EASTMAN AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
Eastman heartily endorsed the Bolshevik Revolution as the fulfillment of his own hopes, values, and theories. As early as August 1917, before the Bolsheviks seized control, Eastman had applauded the spontaneous evolution of the soviets into actual instruments of power, exclaiming that "the names of our theories have become the names of current facts."[290] Two years later he said in some amazement that the Marxist hypothesis "has held true in very minute detail even throughout this great bewildering spasm of history--the only thread and the only explanation upon which any serious mind can rest. It is the one thing that has ever happened in the political sciences comparable to the confirmations of the hypotheses of Copernicus and Kepler and Newton in the physical sciences. It is a great moment in the history of human knowledge as well as of human happiness."[291]
The Bolsheviks initially fulfilled three of the four agendas in Eastman's life project. They were proletarian revolutionaries; they hoped that their "new socialist man" would jettison traditional identities based on race, nationality, capitalist property morality, Victorian sexual proprieties, and gender; they encouraged literary and cultural experimentation and promoted a democratic culture created and enjoyed by the masses. The only aspect of Eastman's four-fold program which the early Bolsheviks neglected was countercultural living. Although the Communists championed equality for women and for the various nationalities of the Soviet Union, they were sternly puritanical revolutionaries who concentrated on the serious business of social transformation to the virtual exclusion of lyricism, joy in living, and poetic realization in life.
Eastman's own partial consecration to the cause of proletarian revolution was foreshadowed in the name of The Liberator, taken from William Lloyd Garrison's "paper that freed the slaves." In remarks applicable to Lenin, Eastman admitted that "Garrison was not very much like us, I think--not pagan, never idle-hearted, not determined, whatever he should achieve, to have humane pleasure while achieving it.... And yet he was greater than his victory, he was larger of heart and brain than any fanatic possessed by a single wish." Eastman also noted that Garrison was "a consecrated Christian spirit" who had been imprisoned, persecuted, and nearly lynched; such events were "no special incident, but almost a general symbol of his life." Regarded as "a criminal agitator," Garrison had proclaimed the Constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" while exclaiming "our country is the world--our countrymen are mankind." Eastman, who had nearly escaped both a twenty year prison sentence and a lynching, agreed with Garrison's internationalism and his attack on the Constitution for countenancing slavery. In idealizing Lenin and the Bolsheviks, therefore, Eastman was emphasizing a newly prominent side of his longstanding personality. He continued his previous attacks on "emotional rebels and tempermental iconoclasts" and "evangelical reformers." Eastman had always disdained "revolution as it is enjoyed in Bohemian parlors."[292]
For the entire life of The Liberator (1918-1924), Eastman regarded Lenin and his party as embodying the Marxist principles that had characterized his Masses editorials: scientific analysis, hard-headed realism, pragmatic tactical flexibility, internationalism, a focus on causes and effects rather than vacuous phrases and vapid ideals, and emphasis on the class struggle and the economic nature of freedom. As Lenin repeatedly switched policies in response to events, Eastman hailed his tactical flexibility, realism, and open-mindedness.
The children of darkness have always been wiser in their generation than the children of light.... because the latter, besides having tender hearts, have permitted themselves to have tender minds.... They have had no taste for the hard mood of practical action. They have not known how to be ruthless and ironical and undistracted by any sentiment or consideration whatever that is irrelevant to the enactment of their own purposes.[293]
Capitalist men of action such as Morgan ruled the earth, Eastman said, "while the aspirations of pious idealists have given a faint perfume to the atmosphere." However, "the children of light are getting wise." Marx and Engels had loved humanity but "decided that they would not on that account ignore the real forces that operate in the world, or pretend that human nature is any softer than it is." They were "efficient revolutionary engineers" who had discovered the materialist interpretation of history and the necessity of class struggle. Their communist movement combined "the mood of aggressive and calculating achievement" with "the most beautiful and the most extreme of all the aspirations of the human spirit." Marxism signalled "the birth of a relentless, undeviating, technically-minded business promotion and organization of utopian change, nowise inferior in cold and calculating force, to the organization--for instance--of the railroads in the northwest, or of British imperial finance. That is what Bolshevism is. That is what Communism is. That is the mood and meaning of the Third International." Lenin was "a kind of J.P. Morgan Jesus who is engineering our redemption from Moscow."[294]
For Eastman, Lenin represented the ideal of a scientific and pragmatic intellectual on the model of John Dewey. "I have never seen a sign in any speech or writing of Lenin," Eastman proclaimed, "that he regarded the Marxian theory as anything other than a scientific hypothesis in the process of verification." Such "an active and perfect belief in a thoroughly-understood hypothesis is not dogmatism. It becomes dogmatism only if it continues after the hypothesis has been disproven." However, the Bolshevik revolution had thus far validated Marxist emphasis on economic determinism and the class struggle.[295]
As "learned as any professor," Eastman's Lenin was an idealist who, unlike most Marxists, knew "how to think in a concrete situation" and put "the conclusions of his thought into action with an iron will." Lenin was not only a scientific intellectual but an exemplary man of action who "overthrew the government by telephone. He is a man whose orders are carried out." Lenin was one who
knows the true relation between facts and ideas in scientific thinking--and one who knows what to do with his emotions while thought proceeds. In spite of a dictatorial personality, a sureness of himself that is essential to political strength, he seems to be without dogmatic fixations of mind, and without those emotional habits which make it so difficult for the man of action to be a philosopher.... [In Lenin] we do not taste the flavor of revolution as it is enjoyed in Bohemian parlors. We do not see a man guided by emotional flavors. We see a man bent upon the achievement of an end, and guided in determining what are the means to that achievement by a mature and unswerving intelligence.... He does not confuse the Social revolution with a hypnotic fixation upon any moral ideal.[296]
Eastman's Lenin recognized that revolutionaries confronted distinct tasks requiring greatly differing strategies: revolutionary agitation, the actual overthrow of the old regime, and economic and cultural reconstruction after the revolution. "To envisage an ideal with such inflexible passion, and yet retain a complete flexibility in adjudging the means of arriving there, is to occupy the heights of human intelligence," Eastman enthused. Lenin knew that "theoretical knowledge is only an indispensable part of the complete equipment for action.... He has known that the important thing is to keep a clear definition of the goal, and then be practically right as to the method of getting there." He was "a technical and expert scientist" who seemed dogmatic only to those ignorant of science, to "naive literateurs and groping unhappy journalists." Lenin's self-confidence was not only a requisite of practical, political action, but also "an insistence upon science" which could be
just as inflexible in one for whom all scientific principles are working hypothesis, as in one for whom they are a priori intuitions of immutable truth.
