that benefitted everyone. Far from idealizing human nature, Marx built his method upon an assumption of univeral egoism. The concept of class struggle was "a suggestion that seemed practical.... a solution of the problem of how to move toward an ideally free and just society when human beings, by and large, are more interested in their own advancement than in freedom and justice. This man Marx seemed to offer a scheme for attaining the ideal based on the very facts which make it otherwise unattainable." Marxism was scientific in that it was a means towards an end, that of social transformation. "Socialism differs from all reform movements exactly in this, that it names a method by which a new society can be engendered, even taking human nature at its worst."[38]
Eastman's concept of science included almost every field of human knowledge. "The Masses Bookshop", an important part of every issue, advertised literature, social science, philosophy, science, and anything else of interest to a modern intellectual. Revering the individual skeptics of previous ages, Eastman nonetheless exulted that the awakener and liberator in his age was not an individual but the collective endeavor of science. He integrated Freud and Darwin into Marxism, and even modified and appropriated Nietzsche for the revolutionary cause. When asked what books would most benefit socialists, he recommended books on psychology, evolution, anthropology, and related topics, while excluding socialist tracts and tomes. He also insisted that science could be employed for any purpose; it had no predetermined social role. Nor was literature worthy of total dedication. "What you need is not literature but science," he told Masses readers. In the coming century, "scientific technique" would display "literary moralism" as a dominant force. A poet himself, Eastman declared that "there is other work to be done by those whose goal is social liberty, than agitate and converse and write beautiful literature and poems of love and anarchy. Either we will bend this patient, sharp-eyed and dogged-moving monster, Science, to our high purposes of life, or others will use him for death and tyranny. For he is the sovereign instrument of all great and lasting change."[39]
This concept of science as an open-ended process of pragmatic experimentation rather than a fixed body of conclusions shaped Eastman's theory and practice of revolution. Eastman disdained total world-systems in philosophy, the air-tight weltanschauung that left no room for contingency, doubt, or new knowledge. In this spirit, The Masses neither explained every human problem by reference to class, or hoped that proletarian revolution would abolish every oppression. Eastman considered feminism, birth control, literary freedom, black liberation, and other issues as separate and distinct from the class struggle, even if their advocates could by an act of will unite them. "Sex equality is a question by itself," he said. "Socialism does not include it.... The question of sex equality, the economic, social, political independence of woman stands by itself, parallel and equal in importance to any other question of the day. The awakening and liberation of woman is a revolution in the very process of life. It is not an event in any class or an issue between classes. It is an issue for all humanity." Prison reform was, after feminism, that "which is most interesting to a revolutionist. For it stands, a little more than any great reform does, apart from the issue between capital and labor. It can be in some measure accomplished without rectifying the distribution of wealth; and, rectifying the distribution of wealth will not accomplish it."[40] This stance was a major improvement upon the usual socialist position, which viewed other social movements as subsidiary causes automatically included in proletarian revolution, and thus unworthy of sustained thought and effort.
Eastman, of course, did relate sexism, racism, the criminalization birth control, and other evils to the class struggle in manifold ways; he simply denied that all forms of oppression and prejudice stemmed exclusively from capitalism. "Racial animosity the world over is animosity against an economic rival," he said; although we harbor "a survived impulse of suspicion against a man of alien traits," we downplay such suspicion when it is not exacerbated by a real or imagined clash of interests." Similarly, Eastman argued that revolutionaries should support birth control as a necessity in any society, whether based on class oppression or not; but he also related it to the contemporary class struggle. "An unskilled worker is never free, but an unskilled worker with a large family of half-starving children cannot even fight for freedom. That for us is the connection between birth-control and the working-class struggle."[41]
Although some of Eastman's subsequent critics have complained that he did not sufficiently unify his various causes under an overarching rubric, it was precisely his relating a diversity of causes--in a magazine, in a free-spirited movement, in life, and hopefully in the future society--that constituted one of his major contributions to the revolutionary movement. Like Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, The Masses and The Liberator incorporated the views and needs of women, blacks, and other suppressed groups on an equal basis with the necessities of class struggle. That Eastman did not unite them in one grandiose theory that made all evils follow inevitably from one cause, enhanced rather than diluted his revolutionary theory. Unified theories often falsify reality and subordinate all causes to the one deemed primary. Moreover, while always insisting on the partial autonomy of other liberation movements, Eastman increasingly stressed class war as the most important mechanism of change after American entry into World War I, the Red Scare, and the Bolshevik Revolution.
It is true that Eastman did not delve as deeply into the complicated relations between the different forms of oppression as his intellectual successors, the cultural Marxists, have done. Sophisticated Marxists have perceived many subtle interactions between gender, race, nationality, and class. They have viewed reality as a complicated field of multifaceted relationships in which there is no "base" and no "superstructure," but only a field of interlocking causes. The causal nexus appears as one big blur, rather like an electron field; there is no gender and no race aside from class, and no class undelimited by gender and race. Eastman too often contented himself with asserting the separateness of causes he nevertheless related on an intellectual as well as an activist level. In particular, his interpretation of Marxism as stating that most people act in their own economic interests deflected his attention from the more profound issue: how ruling-class economic power translates into cultural power and shapes the entire society, often leading workers to act against their own interests and for those of their masters. This is the problem of hegemony, upon which Eastman only barely and occasionally touched. Unlike the satirical "Mr. Block" cartoons of the IWW press, which reflected the IWW's intimate knowledge of the backward consciousness of most workers, cartoons in The Masses (and even more, The Liberator) usually idealized workers and the working class. But despite these shortcomings, Eastman did begin the necessary process of broadening Marxism, inaugurating the first inchoate gropings towards a more positive integration of gender, race, and class, and of diverse modern thinkers. This confrontation with American realities, with its potential for mobilizing women and people of color upon the basis of their specific needs and identites, was contribution enough for one person in one decade.
