TOWARDS AN AMERICAN REVOLUTION
War, repression, and revolution mandated that Eastman specify his positions on urgent issues and choose sides in a manner previously unnecessary. Even since the Ludlow massacre, Eastman had recognized that crisis and upheaval hardened class lines and demanded that everyone take sides; by 1918 Eastman was convinced that worldwide revolution was possible. The Liberator, therefore, increasingly endorsed the Socialist party's emerging Left Wing and, after the SP split, repudiated the SP in favor of the Communist Labor party (and, still later, a united Workers party). The Masses had prided itself on its ecumenical and pluralistic Socialism and, while staunchly leftist, had explicitly avoided hard-and-fast judgments on divisive theoretical and practical issues. World War I, American entry, the Red Scare, the Bolshevik revolution, the U.S. invasion of the Soviet Union, and the murder of Karl Liebknecht by the reformist Socialists in Germany, all convinced Eastman that the middle ground had evaporated in both Europe and the United States. As demands for action proliferated, Eastman applied his general pragmatic philosophy to the urgent problems of the hour. Rather than commenting upon current events from a philosophical and non-sectarian Socialist perspective, therefore, Eastman increasingly focused on ideological battles within and between the disintegrating Socialist and emergent Communist parties. "What Is To Be Done?" attained urgency in revolutionary times.
In elaborating the specific programmatic consequences of his general beliefs, Eastman accentuated certain aspects of his prewar philosophy while subsuming others. Most historians of Eastman and the Lyrical Left, belittling both as incoherent, bourgeois, trivial, and essentially conservative or reformist, have simply ignored The Liberator, whose focused revolutionism directly contravenes their thesis. Eastman's main biographer, denied the luxury of ignoring his subject's trajectory after 1917, acknowledges Eastman's seriousness of purpose and genuine radicalism but incomprehendingly condemns his Bolshevik sympathies, while largely ignoring the continuities between Eastman's Weltanschauung in the periods 1912-1917 and 1918-1924.
Eastman, of course, had long favored the IWW's revolutionary industrial unionism, direct action, and sabotage, even if he had also advocated political action. After the war, he again advocated whatever tactics worked while eschewing dogmatic reliance upon a single method of change. Although strongly supporting the IWW, he criticized leftist intolerance of political action. Insisting that "the industrial parliament is the essential organ of the revolution," Eastman also asserted that the revolutionary vanguard also included "leaders of the left wing of the political parliament," who would continue their "great work... until the political form is sloughed off by the industrial, and the revolution reveals its true nature as a dictatorship of the proletariat." Eastman advised that "the purposeful revolutionary" utilize parliamentary forms when appropriate in his quest for "the realities and not the mere forms of liberty and equality";[330] he criticized only those who confused bourgeois democratic forms with actual freedom and relied exclusively upon electioneering.
Despite his fervent support of Lenin, Eastman maintained his disdain for dogmatism, sectarianism, and theoretical quibbling. "No general program can absolve us from the continual necessity of using our judgment about particular situations.... Action is the dictator. Action and experimental evidence have drawn the new line between those who are Socialists and those who are not." Many "moderates" had displayed sterling internationalism and class consciousness during the war, while some revolutionary theorists had wallowed in patriotic debauchery. However, Eastman significantly added that "after what has happened in Europe, our intolerance can know no bounds" against patriotic and reformist Socialists.[331]
Events in Russia and Germany increasingly convinced Eastman that the soviet--a new, powerful, class-wide social form that supplanted the old political instruments of government--was the proper mechanism of revolutionary transformation. In 1918 he acknowledged that capitalist terrorism had temporarily rendered industrial organization impossible in the United States, but the next year he exulted that in Germany as in Russia "the power is in the workmen's councils. The political government becomes more and more but a figure and a puppet" and "the expression in politics of an economic system whose day is past.... The sovereignity belongs to the working class, the future to them." He admitted that "America is not Russia, to be sure, and we shall have our own problems, but the main outlines of the labor republics of the future are laid down in the Russian constitution, and the 'doctrines of Lenine' are the doctrines of revolutionary Socialism the world over."[332]
Eastman declared that the soviet was inevitable and the "most spontaneous and elastic form of organization." American radicals must stress "agitation and organization of the industrial unions which will constitute the bony structure of the revolutionary society, even though the soviets move it to life." Each revolution would indeed develop its own methods, but American radicals could still endorse "the general programme of soviet formation, when it is already so completely spread over the world in concrete reality," transiently in Butte and Seattle and more permanently in Russia. Agitators should relate their arguments to "the actual interests and prepossessions of the masses they address," Eastman said; "revolutions cannot be made to order." Yet American workers were "far more ready to receive light and guidance from their [Russia's and Hungary's] concrete examples than from the musty piles of abstract pamphlets" usually given them. Workers Councils were "far more closely and directly related to the immediate lives and interests of the working class than an economic philosophy can ever be." Eastman endorsed the Soviet Union's labor qualification for the franchise, saying that even the exotic phrase "dictatorship of proletariat" was more natural to the militant, striking worker than a tepid emphasis on the cooperative commonwealth. "If a class struggle is what he is fighting in, dictatorship of the proletariat is a good name for his victory," he declared.[333]
After the Bolshevik revolution, Eastman supported the emergence of an organized Left Wing within the Socialist party. The formal organization of a Left caucus would destroy the SP only if "the right and center, who control the party machinery," used that machinery "to destroy or expel the left." The dispute within the SP was not mere theoretical hair-splitting, Eastman said, but concerned vital issues of philosophy and strategy. "There is no place for our party in America except in close co-operation with the revolutionary unions, the IWW and the Workmen's Councils, building up the power of the future. The new Labor Party is the right. The Socialist Party must be the left, or it will be nothing at all."[334] When the German Social Democrats murdered their former comrade Karl Liebknect, whom Eastman had recently extolled as advocating soviet revolution rather than parliamentary reform, Eastman thundered that class struggle within the Socialist movement itself now raged worldwide.