The science of democratic progress, in so far as such a science exists, has its foundation and main framework in the principles of Economic Interpretation and Class Struggle that were formulated by Karl Marx. Lenin's mind as a leader of democratic progress dwells within that science.[297]
Because Lenin did not confuse poetic realization and scientific intelligence, he embodied both.[298]
In almost religious imagery, Eastman rhapsodized that the Soviet leader incarnated Plato's philosopher-king. The Greek philosopher had dreamed of a king who would establish "a kingdom of truth and genuine nobility upon the earth, a society in which great qualities of mind and heart would actually coincide with great influence and power." He was "a Communist" who recognized "that such a society could come into being only after distinctions based upon the possession of wealth have been absolutely and cleanly removed." Plato thought that although the rich would kill such a king, "in the whole course of ages, perhaps a single one may be saved." Eastman continued:
The aspiring mind of the world has never for the space of a generation forgotten Plato's hope.... It has waited for the king's son to come. It has steadfastly refused to believe that Plato's republic was merely an abstract dream. And now after twenty-two hundred years, the king's son has come. But he has come in overalls and old clothes of the farm, with the iron sceptre of Spartacus in his hand, with grim steel in his heart, tempered in centuries of massacre and disillusion, and with the inexorable discipline of science in his mind.[299]
Lenin, Eastman proclaimed, was "a statesman of new and extraordinary force. There will be something almost supernatural in the hold upon historic forces that Marxian science and the philosophy of change will give into the hands of this man. He is a suitable repository of the power of the new international class, that is destinied to revolutionize the social and political, as capitalists have revolutionized the mechanical, fabric of the world."[300] Lenin "writes his wise, patient, reiterative articles to the Russian people, as though to children"; his admonitions were "fatherly" and "teacherly"; he spoke "not condescendingly or tolerantly, but with affectionate appreciation, of these disorganized and disorderly assemblies of the masses, which are the beginings of their whole and ultimate liberation."[301] Eastman said that "hero-worship of Lenin is a very different thing from revolutionary socialism. And yet Lenin is in the position of leadership, and he not only leads, but in his mind and character he typifies the proletarian revolution--its scientific spirit, its abandonment of ideologies and stage-eloquence, its inflexible will, its simplicity and courage, and generosity, and consecration. Therefore a slander against Lenin is an offense to all revolutionists."[302]
When Lenin died in 1924, Eastman (who was in the Soviet Union at the time) summed up the lessons of his career in an almost worshipful essay in The Liberator. "Lenin's death has left orphans in every city of the world," Eastman declared. "Hundreds of millions of grown-up people felt toward him as a child feels toward its father--that his purity of heart was absolute, and that his wisdom was ultimate. And this feeling was never violated by any act or word of his."[303] Lenin was a Marxist who rejected "evangelical methods" of "exhorting excitable people, and arguing with reasonable people," about the morality and desirability of his ideas. Instead, he "investigated and settled with Darwinian thoroughness" Marxism's applicability in a backward, agrarian society. Although the Soviets had coined the term "Leninism,"
Lenin did not create an ism. He did just the opposite thing: he took an ism down out of the intellectual heaven, and made it live and work.... Marx abolished utopianism out of the theory of socialism; Lenin abolished utopianism out of its practice. Marx discovered the mechanics of history; Lenin was the first great historic engineer. Lenin was the first leader of mankind who, instead of unconsciously expressing the dominant social forces of his time, analyzed those forces and understood them, and built a machine which enabled him to guide the one he believed in to its goal.... Lenin was the first man who ever consciously and in a profound sense, made history.[304]
While struggling for the basic needs of the masses, the Bolshevik leader transcended the narrow reformism (natural to the workers) which contented itself with the achievement of those immediate and petty demands. "Lenin wrote his first pamphlets about unjust fines" and hot water to make tea at work. "He entered into the smallest daily problems of that class which he had determined should become the sovereign of Russia. He identified himself with them, won their confidence, took the lead in one of the biggest strikes in their history.... He had identified himself concretely with the economic movement of the working-class. He had brought the idea of the socialist revolution into union with the dynamic force which alone could achieve it." Eastman declared that "the first basic principle of revolutionary engineering" was that "the inspired revolutionary idealist should participate personally in the petty and unrevolutionary struggles of the workers for a pittance of life. He should make himself the indispensable man in that struggle."[305]
Lenin's second principle was ideological independence of the masses. "While identifying yourself personally with the narrow economic struggle of the workers, do not acquiesce by one word, or for the length of one moment, to the narrow and bourgeois political understanding which accompanies it. Do not bow down to the elemental instincts of the masses. Take the position of ideological and political leadership, without any false modesty or sentimental democratism, of any thought about what class you belong to." Lenin "found the true equilibrium of a revolutionist" between the economists who were totally were absorbed by the masses and the terrorists who romanticized "the lonely devotee of ideas." Lenin's solution was "Personal identification with the struggling class; ideological independence of them, and complete, explicit, continual expression of the revolutionary ideology."[306]
Because Eastman extolled pragmatism and a realpolitik toughness, and privileged the class struggle over bourgeois democracy, he supported the Bolshevik dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, in which they were a minority. He even falsely stated that the elections for that body had occurred under the Kerensky regime. A merely political revolution which left the economic structure unchanged represented not freedom, Eastman explained, but only a change of masters. The Bolsheviks, however, had recognized a new form of sovereignity, the soviets, which represented economic rather than territorial government. The Constituent Assembly
was a parliament elected under the Bourgeois government, and therefore would be still subject to that super-political control by capital, which is the "king" that a proletarian revolution intends to overthrow. To ask a social-revolutionary government to recognize the parliament summoned and elected under a bourgeois government they have overthrown, is as unreasonable as it would have been to ask Kerensky's government to recognize the crown council. This is simple and evident fact to those who have learned well the lesson of Marx--who have learned to think of liberty and right and revolution in economic rather than political terms....
It is the working class who will accomplish [revolution], and they will accomplish it, if they can, by establishing a dictatorship, overt and uncompromising. The truth is that only after a general transfer of land and factories to the workers is accomplished, so that substantially all the people have become workers, and the super-political influence of a capitalist class is removed, can an appeal to the people really be an appeal to the people.... This delving under the forms of law and politics to the economic materials of right and liberty, is the essence of socialist thinking.[307]
The typical American "moralistic democrat" could not grasp this fundamental truth; but his disillusioned rantings would not affect any clear-eyed scientific thinker.
Eastman similarly justified the arrest of dissidents, including revolutionaries against Czarism who now found themselves opposing Bolshevism in the name of democracy. Lenin's jailing of such people followed from his Marxist beliefs "with the same inevitability that conclusion follows premise." Lenin
believes that the class struggle between laborers and the owners of machinery and land is absolute, and must issue in the expropriation of the owners, before the world can be free or democratic. This being true, he concludes that the "liberal" compromisers, the moderates, the Menchevik socialists, who desire at the moment of victory to obscure and dilute the class-struggle for the sake of more trivial and immediate benefits, are the worst enemies of freedom and democracy. Therefore, in a quite logical and impersonal manner he arrests them, suspends their publications, and puts them in jail.... Their lack of Marxian understanding makes the goodness of their hearts a danger to liberty and they must go.[308]
The American press had reported that Babushka Breshkovskaya, a heroic fighter for liberty who had spent most of her life in jail or Siberia, was again in prison--this time for criticizing the Bolshevik regime. Eastman pondered "the poignant incident of her imprisonment":
A woman, and a fighter--full of love and rebellion and great thoughts--she was for years a symbol to the American middle-class idealists of the whole revolutionary movement in Russia. Now she is in jail again--for liberty! And the American idealists finds it difficult to readjust his thoughts, and his admirations, to the novelty of that. She is in jail because her dream of liberty is now the old dream--the political and not the industrial, the evangelical ideal and not the economic force that will make it real. At least so it seems to me. There is a risk in every temporary violation of personal liberty; but in the cause of ultimate liberty for all, this risk must be taken.[309]
If Breshkovskaya remained a radical, Eastman hoped, she might rejoice that the revolution she had fostered had progressed so far that it now considered her a reactionary.[310] Eastman further claimed that the dictatorship of the proletariat represented the vast majority of the Russian people, peasants as well as workers and that its rule was the only alternative to a malevolent capitalist dictatorship.
Eastman denounced as enemies of the revolution "the evangelical reformers and the soft-headed Socialists who would again lead the workers of the world off on the emotional chase after vapors attending the political apparition of democracy."[311] Capitalism entailed eternal misery, repression, and mass death; although revolution might cause temporary suffering, it would quickly abolish oppression. Although "people of tender heart" supported so-called moderate governments, "nothing could be more cruel than their short-sightedness. The idea of a republic of free labor, without a capitalistic class, is firmly and permanently established in the world. The experiment begun, nothing but perpetual forcible repression can stop it until it is carried through to the end." Liberal or social-democratic governments would either suppress their opposition or abdicate. In the first case vaunted bougeois freedoms would dissipate and
bloodshed will be spread out over the century. In the second case a period of enormous disorder and apparent chaos will be passed through, but the new peace of industrial freedom will emerge steadily and surely, and the twentieth century will see the beginning of the kingdom of man.