Critics have also claimed that Eastman (and many other Americans) simplified and distorted Freud as they appropriated him for their own ends. In particular, Eastman is accused of regarding repression as merely debilitating rather than as a necessity of civilization and of claiming that unconscious desires were the root of much evil; this allegedly generated the excessively optimistic belief that merely removing inhibitions or uncovering the unconscious could transform society, culture, and the individual.[42] Other critics imply that Freudianism is incompatible with Marxism. Eastman, however, realized that Freud could sometimes bolster Socialism and the economic interpretation of reality even if he sometimes undermined them. Discussing Rockefeller's religiosity, Eastman said that he might indeed be a sincere idealist, one of those who "carefully guarded their personal privilege and source of income against every accident. The larger part of our mind is unconscious, and it knows how to take care of these emotions. We agonize over misfortunes of others, but our agony quite automatically forgets to get around to the real point at which, by sacrificing our own power, we can relieve them.... I gladly acknowledge that [Rockefeller] defends his self-interested despotism with those abstract ideals in entire childlike ignorance of what motives control him." It was, therefore, all the more important that disinterested critics reveal his true motives--perhaps even to himself. In such cases, the new science of psychology could help Marxists uncover the genuine motivations that underlay rhetoric and pretense. On another occasion, however, having received a book claiming that Martin Luther rebelled out of uncontrolled lust, masturbation, and neurorsis, he ironically commented that it was "rather shocking to one piously reared in the economic interpretation of the Reformation."[43]
Although Eastman extolled Freudianism as a science which, like Marxism, penetrated beneath shams and shibboleths into the wellsprings of human motivation, he never regarded it as anything other than a hypothesis that must be verified by experience. Moreover, he could cheerfully remind his critics that even the greatest thinkers should not be learned by rote or mechanically applied, but creatively appropriated by persons possessing their own goals and values. Eastman's applications of Freud have the same virtues and same vices as his inclusion of feminist and racial issues in the revolutionary movement: he was a pioneer who began a necessary project, and, almost inevitably, occasionally erred when addressing specific issues. His concept of science as the application of continually discovered truths to shifting problems hardly allows for the possibility of arriving at specific insights that remain unchanged over time.
Nevertheless, Eastman was among the first Marxists to recognize that human nature, however flexible and variable it may be, includes irrational needs, unacknowledged desires, and a whole range of impulses that cannot be subsumed under any rational calculation of economic interest. The Marxism of Eastman's day was based on the classical bourgeois economic assumption that Economic Man would act in his self-interest once it was pointed out to him (either by others in his plight who had already perceived their common interest, or by relatively disinterested intellectuals). Yet the entire socialist enterprise would be unnecessary if this were true. Oppressed groups cling to inherited identities based on race, gender, religion, and nationality while repudiating class consciousness. People are cultural beings who usually perceive their self-interest in non-economic terms bound up in their values and self-identities even when those identities contradict their economic interests. Freud and the subsequent research of empirical psychologists can inform discussions of hegemony and the broader issue of why subordinate groups so often idealize and obey authority.
Eastman also revised Marx for his purposes. He considered science as intelligence directed towards an end; it therefore informed idealism. Philosophers, poets, and revolutionaries should not formulate yet another philosophy of life or draw the blueprints for utopia, but rather discern which emergent force would embody their hopes and achieve their objectives. The scientific idealist understood the motives and social forces driving proposed changes "and knows just where to place his help." Marx believed that he embodied the science of his day, which valued predictive ability. But Eastman believed that Marx's most important prediction, that proletarian revolution was inevitable, was but "a rationalization of his wish." Whole new sciences had been discovered since Marx's day. Contemporary Marxists must "recompose this system in the light of a truer conception of the nature of science.... We must alter and remodel what he wrote, and make of it, and what else our recent science offers, a doctrine that shall clearly have the nature of hypothesis, of method for proceeding toward our end. A technique of progress" rather than abstract and eternal truths about the nature of reality, "is what today demands." Moreover, "what we want is not a prediction, but a method of progress. We do not want to know what to watch, we want to know what to do"--what social forces the abstract idealist should aid. Marx himself had exemplified this approach; despite his pretense to objectivity, "his passion breaks through on every chapter, and his most impersonal conclusions point to action every time. He prophecies a social revolution, but he rarely fails to tell you, if you want that revolution, what to do."[44]
Eastman demanded that revolutionaries sometimes help fulfill bourgeois programs, such as women's suffrage or capitalist tendencies towards a world federation. Speaking of the latter, Eastman claimed that utilizing capitalist as well as proletarian energies obeyed "the dictates of the Economic Interpretation of History" because both classes had an interest in survival. "Let us admit that we are here dealing with a hope that is not social revolutionary in any sense." World federation "may logically come before anything like a social revolution is accomplished. But logical or not, let us not block the progress of our hopes, out of respect to a major premise."[45]
Because of his concept of science as experimental progress towards a goal rather than a literal description of reality, Eastman rejected one of the central dogmas of Second International Marxism, that of socialism's inevitable triumph. Practically, this doctrine fostered the policy of "revolutionary waiting" by an "inheritor party"; socialists must merely amass the gathering proletarian forces and await the revolution.[46] That revolutionists may have have unique opportunities that will not recur, that they should take advantage of events to advance their program or seize power, was anathema. "Revolutionary waiting" was a passive policy which inculcated obedience, conservatism, and a feeling that, if only the party was kept functioning, power would fall into its hands automatically. Thus, when Eastman proposed that socialist intellectuals analyze the disposition of social forces and place their energies where they would do the most good, he was, while perhaps congruent with Marx, actually contradicting much Socialist party ideology and practice.
