CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Eastman fomented revolution in the sphere of cultural values as well as in economics and politics. He pursued a nuanced strategy on the cultural front. Just as he favored both the IWW's form of radical economic action and the Socialist party's more conventional electoral activities, so he utilized, contested and repudiated traditional cultural symbols. He demanded that the ruling class live up to its professed values even while rejecting those values themselves.
In late 1912 two incidents gave Eastman the opportunity to assay the possible uses of traditional culture. To his delight, a minister was imprisoned for reading the Bible while a Socialist mayor was jailed for reading the Constitution. "We have always contended that there are good things in both these documents" Eastman gloated, "and it is a pleasure to see them taken so seriously." Their meaning depended upon the context in which they were read--the time, place, and audience. The minister read the gospel not in church, where the audience was sitting down and lacked "the slightest intention of doing anything," but before an assemblage of striking workers, where it could generate action. "His immediate arrest and imprisonment... was a kind of corroboration of the Bible, and made us feel that this document could be used for the encouragement of active virtue on weekdays, as well as for the comforting of sinners on Sunday, if only it were brought out into the places where activity, and therefore virtue, is possible."[133]
Mayor Lunn of Schenectady was arrested while reading the Bill of Rights to "a congregation of people without property. Now, the Bill of Rights--however much real democratic idealism might have gone into its composition--was launched by the power of property, and was consecrated to the protection of property owners against an aristocracy. And when it is applied to the protection of workers against property owners it becomes a new document, and will have to be fought for and established all over again in a new struggle if it is to prevail."[134] If the established authorities routinely violated both the Constitution and statutory law, they nonetheless upheld their spirit. Law signified and bolstered the power of the owners of property; it did not protect workers, who must appropriate it for their own ends.
Eastman's commentary on these incidents perfectly illuminates one aspect of his cultural stance. He recognized that the constitution and organized religion often served as conscious instruments of class exploitation. Yet he realized that much genuine idealism underlay them, and he appealed to the professed values of their upholders as a means for winning justice and freedom for the working class. He castigated the hypocrisy of the religious establishment even as he extolled Christ as an agitator, mystic, and anarchist. "The Church is Judas" that betrayed Christ for silver. "The Christian church has been, and is, the betrayer of Christ.... The only things of his day that roused Jesus to invective are the things this church perpetrates in his name--bigotry, self-righteousness, and the hypocrisy of those who mumble words of virtue in complacency but do nothing." Christian churches countenanced child labor because half of the workers could not feed their children by their own labors. "And if the children quit work, either they will die of starvation, and the plutocracy will go to smash for lack of new labor, or the plutocracy will have to pay decent wages to their parents." So the church inculcated the honorableness of toil, submission to one's master, and reward in the future life.[135]
Eastman proclaimed that "there is a big spiritual force under the roof of the church, and as the power of the church declines we want to bring as much of that force our way as we can. We want to save up all the virtue that is being wasted in trying not to swear, and swing it into the channel of true revolutionary effort." The "true religion" was "the religion of science"; Eastman hoped that Christianity would dissolve and be replaced by "a more sincere, and more free, and more humane, and more scientific idealism." A revolutionary with such hopes might conciliate the faithful even as he tried to win them for a larger and truer cause. Eastman, therefore, also said that "we believe in Jesus. We believe that he lived and died laboring and fighting in a noble atmosphere of disreputability for the welfare and liberty of man... We are indignant not only because the Church is reactionary, but because the Church betrayed Jesus. The Church took Christ's name and then sold out to the ruling class. The Church is Judas." Eastman claimed that he attacked not Christ but his betrayers. He recognized that some clergy genuinely sided with the poor and the working class, but predicted that this would become much more difficult as class lines hardened.[136]
The Masses was much criticized for its satires of tradition religion, in particular "The Masses Bible Class" and C.E.S. Wood's "Heavenly Discourses," two regular serials. "A Ballad" spoke highly of Joseph and tenderly of Mary, but suggested that Joseph married Mary to give a name to a child not his own; it resulted in the banning of The Masses from the subway newsstands of New York. Such material alienated religious leftists and others who objected to the gratuitious offending of the faithful. Christian Socialist Vida Scudder was one such critic. Attacks on religion would "cheapen yourselves and limit your appeal," she warned Eastman. Many Christians derived "authentic inspiration from sources closed to you. And don't sneer at their sanctities--it isn't worth your while."[137]
Eastman extolled the Discourses as written by "a spiritual follower of Jesus" and proclaimed that he would print Wood's contributions "even if the whole subscription list resigned."[138] Defending "A Ballad," he boldly challenged his critics: "You exhort me to have reverence for a false idea. I exhort you to revere the reality of life." Eastman accused the poem's critics of hating it not because they revered the story of the virgin birth but because they did not revere nature. "To you there is something unholy in the bodily union of Earth's lovers, in the tragedies of passion's way with us. To you there is something unholy in reality, and you have fled away from that to take refuge in your sacred myth." Your souls "are irreverent towards what is of the highest import in the actual conduct of life. Ours are healthy and reverent.... The religion of reality and its possibilities--that is what separates us--not the religion of Christ." Eastman also suspected the professed altruism of he who protested not on his own behalf but because others were offended, charging that such a critic had "renounced with his intellect the old miracle gods, without affirming in his heart the new natural gods of today.... He is afraid that reality will offend a false ideal.... You are irreligious in the worst sense, the sense of not heartily committing your souls to anything whatever.... The world will never get its rebirth from you."[139]
Eastman also attacked respectability, gentility, and sexual prudery and decorum--the entire way of life professed by the elite classes and admired by many workers--as "a refined insulation from real contacts with the matter of life." Contrary to his assertion that life "burns in both camps," he asserted that the elites "wrap themselves in fabrics and fine manners. They encase themselves in forms. They touch nothing to the quick" and "dwell in their mansions of great aspect as in the tomb, forbidden by their ideal the realization of the tragedy of their own deadness." The outbreak of World War I revealed "the bloody fundamentals" of Western culture; beneath the shibboleths of love and justice lay "a class-owned humanity preoccupied with commercial rivalry and the exploitation of labor.... There is no Christianity, no culture, no civilization. Our whole upper-class polity and pretense of spirituality is built of a leisure that is the loot of predatory exploitation and the perpetual exploitation and death of the poor."[140]
As usual, such general if incendiary denunciations caused Eastman less trouble than specific items which traduced traditional sexual morality. The Masses carefully avoided obscenity, but offended puritanical revolutionaries by its espousal of free love, birth control, and sexual self-expression in literature. It carried numerous advertisements for scientific books about human sexuality and nonchalantly reviewed contemporary novels that shocked Victorian sensibilities. Anthony Comstack's successor as chief censor of the United States confiscated the September 1916 issue because it contained an advertisement for Forel's The Sexual Question, which allegedly advocated sodomy. (Eastman denied the charge). No less a personage than George Bernard Shaw accused Eastman of publishing "vulgar and ignorant stuff because it was blasphemous, and coarse and carnal work because it was scandalous." Such frivolity, Shaw charged, would aid hypocrites and prudes. Eastman denied publishing anything vulgar and told Shaw that "we are perfectly naive in our sophistication. We live in a world of the kind we believe in, and publish what we find excellent to our own taste and moral judgment with a really pastoral unconcern about the opinionated public.... You ought to try to be a little more carnal."[141]
Eastman's countercultural revolutionism was perhaps most explicit in his espousal of a radical and uncompromising feminism. Eastman demanded total liberation for women in every sphere of life. Although he advocated specific reforms such as government support for mothers, suffrage, birth control, and women's full economic equality and independence, he regarded such measures only as means towards the full personhood of all women. He extolled radical feminists who lived the revolution, whose lives embodied the fully emancipated female.