These are the alternatives between which idealists must choose. And for us, we choose the path of tenderness and far-sighted understanding, even though it must lead through a long period of economic disorder, and relaxation of the boast of efficiency. We would rather live in a poor and seriously troubled world, men earnestly striving shoulder to shoulder to build up toward prosperity a republic of free labor, than to live in a world in which the rich are still rich, the poor are poor, and efficiency is maintained by starving and shooting down strikers and military rebels, and throwing into prison men and women who will insist upon voicing the true ideal. We choose the path of revolutionary reconstruction.[312]
Although he favored peaceful revolution, and hailed Bela Kun's non-violent (if transitory) ascension to power, Eastman had always accepted that revolution might necessitate violence. As we have seen, he had welcomed some "concentrated horrors in the South" on behalf of black freedom and self-respect, and had defended retaliatory violence by the McNamara brothers and the Ludlow strikers. He had always insisted that the relatively independent literati and intellectuals could lessen the amount of violence that accompanied revolution by energetically supporting the working class. Unlike many intellectuals, who shrank from the brutality and dislocations of actual revolution, Eastman belittled the "incidental misfortunes... befalling the lives and belongings and sacred rights and vested idealisms of thousands of goodly people" in the Soviet Union. "All that is inevitable, and is nothing to the daily miseries of millions, and the steady corruption of all moral beauty and mental rectitude under the hypocritical slave-system of the ages."[313]
Eastman defended Bolshevik supression of political democracy on grounds of the class struggle, the economic meaning of freedom, and pragmatism--ideas he had long championed. He had always insisted that reform impeded rather than furthering revolution, and that economic freedom in the sense of worker ownership and control of the economy undergirded every other form of liberty. Now he repeated that the workers must "abolish the economic slavery involved in the present system, and until that is accomplished any conflicting ideal of freedom is a superficial impertinence." Eastman justified the Soviet suppression of freedom of speech on the grounds that "a dominant class will always suppress the propaganda that seriously threatens its dominance.... Where there is class rule there can be no fundamental freedom of speech." Eastman declared that Russia was more moderate in its suppression, and more honest about it, than the United States; moreover, if the Bolsheviks succeeded, they would abolish class rule and establish "the conditions for a genuine and fundamental freedom, not only of speech, but of life itself for everybody." In the United States the Bill of Rights would be abrogated either "to suppress, imprison, and slow-murder" revolutionists and protect property, or to establish "a more real and universal liberty." Criticized by a liberal editor for rejecting an ad for a book of which he disapproved, Eastman repudiated any "absolute ideal, whether it be the ideal of free speech or any other. Our loyalty is not to abstract ideals, our loyalty is to concrete purposes."[314]
Eastman also asserted that the so-called "red terror" stemmed from the exigencies of civil war fueled by foreign (including U.S.) invasion. "The red terror is but a revolutionary name for martial law"; mass terror "depicts the masses of the people defending their government by capital punishment from the treasonable attempts of a small minority.... In such times as Russia has passed through, the toll of American rebels murdered by this government would reach the hundreds of thousands." American elites fomented treason and rebellion against the Soviet government and then whined when the traitors it aided were executed. Having failed to overthrow Lenin's government, American officials "come back here snivelling and dripping at the eyes, because, thanks to their nefarious and criminal interference, their aiding and abetting of traitors to Lenin's government, those traitors got shot."[315]
More surprisingly, Eastman vigorously supported Lenin's emphasis on Taylorism--hard work, efficiency, honest accounting, and discipline. Even here, however, Eastman was somewhat consistent: he had always viewed work as inherently disagreeable because regimenting, and had equated leisure and "realization" with freedom. Eastman therefore accepted (at least for others) hard work and rigid discipline at the workplace. He regarded the work ethic, exploitative under capitalism, as liberating when workers owned both the means of production and their output. Eastman therefore endorsed Lenin's call for a cultural revolution among the workers and peasants--the inculcation of the prosaic, commonplace virtues appropriate for an industrial economy. Lenin emphasized "the morals of the people as the one indispensable prerequisite of Socialist success." Eastman declared that "strict organization requires subordination of individuals to authority during work.... Socialism is not a revolution backward to the age of the individual artisan; it is a revolution forward to the age of almost completely social production." It demanded "all the individual liberty that is possible in a highly industrial life." Quoting Lenin's attacks on anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, Eastman said that machine production required the unified submission of tens of thousands of individuals to the will of a single man. Socialism would succeed only if it out-produced capitalism. Work and consumption were not mere private affairs, but had vast public significance. Work discipline, however, was offset by workers' control over the ultimate production process, exercised by the soviets, and "by an absolute and continual control by the masses of the persons in whom that authority is vested."[316]
Eastman endorsed Taylorism because his concept of economic freedom contained a major contradiction. On the one hand it meant workers' ownership and management of the means of production, while on the other it entailed a decent standard of consumption, which in turn necessitated high production. Capitalist apologists routinely use this definition of economic freedom to justify industrial autocracy; even today defenders of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie tout their supposed role in boosting production (and ultimately working-class consumption). Many radicals pointed this out and criticized Bolshevik regimentation at the workplace--especially dangerous when combined with their one-party political structure and repression of dissent. Eastman replied to this criticism with arguments that symbolize a Great Divide in leftist ranks, one with antecedents in prewar divisions. Eastman agreed with the IWW that economic democracy trumped political, and that democratic political institutions under capitalism only masked class rule. However, he now emphasized discipline, control, and production over the traditional IWW and left-Socialist insistence that workers must directly rule on the shop floor before they could own society and achieve true freedom.
Bolshevik regimentation of labor and suppression of political democracy soon aroused opposition on the Left in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Eastman vehemently attacked such left opponents of Communism, particularly Robert Minor, Bertrand Russelll, Robert Dell, and Henry Alsberg. In so doing clarified his own stance while also limiting his own future options. When he later came to share many of these early criticisms, he suffered from a self-inflicted dilemma. Having defended the indefensible and remained silent about egregious abuses, when Eastman announced his disillusionment to the world he did so not by repudiating Bolshevism and questioning his fundamental premises, but by supporting Leon Trotsky and his Left Opposition.
In 1919 Robert Minor, Eastman's friend and a former Masses contributor who was living in the Soviet Union, attacked Bolshevism as state capitalist regimentation of the working class under new masters. "There is no more industrial unionism in Lenin's highly centralized institutions than in the United States Post Office," Minor charged. "What [Lenin] calls industrial unionism is nothing but nationalized industry in the highest degree of centralization" which had "put insurgent industry back into the hands of the business class, who disguise their activities by giving orders under the magic title of 'People's Commissaries.'" Eastman indignantly denounced Minor. Indeed, setting a precedent that would later haunt him, he launched an ad hominem attack on his erstwhile friend and denounced him for publicly criticizing Bolshevism at all. Such criticism, Eastman asserted, betrayed the Revolution. He exclaimed that
Anarchism is a natural philosophy for artists. It is literary, not scientific--an emotional evangel, not a practical movement of men. With the spirit of the 18th century libertarians, who never saw industrial capitalism, the anarchists still think that human freedom can be achieved through the mere negation of restraint. They have no appreciation of the terrific problem of organization involved in revolutionizing the modern world. The working class [must]... reconstruct a tremendous and complex machine of social industry, so that besides producing an increased quantity of economic goods, it will distribute those goods to the people who produced them. They have to abolish the economic slavery involved in the present system, and until that is accomplished any conflicting ideal of freedom is a superficial impertinence. That is what the anarchists, like the liberals, find it impossible to see.[317]
Two years later another such critic, the Englishman Robert Dell, echoed both Minor's ideas and pre-war Wobbly and left-socialist ideology.
"State Socialism is as incompatible with liberty as is the capitalist system," said Dell. He rejected slavery "even to a Communist bureaucracy" and declared that "if the proletariat is merely going to exchange one form of economic slavery for another, it is hardly worth while to have the trouble and inconvenience of a revolution. It would not console me to be told that I was a slave of the 'community,' which some Socialists are beginning to personify just as Nationalists personify the nation." This new form of slavery was not Marxist, Robert Dell insisted; Marx had demanded that "a free federation of all men" replace the State. Dell also criticized the Bolsheviks for dogmatism.[318] Eastman replied that
If Robert Dell were a wage-worker whose lack of freedom consisted in his inability to pay for the fulfillment of any of his wishes--and that is the one and only big universal form of tyranny worth talking about until after it has been removed... he could not possibly make the remark he does about "exchanging one form of economic slavery for another." His sense of personal need would prevent his saying it. The most rigid political tyranny conceivable, if it accomplished the elimination of wage-slavery and continued to produce wealth, would increase the amount of actual liberty so much that the very sides of the earth would heave with relief.