Eastman's concept of the Socialist party, as of Marxism, was instrumental, pragmatic, and fluid. Addressing those who avoided the Socialist party because of quibbles about its doctrine or practice, Eastman reminded them that joining a revolutionary organization "isn't a question of choosing the Absolute. It's a question of seizing any instrument and all the instruments that will be of help toward the end you have in view.... For those who have courage and the self-dependence it is possible now, for the first time in history, to dismiss the Absolute in whatever form in may appear, and use all things, and all ideas too, as instruments and lights merely, for the responsible endeavors of man." The SP was merely a temporary instrument of a larger purpose and may well find itself superseded: "a revolutionary movement that didn't give birth to a new organization with a new idea every few years would be inferitle and dead. It would certainly never give birth to a revolution." But too many socialists considered their party as a church, an infallible instrument of salvation. Dogmatism was "the chief fault of the party. Scientific thinking requires the power to suspend judgment, and that power has habitually been renounced as an automatic part of the act of becoming a party-member.... Clap the creed over any new fact that arises, and if the fact will not fit under the creed, shut your eyes and jaw it under. This manner of employing the mind cannot be called thinking. I call it theological automatism, and I have no doubt it is the leading cause of the failure of the Socialist party progress."[47]
The party should not only eschew dogma and adopt instrumental thinking, however; it must recruit members upon the basis of action rather than theory. "Having released himself from a dogmatic fixation upon his doctrine, [the socialist] will have to learn to subordinate doctrine altogether in his recruiting activities. Even a live and pliant scientific hypothesis is not the nucleus around which a political party can be formed. A political party ought to represent, not a certain kind of knowledge, but a certain economic interest. It ought to take in all the people who agree in wanting something concrete and immediate. The American Socialist party includes only people who agree in understanding something remote and ultimate. It is not a party of the working-class; it is a party of the theory of the working-class. This fatal weakness is accentuated by the fact that the theory is of European origin, and all its terminology and catch-words are alien to our people.... You cannot build an effectual fighting group around it. Theoretic thinking is too unusual--thinking is too universally subordinated to immediate interests, for such a group to grow great and have a direct impact upon history. It will remain merely an organ of special education."[48]
Eastman therefore advocated that the Socialists put their weight behind bourgeois reforms (such as Wilson's international federation) if those reforms advanced the cause of socialism or preserved the conditions necessary for socialist agitation; that the party accept members of non-socialist groups, such as the Non-Partisan League; that it vigorously support the IWW and repeal its own prohibition on sabotage and other illegal acts; and that it address issues of importance to women, blacks, and the middle class. Marxists, he said, should continuously update and revise their theory into an activist, fighting philosophy, of concrete use in the actual struggles of life. In this he adumbrated the concept of an activist organization later fitfully embodied in the Communist party. Since the 1960's radicals have generally participated in every struggle for human liberation, however "bourgeois" or "reformist," while seeking to inject a radical consciousness into them. Radicals strive to make the participants in issue-oriented and particularistic social movements aware of the connection between their oppression and that of others, and between their oppression and the economic and social system within which they live. They teach activists working for black, women's, or gay liberation that they cannot be fully free as long as the means of production are owned and controlled by a tiny proportion of the population and that economic freedom must underlie every other form of human liberation.
Although Eastman championed pragmatism in tactics and eclecticism in philosophy, he insisted that class struggle was the scientific method of social change and largely determined a person's ethical ideals. "Karl Marx was the only idealist who ever took the science of economics seriously," he said. "That science is based upon the assumption that in the big average every man acts in the economic interest of himself and his family.... This being true, then the only way you can effect a substantial change in the production and consumption of wealth is by lining up the people whose economic interests go in the direction of that change. When you get then lined up, you will find the people whose economic interests go in the other direction lined up against them, and you will have a Class Struggle. If your side wins you will have a Revolution, and go down to glory as the defenders of human liberty"; if you lose, the winners "will call you materialistic, incendiary, enemies of Christianity and democratic brotherhood.... But remember this--you suffer, as suffered the martyrs of astonomy and physics, for your faith in true knowledge. Your eyes are unveiled of the delusions of ethics as theirs were unveiled of the delusions of theology. You know the truth" that only revolution by the oppressed class will produce "liberty and equality."[49]
Middle-class reformers and democratic idealists denied "the hard and biting fact that economic self-interest is a dominating force in all history. They still live in a world in which fundamental democratic progress comes by telling, and persuading, and showing how, and propagating reasonable opinions, and better social feeling. This is not the real world. The real world is a world in which privilege can only be uprooted by power." Democratic progress was achieved only by disreputable struggle by the dispossessed against a nobility "whose power is property and whose armor is respectability."[50] Intellectual idealists grouped around The New Republic harbored "a utopian conception of reality" that denied this truth:
It requires a hard head--perhaps a little hardness in the heart--to live and nourish hopes upon such a reality. But that is the reality of science.... Facing this reality, THE MASSES rests its great hope of democracy in agitation and organization of the lower classes, rather than in telling the upper classes, who do not want democracy, how they might get it, if they would only be entirely practical and consent to go very slowly step-by-step. We of THE MASSES would like to assemble the power that will do something; they of the New Republic are satisfied to instruct the power that won't.[51]