And that is why at last, even in the United States, we have a Left Wing, with its own organization, and its own spokesmen, and its own press. We know that the international class struggle is being fought to a finish in Europe, with all the weapons and forces of propaganda that are available on either side. There is no middle ground left. Every thinking man and woman there is either for the revolution or against it. And every one here too. And we are for it, and we cannot tolerate the silence of the official party in this the most critical hour in all the history of the revolutionary hopes of mankind.[335]
Rightist violence and soviet successes had "drawn the line" between the factions in Europe, "and we cannot ignore that line merely because we are far away, unless we renounce our internationalism."[336]
Events in Europe and the United States, therefore, inspired Eastman to endorse the Third International as emodying scientific, experimental, and pragmatic truth. Although subsequent research had so modified Darwin's theory that it constituted "little more now than the wise designation of a field of research," the Communist Manifesto "has survived every test and observation, and 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." Eastman quoted prolifically from the Comintern's manifesto and claimed that war and revolution had "made both liberalism and compromise-socialism impossible. In the countries surrounding Russia at least, the issue is now openly drawn between a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie resting upon blood and iron forever, and the dictatorship of the proletariat which with the final suppression of the bourgeoisie will evolve into a communist civilization."[337]
Eastman defended the Comintern against right-wing Socialists who condemned it as revisionist, dogmatic (and also, ironically, as opportunistic) and dominated by the Soviet Union. Far from departing from orthodox Marxism, the Comintern differed from the Second International only in "its absolute and realistic belief in the theory of the class struggle, and the theory that all public institutions--whether alleged to be democratic or not--will prove upon every critical occasion to be weapons in the hands of the capitalist class." Reformist Socialists, on the contrary, contravened Marx's economic interpretation of history by placing their hopes in bourgeois democratic forms. Communists were not dogmatic in their insistence of the class struggle and the class nature of the state, Eastman said. "There can be no flexibility in the minds of the people actually conducting such a struggle as to the existence of the struggle itself, nor as to the presence of the enemy, and of his weapons and fortifications." But because the revolutionist was engaged in a battle "and not the demonstration of a thesis," he should emulate Lenin and "be an opportunist of the most extreme flexibility, only so your goal is clearly defined and your compromise is for the sake of that goal, and not for the sake of some personal end that leads away from it.... The compromises of practical intelligence, when the will is inflexible, are of the essence of great generalship." The soviet form of organization merely embodied Marx's insights: "the actual experience of a successful revolution has only confirmed the opinions of the revolutionary or thorough-going Marxian factions in all the socialist parties of the world," transforming them from weak, academic factions "into powerful and active majorities everywhere." The Soviet Union did not control the Comintern, Eastman insisted, but simply offered it meeting facilities and the wisdom of successful revolutionaries.[338]
Eastman sardonically commented that, contrary to conservative shibboleths, leftism was eminently practical. The experience of governing had driven the Soviets left rather than right:
Three years of responsibility for the feeding, clothing, governing and defending of a hundred and fifty million people, has made the socialists of Russia so much more extreme than the irresponsible socialists of the rest of the world, that they already stand two splits to the left, and have had to adopt a new name to describe their incorrigibility. There is a lesson in that for those who want to learn it. Socialism is nothing in the world but the practical procedure towards human liberty, and in practicalness one must inevitably become more and more extreme in proportion as he is confronted with actual facts.[339]
Eastman looked to the Comintern for expert, resolute guidance, saing that "Moscow revoltionary engineers" helped revive a moribund IWW and that Comintern pronouncements offered a "theoretical compass" for American Communist agricultural policy. Eastman did not, however, unreservedly endorse the Comintern's every whim, or abdictate his right of independent judgment. Although he accepted without reservation the Comintern's notorious Twenty-One points for affiliation (which dictated every minute detail of strategy, tactics, and mode of organization to its member parties), he admitted that "the fanatical, dogmatizing, religion-making tendency is at work among the revolutionists, as it is everywhere else--the attempt to shift off upon some God or rigid set of ideas the burden and responsibility of the daily exercise of intelligent judgment. Against this tendency all lovers of the fluent truth, and all real lovers of liberty, will struggle to the end of time." Eastman particularly criticized the disingenuous manner in which the Soviet Communist party claimed five Comintern votes for itself, while allowing each other party either one vote or none at all. "This attitude is unwise in exactly the same way as the invasion of Poland was unwise," he said. "It ignores the insurmountable fact that nationalities and nationalist feelings exist. It will be no more possible to unite the revolutionary proletarians of all nations in any international dominated by Russians, as it was for Russians to carry the revolution into Poland." Eastman hoped that the next Comintern congress would create an organization "international as well as revolutionary."[340] Eastman later lamented that other nations contributed little to "the very exact and assured principles of revolutionary procedure that are being laid down from Moscow. Perhaps that will not come until the revolution has won a victory in some other country." However, Western communists might contribute something "lacking in the Russians--even if it is only a greater skill in the important function of doubt." Eastman also complained that the Soviet Union belittled the League of Nations, which he regarded as "an alliance of imperialist powers to prevent war among themselves" and foster "the more tranquil exploitation of the peoples of the earth." Eastman regarded the League as a vitally important development which necessitated a workers International (the Comintern).[341]
Eastman confronted the possibilities of revolution in America while describing the Socialist party split in Chicago in 1919, at which the SP fractured into three tiny parties: an old guard retaining control of the SP name and machinery; a Communist party composed mostly of immigrants from the SP's Slavic Language Federations; and an indigenous Communist Labor party, founded in part by Eastman's close friend, John Reed. "The Chicago Conventions," probably the longest single article that Eastman published in either The Masses or The Liberator, epitomizes the virtues of Eastman's journalism and intellect. A model of eloquence, earnestness, realpolitik, exasperation, and gentle irony, it combines precise detail, cogent analysis, a genuine attempt at fairness, and Eastman's signature skepticism and detachment. Sadly, the events it chronicles also presage the future of the Communist party as one of narrow sectarianism, theological dogmatism, Soviet dominance, arcane factionalism, and sheer irrelevance.
Eastman asserted that the SP had always contained a revolutionary left which favored the IWW, the class struggle, and the Communist Manifesto while distrusting parliamentarism and reformism. These leftists were for the most part "distinctly American" rather than members of the SP's foreign language federations. But the Bolshevik revolution, by "proving the literal truth of almost every word in the Communist Manifesto," had energized the Left. Immigrant members of the Slavic Language Federations, motivated partly by "a genuine emotion not unrelated to patriotism, became "almost unanimously and automatically Bolshevik" even as these federations vastly increased their membership. Their money and votes ensured that the Left Wing, newly organized in a formal caucus with its own publications, had a solid majority in the SP; the forty thousand Slavic Federation members comprised the core of this reconstituted Left. The old guard, outvoted in party elections, maintained control of the SP only by expelling about 60 per cent of the party's membership.[342]
The Slavic Federation leaders repudiated the Left Wing's original idea of capturing the SP. Instead, they called for a separate convention, "partly as a result of their expulsion, partly through a thinly veiled nationalistic egoism, and partly through a sincere if somewhat theological desire to exclude all wavering or 'centrist' elements from the new organization." Slavic Federationists, joined by other expelled SP members, formed the Communist party (CP). Other leftists (mostly native born), demanded seats at the SP's convention; party officials, however, ejected the dissidents by using "the forces of the capitalist state." This resulted in yet another convention and the formation of the Communist Labor party (CLP). Therefore, three conventions met simultaneously in Chicago: one representing the SP's old guard and its rump membership, and two revolutionary parties, divided theoretically on the now-moot issue of working within the SP, and practically upon grounds of ethnic and personal rivalries. Although both dissident groups claimed a majority of the SP membership, Eastman recognized that "the rank and file never had time to consider and act upon the issue between them."[343]
Eastman accepted the SP's undemocratic actions with relative equanimity; necessity knew no law, and steadfast believers in any cause would "transgress the forms of law when they are aroused over a principle." He ruminated that
It is characteristic of old people to attach a great importance to what they have done in the past. And the majority in this convention were old. Even some of the young ones were old. They seemed to think it was personal and impertinent for anyone to be chiefly concerned about what they were doing now, or what they were going to do in the future ... I suppose it will be a rather exasperating thing to say, but I felt sorry for a good many of the delegates. They had served their time, they had borne the heat of battle when some of us were in our cradles, and then to crown it all they had stood up under the bitter test of the St. Louis declaration, going around their home towns for two years, solitary, vilified, whipped with the hatred of their neighbors, beaten and worn down by the universal war-madness of a nation, and not flinching. They could not understand why they should be shoved aside. And I could not either, any more than I can understand death.[344]