The reason Robert Dell fails to see this, is that it would not increase his liberty. It would, however enable him to work and teach and agitate for complete freedom--the abolition of the authority of the state, as well as the authority of religion and tradition and all kinds of congealed ideas--without knowing that his words are rendered futile and foolish before they are spoken by the existence of an underlying, universal, unshakeable system of business that makes freedom impossible.[319]
Eastman declared that Russia had taken the first step towards liberty "without hesitation, without qualification, without compromise. Let them hesitate, qualify, compromise in every other particular that might be necessary--the gain for human freedom remains stupendous. The Russian revolution remains the supreme social achievement of mankind."[320]
Eastman vehemently denied that the Bolsheviks were dogmatic. Rather, they were scientific engineers and resolute pragmatists who seemed dogmatic only because they insisted on testing a scientific hypothesis rather than indulging in the luxury of a quietistic skepticism. "A man in a sink-hole has to believe in something," Eastman insisted. "He has to regard some facts as confirmed and some ideas as valid, or at least worth acting upon, because he has to act. A man lolling on the bank in a comfortable chair does not have to believe in anything. This is one of his special privileges. And the special privilege of not believing in anything is the one to which the bourgeois intellectual clings long after he has acknowledged the injustice of all others." The detached bourgeois intellectual called the workers dogmatic, fanatical, religious, "and various other intellectual bad names, because the proletariat believes that certain facts are verified and certain ideas valid. He thinks he is very wise and liberal-godlike in doing this, but he is really only making a final assertion of his own superior caste." If the proletariat "were completely in possession of its philosophy," it would demand to share "that exclusive right to be skeptical... which you find so liberal and so delightful.... That is why I am doing so much believing just now and just here."[321]
Eastman therefore advocated suppression of capitalist papers in the United States as in Russia, viewing it not as evidence of dogmatism but as a necessary step in the class war. In so doing he reversed his previous support of almost unlimited free speech (a mainstay of his defense in the Masses trials). The Wilson administration's brutal suppression of dissent in the United States, as well as Czarist, Socialist, and Bolshevik repression abroad, convinced Eastman that every government was an instrument of class rule that would silence opponents whenever the ruling class felt threatened. In 1919, when workers seized the newspapers during the Winnipeg general strike, Eastman extolled this as an example for American workers. "More and more the workers are realizing that no effort to better their condition at the expense of capital can succeed until these organs of antagonistic propaganda are silenced.... They are the forefront batteries of the citadel of power. Without them capitalism would not last twelve months in any industrial city of the world."[322] When criticized for rejecting an ad for a book of which he disapproved, Eastman ridiculed scolding bourgeois editors who had advocated the silencing of him and his publications during the war. "The unusual and funny thing about me is not that I don't believe in Free Speech. There is no editor in the United States who believes in Free Speech. The funny thing about me is that I come right out and say so.... I know it to be a fact that as soon as my speech becomes again a menace to the absolutely vital interests of the ruling business men, they will suppress me again if they can. And I know also that only one thing would please me better than to suppress the Tribune, if I had the power, and that would be to suppress the Times."[323]
Eastman's expostulations convinced few liberals, however. Soon after Dells's letter, Henry Alsberg, another disillusioned supporter of the Bolsheviks, denounced his former allies as dogmatic, bureaucratic, corrupt, tyrannical and contemptuous of human personality. Eastman scolded Alsberg as a typical romantic liberal who had expected too much too fast and believed that revolution would fulfill his quaint reformist hopes.
But if he stays around, and finds out that these great men too are only working on the old materials of human nature, that little daily practical efforts are as much the essence of revolution as of reform, that every success contains its failure, that life after all, even under the revolution, is only "one damn thing after another"--then there will come to him a terrible disillusionment.... You can always distinguish the emotional reactions of these revolutionary cherubs from the most vigorous criticisms of a thinking revolutionist, by the fact that they disparage the situation under the revolution, not in comparison with the situation at home but in comparison with the ideal of perfection.[324]
Eastman also noted the irony that Americans, who had not suffered from the horrors of revolution, were discouraged, whereas the Russians who were building socialism against great obstacles remained optimistic. The Russians "never imagined that the revolution was going to produce a millenium," he said. The impatient and immature "American lyrical Socialist" repudiated the Bolshevik "engineer of history." But revolution was not in itself total change; rather, the conquest of power by the working class was the prerequisite for an ongoing transformation of society.
Revolution does not produce a system of industry in which there is no exploitation and all the profit goes to the worker; it enables those who want such a system to employ the best engineering brains and all the material and mental apparatus of the national life in the all-glorious act of trying to produce it. Revolution does not produce a race of people educated in science and the poetic love of life; it enables the real idealists to go into the schools and educate the race that way. Revolution does not produce liberty; it takes the bloody and black mockery out of the sound of the word and enables those who love liberty to strive with sincerity and sound reason to produce the conditions which will make it possible. There is no short cut to the goal of human culture. It is possible to lay open the road to that goal and hold it open. That is what the proletarian revolution was supposed to do, and that it what it has done.[325]
On these pragmatic and gradualist grounds Eastman defended Lenin's payment of high wages to bourgeois specialists and technicians, his welcome of foreign investment, and his New Economic Policy--all anathema to the Left. These policies were not the hypocritical betrayals of a government exploiting the workers, but tactical retreats, the necessity for which Lenin openly and honestly explained. The key issue was which class controlled the government. Capitalist governments had as their main goal the accumulation of capital in the hands of a tiny minority; the Soviet government represented the workers and peasants, and furthered their interests by whatever expedients were necessary under current conditions. The Bolsheviks "have told us from the beginning that unless a proletarian revolution occurred in one of the great industrial countries, Russia could not proceed directly towards Communism, because the industrial workers have not the manufactured goods to exchange with the peasants for food." Because revolution had not occurred abroad, "they are now compelled, as they have constantly told us they would be, to reintroduce capitalism" in "such a form and to such an extent, as will not endanger the present political sovereignity of the workers" or hinder Socialist economic projects. Workers would retain the commanding heights of the economy. Throughout the world the workers fought against entrenched capitalists, whereas "in Russia we shall now see a capitalist class fighting for power against the workers entrenched in industry, and armed with the press, the schools, the true interests of mankind, and the political state. There is a hazard, to be sure," in Lenin's tactical retreat, but no room for despair.[326] Ironically echoing the notorious "revisionist" Eduard Bernstein, Eastman proclaimed that
There are no end terms. All time is a period of transition. The task of the proletariat, even in the most advanced industrial countries, will be a gradual experimental elimination of private capital, a determination of the possibilities and limits of social production. Capitalism never completed the destruction of feudalism, and communism may never complete the destruction of capitalism. We do not need a blueprint of the society at which the proletarian dictatorship will arrive. What we do need is an assurance that the proletariat can socialize and successfully operate a sufficiently large block of industry, to assure its own sovereignity and the continuance of the process.[327]
As early as 1920, Eastman had endorsed "socialism in one country." Capitalism's collapse meant that Russia could "develop a system of socialist economics by itself" and provide an exemplar for the world.