Class struggle was a scientific method that did not imply or encourage hatred. "The class struggle is a conflict of human interests that are simply natural," Eastman said. "It is not bad men against good men. It is not smart against stupid men.... Some of the best people in the land are on the owning side." Most combatants on both sides were "just plain, ordinary, common, back-parlor folks like J.P. Morgan, looking out for their family interests the best way they can, and loving to be a power in the community." The accidents of birth rather than moral qualities determined our stance; workers, people born without property, would emulate Morgan if offered the chance. "The doctrine of the class struggle is flatly opposed to class hate. It is a calm and loving acknowledgment that our problems arise out of a conflict of interests which are inevitable and all right-all right on both sides."[52] Although Socialists did not hate capitalists, they must wage relentless war against them, eschewing reform and compromise. "We do not wish to make peace.... between capital and labor at the current general rate of exploitation. Peace betwen capital and labor at just that rate is the dearest wish of capital."[53]
Eastman became editor of The Masses amidst the bitter dispute between the IWW and the SP over the relative importance of industrial versus political action. The IWW favored union organization, strikes, and militant tactics such as sabotage at the point of production while rejecting electoral politics as a meaningless charade; the SP, touting party organization and voting, necessarily repudiated illegal methods. In tune with his pragmatic and electic bent, Eastman believed that the two organizations should work in tandem rather than dogmatizing about the precise mechanism of class-conscious revolution or the exact shape of the future society. Yet from the beginning he agreed with the IWW (and with SP radicals such as Eugene Debs) that politics merely reflected economics. Revolutionists, he believed, would ultimately win upon the field of industrial organization. These views presaged his later support for the Bolshevik revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In his maiden editorial in The Masses Eastman adroitly combined economic with political action. The struggle between capital and labor was "the big, ominous conflict in this country today.... Above it, like froth on a cataract, dances a political contest among a handful of wealthy sporting gentlemen.... The people get the privilege of sitting on the bleachers, and suffering the illusion of a real contest. They like it. Everybody likes it. American politics is essentially a sport.... Politics and Baseball are the most popular sports in America." However, the "struggle in bitterness for the substance of life" was in deadly earnest. "The great struggle of life, rumors of which continually rumble beneath all this mere fun and frolic, will be found moving steadily closer into the central arena. A few more years of starvation strikes, armed intimidations, murders, murder trials, labor injunctions, dynamite courts, free speech fights--a few more years, and this tumult upon the field of industry will break into that field which has been so long dedicated to recreation, and those who are still left on the bleachers will see a political conflict that is worth the price of admission." This statement acknowledged the primacy of the underlying economic conflict while also calling the political battleground "the central arena." The SP injected class conflict into the political realm while the capitalist parties (especially the reformist Progressive party) maneuvered to exclude it; therefore every vote for SP candidate Eugene Debs was "a vote for revolutionary Socialism and the working-class struggle."[54]
Eastman declared that the interneicine squabbling between the IWW and the SP expressed "the dogmatic mode of thinking." Direct action meant strikes, including a nation-wide class strike; political action entailed class conscious voting, possibly leading to "a complete expropriation of capitalists by an unpropertied majority.... So far from being opposed to teach other, political action and direct action always have, and always will accompany each other.... Both are correct methods.... The incorrect method is that of the man who adopts one, and then spends his time and energy denouncing the other." Neither industrial nor political action was intrinsically superior; "now one and now the other is more important. All these questions of method are to be answered differently at different times, at different places, in different circumstances. They are forever new questions, arising in new conditions, and depending for a correct answer upon our exercise of a free and intelligent judgment. Therefore, the one thing continually important is to keep our judgment free. Tie up to no dogma whatever."[55]
Eastman, therefore, seemingly occupied the middle ground, exclaiming that "we shall never have a united revolutionary movement" until IWW and SP partisans "grow up." Both sides were "right when they affirm" and "wrong when they deny."[56] However, believing that economic organization at the point of production necessarily preceded and undergirded political triumph, Eastman in fact tilted towards the IWW. Indeed, on this crucial point his philosophy closely resembled that of both Daniel De Leon, the Socialist Labor party leader who had helped form the IWW but had been in effect expelled in 1908, and Eugene Debs, both of whom privileged economic over political organization.
Anybody who talks about "the power of the ballot"--if he really means a power to deprive the ruling class of the capital--is talking nonsense. A revolutionary vote would be nothing but a shower of confetti, if it were not backed up by an economic force. And the followers of Marx will be the first to say so.... The reason Socialist politics never accomplished anything revolutionary is that there has not yet been a revolutionary power behind it. Just as soon as you deliver the power on the economic field, the party will deliver results on the political field. No sooner, no later.[57]
The ballot was "ineffectual for great changes unless there is economic power behind it." Like Debs, Eastman occasionally warned that "there is danger to the Socialist party when it sends a man to Congress"; elected representatives might become mired in mere reformism and forget "the class struggle and the economic interpretation of history."[58]
Despite his pragmatic eclecticism, Eastman demanded revolution--"a change effected through a conquest of power by the lower classes"--while repudiating reform, "a change effected through concessions made by those who hold the power." Mediation, negotiation, "impartial" boards, the "public interest," and other such shibboleths only disguised class rule under benevolent forms and rhetoric. "Impartial" boards and mediators would unhesitantly side with the capitalists "because the capitalistic habit of thought prevails throughout society, and the very concept of justice in the mind of a supposedly impartial judge is a capitalistic concept," including the right of owners of property to live off the labor of others. The "public" representative on the "impartial" committees was invariably "one of the chief bulwarks of capitalism," a disinterested, idealistic, thoughtful person "who represents not merely capitalism, but capitalism idealized, capitalism hallowed by its religion." Seemingly wise and benevolent, the public representative inveigled and swindled the workers when raw, overt capitalism could not crush them. "And to overthrow him you will have to do more than organize trade unions; you will have to do more than perfect a political machine; you will have to build up and popularize a new idealism and a new religion" and "become a little fanatical" about distinction between reform and revolution. "What labor wins through the intercession of capitalist idealism is no true step in the conquest of power. But what labor wins with its own force against capital and capitalistic justice, no matter if it be the tiniest concession in wages or hours of labor, is a genuine advance in the social revolution."[59]