While sympathizing with these relics of a dead past, Eastman favored the revolutionary left, whose actions would decide "whether the Socialist theory shall be permitted to recede into the cerebrum, where it becomes a mere matter of creed, ritual, and sabbath-day emotion, as the Christian theory has done, or whether it shall be kept in live and going contact with everyday nerves and muscles of action."[345]
Eastman also attended the Communist party convention as it debated its relations with the rival CLP. He found CP debates "vividly entertaining" and "far more philosophic, more erudite, more at ease in the Marxian dialect, than anything to be heard at either of the other conventions." The CP correctly expelled not only social democrats "who murder the revolution with machine guns," but also centrists "who poison it with passivity and negative thoughts." Lenin himself had condemned the wavering center as representing "economic classes not wholly bourgeois nor yet wholly proletarian" and as "hostile in the period of the actual breakdown of capitalism." Yet Eastman expressed dismay when the CP leaders rejected any conciliation with the CLP and instead demanded total submission by individual CLP members who might consider joining the CP. Eastman condemned the CP's "abstract intellectuality... unrelated to reality or action," its "academic and rather wordy self-importance.... exaggerated almost to the point of burlesque." Eastman lamented that "the heads of the Slavic Socialist Machine are in a mood for the organization of a Russian Bolshevik church, with more interest in expelling heretics than winning converts." They feared potential American members as endangering "the machine's hold upon the dogmas and the collection box."[346]
Eastman claimed that some native-born Americans succumbed to CP blandishments because of
that inward dread of not proving sufficiently revolutionary which hounds us all.... because we are conscious of the continual temptation of respectability and personal prudence, and because we see so many of our fighting Comrades lose their courage and fall by the wayside. It is a wholesome dread. But we ought to be sufficiently sure we are revolutionary, so that we have a good deal of energy left for trying to be intelligent. And it is not intelligent to start the American Communist Party with a mixture of theological zeal, machine politics and nationalistic egoism in control.[347]
Eastman concluded that the Slavs should organize independently and that "the American party should begin elsewhere, more modestly, and more in proportion to the actual state of the revolutionary movement in America." Lenin himself would reject the Slavs "who are trying to bluff us in the name of our internationalism into accepting a nationalistic control of the movement." Eastman hoped that eventually "the rank and file of the revolutionary workers" would demand a unified Left.[348]
Eastman clearly favored the Communist Labor party, the only convention not willed into existence "by the perceptible workings of an established machine." The CLP charged that the CP was authoritarian and dictatorial, would not accept Americans as equals, and could not organize American workers. Nevertheless, Eastman admitted that the CLP contained mere idealists and emotional rebels who lacked a solid grasp of Marxist theory; its debates were "between those who understood and accepted the Moscow manifesto, and wanted to apply it in a concrete and realistic way to American conditions, and those who did not understand or accept it, dreaded its practical application, and wanted to take refuge in more vague and old fashioned socialistic pronouncements." Meeting in the new IWW hall, the CLP debunked the electoral path to power as both impossible and useless under capitalism. Eastman quoted John Reed's "one burst of oratory" in support of that traditional IWW doctrine. He praised the CLP's platform as
upon the whole a vital, simple and realistic application of the theories of Marx, and the policies of Lenin, to present conditions in America. It contrasts with the program of the communist convention in no point of principle, but it applies its principles more specifically to existing conditions. It is written in a more American idiom, it is written in the language of action rather than of historic theory, it is not abstractly didactic in its attitude towards organized labor, but somewhat humbly instructive and promising of concrete help. In these respects it seems to me superior to the program of the Communist Party, although I have not had time to study and compare them at length.[349]
Eastman's descriptions of the three conventions were almost clinical in their exactness. He explained arcane matters of theory, complicated by personal conflicts and ethnic power struggles, to a somewhat bewildered audience. After describing one intricate maneuver Eastman exclaimed "if that makes the reader dizzy, he has the satisfaction of knowing that he would have been a thousand times dizzier if he had actually tried to attend those three conventions." He concluded, with a marked lack of dogmatism, that the events of Chicago had left him hopeful but wary. "Nothing that happened in Chicago was satisfactory," he said. "But the Communist Labor party has a certain atmosphere of reality, a sense of work to be done, a freedom from theological dogma on the one hand and machine politics on the other, which is new in American socialism, and hopeful."[350] Having supported the expulsion of waverers and doubters from any revolutionary party, he himself could not unreservedly choose sides.
Although Eastman supported the Communist Labor party mainly as a political vehicle for protecting non-political, industrial revolution along IWW or soviet lines, he did not in his innermost being accept the full consequences of his stance. He had often praised Eugene Debs, who remained a contributing editor of The Liberator; and in April 1920 he ran a full-page picture of the Socialist leader in his federal penitentiary cell, above the caption "Our Candidate." Apparently realizing that this contravened his own professed emphasis on soviet revolution rather than electoral activity, in the next issue he lamely explained that
last month we expressed our abiding sense of solidarity with the spirit of Eugene Debs by publishing a portrait of him as "Our Candidate." After the magazine was printed Debs became the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party. As our readers are aware, we believe that real understanding of the revolution is to be found rather in the IWW and the other organizations which accept the principles of communism, than in the edifice of the Socialist Party. Eugene Debs is a great deal more to us than our candidate for president.[351]
He regretted that Debs had strayed "from the actual industrial conflict to the lecture platform and the political rostrum exclusively"; he could have guided the railroad workers more effectively had he remained involved in their unions. Agreeing with Zinoviev that revolutionaries could utilize Parliament for their purposes, Eastman added that "apparently it is not now being so exploited in any country east of Italy." He insisted that "for labor to decide to accomplish something by political action is the same thing as for labor to decide not to accomplish it."[352]
The Liberator, therefore, placed its hopes in organized labor (especially the IWW) and in strikes rather than in elections. However, Eastman did not romanticize labor or exaggerate its radicalism. When the railroad brotherhoods demanded that the government assume ownership of the railroads and compensate its former owners with bonds, he declared that "the establishment of a fixed hereditary aristocracy of government bondholders is not actually a revolutionary step, but it brings us to a point from which a revolutionary step appears more simple and its necessity more obviously apparent." Once the government operated the railroads, workers would perceive the bondholders as the idle parasites that they were. Eastman hoped that the demand for government ownership was implicitly proto-revolutionary--"perhaps it is an actual beginning of the dynamics of revolution in America"--because of the brotherhoods' tone of demand rather than supplication.[353]
Eastman similarly rebuked William Z. Foster for claiming that the AFL was revolutionary. Foster opposed the IWW and favored the AFL on the grounds that unions always seize whatever they can from the capitalists; whatever the AFL's protestations and actual beliefs, therefore, the it would abolish capitalism as soon as it had the power. Eastman fairly quoted Foster's (and Karl Radek's) arguments for working within the AFL and commented that "the future contains new judgments as well as new facts.... The decision is for those in practical contact with the facts." He acknowledged that Foster (as Upton Sinclair in his previous tactical dispute with Eastman over SP wartime policy) advocated "what he considers practical generalship in the place of emotional expression--or even intellectual expression of ultimate truths--upon the part of those who are working for the emancipation of labor." Foster's pragmatic strategy of radicalizing the AFL from within was therefore "a practical suggestion as far as it goes." However, his assertion that the AFL was inherently revolutionary was a form of "sophistical word-conjuring" which misrepresented the facts. Revolutionaries had "a clear conception of the overthrow of capitalism and a courageous will to it," both of which the AFL lacked. Foster had "idealized the facts" and romanticized the AFL, and thus advocated a flawed policy.[354]
Because both Communist parties advocated underground, illegal organization at a time of alleged bomb threats against government officials, Eastman also denounced conspiratorial romanticism and revolutionary terrorism. When authorities discovered unexploded bombs addressed to prominent reactionaries, Eastman asserted that the bombs were placed by agents provacateurs. When subsequent bombs actually exploded, Eastman admitted that they may conceivably have been planted by "the more high-strung and childlike" among those seeking vengeance for government terrorism against political prisoners. Many victims of repression, he asserted, were "the finest and best-loved people in their communities." Like Emma Goldman, he warned the authorities that indiscriminate repression would elicit retaliation by dissidents who lacked any legal means of protest. Although Eastman recognized that the capitalist state would inevitably throttle its opponents, he argued that elementary decency on the part of the authorities even amidst their inevitable repressive measures "might defend us against dynamiting in spite of the rigors of the class struggle. So far as I understand human nature, they are the only kind of measures that will."[355] However, Eastman opposed random violence by revolutionists under current conditions whatever the provocation.