"Sex equality," Eastman insisted, "is a question by itself.... Socialism does not include it.... The question of sex equality, the economic, social, political independence of woman stands by itself, parallel and equal in importance to any other question of the day. The awakening and liberation of woman is a revolution in the very process of life. It is not an event in any class or an issue between classes. It is not an event in history. It is an event in biology" that would transform the very composition of the race. "Sex selection and the survival of the fittest are held mainly responsible for the course of evolution. Sex selection means the choice--especially by the female--of superior mates." But depriving women of real choice by making them economically dependent on males thwarted this wholesome evolutionary imperative. "The lifting and conserving power of woman's choice is lost, because her choice is not free.... Since women are industrially unfit during the season of motherhood, an award of money for motherhood itself is essential for their complete independence. This award should come from society as a whole" as payment for an essential social service rather than as charity.[142]
Contradicting Marxist orthodoxy, Eastman proclaimed that "the liberation of the genius and energies and beauties of women" was "the greatest change that will come to the world in our day." Women's liberation would change "the very kind of descendants we generate" in addition to transforming culture. "So long as the social ideal was a repressed and petty-minded woman, that type of woman was selected to become the mother of the majorities of posterity, and by an inexorable law she handed on, to sons and daughters alike, the limitations of her nature. But as we learn to love the ideal of the woman who is great, we tend to make her the mother of the majorities of posterity, and thus the very quality of the human stock is enhanced."[143]
Eastman castigated the Socialist party for downplaying women's suffrage. Socialists had behaved "like every other group of sexually selfish men." Indeed, they endorsed suffrage only because Marx and Engels had favored it and because they would soon need women's votes. Eastman particularly criticized the SP's refusal to support bourgeois suffragists--a policy borrowed from the Second International's Stuttgart declaration. Eastman declared this policy "in flat contradiction of the established policy of the International upon all other matters, which is to join with the bourgeoisie in their fight for a universal franchise wherever the political revolution is not completely accomplished." In other words, Socialists supported women's suffrage not as they did men's, "but passively and tamely, because it had been written into their platform by greater men than they."[144]
Eastman did not expect great practical and political results from women's suffrage. Women, he believed, were simply persons like men rather than the transforming angels of suffragist propaganda. Moreover, Eastman discounted the power of a ballot unbacked by economic power at the point of production. He favored women's suffrage because it would educate, liberate, and elevate women. "Universal citizenship has meant in human history universal education... By giving to women a higher place in our social esteem, it will promote the universal development." Our entire personalities are shaped by "the natural expectations of those around us. If society expects a girl to become a fully devleoped, active and intelligent individual, she will probably do it. If society expects her to remain a doll-baby all her life, she will make a noble effort to do that." Full citizenship for women would transform them from "mere drudges or parlor ornaments. They will no longer try to satisfy their ambitions by seeing who can parade the most extreme buffooneries of contemporary fashion on the public highway. They will grow up to be interested and living individuals, and satisfy their ambitions only with the highest prizes of adventure and achievement that life offers."[145]
Although many suffragists argued that enfranchisement for women would benefit children because women voters would purify the milk supply and otherwise safeguard children, Eastman asserted that suffrage and full citizenship for women would create new and better mothers. "Only a developed and fully constituted individual is fit to be the mother of a child," he said. "Only one who has herself made the most of the present, is fit to hold in her arms the hope of the future..... I do not want women to have, for the sake of their children, the control of the milk-supply and the food laws, half so much as I want them to have, for the sake of their children, all the knowledge-by-experience that they can possibly get. That is the vital connection between child welfare and woman suffrage--that is the deeper ideal. No woman is fit to bring children into the world until she knows to the full the rough and actual character of the world into which she is bringing them." Political reforms would accomplish little, but educating women in equality would transform the world. "The babies of this world suffer a good deal more from silly mothers than they do from sour milk. And any change in political forms, however superficial from the standpoint of economic justice, that will increase the breath of experience, the sagacity, the humor, the energetic and active life-interest of mothers, can only be regarded as a profound historic revolution."[146]
Eastman also vigorously supported birth control and the public violation of the laws that criminalized it. The Masses praised Emma Goldman, Jessie Ashley, Ida Rauh, and Margaret Sanger for openly flouting the law. Such rebels would repeal the law by their open defiance. "There is no more important stand, and no stand that requires more bravery and purity of heart, then the one [Sanger] is making," Eastman said.[147] Foreshadowing the abortion "speak outs" of the 1970s, he urged that physicians who had prescribed birth control (and, implicitly, women who had used it) publicly announce that fact, thus both legitimizing birth control and undermining the laws that prohibited its discussion. He realized that this might trample on the delicacy and violate the privacy of those who testified, but asserted that the benefits justified the costs. He asked, "Shall we let those little resistances which we feel against public acknowledgement of a private truth, a truth as vital as birth itself, silence us in this critical fight for humanity?" Eastman vowed that The Masses would "advertise and fight" for birth control "so far as we can without forfeiting our mailing privileges."[148]
Eastman's advocacy of birth control evoked some opposition on the left. Some revolutionaries opposed agitation for birth control, claiming that it was insufficiently revolutionary or "a palliative, a method of promoting contentment in poverty." A Socialist society, these radicals asserted, would enable workers to have all the children they wanted. Eastman, however, pointed out that voluntary childbirth required that workers, and not just the rich, have access to birth control information. The idea that bearing children should be "a deliberate and therefore responsible act" was wisdom, "the direction of instinctive activities by intelligence," and therefore virtue. Those who opposed birth control on moral or religious grounds were "more like salmon than saints. For indiscriminate propagation against an enormous death rate is the regular method of survival for those lower forms of life."[149]
Revolutionaries who belittled birth control agitation had some point, Eastman conceded. "In a society which stands in such need of social revolution as ours, it is difficult to promote with much passion knowledge which has no bearing on that need," he said. Mainstream publications were now widely discussing the issue and "probably making a great many more converts to it than we did. The propaganda is fairly launched in the American press, and we are satisfied. We can now lay the general question aside" and discuss birth control's "revolutionary significance." Eastman claimed that limiting the supply of workers would raise wages; furthermore, "an unskilled worker is never free, but an unskilled worker with a large family of half-starving children cannot even fight for freedom. That for us is the connection between birth control and the working-class struggle."[150] However, The Masses continued to cover the radical birth control movement, which it regarded as in itself a clarion call for human liberty.