Let the military and patriotic-authoritarian regime come to an end in one country; and let that country demonstrate to the masses of the people in all lands that happiness, and freedom, and real civilization, and the "decay of the state," do begin from the overthrow of capitalism; at the same time let that country occupy, as Russia will, a dominating position in the markets of the world. That is the strategy of real revolution, and what we have hoped for continually, as we watched the power of the Red Army grow.[328]
By 1923, Eastman's first-hand observations of Soviet successes reinforced his conviction that the Western proletariat could also "accomplish all that we have expected of it. The dictatorship of the proletariat has ceased to be an article of faith. It has become a form of government, tested and proven more just and more adequate to the conditions of modern industrial life, than others." The Soviet people faced extraordinary obstacles: a poorly developed industrial base further weakened by years of international and civil war, and the difficulties of reconciling the interests of peasants and workers within the framework of a proletarian state. Success in Russia depended "largely upon the course of events in other parts of the world"; workers and idealists "in every corner of the world" must "give all help to the heroic men and women" battling for socialism in Russia.[329]
The Bolsheviks initially fulfilled three of the four agendas in Eastman's life project. They were proletarian revolutionaries; they hoped that their "new socialist man" would jettison traditional identities based on race, nationality, capitalist property morality, Victorian sexual proprieties, and gender; they encouraged literary and cultural experimentation and promoted a democratic culture created and enjoyed by the masses. The only aspect of Eastman's four-fold program which the early Bolsheviks neglected was countercultural living. Although the Communists championed equality for women and for the various nationalities of the Soviet Union, they were sternly puritanical revolutionaries who concentrated on the serious business of social transformation to the virtual exclusion of lyricism, joy in living, and poetic realization in life.
Eastman's own partial consecration to the cause of proletarian revolution was foreshadowed in the name of The Liberator, taken from William Lloyd Garrison's "paper that freed the slaves." In remarks applicable to Lenin, Eastman admitted that "Garrison was not very much like us, I think--not pagan, never idle-hearted, not determined, whatever he should achieve, to have humane pleasure while achieving it.... And yet he was greater than his victory, he was larger of heart and brain than any fanatic possessed by a single wish." Eastman also noted that Garrison was "a consecrated Christian spirit" who had been imprisoned, persecuted, and nearly lynched; such events were "no special incident, but almost a general symbol of his life." Regarded as "a criminal agitator," Garrison had proclaimed the Constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" while exclaiming "our country is the world--our countrymen are mankind." Eastman, who had nearly escaped both a twenty year prison sentence and a lynching, agreed with Garrison's internationalism and his attack on the Constitution for countenancing slavery. In idealizing Lenin and the Bolsheviks, therefore, Eastman was emphasizing a newly prominent side of his longstanding personality. He continued his previous attacks on "emotional rebels and tempermental iconoclasts" and "evangelical reformers." Eastman had always disdained "revolution as it is enjoyed in Bohemian parlors."[292]
For the entire life of The Liberator (1918-1924), Eastman regarded Lenin and his party as embodying the Marxist principles that had characterized his Masses editorials: scientific analysis, hard-headed realism, pragmatic tactical flexibility, internationalism, a focus on causes and effects rather than vacuous phrases and vapid ideals, and emphasis on the class struggle and the economic nature of freedom. As Lenin repeatedly switched policies in response to events, Eastman hailed his tactical flexibility, realism, and open-mindedness.
The children of darkness have always been wiser in their generation than the children of light.... because the latter, besides having tender hearts, have permitted themselves to have tender minds.... They have had no taste for the hard mood of practical action. They have not known how to be ruthless and ironical and undistracted by any sentiment or consideration whatever that is irrelevant to the enactment of their own purposes.[293]
Capitalist men of action such as Morgan ruled the earth, Eastman said, "while the aspirations of pious idealists have given a faint perfume to the atmosphere." However, "the children of light are getting wise." Marx and Engels had loved humanity but "decided that they would not on that account ignore the real forces that operate in the world, or pretend that human nature is any softer than it is." They were "efficient revolutionary engineers" who had discovered the materialist interpretation of history and the necessity of class struggle. Their communist movement combined "the mood of aggressive and calculating achievement" with "the most beautiful and the most extreme of all the aspirations of the human spirit." Marxism signalled "the birth of a relentless, undeviating, technically-minded business promotion and organization of utopian change, nowise inferior in cold and calculating force, to the organization--for instance--of the railroads in the northwest, or of British imperial finance. That is what Bolshevism is. That is what Communism is. That is the mood and meaning of the Third International." Lenin was "a kind of J.P. Morgan Jesus who is engineering our redemption from Moscow."[294]
For Eastman, Lenin represented the ideal of a scientific and pragmatic intellectual on the model of John Dewey. "I have never seen a sign in any speech or writing of Lenin," Eastman proclaimed, "that he regarded the Marxian theory as anything other than a scientific hypothesis in the process of verification." Such "an active and perfect belief in a thoroughly-understood hypothesis is not dogmatism. It becomes dogmatism only if it continues after the hypothesis has been disproven." However, the Bolshevik revolution had thus far validated Marxist emphasis on economic determinism and the class struggle.[295]
As "learned as any professor," Eastman's Lenin was an idealist who, unlike most Marxists, knew "how to think in a concrete situation" and put "the conclusions of his thought into action with an iron will." Lenin was not only a scientific intellectual but an exemplary man of action who "overthrew the government by telephone. He is a man whose orders are carried out." Lenin was one who
knows the true relation between facts and ideas in scientific thinking--and one who knows what to do with his emotions while thought proceeds. In spite of a dictatorial personality, a sureness of himself that is essential to political strength, he seems to be without dogmatic fixations of mind, and without those emotional habits which make it so difficult for the man of action to be a philosopher.... [In Lenin] we do not taste the flavor of revolution as it is enjoyed in Bohemian parlors. We do not see a man guided by emotional flavors. We see a man bent upon the achievement of an end, and guided in determining what are the means to that achievement by a mature and unswerving intelligence.... He does not confuse the Social revolution with a hypnotic fixation upon any moral ideal.[296]
Eastman's Lenin recognized that revolutionaries confronted distinct tasks requiring greatly differing strategies: revolutionary agitation, the actual overthrow of the old regime, and economic and cultural reconstruction after the revolution. "To envisage an ideal with such inflexible passion, and yet retain a complete flexibility in adjudging the means of arriving there, is to occupy the heights of human intelligence," Eastman enthused. Lenin knew that "theoretical knowledge is only an indispensable part of the complete equipment for action.... He has known that the important thing is to keep a clear definition of the goal, and then be practically right as to the method of getting there." He was "a technical and expert scientist" who seemed dogmatic only to those ignorant of science, to "naive literateurs and groping unhappy journalists." Lenin's self-confidence was not only a requisite of practical, political action, but also "an insistence upon science" which could be
just as inflexible in one for whom all scientific principles are working hypothesis, as in one for whom they are a priori intuitions of immutable truth.