Even in the worst days of Czardom the Bolshevik party did not engage in propaganda of the deed. That was the policy of the Social Revolutionaries, who are now opposed to the Bolshevik government and even disposed to employ the same tactics against the too rigorous public order which that government has been compelled to establish. There is no reason to suppose that under the White Terror in America the Bolsheviks will make any departure from the practical tactics of organization and agitation which were so successful in Russia. The capitalist papers may shout "Bolshevism" whenever an explosion occurs, but their shouting only strengthens the always plausible hypothesis that it was for the purpose of the shouting that the explosion occurred.[356]
Eastman disdained "those who will urge the working classes to get out on the barricades and be mowed down by machine guns" before they were properly organized in industrial unions. He ironically insisted that "force and not beauty of any kind is what wins in a fight" and that romantics, including "Communists whose one thought is to rush to American proletariat unto the barricades to be shot" must learn this. Eastman proved prophetic: even nonviolent strikers were shot down with extreme brutality (as Eastman himself repeatedly pointed out). Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer used alleged bomb conspiracies as a pretext for a renewed wave of terrorism and violence against dissidents.[357]
For two years after the SP split, Eastman resolutely defended Bolshevism abroad and Communism at home against the attacks of the right and center Socialists. However, savage U.S. repression, the defeat of the major strikes of 1919, and the publication of Lenin's Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder encouraged Eastman to reiterate his initial criticisms of the incipient Communist movement. In early 1920 Eastman graphically described numerous instances of gruesome violence against dissidents and exclaimed:
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 restrained by any relic or memory of the ideals of freedom which meant so much in the eighteenth century, 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.[358] Most Americans viewed their country as a bastion of liberty; this self-delusion merely fostered "atrocities of repression that any people with a little saving color of shame or self-criticism in their make-up would find impossible. We are not distinguished by freedom, but by the sanctimoniousness with which we institute the grossest forms of tyranny." Major newspapers "make daily incitement to mob violence"; only in the United States did candidates "seek office by boasting of their contempt for the legal and constitutional rights of men."[359] Later that year Eastman decried the conviction of two Communist theoreticians for "no specific act whatsoever, but for the beliefs that are inside their own heads." Eastman denounced the trial as "a scene reproduced from the day of the persecution of witches." Characteristically, however, he criticized the "Left Wing Manifesto" for which the authors were indicted, saying it was "as careless as it was boresome and academic in its phraseology."[360]
Eastman's frustration with idle theorizing, conspiratorial romanticism, and a lack of concrete action boiled over by late 1921, a time when the CP and CLP were grudgingly, and with proddings from Moscow, uniting in a Workers party which remained semi-secret. Eastman exclaimed that "except for the deepening and confirming" of the epochal Socialist split in Chicago,
nothing of appreciable value to the cause of communism has been done by the revolutionists. A good deal has been done to the detriment of the cause. In spite of "increasing misery" that surpasses the demands of any theory, the workers in America seem to be less friendly to communism than they were two years ago.[361]
Eastman asserted that, despite the ringing and univeral pronouncement of the Third International, capitalism was not collapsing in the United States "in the same immediate sense" as in Europe. Although the American political and economic structure was for the moment impregnable, the communists were using tactics appropriate only during a time of imminent revolution. Such antics were ludicrous and counterproductive in the period of "preliminary propaganda" in which revolutionaries now found themselves.
The Communist Parties have been stressing the idea of party discipline to a degree that would seem sensible to a matter-of-fact person only in an army on the eve of battle.... They have formed an elaborate conspiratorial organization excellently adapted to promote treasonable and seditious enterprises, although they have no such enterprises on foot.... Although America is in fact ruthless and savage, untamed either by law or culture.... it is not so much the ruthlessness of the American capitalists, as the romanticism of the American communists, which accounts for their being underground. The majority of their leaders want to be underground. They enjoy disciplining the devotees of a rebellion, but educating the workers for the revolution is a less interesting task, and they are not fulfilling it.[362]
The American proletariat was not revolutionary "even when politically alive and insurgent"; it placed its faith in political democracy and disdained class struggle. The Communists' immediate task was education of the workers, "or at least an appreciable vanguard of them," in the realities of the economic interpretation of history and institutions, the class struggle, and "a faith in the principles of the revolution."[363]
Eastman insisted that American conditions differed from those of Czarist Russia and that conspiratorial romanticism was a dead-end in the United States. The Bolsheviks had not won the Russian revolution alone and unaided; many parties had laid the groundwork for success. Indeed, All parties had been necessarily underground in Czarist Russia, which lacked a bourgeois revolution and a legal opposition. The two American communist parties, "one of them stagnant with complacence over its own theological perfection, and the other not sure enough of itself to act," had in their merger "produced little more than a lively underground debating society." He applied realpolitik to infantile leftists, concluding that "those pure and perfect theologians of Bolshevism, whose only purpose is to establish in this country a secret brotherhood of revolutionary saints, have to be dropped aside with the same resolute practicality with which the sentimental socialists have been dropped."[364]
Eastman soon elaborated upon these views while rebutting a critic who had angrily demanded that he abandon revolutionary politics and focus on writing poetry. Such an "excommunication," Eastman said, was in reality "a testimonial." Affirming that "science, and not theology, is the hope of the working class," Eastman denounced "the rabbinical bigots of esoteric communism who are wrecking the American movement." Although such fundamentalists might accuse him of reformism or apostasy, "I am willing to incur the risk. The distinction between a revolutionist and a yellow socialist" was not "so fragile" that it required denying reality. Although the "Bolshevik priesthood" defended their ludicrous party discipline as "the backbone of their church," Eastman insisted that "my attack is in the spirit of Marxian science and their rejoinder is not. The revolution will not come, or coming, it will not survive, if it depends fundamentally upon discipline. It will not survive if it depends fundamentally upon anything but the physical conditions of production and the hereditary instincts of men."[365]
Eastman asserted that "the peculiar situation" in Russia had confused American Communists. Two astounding Russian developments in particular were inapplicable elsewhere, especially in the United States. The first was the enormous and increasing role "played by the moral will of a few consecrated idealists organized in the communist party"; the second was Lenin's equation of electrification with communism. Eastman said that "Marxian science does not contemplate the salvation of the world by a consecrated brotherhood, and certainly it did not depend for its validity upon the discovery or exploitation of electricity. The significance of both these surprising pieces of news is the same. The conditions of production in Russia are not such as to make a communist economy possible--production is not 'socialized'--and yet the proletariat has captured the power." Its leadership must retain that power "until revolution occurs in a country where production is socialized, or until Russian production can be socialized in a hurry by the accidental help of a plan of electrification." The retention of power upon the basis of revolutionary will and technological progress was "a temporary effort, depending for its success not upon the present instincts of the masses of mankind, but upon the will of a few who understand the future and the past."[366]
Eastman's critic had also asserted that government terrorism, not communist romanticism, had driven the Ameican movement underground. Eastman, however, insisted that the unique ferocity of U.S. repression only accentuated his demand that "revolutionary fighters" not increase their risk "gratuitiously and for no other purpose than emotional expression." Eastman, therefore, claimed that orthodox Marxism and the interests of the revolution mandated his realistic, pragmatic stance. He attacked ultra-leftists and well as rightists for indulging in the very sort of irresponsible and dilettante revolutionism of which he himself was accused by his opponents and by subsequent historians. Asserting his own revolutionary credentials, he said that "I gave all I had to the cause of deepening and confirming" the split between the Left and Right in 1919. He repeated that the conservative Socialists never understood the basis of the split--"the principle that the political state, whether democratic or feudal" was exclusively "a weapon in the hands of the class possessing economic power, a weapon so formidable that an equally formidable weapon must be forged by the class in revolt, a 'soviet' state capable of enforcing its dictatorship." Because they viewed the ideas and program of the Left as mere emotive ranting (as indeed Eastman regarded the Left's contemporary expression) conservatives missed "the absolute divergence of belief and method between them and those who follow the science of revolution."[367] By the time he dpearted for the Soviet Union, Eastman hoped that the unified Workers party had promulgated a realistic program of "organization, propaganda, and action in the current struggle."[368]
In elaborating the specific programmatic consequences of his general beliefs, Eastman accentuated certain aspects of his prewar philosophy while subsuming others. Most historians of Eastman and the Lyrical Left, belittling both as incoherent, bourgeois, trivial, and essentially conservative or reformist, have simply ignored The Liberator, whose focused revolutionism directly contravenes their thesis. Eastman's main biographer, denied the luxury of ignoring his subject's trajectory after 1917, acknowledges Eastman's seriousness of purpose and genuine radicalism but incomprehendingly condemns his Bolshevik sympathies, while largely ignoring the continuities between Eastman's Weltanschauung in the periods 1912-1917 and 1918-1924.