Indeed, the contrast between dancer Isadore Duncan's and birth control crusader Margaret Sanger's visions of lived feminism provided the occasion for one of Eastman's major pronouncements on the means and ends of social revolution and on the role that The Masses and its editors could play in it. Duncan had "risen to create, in her language of motion, a poem of the children of the future--children of a time when life shall be both frank and free, and proceed under the sky with the happy fearlessness of faith in the beauty of its real nature. So at least I perceived the dancing of those girls, free-clad and strong of limb." Eastman somewhat wistfully declared that those who expended their youths fighting capitalism and superstition envisoned a world such as Duncan's dancers embodied. "It is a happier task to draw costly patterns in the air of what the world shall yet become, than to stay at the soiled and disreputable business of dragging it along," he said. "Yet both these tasks are necessary, and I only wish the visible joy of the one might mingle a little oftener with the dark labor of the other."[151]
Margaret Sanger had performed a more heroic, if less beautiful and less intrinsically satisfying, labor. She recognized "that second if not almost first, of the steps toward perfecting life" was ensuring "that no unwanted and insupportable life is born on the earth. The birth of a child should be the deliberate and chosen act of its parents." The prosperous classes practiced birth control (receiving illegal information from their private physicians), but when workers demanded such information the government in all its majesty throttled them. A federal court had recently vindicated an author's right to "discuss vital truths of the body for purposes of art"; birth control advocates now demanded the same freedom for the purposes of morality.[152]
Sanger's task was the more difficult, Eastman averred, "because morality is not so much fun as art"; her birth control pamphlet, unlike great novels or poetry, was not a pleasure to read except "for those who need to know. But it is a thousand times more important to all. For the whole world is gravid and sick with untimely children." Eastman positied many possible sources of the opposition to birth control: the need of capitalists for workers and of the state for soldiers; male fear "that women may become in reality free and independent individuals"; residual superstition and a "morbid fear of truth in those who lack the character to live in its presence." However, one thing was certain: "We need not sing the songs nor dance the dances of a future race of children--frank and free and healthy growing in their bodies and their souls--unless we are willing earnestly and openly to consider, and know, and make known to all, the wise control of the physical processes by which those children shall be brought into the world."[153] The success of Sanger's hard, disagreeable, and disreputable crusade, therefore, was a prerequisite for a world in which all children, and all women and men, could achieve the lyrical life of joy and freedom epitomized by Duncan's dance trope. Eastman hoped that his life and his publication could somehow combine the ineffable expression of beauty symbolized by Duncan with the tenacious fight for social justice and freedom epitomized by Sanger.
The death of feminist Inez Milholland evoked a sad yet sweet melancholy in Eastman as he reflected upon the contrast between her effervescent living-the-revolution career and his own mostly literary advocacy. His ruminations resembled Emma Goldman's denunciations of those who preached revolution but practiced conventional pieties. Eastman's Milholland savored love, social esteem, and happiness, but valued truth above all; and she never bought happiness by obscuring any truth, no matter how discomforting.
There was something almost superhuman in the way this young and beautiful girl passed among all the classes and kinds of people, sowing and reaping the joys of life, and yet never losing her self, never shaping or coloring her true nature and her true purpose and belief for the sake of a smooth half hour with anybody. Truth burned in her like a flame, and sentimental or hypocritical people were scorched by it. She made them uncomfortable. She was not afraid to make them uncomfortable. She was brave enough to be true.... It goes without saying that she believed with consecration in all the things we are doing to make men free and to make women free; but if everyone of us who believe were possessed of that drastic courage she had to make our belief known and felt in our words and acts always, how much more quickly would we win the world. We pretend that we are trying to win people by our pale casuistries and dilute forms of conduct, but what we are really doing is making the job a little softer for ourselves. We are trying to have a good time as we go along, which is all right. But what Inez Milholland's life proved is that it is possible to have a glorious good time, and yet stand like iron for the knowledge of truth and liberty of man on every occasion.[154] Revolutionists who lived their values would transform humanity "by showing to the world in fearless outlines of race that cannot be ignored the new ideal." Milholland exemplified "in her flashing and heroic beauty of color and gesture this new ideal that is bringing to the world an enhancement of life more deep and sure than any that was ever written upon a page of history."[155]
When Eastman penned these lines, he was quite possibly suffering from doubts about the value of his own more literary and less activist revolutionism. Only a few months earlier he had, after criticizing the intellectual and bourgeois reformers on The New Republic, ended by saying that "in one respect we are all alike. We none of us do anything. So what is the use of pretending that we do? We talk or write about what ought to be done, and then, as Walter Lippmann says of 'some of the writers in THE MASSES,' we go home to dinner. It may look more like doing something to write reformer's opinions than to write revolutionary opinions, but it really isn't. It is just as easy. The difficult thing is to do anything, and none of us has tried that." Earlier that year he had praised a novel by Socialist Anna Walling by saying that "both her and her heroine seem so foreign to me, having that intensity of sustained fervor of life in reality, that seems only for Russians and Jews. They burn with hot fire. Their being is self-justified. They live and are sources of life... As for me, I loaf, and smoulder, and dodge life, and tinker with trivialities, until at least some momentary conflux of stimulus and impulse creates me, and I do enter into those ecstasies and agonies that flesh was never made for, and lie limp and melancholy very soon after. I think that I like to praise her book, because I want to assert that although I cannot be these things, I can at least have them."[156]
Eastman's cultural radicalism also starkly appeared in his views on patriotism, which he regarded as "the most banal of stupid human idol-worships."[157] The Masses ran articles praising patriotism, articles damning it, and essays exploring its possible uses in the working-class struggle. Eastman himself, despite his professed tactic of winning people by appealing to their cherished values and his conviction that neither interest, nor morality, nor knowledge could undermine patriotism, denounced it with increasing vigor as World War I progressed. "The Religion of Patriotism," published after the United States entered the war, was his most vehement denunciation of patriotism and his most comprehensive effort to understand the forces behind it. Patriotism, Eastman asserted, offered an Absolute to replace God and a sense of the miraculous; it combined satisfaction of so many of our instincts that no one motive could break its hold.