Eastman often defined revolution as any action which increased the proportion of wealth appropriated by the workers--increases that necessarily came at the expense of capital. Reform, on the other hand, entailed changes which benefitted both classes. Many reforms directly benefitted capitalists by placating rebellious workers and improving their health and thus their productivity. "The power behind Reform is capital." Intelligent farmers provided their draft animal with sufficient food, medical care, and shelter. "Philanthrophy is the best efficiency," Eastman said; [60]
Eastman regarded the middle-class reformists of the Progressive party as both furthering and threatening the SP's program of class-conscious revolution. The Progressives fostered government regulation and even ownership of key industries, which would pave the way for working-class appropriation of the trusts; however, government ownership under capitalism was a mere sop that would solidify capitalist control, defuse discontent by marginally improving the condition of the workers, and masquerade as true Socialism. "The trusts that own the government" would foster "government ownership of the trusts" for their own self-preservation; government regulation, ownership, and labor legislation constituted "the next step in the evolution of capitalism."[61]
Eastman exclaimed that "the more government ownership [the Progressives] introduce, the better we like it; the more labor legislation, the better we like it--only provided there is enough clear thought and independent volition in the Socialist movement to keep clear the issue between us." The Progressive party was the SP's chief enemy because it advanced many of the immediate demands present in the SP's own platform; "some of its future members are in our own ranks." Socialists must encourage such reformists to leave the SP and must fight so hard for Socialism "that nobody will ever be in the slighest degree confused about the difference between us."[62] Eastman proclaimed:
We intend a social revolution, to be accomplished by a class-conscious struggle against capital and privilege. They intend a social amelioration to be accomplished by the enlightened self-interest of the privileged, combined with a little altruism and a great deal of altruistic oratory. Essentially they represent the enlightened self-interest of capitalists. We represent the enlightened self-interest of the workers, and the fight goes on.[63]
Roosevelt's Bull Moose party would "swallow up every member of the Socialist Party" who conflated "working-class revolution and the evolution of state ownership and industrial efficiency within the capitalist class." This "will be the best thing that ever happened to Socialism in America. It will purge the Socialist party of sympathizers. And if those of us who are left will only stand up to our faith with courage and with clear heads, we will have a line drawn in this country between the party of the people and the parties of the people's money, sixty-five times as quick as we would have if the Bull Moose had never come out of the woods."[64] Eastman the pragmatist and opponent of dogmatism and sectarianism, therefore, endorsed a pure, revolutionary party which fostered economic revolution and repudiated reform. He therefore presaged his later endorsement of the Bolshevik revolutions abroad and the Communist party at home.
Eastman believed that reforms often enslaved, degraded, or pacified workers. Government ownership destroyed unions because public employees were denied the right to strike. Benevolent reformers, endlessly extolled in the capitalist press, offered workers baubles that distracted them from self-activity and the urgent tasks of revolution. However, Eastman urged that workers accept whatever reforms and concessions capitalists offered. His contradictory pronouncements on the minimum wage for female workers indicates his dilemma. At one point he denounced the minimum wage as "probably the meanest conception the reform spirit ever gave birth to" because enactment would soothe the consciences of the exploiters and the general public. The proposed minimum wage could not support a worker in decency, but would enable capitalists to blame women for their poverty. "If I were a girl working all day and suffering the imposition of a living wage in a rich country, I trust I would be either a prostitute or a thief," Eastman exclaimed. However, he later hailed Oregon's mimimum wage for women as vastly improving their welfare and facilitating social revolution. Similarly, Eastman excoriated capitalist mass murder and oppression but sometimes welcomed particularly egregious atrocities as radicalizing workers. When the Supreme Court devastated unions labor in the infamous Danbury Hatters' case, Eastman hailed "the decision that makes boycotts illegal. It will only drive home the folly of just laws in an unjust society. It will throw the animus of labor against an unjust society. It will demonstrate the class struggle. It will make Gompers sick. It will drive yet more of those men under him who mean business, into the camp of the open rebels."[65]
Eastman's comments on Germany's advanced welfare state epitomized his dilemma and that of the revolutionary left. Otto von Bismark had enacted labor and social legislation as a means of throttling German socialism. German capitalists also used repression and unfair election laws, but recognized that providing for the material welfare of their workers was sound business practice. By causing workers to find their salvation in the state rather than their own self-activity, it also yielded political benefits for the exploiters. During World War I Eastman warned that the enlightened capitalism of Germany threated world revolution. "The ruling caste in Germany have known how not only to preach the theory of well-being in a disciplined state--every ruling caste has done that--but they have been wise enough actually to produce a little of the well-being," he said. "And that is the triumph they are celebrating now. The masses of the people are better off in Germany than they are anywhere else." Germany's welfare state raised productive and docile workers who willingly followed their exploiters into imperialistic war. "Care for your people if you want them to fight," Eastman said. "Care for them if you want them to work. It pays. That is a policy of German culture that will become the common heritage of the world, whatever way the war goes." This policy threatened "the lovers of real liberty in all countries." If American capitalists similarly provided for their workers the proletariat might "accept a liberty that was merely political form and historic emotion"; and America's boasted freedom would then "become as insubstantial in its way" as Germany's illusory, yet endlessly touted, metaphysical and spiritual freedom.[66]