Eastman, of course, had long favored the IWW's revolutionary industrial unionism, direct action, and sabotage, even if he had also advocated political action. After the war, he again advocated whatever tactics worked while eschewing dogmatic reliance upon a single method of change. Although strongly supporting the IWW, he criticized leftist intolerance of political action. Insisting that "the industrial parliament is the essential organ of the revolution," Eastman also asserted that the revolutionary vanguard also included "leaders of the left wing of the political parliament," who would continue their "great work... until the political form is sloughed off by the industrial, and the revolution reveals its true nature as a dictatorship of the proletariat." Eastman advised that "the purposeful revolutionary" utilize parliamentary forms when appropriate in his quest for "the realities and not the mere forms of liberty and equality";[330] he criticized only those who confused bourgeois democratic forms with actual freedom and relied exclusively upon electioneering.
Despite his fervent support of Lenin, Eastman maintained his disdain for dogmatism, sectarianism, and theoretical quibbling. "No general program can absolve us from the continual necessity of using our judgment about particular situations.... Action is the dictator. Action and experimental evidence have drawn the new line between those who are Socialists and those who are not." Many "moderates" had displayed sterling internationalism and class consciousness during the war, while some revolutionary theorists had wallowed in patriotic debauchery. However, Eastman significantly added that "after what has happened in Europe, our intolerance can know no bounds" against patriotic and reformist Socialists.[331]
Events in Russia and Germany increasingly convinced Eastman that the soviet--a new, powerful, class-wide social form that supplanted the old political instruments of government--was the proper mechanism of revolutionary transformation. In 1918 he acknowledged that capitalist terrorism had temporarily rendered industrial organization impossible in the United States, but the next year he exulted that in Germany as in Russia "the power is in the workmen's councils. The political government becomes more and more but a figure and a puppet" and "the expression in politics of an economic system whose day is past.... The sovereignity belongs to the working class, the future to them." He admitted that "America is not Russia, to be sure, and we shall have our own problems, but the main outlines of the labor republics of the future are laid down in the Russian constitution, and the 'doctrines of Lenine' are the doctrines of revolutionary Socialism the world over."[332]
Eastman declared that the soviet was inevitable and the "most spontaneous and elastic form of organization." American radicals must stress "agitation and organization of the industrial unions which will constitute the bony structure of the revolutionary society, even though the soviets move it to life." Each revolution would indeed develop its own methods, but American radicals could still endorse "the general programme of soviet formation, when it is already so completely spread over the world in concrete reality," transiently in Butte and Seattle and more permanently in Russia. Agitators should relate their arguments to "the actual interests and prepossessions of the masses they address," Eastman said; "revolutions cannot be made to order." Yet American workers were "far more ready to receive light and guidance from their [Russia's and Hungary's] concrete examples than from the musty piles of abstract pamphlets" usually given them. Workers Councils were "far more closely and directly related to the immediate lives and interests of the working class than an economic philosophy can ever be." Eastman endorsed the Soviet Union's labor qualification for the franchise, saying that even the exotic phrase "dictatorship of proletariat" was more natural to the militant, striking worker than a tepid emphasis on the cooperative commonwealth. "If a class struggle is what he is fighting in, dictatorship of the proletariat is a good name for his victory," he declared.[333]
After the Bolshevik revolution, Eastman supported the emergence of an organized Left Wing within the Socialist party. The formal organization of a Left caucus would destroy the SP only if "the right and center, who control the party machinery," used that machinery "to destroy or expel the left." The dispute within the SP was not mere theoretical hair-splitting, Eastman said, but concerned vital issues of philosophy and strategy. "There is no place for our party in America except in close co-operation with the revolutionary unions, the IWW and the Workmen's Councils, building up the power of the future. The new Labor Party is the right. The Socialist Party must be the left, or it will be nothing at all."[334] When the German Social Democrats murdered their former comrade Karl Liebknect, whom Eastman had recently extolled as advocating soviet revolution rather than parliamentary reform, Eastman thundered that class struggle within the Socialist movement itself now raged worldwide.
And that is why at last, even in the United States, we have a Left Wing, with its own organization, and its own spokesmen, and its own press. We know that the international class struggle is being fought to a finish in Europe, with all the weapons and forces of propaganda that are available on either side. There is no middle ground left. Every thinking man and woman there is either for the revolution or against it. And every one here too. And we are for it, and we cannot tolerate the silence of the official party in this the most critical hour in all the history of the revolutionary hopes of mankind.[335]
Rightist violence and soviet successes had "drawn the line" between the factions in Europe, "and we cannot ignore that line merely because we are far away, unless we renounce our internationalism."[336]
Events in Europe and the United States, therefore, inspired Eastman to endorse the Third International as emodying scientific, experimental, and pragmatic truth. Although subsequent research had so modified Darwin's theory that it constituted "little more now than the wise designation of a field of research," the Communist Manifesto "has survived every test and observation, and 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." Eastman quoted prolifically from the Comintern's manifesto and claimed that war and revolution had "made both liberalism and compromise-socialism impossible. In the countries surrounding Russia at least, the issue is now openly drawn between a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie resting upon blood and iron forever, and the dictatorship of the proletariat which with the final suppression of the bourgeoisie will evolve into a communist civilization."[337]
Eastman defended the Comintern against right-wing Socialists who condemned it as revisionist, dogmatic (and also, ironically, as opportunistic) and dominated by the Soviet Union. Far from departing from orthodox Marxism, the Comintern differed from the Second International only in "its absolute and realistic belief in the theory of the class struggle, and the theory that all public institutions--whether alleged to be democratic or not--will prove upon every critical occasion to be weapons in the hands of the capitalist class." Reformist Socialists, on the contrary, contravened Marx's economic interpretation of history by placing their hopes in bourgeois democratic forms. Communists were not dogmatic in their insistence of the class struggle and the class nature of the state, Eastman said. "There can be no flexibility in the minds of the people actually conducting such a struggle as to the existence of the struggle itself, nor as to the presence of the enemy, and of his weapons and fortifications." But because the revolutionist was engaged in a battle "and not the demonstration of a thesis," he should emulate Lenin and "be an opportunist of the most extreme flexibility, only so your goal is clearly defined and your compromise is for the sake of that goal, and not for the sake of some personal end that leads away from it.... The compromises of practical intelligence, when the will is inflexible, are of the essence of great generalship." The soviet form of organization merely embodied Marx's insights: "the actual experience of a successful revolution has only confirmed the opinions of the revolutionary or thorough-going Marxian factions in all the socialist parties of the world," transforming them from weak, academic factions "into powerful and active majorities everywhere." The Soviet Union did not control the Comintern, Eastman insisted, but simply offered it meeting facilities and the wisdom of successful revolutionaries.[338]
Eastman sardonically commented that, contrary to conservative shibboleths, leftism was eminently practical. The experience of governing had driven the Soviets left rather than right:
Three years of responsibility for the feeding, clothing, governing and defending of a hundred and fifty million people, has made the socialists of Russia so much more extreme than the irresponsible socialists of the rest of the world, that they already stand two splits to the left, and have had to adopt a new name to describe their incorrigibility. There is a lesson in that for those who want to learn it. Socialism is nothing in the world but the practical procedure towards human liberty, and in practicalness one must inevitably become more and more extreme in proportion as he is confronted with actual facts.[339]
Eastman looked to the Comintern for expert, resolute guidance, saing that "Moscow revoltionary engineers" helped revive a moribund IWW and that Comintern pronouncements offered a "theoretical compass" for American Communist agricultural policy. Eastman did not, however, unreservedly endorse the Comintern's every whim, or abdictate his right of independent judgment. Although he accepted without reservation the Comintern's notorious Twenty-One points for affiliation (which dictated every minute detail of strategy, tactics, and mode of organization to its member parties), he admitted that "the fanatical, dogmatizing, religion-making tendency is at work among the revolutionists, as it is everywhere else--the attempt to shift off upon some God or rigid set of ideas the burden and responsibility of the daily exercise of intelligent judgment. Against this tendency all lovers of the fluent truth, and all real lovers of liberty, will struggle to the end of time." Eastman particularly criticized the disingenuous manner in which the Soviet Communist party claimed five Comintern votes for itself, while allowing each other party either one vote or none at all. "This attitude is unwise in exactly the same way as the invasion of Poland was unwise," he said. "It ignores the insurmountable fact that nationalities and nationalist feelings exist. It will be no more possible to unite the revolutionary proletarians of all nations in any international dominated by Russians, as it was for Russians to carry the revolution into Poland." Eastman hoped that the next Comintern congress would create an organization "international as well as revolutionary."[340] Eastman later lamented that other nations contributed little to "the very exact and assured principles of revolutionary procedure that are being laid down from Moscow. Perhaps that will not come until the revolution has won a victory in some other country." However, Western communists might contribute something "lacking in the Russians--even if it is only a greater skill in the important function of doubt." Eastman also complained that the Soviet Union belittled the League of Nations, which he regarded as "an alliance of imperialist powers to prevent war among themselves" and foster "the more tranquil exploitation of the peoples of the earth." Eastman regarded the League as a vitally important development which necessitated a workers International (the Comintern).[341]
Eastman confronted the possibilities of revolution in America while describing the Socialist party split in Chicago in 1919, at which the SP fractured into three tiny parties: an old guard retaining control of the SP name and machinery; a Communist party composed mostly of immigrants from the SP's Slavic Language Federations; and an indigenous Communist Labor party, founded in part by Eastman's close friend, John Reed. "The Chicago Conventions," probably the longest single article that Eastman published in either The Masses or The Liberator, epitomizes the virtues of Eastman's journalism and intellect. A model of eloquence, earnestness, realpolitik, exasperation, and gentle irony, it combines precise detail, cogent analysis, a genuine attempt at fairness, and Eastman's signature skepticism and detachment. Sadly, the events it chronicles also presage the future of the Communist party as one of narrow sectarianism, theological dogmatism, Soviet dominance, arcane factionalism, and sheer irrelevance.
Eastman asserted that the SP had always contained a revolutionary left which favored the IWW, the class struggle, and the Communist Manifesto while distrusting parliamentarism and reformism. These leftists were for the most part "distinctly American" rather than members of the SP's foreign language federations. But the Bolshevik revolution, by "proving the literal truth of almost every word in the Communist Manifesto," had energized the Left. Immigrant members of the Slavic Language Federations, motivated partly by "a genuine emotion not unrelated to patriotism, became "almost unanimously and automatically Bolshevik" even as these federations vastly increased their membership. Their money and votes ensured that the Left Wing, newly organized in a formal caucus with its own publications, had a solid majority in the SP; the forty thousand Slavic Federation members comprised the core of this reconstituted Left. The old guard, outvoted in party elections, maintained control of the SP only by expelling about 60 per cent of the party's membership.[342]
The Slavic Federation leaders repudiated the Left Wing's original idea of capturing the SP. Instead, they called for a separate convention, "partly as a result of their expulsion, partly through a thinly veiled nationalistic egoism, and partly through a sincere if somewhat theological desire to exclude all wavering or 'centrist' elements from the new organization." Slavic Federationists, joined by other expelled SP members, formed the Communist party (CP). Other leftists (mostly native born), demanded seats at the SP's convention; party officials, however, ejected the dissidents by using "the forces of the capitalist state." This resulted in yet another convention and the formation of the Communist Labor party (CLP). Therefore, three conventions met simultaneously in Chicago: one representing the SP's old guard and its rump membership, and two revolutionary parties, divided theoretically on the now-moot issue of working within the SP, and practically upon grounds of ethnic and personal rivalries. Although both dissident groups claimed a majority of the SP membership, Eastman recognized that "the rank and file never had time to consider and act upon the issue between them."[343]
Eastman accepted the SP's undemocratic actions with relative equanimity; necessity knew no law, and steadfast believers in any cause would "transgress the forms of law when they are aroused over a principle." He ruminated that
It is characteristic of old people to attach a great importance to what they have done in the past. And the majority in this convention were old. Even some of the young ones were old. They seemed to think it was personal and impertinent for anyone to be chiefly concerned about what they were doing now, or what they were going to do in the future ... I suppose it will be a rather exasperating thing to say, but I felt sorry for a good many of the delegates. They had served their time, they had borne the heat of battle when some of us were in our cradles, and then to crown it all they had stood up under the bitter test of the St. Louis declaration, going around their home towns for two years, solitary, vilified, whipped with the hatred of their neighbors, beaten and worn down by the universal war-madness of a nation, and not flinching. They could not understand why they should be shoved aside. And I could not either, any more than I can understand death.[344]
While sympathizing with these relics of a dead past, Eastman favored the revolutionary left, whose actions would decide "whether the Socialist theory shall be permitted to recede into the cerebrum, where it becomes a mere matter of creed, ritual, and sabbath-day emotion, as the Christian theory has done, or whether it shall be kept in live and going contact with everyday nerves and muscles of action."[345]
Eastman also attended the Communist party convention as it debated its relations with the rival CLP. He found CP debates "vividly entertaining" and "far more philosophic, more erudite, more at ease in the Marxian dialect, than anything to be heard at either of the other conventions." The CP correctly expelled not only social democrats "who murder the revolution with machine guns," but also centrists "who poison it with passivity and negative thoughts." Lenin himself had condemned the wavering center as representing "economic classes not wholly bourgeois nor yet wholly proletarian" and as "hostile in the period of the actual breakdown of capitalism." Yet Eastman expressed dismay when the CP leaders rejected any conciliation with the CLP and instead demanded total submission by individual CLP members who might consider joining the CP. Eastman condemned the CP's "abstract intellectuality... unrelated to reality or action," its "academic and rather wordy self-importance.... exaggerated almost to the point of burlesque." Eastman lamented that "the heads of the Slavic Socialist Machine are in a mood for the organization of a Russian Bolshevik church, with more interest in expelling heretics than winning converts." They feared potential American members as endangering "the machine's hold upon the dogmas and the collection box."[346]
Eastman claimed that some native-born Americans succumbed to CP blandishments because of