Patriotism indulges that craving for a sense of union with a solidary herd, which is in inheritance of all gregarious animals. It is a craving which our modern sophisticated, citified, and diverse civilization leaves unfed in normal times.... Men are willing to be dead, if they can only be dead in a pile.... The moment we declare for the herd, and let loose our enthusiasm into that vent, a half dozen other starved monsters of passionate desire that our lawful and cultivated life has caged and thwarted, rush to this outlet and find satisfaction.
One of them is angry hate. Men are full of it, and they get small chance to exercise it in these days of legality and respectable convention. The war liberates them.... Another and even more bursting reservoir that ordinary moral conduct never half relieves, is rivalrous egoism. Society suppresses the braggart.... In consequence every individual is full as a bladder with inexpressible self-esteem. And by a quickly articulated emotional device, this passion too is sluiced into the channel of patriotism. A man identifies himself with his country, and then he brags about his country to his heart's desire, and nobody observes that he is bragging about himself.[158]
Patriotism, Eastman argued, met other needs as well. It compensated for personal inadequacy and provided a refuge from the care of thinking and acting for ourselves. Socialism served many of these same functions, "but it is not a religion that binds or blesses the rich and powerful, and so it could hardly become established in a country like ours.... We needed something that would give us the same emotional crystalization without greatly disturbing the profits on capital.... Other religions always seemed to require courage, or faith, or loneliness, or energy-of-intent; this requires only the most social and joyful abandonment of intelligent judgment and moral restraint. It is the easiest religion under the sun to feel and feel deeply, for it gives the highest quantity of satisfactions, requires no imaginative faith, and demands at the most that physical crowd-courage which is a common heritage of our race."[159] Despite his own conviction that "the antipatriots are nursing a dream" and that the patriotic tide was irresistible once war erupted, Eastman risked The Masses and his life in antiwar agitation. In repudiating patriotism--as in scorning white racism and male chauvinism, and critiquing religion and United States national traditions--Eastman demanded that Americans abandon the traditional sources of their personal identities and reforge their intimate selves along other lines.
Eastman has been accused, by critics in his own time and later, of diluting the class struggle by engrafting alien issues onto it. But Eastman, along with other cultural radicals in the IWW, could argue that cultural revolution was a necessary prerequisite to class-conscious social revolution. Socialism required that each worker see himself or herself not as an American, or Catholic, or white, or ethnic, or man or woman but primarily as a worker and simultaneously as "an individual in the universe".[160] Workers must eschew old solidarities and collective identities based on birth and tradition for a new group identity based on class; they must also repudiate an old individualism based on competition for money, power, and status, substituting an expanded sense of individual personality capable of reason, of love, of creative work--of poetry, science, and genuinely equal relationships.
Cultural revolution undeniably clashed with workers' sensibilities and values at almost every point--with patriotism, religious affiliation, ethnic loyalties, cultural and sexual conservatism, white supremacy, male chauvinism, and female decorum. (That many of these traditional values contradict one another--that primary identification as an American is incompatible with ethnic, racial, religious hatreds and gendered hierarchies--is but another indication of their inadequacy; they are absurdly incompatible as well as individually pernicious.) But Eastman regarded cultural revolution as an essential component of class struggle, not a distraction from it. Workers could not identify themselves primarily as members of a class until they had abandoned more particularistic forms of self-identity.
Eastman could also argue that cultural revolution no more alienated and threatened the workers than did the concepts of class, class struggle, and Socialism. Those who accuse cultural radicals of stressing extraneous issues implicitly assume the existence of a natural, innate class consciousness awaiting awakening by agitators. But no working class is inherently anything; all values are cultural values, learned and transmitted by people and institutions. The American working class, in particular, rejected socialism as vehemently and murderously as it did free love, birth control, internationalism, feminism, and racial egalitarianism. Until workers overcame their archaic forms of self-identity, Eastman presciently believed, class struggle would be difficult if not impossible.
Cultural revolution, in other words, was an essential part of the class struggle and must precede and accompany, as well as result from, social revolution. Eastman marvelled at the seeming transformation of human nature instantly effected by the patriotic frenzy unleashed by war. War patriotism "can stampede the energies of man, and hold them at a higher level over years.... Men who would not contribute a peaceable eight cents to the public weal drop their cash, credit, and commercial prospects, and go toss in their lives like a song, at the bidding of an alien abstraction called the state."[161] This somewhat overstated the generosity of the capitalist elites, who profitted enormously by the war; but it accurately characterized most workers. The same is true for racial and gender privilege; people will sacrifice their material interests and very lives to degrade others and maintain their own dominance. Even the victims of oppression sometimes find predictability, comfort, and stability in their prescribed roles. Many workers extoll capitalism, while many women oppose feminism and champion "woman's traditional sphere." The class-conscious cultural revolutionary, then, must create a viable counterculture and induce the victims of oppression to define "us v. them" in different terms. The workers would then eschew all artificial and self-destructive identifications for real and constructive ones. Eastman vastly underestimated the difficulty of this revolutionary task.
Eastman's attack on ethnic, racial, gendered, and national identities threatened the inherited (even if also invented) identities of many workers. It was, however, an essential prerequisite or accompanyment of any meaningful class struggle. Although such parochial forms of self-identity sometimes reinforced class consciousness, they more often diluted it. Potential conflict always existed between identification as a worker and self-perception as a member of another community that both included many capitalists and excluded most workers. The ruling groups who owned the economy and the mechanisms of communication incited and exacerbated particularistic identities that divided and demoralized the working class. Racial, ethnic, and national identifications were inherently irrational because they were social constructs masquerading as eternal and objective realities; they also intensified collective egoism and intolerance while laying claim to selflessness. They truncated individual human personality by channeling it along prefabricated lines. Eastman, however, urged that each individual choose "the true and wise" course, of all the "million solutions possible," for himself. Even aside from the class struggle, therefore, traditional, parochial affiliations menaced human personality. Eastman and his cohorts rejected such identifications for themselves and invited the workers to share in a hitherto elite form of privilege, the self-definition and self-creation of one's own individual life and personality.
Eastman urged that workers demystify the ruling-class hegemonic ideas that bolstered capitalism and act in their own self-interest. His cultural revolutionism was not only an essential part of the class struggle; it also reminded workers that they had non-class identities--as blacks, as women, as sexual beings, as individual persons capable of laughter, poetry, and the enjoyment of life--with group and individual interests of their own. Eastman recognized the specific oppressions suffered by some groups (such as blacks and women), and repudiated suggestions that these injustices stemmed solely from class oppressions. However, he recognized that mere equality under capitalism represented not freedom but slavery and, especially during The Liberator years, warned blacks and women that they could not win genuine freedom in isolation from the working-class revolution. He believed that religious superstitions, respectable nostrums, and sexual inhibitions afflicted the working class while benefitting capitalists, whose position was bolstered by working-class ignorance. The books listed monthly in "The Masses Bookshop" (which much resembled those available in IWW halls) reminded readers that all human endeavor and knowledge was their province. The revolutionary vision, Eastman insisted, must encompass all of life's joys and wonders, rather than narrowly focusing on economics and politics; it must fight superstition and ignorance in every realm of life.