The science of democratic progress, in so far as such a science exists, has its foundation and main framework in the principles of Economic Interpretation and Class Struggle that were formulated by Karl Marx. Lenin's mind as a leader of democratic progress dwells within that science.[297]
Because Lenin did not confuse poetic realization and scientific intelligence, he embodied both.[298]
In almost religious imagery, Eastman rhapsodized that the Soviet leader incarnated Plato's philosopher-king. The Greek philosopher had dreamed of a king who would establish "a kingdom of truth and genuine nobility upon the earth, a society in which great qualities of mind and heart would actually coincide with great influence and power." He was "a Communist" who recognized "that such a society could come into being only after distinctions based upon the possession of wealth have been absolutely and cleanly removed." Plato thought that although the rich would kill such a king, "in the whole course of ages, perhaps a single one may be saved." Eastman continued:
The aspiring mind of the world has never for the space of a generation forgotten Plato's hope.... It has waited for the king's son to come. It has steadfastly refused to believe that Plato's republic was merely an abstract dream. And now after twenty-two hundred years, the king's son has come. But he has come in overalls and old clothes of the farm, with the iron sceptre of Spartacus in his hand, with grim steel in his heart, tempered in centuries of massacre and disillusion, and with the inexorable discipline of science in his mind.[299]
Lenin, Eastman proclaimed, was "a statesman of new and extraordinary force. There will be something almost supernatural in the hold upon historic forces that Marxian science and the philosophy of change will give into the hands of this man. He is a suitable repository of the power of the new international class, that is destinied to revolutionize the social and political, as capitalists have revolutionized the mechanical, fabric of the world."[300] Lenin "writes his wise, patient, reiterative articles to the Russian people, as though to children"; his admonitions were "fatherly" and "teacherly"; he spoke "not condescendingly or tolerantly, but with affectionate appreciation, of these disorganized and disorderly assemblies of the masses, which are the beginings of their whole and ultimate liberation."[301] Eastman said that "hero-worship of Lenin is a very different thing from revolutionary socialism. And yet Lenin is in the position of leadership, and he not only leads, but in his mind and character he typifies the proletarian revolution--its scientific spirit, its abandonment of ideologies and stage-eloquence, its inflexible will, its simplicity and courage, and generosity, and consecration. Therefore a slander against Lenin is an offense to all revolutionists."[302]
When Lenin died in 1924, Eastman (who was in the Soviet Union at the time) summed up the lessons of his career in an almost worshipful essay in The Liberator. "Lenin's death has left orphans in every city of the world," Eastman declared. "Hundreds of millions of grown-up people felt toward him as a child feels toward its father--that his purity of heart was absolute, and that his wisdom was ultimate. And this feeling was never violated by any act or word of his."[303] Lenin was a Marxist who rejected "evangelical methods" of "exhorting excitable people, and arguing with reasonable people," about the morality and desirability of his ideas. Instead, he "investigated and settled with Darwinian thoroughness" Marxism's applicability in a backward, agrarian society. Although the Soviets had coined the term "Leninism,"
Lenin did not create an ism. He did just the opposite thing: he took an ism down out of the intellectual heaven, and made it live and work.... Marx abolished utopianism out of the theory of socialism; Lenin abolished utopianism out of its practice. Marx discovered the mechanics of history; Lenin was the first great historic engineer. Lenin was the first leader of mankind who, instead of unconsciously expressing the dominant social forces of his time, analyzed those forces and understood them, and built a machine which enabled him to guide the one he believed in to its goal.... Lenin was the first man who ever consciously and in a profound sense, made history.[304]
While struggling for the basic needs of the masses, the Bolshevik leader transcended the narrow reformism (natural to the workers) which contented itself with the achievement of those immediate and petty demands. "Lenin wrote his first pamphlets about unjust fines" and hot water to make tea at work. "He entered into the smallest daily problems of that class which he had determined should become the sovereign of Russia. He identified himself with them, won their confidence, took the lead in one of the biggest strikes in their history.... He had identified himself concretely with the economic movement of the working-class. He had brought the idea of the socialist revolution into union with the dynamic force which alone could achieve it." Eastman declared that "the first basic principle of revolutionary engineering" was that "the inspired revolutionary idealist should participate personally in the petty and unrevolutionary struggles of the workers for a pittance of life. He should make himself the indispensable man in that struggle."[305]
Lenin's second principle was ideological independence of the masses. "While identifying yourself personally with the narrow economic struggle of the workers, do not acquiesce by one word, or for the length of one moment, to the narrow and bourgeois political understanding which accompanies it. Do not bow down to the elemental instincts of the masses. Take the position of ideological and political leadership, without any false modesty or sentimental democratism, of any thought about what class you belong to." Lenin "found the true equilibrium of a revolutionist" between the economists who were totally were absorbed by the masses and the terrorists who romanticized "the lonely devotee of ideas." Lenin's solution was "Personal identification with the struggling class; ideological independence of them, and complete, explicit, continual expression of the revolutionary ideology."[306]
Because Eastman extolled pragmatism and a realpolitik toughness, and privileged the class struggle over bourgeois democracy, he supported the Bolshevik dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, in which they were a minority. He even falsely stated that the elections for that body had occurred under the Kerensky regime. A merely political revolution which left the economic structure unchanged represented not freedom, Eastman explained, but only a change of masters. The Bolsheviks, however, had recognized a new form of sovereignity, the soviets, which represented economic rather than territorial government. The Constituent Assembly
was a parliament elected under the Bourgeois government, and therefore would be still subject to that super-political control by capital, which is the "king" that a proletarian revolution intends to overthrow. To ask a social-revolutionary government to recognize the parliament summoned and elected under a bourgeois government they have overthrown, is as unreasonable as it would have been to ask Kerensky's government to recognize the crown council. This is simple and evident fact to those who have learned well the lesson of Marx--who have learned to think of liberty and right and revolution in economic rather than political terms....
It is the working class who will accomplish [revolution], and they will accomplish it, if they can, by establishing a dictatorship, overt and uncompromising. The truth is that only after a general transfer of land and factories to the workers is accomplished, so that substantially all the people have become workers, and the super-political influence of a capitalist class is removed, can an appeal to the people really be an appeal to the people.... This delving under the forms of law and politics to the economic materials of right and liberty, is the essence of socialist thinking.[307]
The typical American "moralistic democrat" could not grasp this fundamental truth; but his disillusioned rantings would not affect any clear-eyed scientific thinker.
Eastman similarly justified the arrest of dissidents, including revolutionaries against Czarism who now found themselves opposing Bolshevism in the name of democracy. Lenin's jailing of such people followed from his Marxist beliefs "with the same inevitability that conclusion follows premise." Lenin
believes that the class struggle between laborers and the owners of machinery and land is absolute, and must issue in the expropriation of the owners, before the world can be free or democratic. This being true, he concludes that the "liberal" compromisers, the moderates, the Menchevik socialists, who desire at the moment of victory to obscure and dilute the class-struggle for the sake of more trivial and immediate benefits, are the worst enemies of freedom and democracy. Therefore, in a quite logical and impersonal manner he arrests them, suspends their publications, and puts them in jail.... Their lack of Marxian understanding makes the goodness of their hearts a danger to liberty and they must go.[308]
The American press had reported that Babushka Breshkovskaya, a heroic fighter for liberty who had spent most of her life in jail or Siberia, was again in prison--this time for criticizing the Bolshevik regime. Eastman pondered "the poignant incident of her imprisonment":
A woman, and a fighter--full of love and rebellion and great thoughts--she was for years a symbol to the American middle-class idealists of the whole revolutionary movement in Russia. Now she is in jail again--for liberty! And the American idealists finds it difficult to readjust his thoughts, and his admirations, to the novelty of that. She is in jail because her dream of liberty is now the old dream--the political and not the industrial, the evangelical ideal and not the economic force that will make it real. At least so it seems to me. There is a risk in every temporary violation of personal liberty; but in the cause of ultimate liberty for all, this risk must be taken.[309]
If Breshkovskaya remained a radical, Eastman hoped, she might rejoice that the revolution she had fostered had progressed so far that it now considered her a reactionary.[310] Eastman further claimed that the dictatorship of the proletariat represented the vast majority of the Russian people, peasants as well as workers and that its rule was the only alternative to a malevolent capitalist dictatorship.
Eastman denounced as enemies of the revolution "the evangelical reformers and the soft-headed Socialists who would again lead the workers of the world off on the emotional chase after vapors attending the political apparition of democracy."[311] Capitalism entailed eternal misery, repression, and mass death; although revolution might cause temporary suffering, it would quickly abolish oppression. Although "people of tender heart" supported so-called moderate governments, "nothing could be more cruel than their short-sightedness. The idea of a republic of free labor, without a capitalistic class, is firmly and permanently established in the world. The experiment begun, nothing but perpetual forcible repression can stop it until it is carried through to the end." Liberal or social-democratic governments would either suppress their opposition or abdicate. In the first case vaunted bougeois freedoms would dissipate and
bloodshed will be spread out over the century. In the second case a period of enormous disorder and apparent chaos will be passed through, but the new peace of industrial freedom will emerge steadily and surely, and the twentieth century will see the beginning of the kingdom of man.