that inward dread of not proving sufficiently revolutionary which hounds us all.... because we are conscious of the continual temptation of respectability and personal prudence, and because we see so many of our fighting Comrades lose their courage and fall by the wayside. It is a wholesome dread. But we ought to be sufficiently sure we are revolutionary, so that we have a good deal of energy left for trying to be intelligent. And it is not intelligent to start the American Communist Party with a mixture of theological zeal, machine politics and nationalistic egoism in control.[347]
Eastman concluded that the Slavs should organize independently and that "the American party should begin elsewhere, more modestly, and more in proportion to the actual state of the revolutionary movement in America." Lenin himself would reject the Slavs "who are trying to bluff us in the name of our internationalism into accepting a nationalistic control of the movement." Eastman hoped that eventually "the rank and file of the revolutionary workers" would demand a unified Left.[348]
Eastman clearly favored the Communist Labor party, the only convention not willed into existence "by the perceptible workings of an established machine." The CLP charged that the CP was authoritarian and dictatorial, would not accept Americans as equals, and could not organize American workers. Nevertheless, Eastman admitted that the CLP contained mere idealists and emotional rebels who lacked a solid grasp of Marxist theory; its debates were "between those who understood and accepted the Moscow manifesto, and wanted to apply it in a concrete and realistic way to American conditions, and those who did not understand or accept it, dreaded its practical application, and wanted to take refuge in more vague and old fashioned socialistic pronouncements." Meeting in the new IWW hall, the CLP debunked the electoral path to power as both impossible and useless under capitalism. Eastman quoted John Reed's "one burst of oratory" in support of that traditional IWW doctrine. He praised the CLP's platform as
upon the whole a vital, simple and realistic application of the theories of Marx, and the policies of Lenin, to present conditions in America. It contrasts with the program of the communist convention in no point of principle, but it applies its principles more specifically to existing conditions. It is written in a more American idiom, it is written in the language of action rather than of historic theory, it is not abstractly didactic in its attitude towards organized labor, but somewhat humbly instructive and promising of concrete help. In these respects it seems to me superior to the program of the Communist Party, although I have not had time to study and compare them at length.[349]
Eastman's descriptions of the three conventions were almost clinical in their exactness. He explained arcane matters of theory, complicated by personal conflicts and ethnic power struggles, to a somewhat bewildered audience. After describing one intricate maneuver Eastman exclaimed "if that makes the reader dizzy, he has the satisfaction of knowing that he would have been a thousand times dizzier if he had actually tried to attend those three conventions." He concluded, with a marked lack of dogmatism, that the events of Chicago had left him hopeful but wary. "Nothing that happened in Chicago was satisfactory," he said. "But the Communist Labor party has a certain atmosphere of reality, a sense of work to be done, a freedom from theological dogma on the one hand and machine politics on the other, which is new in American socialism, and hopeful."[350] Having supported the expulsion of waverers and doubters from any revolutionary party, he himself could not unreservedly choose sides.
Although Eastman supported the Communist Labor party mainly as a political vehicle for protecting non-political, industrial revolution along IWW or soviet lines, he did not in his innermost being accept the full consequences of his stance. He had often praised Eugene Debs, who remained a contributing editor of The Liberator; and in April 1920 he ran a full-page picture of the Socialist leader in his federal penitentiary cell, above the caption "Our Candidate." Apparently realizing that this contravened his own professed emphasis on soviet revolution rather than electoral activity, in the next issue he lamely explained that
last month we expressed our abiding sense of solidarity with the spirit of Eugene Debs by publishing a portrait of him as "Our Candidate." After the magazine was printed Debs became the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party. As our readers are aware, we believe that real understanding of the revolution is to be found rather in the IWW and the other organizations which accept the principles of communism, than in the edifice of the Socialist Party. Eugene Debs is a great deal more to us than our candidate for president.[351]
He regretted that Debs had strayed "from the actual industrial conflict to the lecture platform and the political rostrum exclusively"; he could have guided the railroad workers more effectively had he remained involved in their unions. Agreeing with Zinoviev that revolutionaries could utilize Parliament for their purposes, Eastman added that "apparently it is not now being so exploited in any country east of Italy." He insisted that "for labor to decide to accomplish something by political action is the same thing as for labor to decide not to accomplish it."[352]
The Liberator, therefore, placed its hopes in organized labor (especially the IWW) and in strikes rather than in elections. However, Eastman did not romanticize labor or exaggerate its radicalism. When the railroad brotherhoods demanded that the government assume ownership of the railroads and compensate its former owners with bonds, he declared that "the establishment of a fixed hereditary aristocracy of government bondholders is not actually a revolutionary step, but it brings us to a point from which a revolutionary step appears more simple and its necessity more obviously apparent." Once the government operated the railroads, workers would perceive the bondholders as the idle parasites that they were. Eastman hoped that the demand for government ownership was implicitly proto-revolutionary--"perhaps it is an actual beginning of the dynamics of revolution in America"--because of the brotherhoods' tone of demand rather than supplication.[353]
Eastman similarly rebuked William Z. Foster for claiming that the AFL was revolutionary. Foster opposed the IWW and favored the AFL on the grounds that unions always seize whatever they can from the capitalists; whatever the AFL's protestations and actual beliefs, therefore, the it would abolish capitalism as soon as it had the power. Eastman fairly quoted Foster's (and Karl Radek's) arguments for working within the AFL and commented that "the future contains new judgments as well as new facts.... The decision is for those in practical contact with the facts." He acknowledged that Foster (as Upton Sinclair in his previous tactical dispute with Eastman over SP wartime policy) advocated "what he considers practical generalship in the place of emotional expression--or even intellectual expression of ultimate truths--upon the part of those who are working for the emancipation of labor." Foster's pragmatic strategy of radicalizing the AFL from within was therefore "a practical suggestion as far as it goes." However, his assertion that the AFL was inherently revolutionary was a form of "sophistical word-conjuring" which misrepresented the facts. Revolutionaries had "a clear conception of the overthrow of capitalism and a courageous will to it," both of which the AFL lacked. Foster had "idealized the facts" and romanticized the AFL, and thus advocated a flawed policy.[354]
Because both Communist parties advocated underground, illegal organization at a time of alleged bomb threats against government officials, Eastman also denounced conspiratorial romanticism and revolutionary terrorism. When authorities discovered unexploded bombs addressed to prominent reactionaries, Eastman asserted that the bombs were placed by agents provacateurs. When subsequent bombs actually exploded, Eastman admitted that they may conceivably have been planted by "the more high-strung and childlike" among those seeking vengeance for government terrorism against political prisoners. Many victims of repression, he asserted, were "the finest and best-loved people in their communities." Like Emma Goldman, he warned the authorities that indiscriminate repression would elicit retaliation by dissidents who lacked any legal means of protest. Although Eastman recognized that the capitalist state would inevitably throttle its opponents, he argued that elementary decency on the part of the authorities even amidst their inevitable repressive measures "might defend us against dynamiting in spite of the rigors of the class struggle. So far as I understand human nature, they are the only kind of measures that will."[355] However, Eastman opposed random violence by revolutionists under current conditions whatever the provocation.