Eastman discussed reform and revolution amidst a left\right conflict within the Socialist party. During the heyday of The Masses, the left wing opposed inclusion of immediate demands in party platforms, declaring that such reforms were bourgeois palliatives that facilitated co-optation by reformers, downplayed the class struggle, and risked the loss of Socialist party identity. Eugene Debs, the party's most popular leader and usual presidential candidate, scorned "vote catching" tactics that emphasized non-Socialist reforms as a tactic to expand the party's base even as he staunchly supported the liberation struggles of disfranchised African Americans and women.[67] Debs and other radicals deemed such "vote catching" counterproductive because bourgeois parties (such as Roosevelt's Progressives or Wilson's Democrats) could appropriate such reforms and thus lure away those specious and temporary Socialist voters upon whom the party would have become dependent. Many leftists assumed that anyone who understood socialism would vote for the party repeatedly until it triumphed, regardless of local or immediate issues; the party could not win or lose "real socialist" votes because of its immediate demands. But even if an emphasis on immediate demands attracted votes, the radicals maintained, it would trick workers into voting for the Socialist party for non-Socialist reasons. Debs and the radicals wanted the workers to consciously understand socialism and desire it, not vote for it because they wanted something else.[68] In their view the working class, lacking the property that had undergirded the dominance of previous ruling classes, could win only through conscious understanding and class-conscious organization. The more electorally-oriented right wing, however, maintained that immediate demands would attract votes and that Socialists could gradually enact their program through specific legislation.[69]
Eastman often sided with the left. He bitterly assailed reform as incompatible with revolution, and once reiterated the familiar complaint that the Socialist party was at risk when its candidates actually won office.[70] Yet some of Eastman's other ideas undermined this approach. Eastman believed that people support revolutionary change not because of rational, intellectual argument or ethical preachments, but because they desire practical aims fostered by radical organizations. If this is true, then the seemingly radical Debsian idea in fact misunderstood the mechanism by which people are persuaded of new points of view and enticed into voting for a new party. Eastman was correct when he said that people would vote socialist not out of agreement with doctrine, but out of desire to achieve a concrete goal in the present. If the capitalist parties endorsed the SP's immediate program in an attempt to co-opt or out-bid the SP, could not the Socialists simply intensify their demands? Debs's policy, which mirrored the SPD's policy of isolation and intransigent opposition, was based on a preaching-and-conversion model of the transition to socialism, an appeal to abstract understanding rather than concrete wish. As commentators on the SPD have remarked, this policy is profoundly conservative in effect. It does not directly engage society or challenge it over immediate problems, use specific issues as springboards for galvanizing, educating and radicalizing the masses, or change popular understandings through action and participation. Instead, it seeks to mobilize the workers upon the basis of abstract doctrine. No party, however, can assume power by converting the majority to a totally different concept of society. A revolutionary party must partly create that society in embryo, enlisting people on the basis of felt needs and demonstrating that better arrangements are possible by involving workers in the actual construction of the new society. Immediate reformist demands, seen as a type of mobilizing action, can be functionally more radical than a self-isolating, intransigent opposition. Building a counterculture that directly engages mainstream institutions, as the IWW attempted, is also activist and radical. The main divide, as Eastman himself realized by the early 1920s, was between those who want to do something here and now, and those who merely preach and prepare for some future time when action will be possible.
Eastman's desire to directly engage the workers upon the basis of concrete programs unavoidably touched upon a problem inherent in socialist politics, and which was aggravated in the United States by federalism, winner-take-all elections, and the two-party system. The problem, as formulated by Max Weber, consists of relating specific reforms and ultimate ends, following an "ethic of responsibility" aimed at concrete and realistic improvements rather than an "ethic of ultimate ends" which eschews involvement in favor of preserving one's own integrity and purity.[71] How can radicals confront the pressing issues of the day if their party is so small it has scant chance of winning--or if, as in Germany and the United States, it faces an electoral system that renders victory impossible? Long after Max Eastman's heyday, the tiny remnants of the Socialist party would conclude that it could serve the working class best by working as an educational and pressure group within the Democratic party. According to this theory and policy, a social-democratic workers' party did indeed exist in the United States, but as a faction within the Democratic party.[72]
One aspect of Eastman's thought led, however inchoately, in this direction. Eastman flirted with Woodrow Wilson in 1916 (John Reed actually voted for him) on the grounds that civil liberties would end, and socialist agitation become impossible, if America entered World War I--a prediction that proved only too accurate. Eastman, while voting for the Socialist candidate, issued a statement in support of Wilson, thus evoking the understandable wrath of the party faithful, who were not placated by Eastman's somewhat disingenious explanation.[73]
Eastman reconciled his subordination of immediate demands with his insistence on practical action by differentiating between reforms benefitting everyone and those helping labor at the expense of capital. Only the latter were socialistic. Eastman thought that many of the specific demands enunciated in the Socialist party platform were a potpourri unrelated to any distinct class interest and based on a delusory belief in a general interest. "If the Socialist Party would lay off its theoretical complacence, subordinate its religion of the Co-operative Commonwealth, and unify its platform under the working-principle that all changes which can clearly be proven to benefit labor at the expense of capital are socialistic, it might crystalize around itself a major part of the exploited classes," he said.[74] More importantly, Eastman, like Debs, always privileged industrial over political action, believing that the organization of workers into class-conscious, revolutionary industrial unions trumped electioneering. This underlay Eastman's insistence that the Socialist party should support the IWW and even, where appropriate, the AFL. Eastman also advocated vigorous support of reforms not directly related to class, such as feminism, birth control, and prison reform.
The essential qualities of Eastman's radicalism thus included a pragmatic concept of truth and an experimental concept of science; a skeptical aversion to dogma and fanaticism; humor; a love of poetry and philosophy; and a determination to make social revolution into an instrument for personal fulfillment. One might expect these characteristics to make Eastman a somewhat tepid radical, prone to compromise and moderation. Yet instead they enabled Eastman to transcend the shibboleths of capitalist society as trenchantly as he did the dogmas of socialism. His very tendency to evaluate actions by their results rather than on the basis of abstract ideals and conventional slogans predisposed him to a most intransigent and thoroughgoing radicalism. One example of this was his preference for class war over international war.