In late 1912 two incidents gave Eastman the opportunity to assay the possible uses of traditional culture. To his delight, a minister was imprisoned for reading the Bible while a Socialist mayor was jailed for reading the Constitution. "We have always contended that there are good things in both these documents" Eastman gloated, "and it is a pleasure to see them taken so seriously." Their meaning depended upon the context in which they were read--the time, place, and audience. The minister read the gospel not in church, where the audience was sitting down and lacked "the slightest intention of doing anything," but before an assemblage of striking workers, where it could generate action. "His immediate arrest and imprisonment... was a kind of corroboration of the Bible, and made us feel that this document could be used for the encouragement of active virtue on weekdays, as well as for the comforting of sinners on Sunday, if only it were brought out into the places where activity, and therefore virtue, is possible."[133]
Mayor Lunn of Schenectady was arrested while reading the Bill of Rights to "a congregation of people without property. Now, the Bill of Rights--however much real democratic idealism might have gone into its composition--was launched by the power of property, and was consecrated to the protection of property owners against an aristocracy. And when it is applied to the protection of workers against property owners it becomes a new document, and will have to be fought for and established all over again in a new struggle if it is to prevail."[134] If the established authorities routinely violated both the Constitution and statutory law, they nonetheless upheld their spirit. Law signified and bolstered the power of the owners of property; it did not protect workers, who must appropriate it for their own ends.
Eastman's commentary on these incidents perfectly illuminates one aspect of his cultural stance. He recognized that the constitution and organized religion often served as conscious instruments of class exploitation. Yet he realized that much genuine idealism underlay them, and he appealed to the professed values of their upholders as a means for winning justice and freedom for the working class. He castigated the hypocrisy of the religious establishment even as he extolled Christ as an agitator, mystic, and anarchist. "The Church is Judas" that betrayed Christ for silver. "The Christian church has been, and is, the betrayer of Christ.... The only things of his day that roused Jesus to invective are the things this church perpetrates in his name--bigotry, self-righteousness, and the hypocrisy of those who mumble words of virtue in complacency but do nothing." Christian churches countenanced child labor because half of the workers could not feed their children by their own labors. "And if the children quit work, either they will die of starvation, and the plutocracy will go to smash for lack of new labor, or the plutocracy will have to pay decent wages to their parents." So the church inculcated the honorableness of toil, submission to one's master, and reward in the future life.[135]
Eastman proclaimed that "there is a big spiritual force under the roof of the church, and as the power of the church declines we want to bring as much of that force our way as we can. We want to save up all the virtue that is being wasted in trying not to swear, and swing it into the channel of true revolutionary effort." The "true religion" was "the religion of science"; Eastman hoped that Christianity would dissolve and be replaced by "a more sincere, and more free, and more humane, and more scientific idealism." A revolutionary with such hopes might conciliate the faithful even as he tried to win them for a larger and truer cause. Eastman, therefore, also said that "we believe in Jesus. We believe that he lived and died laboring and fighting in a noble atmosphere of disreputability for the welfare and liberty of man... We are indignant not only because the Church is reactionary, but because the Church betrayed Jesus. The Church took Christ's name and then sold out to the ruling class. The Church is Judas." Eastman claimed that he attacked not Christ but his betrayers. He recognized that some clergy genuinely sided with the poor and the working class, but predicted that this would become much more difficult as class lines hardened.[136]
The Masses was much criticized for its satires of tradition religion, in particular "The Masses Bible Class" and C.E.S. Wood's "Heavenly Discourses," two regular serials. "A Ballad" spoke highly of Joseph and tenderly of Mary, but suggested that Joseph married Mary to give a name to a child not his own; it resulted in the banning of The Masses from the subway newsstands of New York. Such material alienated religious leftists and others who objected to the gratuitious offending of the faithful. Christian Socialist Vida Scudder was one such critic. Attacks on religion would "cheapen yourselves and limit your appeal," she warned Eastman. Many Christians derived "authentic inspiration from sources closed to you. And don't sneer at their sanctities--it isn't worth your while."[137]
Eastman extolled the Discourses as written by "a spiritual follower of Jesus" and proclaimed that he would print Wood's contributions "even if the whole subscription list resigned."[138] Defending "A Ballad," he boldly challenged his critics: "You exhort me to have reverence for a false idea. I exhort you to revere the reality of life." Eastman accused the poem's critics of hating it not because they revered the story of the virgin birth but because they did not revere nature. "To you there is something unholy in the bodily union of Earth's lovers, in the tragedies of passion's way with us. To you there is something unholy in reality, and you have fled away from that to take refuge in your sacred myth." Your souls "are irreverent towards what is of the highest import in the actual conduct of life. Ours are healthy and reverent.... The religion of reality and its possibilities--that is what separates us--not the religion of Christ." Eastman also suspected the professed altruism of he who protested not on his own behalf but because others were offended, charging that such a critic had "renounced with his intellect the old miracle gods, without affirming in his heart the new natural gods of today.... He is afraid that reality will offend a false ideal.... You are irreligious in the worst sense, the sense of not heartily committing your souls to anything whatever.... The world will never get its rebirth from you."[139]
Eastman also attacked respectability, gentility, and sexual prudery and decorum--the entire way of life professed by the elite classes and admired by many workers--as "a refined insulation from real contacts with the matter of life." Contrary to his assertion that life "burns in both camps," he asserted that the elites "wrap themselves in fabrics and fine manners. They encase themselves in forms. They touch nothing to the quick" and "dwell in their mansions of great aspect as in the tomb, forbidden by their ideal the realization of the tragedy of their own deadness." The outbreak of World War I revealed "the bloody fundamentals" of Western culture; beneath the shibboleths of love and justice lay "a class-owned humanity preoccupied with commercial rivalry and the exploitation of labor.... There is no Christianity, no culture, no civilization. Our whole upper-class polity and pretense of spirituality is built of a leisure that is the loot of predatory exploitation and the perpetual exploitation and death of the poor."[140]
As usual, such general if incendiary denunciations caused Eastman less trouble than specific items which traduced traditional sexual morality. The Masses carefully avoided obscenity, but offended puritanical revolutionaries by its espousal of free love, birth control, and sexual self-expression in literature. It carried numerous advertisements for scientific books about human sexuality and nonchalantly reviewed contemporary novels that shocked Victorian sensibilities. Anthony Comstack's successor as chief censor of the United States confiscated the September 1916 issue because it contained an advertisement for Forel's The Sexual Question, which allegedly advocated sodomy. (Eastman denied the charge). No less a personage than George Bernard Shaw accused Eastman of publishing "vulgar and ignorant stuff because it was blasphemous, and coarse and carnal work because it was scandalous." Such frivolity, Shaw charged, would aid hypocrites and prudes. Eastman denied publishing anything vulgar and told Shaw that "we are perfectly naive in our sophistication. We live in a world of the kind we believe in, and publish what we find excellent to our own taste and moral judgment with a really pastoral unconcern about the opinionated public.... You ought to try to be a little more carnal."[141]
Eastman's countercultural revolutionism was perhaps most explicit in his espousal of a radical and uncompromising feminism. Eastman demanded total liberation for women in every sphere of life. Although he advocated specific reforms such as government support for mothers, suffrage, birth control, and women's full economic equality and independence, he regarded such measures only as means towards the full personhood of all women. He extolled radical feminists who lived the revolution, whose lives embodied the fully emancipated female.