Even in the worst days of Czardom the Bolshevik party did not engage in propaganda of the deed. That was the policy of the Social Revolutionaries, who are now opposed to the Bolshevik government and even disposed to employ the same tactics against the too rigorous public order which that government has been compelled to establish. There is no reason to suppose that under the White Terror in America the Bolsheviks will make any departure from the practical tactics of organization and agitation which were so successful in Russia. The capitalist papers may shout "Bolshevism" whenever an explosion occurs, but their shouting only strengthens the always plausible hypothesis that it was for the purpose of the shouting that the explosion occurred.[356]
Eastman disdained "those who will urge the working classes to get out on the barricades and be mowed down by machine guns" before they were properly organized in industrial unions. He ironically insisted that "force and not beauty of any kind is what wins in a fight" and that romantics, including "Communists whose one thought is to rush to American proletariat unto the barricades to be shot" must learn this. Eastman proved prophetic: even nonviolent strikers were shot down with extreme brutality (as Eastman himself repeatedly pointed out). Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer used alleged bomb conspiracies as a pretext for a renewed wave of terrorism and violence against dissidents.[357]
For two years after the SP split, Eastman resolutely defended Bolshevism abroad and Communism at home against the attacks of the right and center Socialists. However, savage U.S. repression, the defeat of the major strikes of 1919, and the publication of Lenin's Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder encouraged Eastman to reiterate his initial criticisms of the incipient Communist movement. In early 1920 Eastman graphically described numerous instances of gruesome violence against dissidents and exclaimed:
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 restrained by any relic or memory of the ideals of freedom which meant so much in the eighteenth century, 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.[358] Most Americans viewed their country as a bastion of liberty; this self-delusion merely fostered "atrocities of repression that any people with a little saving color of shame or self-criticism in their make-up would find impossible. We are not distinguished by freedom, but by the sanctimoniousness with which we institute the grossest forms of tyranny." Major newspapers "make daily incitement to mob violence"; only in the United States did candidates "seek office by boasting of their contempt for the legal and constitutional rights of men."[359] Later that year Eastman decried the conviction of two Communist theoreticians for "no specific act whatsoever, but for the beliefs that are inside their own heads." Eastman denounced the trial as "a scene reproduced from the day of the persecution of witches." Characteristically, however, he criticized the "Left Wing Manifesto" for which the authors were indicted, saying it was "as careless as it was boresome and academic in its phraseology."[360]
Eastman's frustration with idle theorizing, conspiratorial romanticism, and a lack of concrete action boiled over by late 1921, a time when the CP and CLP were grudgingly, and with proddings from Moscow, uniting in a Workers party which remained semi-secret. Eastman exclaimed that "except for the deepening and confirming" of the epochal Socialist split in Chicago,
nothing of appreciable value to the cause of communism has been done by the revolutionists. A good deal has been done to the detriment of the cause. In spite of "increasing misery" that surpasses the demands of any theory, the workers in America seem to be less friendly to communism than they were two years ago.[361]
Eastman asserted that, despite the ringing and univeral pronouncement of the Third International, capitalism was not collapsing in the United States "in the same immediate sense" as in Europe. Although the American political and economic structure was for the moment impregnable, the communists were using tactics appropriate only during a time of imminent revolution. Such antics were ludicrous and counterproductive in the period of "preliminary propaganda" in which revolutionaries now found themselves.
The Communist Parties have been stressing the idea of party discipline to a degree that would seem sensible to a matter-of-fact person only in an army on the eve of battle.... They have formed an elaborate conspiratorial organization excellently adapted to promote treasonable and seditious enterprises, although they have no such enterprises on foot.... Although America is in fact ruthless and savage, untamed either by law or culture.... it is not so much the ruthlessness of the American capitalists, as the romanticism of the American communists, which accounts for their being underground. The majority of their leaders want to be underground. They enjoy disciplining the devotees of a rebellion, but educating the workers for the revolution is a less interesting task, and they are not fulfilling it.[362]
The American proletariat was not revolutionary "even when politically alive and insurgent"; it placed its faith in political democracy and disdained class struggle. The Communists' immediate task was education of the workers, "or at least an appreciable vanguard of them," in the realities of the economic interpretation of history and institutions, the class struggle, and "a faith in the principles of the revolution."[363]
Eastman insisted that American conditions differed from those of Czarist Russia and that conspiratorial romanticism was a dead-end in the United States. The Bolsheviks had not won the Russian revolution alone and unaided; many parties had laid the groundwork for success. Indeed, All parties had been necessarily underground in Czarist Russia, which lacked a bourgeois revolution and a legal opposition. The two American communist parties, "one of them stagnant with complacence over its own theological perfection, and the other not sure enough of itself to act," had in their merger "produced little more than a lively underground debating society." He applied realpolitik to infantile leftists, concluding that "those pure and perfect theologians of Bolshevism, whose only purpose is to establish in this country a secret brotherhood of revolutionary saints, have to be dropped aside with the same resolute practicality with which the sentimental socialists have been dropped."[364]
Eastman soon elaborated upon these views while rebutting a critic who had angrily demanded that he abandon revolutionary politics and focus on writing poetry. Such an "excommunication," Eastman said, was in reality "a testimonial." Affirming that "science, and not theology, is the hope of the working class," Eastman denounced "the rabbinical bigots of esoteric communism who are wrecking the American movement." Although such fundamentalists might accuse him of reformism or apostasy, "I am willing to incur the risk. The distinction between a revolutionist and a yellow socialist" was not "so fragile" that it required denying reality. Although the "Bolshevik priesthood" defended their ludicrous party discipline as "the backbone of their church," Eastman insisted that "my attack is in the spirit of Marxian science and their rejoinder is not. The revolution will not come, or coming, it will not survive, if it depends fundamentally upon discipline. It will not survive if it depends fundamentally upon anything but the physical conditions of production and the hereditary instincts of men."[365]
Eastman asserted that "the peculiar situation" in Russia had confused American Communists. Two astounding Russian developments in particular were inapplicable elsewhere, especially in the United States. The first was the enormous and increasing role "played by the moral will of a few consecrated idealists organized in the communist party"; the second was Lenin's equation of electrification with communism. Eastman said that "Marxian science does not contemplate the salvation of the world by a consecrated brotherhood, and certainly it did not depend for its validity upon the discovery or exploitation of electricity. The significance of both these surprising pieces of news is the same. The conditions of production in Russia are not such as to make a communist economy possible--production is not 'socialized'--and yet the proletariat has captured the power." Its leadership must retain that power "until revolution occurs in a country where production is socialized, or until Russian production can be socialized in a hurry by the accidental help of a plan of electrification." The retention of power upon the basis of revolutionary will and technological progress was "a temporary effort, depending for its success not upon the present instincts of the masses of mankind, but upon the will of a few who understand the future and the past."[366]
Eastman's critic had also asserted that government terrorism, not communist romanticism, had driven the Ameican movement underground. Eastman, however, insisted that the unique ferocity of U.S. repression only accentuated his demand that "revolutionary fighters" not increase their risk "gratuitiously and for no other purpose than emotional expression." Eastman, therefore, claimed that orthodox Marxism and the interests of the revolution mandated his realistic, pragmatic stance. He attacked ultra-leftists and well as rightists for indulging in the very sort of irresponsible and dilettante revolutionism of which he himself was accused by his opponents and by subsequent historians. Asserting his own revolutionary credentials, he said that "I gave all I had to the cause of deepening and confirming" the split between the Left and Right in 1919. He repeated that the conservative Socialists never understood the basis of the split--"the principle that the political state, whether democratic or feudal" was exclusively "a weapon in the hands of the class possessing economic power, a weapon so formidable that an equally formidable weapon must be forged by the class in revolt, a 'soviet' state capable of enforcing its dictatorship." Because they viewed the ideas and program of the Left as mere emotive ranting (as indeed Eastman regarded the Left's contemporary expression) conservatives missed "the absolute divergence of belief and method between them and those who follow the science of revolution."[367] By the time he dpearted for the Soviet Union, Eastman hoped that the unified Workers party had promulgated a realistic program of "organization, propaganda, and action in the current struggle."[368]