International war, he noted in January 1914, was celebrated in song and poetry and glorified by resplendent ideals such as patriotism and national honor. Eastman's evaluation was different. "For myself, I do not think international wars are quite so beautiful. I do not think they are in fact wars between nations--between beautiful abstract ideas. They are more usually wars between the dominant business interests of two sections of the earth, and those fine glamours of Patriotism and National Honor and Glory are only the silken vestures in which Business has to dress itself before its slaughterings on so large a scale will appear properly ceremonious." Nations were unreal abstractions that "do not exist except in the mouths and minds of those who name them. What really exists is the people, and they exist individually, and individually they have no quarrel with each other."[75]
Class war, however, was "a war that is morally necessary, a war that has a great prize in view, human liberty, namely, and the right to live and bear children.... A class war is not beautiful. It does not trail after it the glamours of poetry and art. It is not aristocratic, not noble in the feudal character of that word. It is, indeed... a stern, desperate, dirty, inglorious, and therefore supremely heroic struggle toward a real end." American society, however, reflected the interests and ideals of its owners. "We send our moral warriors [strike leaders and advocates of sabotage] to jail, but our aesthetic murderers and advocates of murder we extol and send up to the legislature." Eastman concluded: "Let us have peace--but if there shall be war, let it be war not of nation against nation, but of men against men, struggling for some real end."[76]
Until American entry into World War I moderated his pronouncements on the issue, Eastman (like Debs) independently approximated the Leninist position that socialists should turn the imperialist war into a civil war. "We are not advocates of violence," he said in January 1917, "but as between two current misfortunes we much prefer domestic to international violence. For in domestic violence it usually happens that some definite benefit is being fought for, and not infrequently the fighting holds a possibility of gaining the benefit." Eastman insisted that "such deliberation about ends and means is, in fact, the distinguishing feature of moral conduct."[77]
A theoretical endorsement of revolution, however strident, is often more palatable to the ruling elites than support of lesser violence that is actually occurring. Yet Eastman distinguished himself from many socialists by his energetic support of sabotage, illegal direct action, and even violence when committed by workers, blacks, or suffragists. Immediately after the Lexington Avenue explosion, where a bomb intended for Rockefeller killed four persons, Eastman spoke at the founding meeting of a workers' defense organization. Revolutionary proletarians convinced that capitalism was immoral, he said, would sometimes flout capitalist law "created for the defense of property holders." Therefore, the workers' defense organization would defend not only the innocent but also "men whose offenses against law have been deliberately committed in the interest of the social revolution." Eastman proclaimed that the meeting he addressed was the first in the United States "for the defense of crimes." He did not advocate illegal acts, but recognized that "working people in their struggle" would violate the law "with high motives and in the interests of the democracy of the future"; the defense committee would protect workers "whether innocent or guilty," accused of industrial and political crimes.[78]
Indeed, one of Eastman's first public pronouncement as a socialist concerned the Socialist party's amendment to its constitution that mandated expulsion of any member who advocated "crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation." In a letter to the New York Call, Eastman noted the irony of the situation. Party leaders favored condemnation of such tactics because such a condemnation would win votes among workers and the middle class alike. Yet such an interdict, issued in the name of opportunism, was actually an exercise in "extreme dogmatism" worthy "of a conclave of Methodist ministers." Eastman's pragmatism validated all methods that advanced the cause of revolution; it asserted that the efficacy of any particular method depended on circumstances and could not be endorsed or condemned on general principles. Eastman's concept of science as hypothesis led him to desire vigorous debate and a wide spectrum of opinion within the party. Therefore, while he supported the program and policy of the Socialist party, "I also advocate sabotage and violence as having been, and as likely to be in the future upon many occasions, excellent tactics in the fight of an oppressed class against its oppressors. Is there not liberality or room enough in the Socialist party for this opinion?"[79] In The Masses, Eastman extolled "sabotage performed morally--i.e., performed with deliberate estimation of its significance and results." Indeed, he drew the logical conclusion from the labor theory of value: any property the workers destroyed belonged to them, not to their capitalist masters, who had merely stolen it from the workers.[80]
Eastman applied his realistic, pragmatic, and skeptical mode of analysis to the various kinds of industrial violence. He judged actions by their actual effects rather than their ideological, legal, or abstract ethical justifications. Eastman and other Masses contributors often asserted that the capitalist system was based on the routine murder and torture of workers--not only those gunned down during strikes, but the far larger number worked to death under horrible conditions and denied the necessities of life. And conditions in America's mines, factories, and tenant farms fully justified this analysis. Fully one-third of the textile workers at the Lawrence, Massachusetts, mills, the site of a major IWW strike in 1912, died before they were 25 years old; many children died within two or three years of starting work. Yet conditions and pay in Lawrence were considerably better than those in southern mills and in many other industries. The Commission on Industrial Relations, an official U.S. government investigating body, concluded in 1915 that millions of Americans were dying deaths of slow torture because of preventable malnutrition, exposure, and disease.[81] An editorial in The Masses charged that "In present-day civilization we accept the fact that every building constructed is raised at the cost of so many human lives. We accept the fact that the steel which comes to its construction has been made out of suffering and death in the steel mills.... We go on wearing the cloth whose manufacture is killing the children." According to conventional morality, "it is permissible to destroy life, as the employers of labor destroy it. But it is wrong to destroy property, or to advocate its destruction, even for the saving of life." Law and order meant simply "that the destruction of property must stop and the destruction of life go on as before."[82]
Eastman's statements concerning the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times in 1910 illustrate his views on industrial violence. The incident arose out of endemic conditions. Workers who resisted corporate mass murder and torture routinely suffered severe repression at the hands of employers and the state. They were gunned down, beaten, jailed, and starved into submission; they confronted judicial injunctions, citizen vigilantes, company police (often deputized by the government), the armed forces of the local, state, and federal governments, and a lying and hostile press. The Structural Iron Workers had for many years successfully resisted an employer offensive that destroyed every other union in the industry, substantially increasing their wages in the process. Their winning tactic was the systematic dynamiting of over a hundred nonunion construction sites. A blast at the homicidally antiunion Los Angeles Times in 1910 accidentally killed 20 workers and resulted in massive government and employer-generated hysteria, the prosecution and conviction of virtually of the entire leadership of the Structural Iron Workers, and a decisive set-back for the labor and socialist movements.[83] The trial of the McNamara brothers for this dynamiting precipitated the debate within the Socialist party about sabotage and violence that ultimately caused its rupture with the IWW.