"Sex equality," Eastman insisted, "is a question by itself.... Socialism does not include it.... The question of sex equality, the economic, social, political independence of woman stands by itself, parallel and equal in importance to any other question of the day. The awakening and liberation of woman is a revolution in the very process of life. It is not an event in any class or an issue between classes. It is not an event in history. It is an event in biology" that would transform the very composition of the race. "Sex selection and the survival of the fittest are held mainly responsible for the course of evolution. Sex selection means the choice--especially by the female--of superior mates." But depriving women of real choice by making them economically dependent on males thwarted this wholesome evolutionary imperative. "The lifting and conserving power of woman's choice is lost, because her choice is not free.... Since women are industrially unfit during the season of motherhood, an award of money for motherhood itself is essential for their complete independence. This award should come from society as a whole" as payment for an essential social service rather than as charity.[142]
Contradicting Marxist orthodoxy, Eastman proclaimed that "the liberation of the genius and energies and beauties of women" was "the greatest change that will come to the world in our day." Women's liberation would change "the very kind of descendants we generate" in addition to transforming culture. "So long as the social ideal was a repressed and petty-minded woman, that type of woman was selected to become the mother of the majorities of posterity, and by an inexorable law she handed on, to sons and daughters alike, the limitations of her nature. But as we learn to love the ideal of the woman who is great, we tend to make her the mother of the majorities of posterity, and thus the very quality of the human stock is enhanced."[143]
Eastman castigated the Socialist party for downplaying women's suffrage. Socialists had behaved "like every other group of sexually selfish men." Indeed, they endorsed suffrage only because Marx and Engels had favored it and because they would soon need women's votes. Eastman particularly criticized the SP's refusal to support bourgeois suffragists--a policy borrowed from the Second International's Stuttgart declaration. Eastman declared this policy "in flat contradiction of the established policy of the International upon all other matters, which is to join with the bourgeoisie in their fight for a universal franchise wherever the political revolution is not completely accomplished." In other words, Socialists supported women's suffrage not as they did men's, "but passively and tamely, because it had been written into their platform by greater men than they."[144]
Eastman did not expect great practical and political results from women's suffrage. Women, he believed, were simply persons like men rather than the transforming angels of suffragist propaganda. Moreover, Eastman discounted the power of a ballot unbacked by economic power at the point of production. He favored women's suffrage because it would educate, liberate, and elevate women. "Universal citizenship has meant in human history universal education... By giving to women a higher place in our social esteem, it will promote the universal development." Our entire personalities are shaped by "the natural expectations of those around us. If society expects a girl to become a fully devleoped, active and intelligent individual, she will probably do it. If society expects her to remain a doll-baby all her life, she will make a noble effort to do that." Full citizenship for women would transform them from "mere drudges or parlor ornaments. They will no longer try to satisfy their ambitions by seeing who can parade the most extreme buffooneries of contemporary fashion on the public highway. They will grow up to be interested and living individuals, and satisfy their ambitions only with the highest prizes of adventure and achievement that life offers."[145]
Although many suffragists argued that enfranchisement for women would benefit children because women voters would purify the milk supply and otherwise safeguard children, Eastman asserted that suffrage and full citizenship for women would create new and better mothers. "Only a developed and fully constituted individual is fit to be the mother of a child," he said. "Only one who has herself made the most of the present, is fit to hold in her arms the hope of the future..... I do not want women to have, for the sake of their children, the control of the milk-supply and the food laws, half so much as I want them to have, for the sake of their children, all the knowledge-by-experience that they can possibly get. That is the vital connection between child welfare and woman suffrage--that is the deeper ideal. No woman is fit to bring children into the world until she knows to the full the rough and actual character of the world into which she is bringing them." Political reforms would accomplish little, but educating women in equality would transform the world. "The babies of this world suffer a good deal more from silly mothers than they do from sour milk. And any change in political forms, however superficial from the standpoint of economic justice, that will increase the breath of experience, the sagacity, the humor, the energetic and active life-interest of mothers, can only be regarded as a profound historic revolution."[146]
Eastman also vigorously supported birth control and the public violation of the laws that criminalized it. The Masses praised Emma Goldman, Jessie Ashley, Ida Rauh, and Margaret Sanger for openly flouting the law. Such rebels would repeal the law by their open defiance. "There is no more important stand, and no stand that requires more bravery and purity of heart, then the one [Sanger] is making," Eastman said.[147] Foreshadowing the abortion "speak outs" of the 1970s, he urged that physicians who had prescribed birth control (and, implicitly, women who had used it) publicly announce that fact, thus both legitimizing birth control and undermining the laws that prohibited its discussion. He realized that this might trample on the delicacy and violate the privacy of those who testified, but asserted that the benefits justified the costs. He asked, "Shall we let those little resistances which we feel against public acknowledgement of a private truth, a truth as vital as birth itself, silence us in this critical fight for humanity?" Eastman vowed that The Masses would "advertise and fight" for birth control "so far as we can without forfeiting our mailing privileges."[148]
Eastman's advocacy of birth control evoked some opposition on the left. Some revolutionaries opposed agitation for birth control, claiming that it was insufficiently revolutionary or "a palliative, a method of promoting contentment in poverty." A Socialist society, these radicals asserted, would enable workers to have all the children they wanted. Eastman, however, pointed out that voluntary childbirth required that workers, and not just the rich, have access to birth control information. The idea that bearing children should be "a deliberate and therefore responsible act" was wisdom, "the direction of instinctive activities by intelligence," and therefore virtue. Those who opposed birth control on moral or religious grounds were "more like salmon than saints. For indiscriminate propagation against an enormous death rate is the regular method of survival for those lower forms of life."[149]
Revolutionaries who belittled birth control agitation had some point, Eastman conceded. "In a society which stands in such need of social revolution as ours, it is difficult to promote with much passion knowledge which has no bearing on that need," he said. Mainstream publications were now widely discussing the issue and "probably making a great many more converts to it than we did. The propaganda is fairly launched in the American press, and we are satisfied. We can now lay the general question aside" and discuss birth control's "revolutionary significance." Eastman claimed that limiting the supply of workers would raise wages; furthermore, "an unskilled worker is never free, but an unskilled worker with a large family of half-starving children cannot even fight for freedom. That for us is the connection between birth control and the working-class struggle."[150] However, The Masses continued to cover the radical birth control movement, which it regarded as in itself a clarion call for human liberty.