These are the alternatives between which idealists must choose. And for us, we choose the path of tenderness and far-sighted understanding, even though it must lead through a long period of economic disorder, and relaxation of the boast of efficiency. We would rather live in a poor and seriously troubled world, men earnestly striving shoulder to shoulder to build up toward prosperity a republic of free labor, than to live in a world in which the rich are still rich, the poor are poor, and efficiency is maintained by starving and shooting down strikers and military rebels, and throwing into prison men and women who will insist upon voicing the true ideal. We choose the path of revolutionary reconstruction.[312]
Although he favored peaceful revolution, and hailed Bela Kun's non-violent (if transitory) ascension to power, Eastman had always accepted that revolution might necessitate violence. As we have seen, he had welcomed some "concentrated horrors in the South" on behalf of black freedom and self-respect, and had defended retaliatory violence by the McNamara brothers and the Ludlow strikers. He had always insisted that the relatively independent literati and intellectuals could lessen the amount of violence that accompanied revolution by energetically supporting the working class. Unlike many intellectuals, who shrank from the brutality and dislocations of actual revolution, Eastman belittled the "incidental misfortunes... befalling the lives and belongings and sacred rights and vested idealisms of thousands of goodly people" in the Soviet Union. "All that is inevitable, and is nothing to the daily miseries of millions, and the steady corruption of all moral beauty and mental rectitude under the hypocritical slave-system of the ages."[313]
Eastman defended Bolshevik supression of political democracy on grounds of the class struggle, the economic meaning of freedom, and pragmatism--ideas he had long championed. He had always insisted that reform impeded rather than furthering revolution, and that economic freedom in the sense of worker ownership and control of the economy undergirded every other form of liberty. Now he repeated that the workers must "abolish the economic slavery involved in the present system, and until that is accomplished any conflicting ideal of freedom is a superficial impertinence." Eastman justified the Soviet suppression of freedom of speech on the grounds that "a dominant class will always suppress the propaganda that seriously threatens its dominance.... Where there is class rule there can be no fundamental freedom of speech." Eastman declared that Russia was more moderate in its suppression, and more honest about it, than the United States; moreover, if the Bolsheviks succeeded, they would abolish class rule and establish "the conditions for a genuine and fundamental freedom, not only of speech, but of life itself for everybody." In the United States the Bill of Rights would be abrogated either "to suppress, imprison, and slow-murder" revolutionists and protect property, or to establish "a more real and universal liberty." Criticized by a liberal editor for rejecting an ad for a book of which he disapproved, Eastman repudiated any "absolute ideal, whether it be the ideal of free speech or any other. Our loyalty is not to abstract ideals, our loyalty is to concrete purposes."[314]
Eastman also asserted that the so-called "red terror" stemmed from the exigencies of civil war fueled by foreign (including U.S.) invasion. "The red terror is but a revolutionary name for martial law"; mass terror "depicts the masses of the people defending their government by capital punishment from the treasonable attempts of a small minority.... In such times as Russia has passed through, the toll of American rebels murdered by this government would reach the hundreds of thousands." American elites fomented treason and rebellion against the Soviet government and then whined when the traitors it aided were executed. Having failed to overthrow Lenin's government, American officials "come back here snivelling and dripping at the eyes, because, thanks to their nefarious and criminal interference, their aiding and abetting of traitors to Lenin's government, those traitors got shot."[315]
More surprisingly, Eastman vigorously supported Lenin's emphasis on Taylorism--hard work, efficiency, honest accounting, and discipline. Even here, however, Eastman was somewhat consistent: he had always viewed work as inherently disagreeable because regimenting, and had equated leisure and "realization" with freedom. Eastman therefore accepted (at least for others) hard work and rigid discipline at the workplace. He regarded the work ethic, exploitative under capitalism, as liberating when workers owned both the means of production and their output. Eastman therefore endorsed Lenin's call for a cultural revolution among the workers and peasants--the inculcation of the prosaic, commonplace virtues appropriate for an industrial economy. Lenin emphasized "the morals of the people as the one indispensable prerequisite of Socialist success." Eastman declared that "strict organization requires subordination of individuals to authority during work.... Socialism is not a revolution backward to the age of the individual artisan; it is a revolution forward to the age of almost completely social production." It demanded "all the individual liberty that is possible in a highly industrial life." Quoting Lenin's attacks on anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, Eastman said that machine production required the unified submission of tens of thousands of individuals to the will of a single man. Socialism would succeed only if it out-produced capitalism. Work and consumption were not mere private affairs, but had vast public significance. Work discipline, however, was offset by workers' control over the ultimate production process, exercised by the soviets, and "by an absolute and continual control by the masses of the persons in whom that authority is vested."[316]
Eastman endorsed Taylorism because his concept of economic freedom contained a major contradiction. On the one hand it meant workers' ownership and management of the means of production, while on the other it entailed a decent standard of consumption, which in turn necessitated high production. Capitalist apologists routinely use this definition of economic freedom to justify industrial autocracy; even today defenders of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie tout their supposed role in boosting production (and ultimately working-class consumption). Many radicals pointed this out and criticized Bolshevik regimentation at the workplace--especially dangerous when combined with their one-party political structure and repression of dissent. Eastman replied to this criticism with arguments that symbolize a Great Divide in leftist ranks, one with antecedents in prewar divisions. Eastman agreed with the IWW that economic democracy trumped political, and that democratic political institutions under capitalism only masked class rule. However, he now emphasized discipline, control, and production over the traditional IWW and left-Socialist insistence that workers must directly rule on the shop floor before they could own society and achieve true freedom.
Bolshevik regimentation of labor and suppression of political democracy soon aroused opposition on the Left in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Eastman vehemently attacked such left opponents of Communism, particularly Robert Minor, Bertrand Russelll, Robert Dell, and Henry Alsberg. In so doing clarified his own stance while also limiting his own future options. When he later came to share many of these early criticisms, he suffered from a self-inflicted dilemma. Having defended the indefensible and remained silent about egregious abuses, when Eastman announced his disillusionment to the world he did so not by repudiating Bolshevism and questioning his fundamental premises, but by supporting Leon Trotsky and his Left Opposition.
In 1919 Robert Minor, Eastman's friend and a former Masses contributor who was living in the Soviet Union, attacked Bolshevism as state capitalist regimentation of the working class under new masters. "There is no more industrial unionism in Lenin's highly centralized institutions than in the United States Post Office," Minor charged. "What [Lenin] calls industrial unionism is nothing but nationalized industry in the highest degree of centralization" which had "put insurgent industry back into the hands of the business class, who disguise their activities by giving orders under the magic title of 'People's Commissaries.'" Eastman indignantly denounced Minor. Indeed, setting a precedent that would later haunt him, he launched an ad hominem attack on his erstwhile friend and denounced him for publicly criticizing Bolshevism at all. Such criticism, Eastman asserted, betrayed the Revolution. He exclaimed that
Anarchism is a natural philosophy for artists. It is literary, not scientific--an emotional evangel, not a practical movement of men. With the spirit of the 18th century libertarians, who never saw industrial capitalism, the anarchists still think that human freedom can be achieved through the mere negation of restraint. They have no appreciation of the terrific problem of organization involved in revolutionizing the modern world. The working class [must]... reconstruct a tremendous and complex machine of social industry, so that besides producing an increased quantity of economic goods, it will distribute those goods to the people who produced them. They have to abolish the economic slavery involved in the present system, and until that is accomplished any conflicting ideal of freedom is a superficial impertinence. That is what the anarchists, like the liberals, find it impossible to see.[317]
Two years later another such critic, the Englishman Robert Dell, echoed both Minor's ideas and pre-war Wobbly and left-socialist ideology.
"State Socialism is as incompatible with liberty as is the capitalist system," said Dell. He rejected slavery "even to a Communist bureaucracy" and declared that "if the proletariat is merely going to exchange one form of economic slavery for another, it is hardly worth while to have the trouble and inconvenience of a revolution. It would not console me to be told that I was a slave of the 'community,' which some Socialists are beginning to personify just as Nationalists personify the nation." This new form of slavery was not Marxist, Robert Dell insisted; Marx had demanded that "a free federation of all men" replace the State. Dell also criticized the Bolsheviks for dogmatism.[318] Eastman replied that
If Robert Dell were a wage-worker whose lack of freedom consisted in his inability to pay for the fulfillment of any of his wishes--and that is the one and only big universal form of tyranny worth talking about until after it has been removed... he could not possibly make the remark he does about "exchanging one form of economic slavery for another." His sense of personal need would prevent his saying it. The most rigid political tyranny conceivable, if it accomplished the elimination of wage-slavery and continued to produce wealth, would increase the amount of actual liberty so much that the very sides of the earth would heave with relief.