Eastman acknowledged the dynamiting's pernicious consequences for labor. After detailing the tactics employed against the Structural Iron Workers, however, he asked a pertinent question. "If the Steel Trust is determined to fight the emancipation of its workers by every means that money, and fraud, and the control of government provides, how do you expect its workers to fight the Steel Trust?" Eastman, like many socialists, declared that a combination of class-conscious voting and industrial organization would be more effectual in the long run than violence, and would constitute "the power that will yet free the workers of the world. It will take more time, more money, more ingenuity and close counsel, to plant the idea of class solidarity in the mind of every worker in the Steel Industry than it would to plant dynamite under a thousand of its factories, but you can do it."[84]
Yet Eastman also recognized a key fact ignored by many socialists: workers are not merely members of a class, but real individuals who must somehow live in the here-and-now, before the revolution. Thus, while somewhat disingenuously disclaiming any intent to defend the dynamiters, he asserted that "They had the courage to be criminals in the defense of their union, which is their life, and they defended it for the time being effectually." Class conscious voting and union organizing were long-term projects "which could not have done what dynamite and self-sacrifice did for the Structural Iron workers just in that crisis." Thus Eastman exhorted his readers that "if you will stand with [the dynamiters] and for them as your brothers, whether you think they went wrong or not, you can make this event not the end of a secret conspiracy, but the beginning of an open revolutionary agitation that will strike into the very heart of capitalism in this country."[85] He defended the dynamiters because, looking beyond the slogans of reformist socialists as well as capitalists, he perceived the real-life dilemmas of actual persons caught in a real and intractable dilemma. Class struggle was a present reality for Eastman, not an abstract slogan applicable at some indeterminate future date.
Despite his pragmatic evaluation of an action based on its effects, Eastman often praised violence even when it had little effect other than demonstrating the fighting spirit of the workers. He arrived in Ludlow, Colorado, in the spring of 1914, shortly after the national guard had burned and machine-gunned the tent colony that housed the wives and children of striking miners. Eastman said that the most bloodless person would find joy in the rampage of destruction which the enraged miners visited upon the machinery that represented the operating capital of the mines: "It is no retribution, it is no remedy, but it proves that the power and the courage of action is here."[86] Similarly, Eastman extolled a man who, having attempted to blow up a New York subway in protest against the intolerable working conditions there, said "I would gladly give my life for 14,000 men." Eastman doubted "that at this time and place he could actually help those 14,000 strikers, and their struggling wives and families, by this act of violence." Even so, his "thoughtful incendiarism" far outranked the patriotic blather of ministers of the gospel who advocated mass slaughter for "the honor of the flag."[87] Similarly, Eastman praised terrorists abroad and at home, "men and women whom the sight of hunger and oppression has driven to offer up their life's blood in one supreme act of protest." The Masses did once imply that bombs were the agent provocateur's tool, and Eastman sometimes criticized assassination not on abstract ethical grounds but for practical reasons: "it is the old-fashioned method, the method of praise-and-blame" that achieved little.[88]
Eastman justified violence not only by workers but by suffragists, prisoners, and blacks. Discussing white atrocities against blacks in Georgia, he recommended that the blacks organize and retaliate along the lines of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and drive the whites out. "We view the possibility of some concentrated horrors in the South with calmness, because we believe there will be less innocent blood and less misery spread over the history of the next century, if the black citizens arise and demand respect in the name of power, than there will be if they continue to be niggers, and accept the counsels of those of their own race who advise them to be niggers." White charity, pity, or uplift endowments could do nothing for African Americans, Eastman said, until blacks arose and liberated themselves.[89] He similarly extolled English suffragists who destroyed property, thus suffering "the renunciation of social respect, of dignity, of property, of health, and even of life, by the best women of the land in the highest cause they can set before them." Eastman said that prison riots were salutory even when the reforms they evoked might have been granted by a benevolent warden. Without "an arrogant demand for even a better justice than [reformers] so benevolently hand down.... without both pride and power from below, neither the system, nor the spirit of the system, will ever be completely changed."[90]
In general, then, Eastman supported endeavors of oppressed groups for self-emancipation. Even when he was critical of the tone or content of some of the radicals' pronouncements he gave their activities wide coverage and supported them in their fights with established authorities. His pragmatism, skepticism, and lack of dogma made him not only an ecumenical and pluralistic radical, but an ultra-left one. Eastman's unique blend of qualities and values defined his radicalism rather than limiting it. His pragmatism and skepticism, and his ability to see through official pronouncements and to see official moralities for what they were, far from moderating his radicalism, intensified it. His skeptical intelligence led him to enunciate values and to apply them consistently and relentlessly, whatever the consequences and conclusions, with no obeisances to "common sense," conventional notions, or respectable opinion. His love of life, far from causing him to shrink from controversy or danger, incited him to risk imprisonment and even death because he demanded the same fullness of life for others as he wanted for himself.