Indeed, the contrast between dancer Isadore Duncan's and birth control crusader Margaret Sanger's visions of lived feminism provided the occasion for one of Eastman's major pronouncements on the means and ends of social revolution and on the role that The Masses and its editors could play in it. Duncan had "risen to create, in her language of motion, a poem of the children of the future--children of a time when life shall be both frank and free, and proceed under the sky with the happy fearlessness of faith in the beauty of its real nature. So at least I perceived the dancing of those girls, free-clad and strong of limb." Eastman somewhat wistfully declared that those who expended their youths fighting capitalism and superstition envisoned a world such as Duncan's dancers embodied. "It is a happier task to draw costly patterns in the air of what the world shall yet become, than to stay at the soiled and disreputable business of dragging it along," he said. "Yet both these tasks are necessary, and I only wish the visible joy of the one might mingle a little oftener with the dark labor of the other."[151]
Margaret Sanger had performed a more heroic, if less beautiful and less intrinsically satisfying, labor. She recognized "that second if not almost first, of the steps toward perfecting life" was ensuring "that no unwanted and insupportable life is born on the earth. The birth of a child should be the deliberate and chosen act of its parents." The prosperous classes practiced birth control (receiving illegal information from their private physicians), but when workers demanded such information the government in all its majesty throttled them. A federal court had recently vindicated an author's right to "discuss vital truths of the body for purposes of art"; birth control advocates now demanded the same freedom for the purposes of morality.[152]
Sanger's task was the more difficult, Eastman averred, "because morality is not so much fun as art"; her birth control pamphlet, unlike great novels or poetry, was not a pleasure to read except "for those who need to know. But it is a thousand times more important to all. For the whole world is gravid and sick with untimely children." Eastman positied many possible sources of the opposition to birth control: the need of capitalists for workers and of the state for soldiers; male fear "that women may become in reality free and independent individuals"; residual superstition and a "morbid fear of truth in those who lack the character to live in its presence." However, one thing was certain: "We need not sing the songs nor dance the dances of a future race of children--frank and free and healthy growing in their bodies and their souls--unless we are willing earnestly and openly to consider, and know, and make known to all, the wise control of the physical processes by which those children shall be brought into the world."[153] The success of Sanger's hard, disagreeable, and disreputable crusade, therefore, was a prerequisite for a world in which all children, and all women and men, could achieve the lyrical life of joy and freedom epitomized by Duncan's dance trope. Eastman hoped that his life and his publication could somehow combine the ineffable expression of beauty symbolized by Duncan with the tenacious fight for social justice and freedom epitomized by Sanger.
The death of feminist Inez Milholland evoked a sad yet sweet melancholy in Eastman as he reflected upon the contrast between her effervescent living-the-revolution career and his own mostly literary advocacy. His ruminations resembled Emma Goldman's denunciations of those who preached revolution but practiced conventional pieties. Eastman's Milholland savored love, social esteem, and happiness, but valued truth above all; and she never bought happiness by obscuring any truth, no matter how discomforting.
There was something almost superhuman in the way this young and beautiful girl passed among all the classes and kinds of people, sowing and reaping the joys of life, and yet never losing her self, never shaping or coloring her true nature and her true purpose and belief for the sake of a smooth half hour with anybody. Truth burned in her like a flame, and sentimental or hypocritical people were scorched by it. She made them uncomfortable. She was not afraid to make them uncomfortable. She was brave enough to be true.... It goes without saying that she believed with consecration in all the things we are doing to make men free and to make women free; but if everyone of us who believe were possessed of that drastic courage she had to make our belief known and felt in our words and acts always, how much more quickly would we win the world. We pretend that we are trying to win people by our pale casuistries and dilute forms of conduct, but what we are really doing is making the job a little softer for ourselves. We are trying to have a good time as we go along, which is all right. But what Inez Milholland's life proved is that it is possible to have a glorious good time, and yet stand like iron for the knowledge of truth and liberty of man on every occasion.[154] Revolutionists who lived their values would transform humanity "by showing to the world in fearless outlines of race that cannot be ignored the new ideal." Milholland exemplified "in her flashing and heroic beauty of color and gesture this new ideal that is bringing to the world an enhancement of life more deep and sure than any that was ever written upon a page of history."[155]
When Eastman penned these lines, he was quite possibly suffering from doubts about the value of his own more literary and less activist revolutionism. Only a few months earlier he had, after criticizing the intellectual and bourgeois reformers on The New Republic, ended by saying that "in one respect we are all alike. We none of us do anything. So what is the use of pretending that we do? We talk or write about what ought to be done, and then, as Walter Lippmann says of 'some of the writers in THE MASSES,' we go home to dinner. It may look more like doing something to write reformer's opinions than to write revolutionary opinions, but it really isn't. It is just as easy. The difficult thing is to do anything, and none of us has tried that." Earlier that year he had praised a novel by Socialist Anna Walling by saying that "both her and her heroine seem so foreign to me, having that intensity of sustained fervor of life in reality, that seems only for Russians and Jews. They burn with hot fire. Their being is self-justified. They live and are sources of life... As for me, I loaf, and smoulder, and dodge life, and tinker with trivialities, until at least some momentary conflux of stimulus and impulse creates me, and I do enter into those ecstasies and agonies that flesh was never made for, and lie limp and melancholy very soon after. I think that I like to praise her book, because I want to assert that although I cannot be these things, I can at least have them."[156]
Eastman's cultural radicalism also starkly appeared in his views on patriotism, which he regarded as "the most banal of stupid human idol-worships."[157] The Masses ran articles praising patriotism, articles damning it, and essays exploring its possible uses in the working-class struggle. Eastman himself, despite his professed tactic of winning people by appealing to their cherished values and his conviction that neither interest, nor morality, nor knowledge could undermine patriotism, denounced it with increasing vigor as World War I progressed. "The Religion of Patriotism," published after the United States entered the war, was his most vehement denunciation of patriotism and his most comprehensive effort to understand the forces behind it. Patriotism, Eastman asserted, offered an Absolute to replace God and a sense of the miraculous; it combined satisfaction of so many of our instincts that no one motive could break its hold.
Patriotism indulges that craving for a sense of union with a solidary herd, which is in inheritance of all gregarious animals. It is a craving which our modern sophisticated, citified, and diverse civilization leaves unfed in normal times.... Men are willing to be dead, if they can only be dead in a pile.... The moment we declare for the herd, and let loose our enthusiasm into that vent, a half dozen other starved monsters of passionate desire that our lawful and cultivated life has caged and thwarted, rush to this outlet and find satisfaction.