The reason Robert Dell fails to see this, is that it would not increase his liberty. It would, however enable him to work and teach and agitate for complete freedom--the abolition of the authority of the state, as well as the authority of religion and tradition and all kinds of congealed ideas--without knowing that his words are rendered futile and foolish before they are spoken by the existence of an underlying, universal, unshakeable system of business that makes freedom impossible.[319]
Eastman declared that Russia had taken the first step towards liberty "without hesitation, without qualification, without compromise. Let them hesitate, qualify, compromise in every other particular that might be necessary--the gain for human freedom remains stupendous. The Russian revolution remains the supreme social achievement of mankind."[320]
Eastman vehemently denied that the Bolsheviks were dogmatic. Rather, they were scientific engineers and resolute pragmatists who seemed dogmatic only because they insisted on testing a scientific hypothesis rather than indulging in the luxury of a quietistic skepticism. "A man in a sink-hole has to believe in something," Eastman insisted. "He has to regard some facts as confirmed and some ideas as valid, or at least worth acting upon, because he has to act. A man lolling on the bank in a comfortable chair does not have to believe in anything. This is one of his special privileges. And the special privilege of not believing in anything is the one to which the bourgeois intellectual clings long after he has acknowledged the injustice of all others." The detached bourgeois intellectual called the workers dogmatic, fanatical, religious, "and various other intellectual bad names, because the proletariat believes that certain facts are verified and certain ideas valid. He thinks he is very wise and liberal-godlike in doing this, but he is really only making a final assertion of his own superior caste." If the proletariat "were completely in possession of its philosophy," it would demand to share "that exclusive right to be skeptical... which you find so liberal and so delightful.... That is why I am doing so much believing just now and just here."[321]
Eastman therefore advocated suppression of capitalist papers in the United States as in Russia, viewing it not as evidence of dogmatism but as a necessary step in the class war. In so doing he reversed his previous support of almost unlimited free speech (a mainstay of his defense in the Masses trials). The Wilson administration's brutal suppression of dissent in the United States, as well as Czarist, Socialist, and Bolshevik repression abroad, convinced Eastman that every government was an instrument of class rule that would silence opponents whenever the ruling class felt threatened. In 1919, when workers seized the newspapers during the Winnipeg general strike, Eastman extolled this as an example for American workers. "More and more the workers are realizing that no effort to better their condition at the expense of capital can succeed until these organs of antagonistic propaganda are silenced.... They are the forefront batteries of the citadel of power. Without them capitalism would not last twelve months in any industrial city of the world."[322] When criticized for rejecting an ad for a book of which he disapproved, Eastman ridiculed scolding bourgeois editors who had advocated the silencing of him and his publications during the war. "The unusual and funny thing about me is not that I don't believe in Free Speech. There is no editor in the United States who believes in Free Speech. The funny thing about me is that I come right out and say so.... I know it to be a fact that as soon as my speech becomes again a menace to the absolutely vital interests of the ruling business men, they will suppress me again if they can. And I know also that only one thing would please me better than to suppress the Tribune, if I had the power, and that would be to suppress the Times."[323]
Eastman's expostulations convinced few liberals, however. Soon after Dells's letter, Henry Alsberg, another disillusioned supporter of the Bolsheviks, denounced his former allies as dogmatic, bureaucratic, corrupt, tyrannical and contemptuous of human personality. Eastman scolded Alsberg as a typical romantic liberal who had expected too much too fast and believed that revolution would fulfill his quaint reformist hopes.
But if he stays around, and finds out that these great men too are only working on the old materials of human nature, that little daily practical efforts are as much the essence of revolution as of reform, that every success contains its failure, that life after all, even under the revolution, is only "one damn thing after another"--then there will come to him a terrible disillusionment.... You can always distinguish the emotional reactions of these revolutionary cherubs from the most vigorous criticisms of a thinking revolutionist, by the fact that they disparage the situation under the revolution, not in comparison with the situation at home but in comparison with the ideal of perfection.[324]
Eastman also noted the irony that Americans, who had not suffered from the horrors of revolution, were discouraged, whereas the Russians who were building socialism against great obstacles remained optimistic. The Russians "never imagined that the revolution was going to produce a millenium," he said. The impatient and immature "American lyrical Socialist" repudiated the Bolshevik "engineer of history." But revolution was not in itself total change; rather, the conquest of power by the working class was the prerequisite for an ongoing transformation of society.
Revolution does not produce a system of industry in which there is no exploitation and all the profit goes to the worker; it enables those who want such a system to employ the best engineering brains and all the material and mental apparatus of the national life in the all-glorious act of trying to produce it. Revolution does not produce a race of people educated in science and the poetic love of life; it enables the real idealists to go into the schools and educate the race that way. Revolution does not produce liberty; it takes the bloody and black mockery out of the sound of the word and enables those who love liberty to strive with sincerity and sound reason to produce the conditions which will make it possible. There is no short cut to the goal of human culture. It is possible to lay open the road to that goal and hold it open. That is what the proletarian revolution was supposed to do, and that it what it has done.[325]
On these pragmatic and gradualist grounds Eastman defended Lenin's payment of high wages to bourgeois specialists and technicians, his welcome of foreign investment, and his New Economic Policy--all anathema to the Left. These policies were not the hypocritical betrayals of a government exploiting the workers, but tactical retreats, the necessity for which Lenin openly and honestly explained. The key issue was which class controlled the government. Capitalist governments had as their main goal the accumulation of capital in the hands of a tiny minority; the Soviet government represented the workers and peasants, and furthered their interests by whatever expedients were necessary under current conditions. The Bolsheviks "have told us from the beginning that unless a proletarian revolution occurred in one of the great industrial countries, Russia could not proceed directly towards Communism, because the industrial workers have not the manufactured goods to exchange with the peasants for food." Because revolution had not occurred abroad, "they are now compelled, as they have constantly told us they would be, to reintroduce capitalism" in "such a form and to such an extent, as will not endanger the present political sovereignity of the workers" or hinder Socialist economic projects. Workers would retain the commanding heights of the economy. Throughout the world the workers fought against entrenched capitalists, whereas "in Russia we shall now see a capitalist class fighting for power against the workers entrenched in industry, and armed with the press, the schools, the true interests of mankind, and the political state. There is a hazard, to be sure," in Lenin's tactical retreat, but no room for despair.[326] Ironically echoing the notorious "revisionist" Eduard Bernstein, Eastman proclaimed that
There are no end terms. All time is a period of transition. The task of the proletariat, even in the most advanced industrial countries, will be a gradual experimental elimination of private capital, a determination of the possibilities and limits of social production. Capitalism never completed the destruction of feudalism, and communism may never complete the destruction of capitalism. We do not need a blueprint of the society at which the proletarian dictatorship will arrive. What we do need is an assurance that the proletariat can socialize and successfully operate a sufficiently large block of industry, to assure its own sovereignity and the continuance of the process.[327]
As early as 1920, Eastman had endorsed "socialism in one country." Capitalism's collapse meant that Russia could "develop a system of socialist economics by itself" and provide an exemplar for the world.
Let the military and patriotic-authoritarian regime come to an end in one country; and let that country demonstrate to the masses of the people in all lands that happiness, and freedom, and real civilization, and the "decay of the state," do begin from the overthrow of capitalism; at the same time let that country occupy, as Russia will, a dominating position in the markets of the world. That is the strategy of real revolution, and what we have hoped for continually, as we watched the power of the Red Army grow.[328]
By 1923, Eastman's first-hand observations of Soviet successes reinforced his conviction that the Western proletariat could also "accomplish all that we have expected of it. The dictatorship of the proletariat has ceased to be an article of faith. It has become a form of government, tested and proven more just and more adequate to the conditions of modern industrial life, than others." The Soviet people faced extraordinary obstacles: a poorly developed industrial base further weakened by years of international and civil war, and the difficulties of reconciling the interests of peasants and workers within the framework of a proletarian state. Success in Russia depended "largely upon the course of events in other parts of the world"; workers and idealists "in every corner of the world" must "give all help to the heroic men and women" battling for socialism in Russia.[329]