One of them is angry hate. Men are full of it, and they get small chance to exercise it in these days of legality and respectable convention. The war liberates them.... Another and even more bursting reservoir that ordinary moral conduct never half relieves, is rivalrous egoism. Society suppresses the braggart.... In consequence every individual is full as a bladder with inexpressible self-esteem. And by a quickly articulated emotional device, this passion too is sluiced into the channel of patriotism. A man identifies himself with his country, and then he brags about his country to his heart's desire, and nobody observes that he is bragging about himself.[158]
Patriotism, Eastman argued, met other needs as well. It compensated for personal inadequacy and provided a refuge from the care of thinking and acting for ourselves. Socialism served many of these same functions, "but it is not a religion that binds or blesses the rich and powerful, and so it could hardly become established in a country like ours.... We needed something that would give us the same emotional crystalization without greatly disturbing the profits on capital.... Other religions always seemed to require courage, or faith, or loneliness, or energy-of-intent; this requires only the most social and joyful abandonment of intelligent judgment and moral restraint. It is the easiest religion under the sun to feel and feel deeply, for it gives the highest quantity of satisfactions, requires no imaginative faith, and demands at the most that physical crowd-courage which is a common heritage of our race."[159] Despite his own conviction that "the antipatriots are nursing a dream" and that the patriotic tide was irresistible once war erupted, Eastman risked The Masses and his life in antiwar agitation. In repudiating patriotism--as in scorning white racism and male chauvinism, and critiquing religion and United States national traditions--Eastman demanded that Americans abandon the traditional sources of their personal identities and reforge their intimate selves along other lines.
Eastman has been accused, by critics in his own time and later, of diluting the class struggle by engrafting alien issues onto it. But Eastman, along with other cultural radicals in the IWW, could argue that cultural revolution was a necessary prerequisite to class-conscious social revolution. Socialism required that each worker see himself or herself not as an American, or Catholic, or white, or ethnic, or man or woman but primarily as a worker and simultaneously as "an individual in the universe".[160] Workers must eschew old solidarities and collective identities based on birth and tradition for a new group identity based on class; they must also repudiate an old individualism based on competition for money, power, and status, substituting an expanded sense of individual personality capable of reason, of love, of creative work--of poetry, science, and genuinely equal relationships.
Cultural revolution undeniably clashed with workers' sensibilities and values at almost every point--with patriotism, religious affiliation, ethnic loyalties, cultural and sexual conservatism, white supremacy, male chauvinism, and female decorum. (That many of these traditional values contradict one another--that primary identification as an American is incompatible with ethnic, racial, religious hatreds and gendered hierarchies--is but another indication of their inadequacy; they are absurdly incompatible as well as individually pernicious.) But Eastman regarded cultural revolution as an essential component of class struggle, not a distraction from it. Workers could not identify themselves primarily as members of a class until they had abandoned more particularistic forms of self-identity.
Eastman could also argue that cultural revolution no more alienated and threatened the workers than did the concepts of class, class struggle, and Socialism. Those who accuse cultural radicals of stressing extraneous issues implicitly assume the existence of a natural, innate class consciousness awaiting awakening by agitators. But no working class is inherently anything; all values are cultural values, learned and transmitted by people and institutions. The American working class, in particular, rejected socialism as vehemently and murderously as it did free love, birth control, internationalism, feminism, and racial egalitarianism. Until workers overcame their archaic forms of self-identity, Eastman presciently believed, class struggle would be difficult if not impossible.
Cultural revolution, in other words, was an essential part of the class struggle and must precede and accompany, as well as result from, social revolution. Eastman marvelled at the seeming transformation of human nature instantly effected by the patriotic frenzy unleashed by war. War patriotism "can stampede the energies of man, and hold them at a higher level over years.... Men who would not contribute a peaceable eight cents to the public weal drop their cash, credit, and commercial prospects, and go toss in their lives like a song, at the bidding of an alien abstraction called the state."[161] This somewhat overstated the generosity of the capitalist elites, who profitted enormously by the war; but it accurately characterized most workers. The same is true for racial and gender privilege; people will sacrifice their material interests and very lives to degrade others and maintain their own dominance. Even the victims of oppression sometimes find predictability, comfort, and stability in their prescribed roles. Many workers extoll capitalism, while many women oppose feminism and champion "woman's traditional sphere." The class-conscious cultural revolutionary, then, must create a viable counterculture and induce the victims of oppression to define "us v. them" in different terms. The workers would then eschew all artificial and self-destructive identifications for real and constructive ones. Eastman vastly underestimated the difficulty of this revolutionary task.
Eastman's attack on ethnic, racial, gendered, and national identities threatened the inherited (even if also invented) identities of many workers. It was, however, an essential prerequisite or accompanyment of any meaningful class struggle. Although such parochial forms of self-identity sometimes reinforced class consciousness, they more often diluted it. Potential conflict always existed between identification as a worker and self-perception as a member of another community that both included many capitalists and excluded most workers. The ruling groups who owned the economy and the mechanisms of communication incited and exacerbated particularistic identities that divided and demoralized the working class. Racial, ethnic, and national identifications were inherently irrational because they were social constructs masquerading as eternal and objective realities; they also intensified collective egoism and intolerance while laying claim to selflessness. They truncated individual human personality by channeling it along prefabricated lines. Eastman, however, urged that each individual choose "the true and wise" course, of all the "million solutions possible," for himself. Even aside from the class struggle, therefore, traditional, parochial affiliations menaced human personality. Eastman and his cohorts rejected such identifications for themselves and invited the workers to share in a hitherto elite form of privilege, the self-definition and self-creation of one's own individual life and personality.
Eastman urged that workers demystify the ruling-class hegemonic ideas that bolstered capitalism and act in their own self-interest. His cultural revolutionism was not only an essential part of the class struggle; it also reminded workers that they had non-class identities--as blacks, as women, as sexual beings, as individual persons capable of laughter, poetry, and the enjoyment of life--with group and individual interests of their own. Eastman recognized the specific oppressions suffered by some groups (such as blacks and women), and repudiated suggestions that these injustices stemmed solely from class oppressions. However, he recognized that mere equality under capitalism represented not freedom but slavery and, especially during The Liberator years, warned blacks and women that they could not win genuine freedom in isolation from the working-class revolution. He believed that religious superstitions, respectable nostrums, and sexual inhibitions afflicted the working class while benefitting capitalists, whose position was bolstered by working-class ignorance. The books listed monthly in "The Masses Bookshop" (which much resembled those available in IWW halls) reminded readers that all human endeavor and knowledge was their province. The revolutionary vision, Eastman insisted, must encompass all of life's joys and wonders, rather than narrowly focusing on economics and politics; it must fight superstition and ignorance in every realm of life.