EASTMAN AND THE MIDDLE CLASS
Eastman, as we have seen, advocated proletarian revolution and disdained middle-class reform. This poses a central question: if Eastman had a clear message for revolutionary activists and ordinary workers, what did he offer the middle-class professionals he wooed on behalf of the revolutionary movement? The Masses addressed an educated, elite audience. Although Eastman desired working-class reader--he offered free subscriptions to class-war prisoners jailed during labor disputes and discounts to labor and socialist organizations that sold subscriptions--the whole tone and content of The Masses suggests a middle-class audience. Eastman often referred to his readers as "you" and to workers as "them." Indeed, Eastman regarded radicalizing some portion of the middle class as an essential part of his socialist mission. Leaders of the SP's right wing such as Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger also attracted a professional constituency, but did so by emphasizing respectability, reform, and electoral activity. How did Eastman intend to win a middle-class following with his incendiary brand of revolutionary socialism? The answer, perhaps, lies in the disruptive and exciting challenges facing the contemporary the middle class.
Eastman addressed a professional and middle class in transition. The dislocations of industrial, monopoly capitalism threatened much of the middle class, squeezing them between the Scylla of powerful new industrialists, bankers, and railroad men, and the Charybdis of a restive working class. Small businessmen, farmers, and formerly independent professionals found themselves culturally and economically imperilled by two classes that had scarcely existed fifty years ago. National conglomerates controlled by distant, anonymous directors with no community loyalties threatened the "island communities" that had characterized the United States. In the late nineteenth century, local elites sometimes supported local workers against absentee owners of large corporations. By the twentieth century, however, industrial capitalism threatened the cultural identities, the very sense of self, of the old independent businessmen. William James declared that "the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers." Before World War I, the Appeal to Reason and similar publications catered to displaced members of the old middle class, especially those in rural areas and small towns. Simultaneously, Eastman forged a philosophy for a sophisticated urban audience, troubled but also allured by new social and cultural developments.[189]
Amidst crisis, Eastman claimed, these middling groups must side with either the workers or the capitalists. Marx had declared that class position determined the outlook of most people whose vital interests were at stake; he acknowledged that people in the middle could exercise relatively free and disinterested judgment. Eastman acknowledged that the middle groups had distinct interests but asserted that they could not achieve their goals without allying themselves with one of the two great classes struggling for supremacy. He further said that proletarians would not constitute an absolute majority for another generation, if ever. But if the proletarians "stood unitedly for their own economic interest, if they stood for the Social Revolution, millions of people whose economic interest is indifferent, or not strongly, or not in the long run, opposed to the revolution, would stand with them. The hope of the class struggle lies not in the evolution of a pure proletarian majority, but it lies in the evolution of pure class consciousness in those who are proletarian" and "drawing a line of battle between these classes clearly and without compromise." Eastman said that "every battle line passes through the center of thousands of the souls of thousands of people, but when the battle rages these people will have to take their stand upon one side or the other. In this fact lies the promise of the social revolution."[190]
The Ludlow massacre confirmed Eastman in his analysis. He interviewed local residents along the entire social spectrum and found that "they have adopted into their breasts the hate or love which their financial necessities dictated." Abstract phrases such as justice, love, and democracy "a little too fragile for service in a time of blood," collapsed. Eastman admitted that special circumstances defined the Colorado situation and that opinions might not so precisely follow class lines elsewhere; he advocated more empirical research on the relationship of class position and ideology. "A little more verification, a little less assertion" would bolster "the health of the Socialist hypothesis." (The Bolshevik Revolution soon strengthened Eastman's confidence in the Marxian theory.) Yet Ludlow definitely proved that "when the class line is once fightingly drawn, all other divisions of society sink into obscurity, and every man, woman, and child is compelled to take a militant stand. I suppose the line between mining capital and mining labor passed through the very middle of some people's lives. They had interests both ways. But they were forced to move. You cannot stand on a red-hot line."[191]
The middle class could intervene in the class struggle and decisively affect its outcome, Eastman believed. Although he sometimes proclaimed and at other times denied that working-class victory was inevitable, he always insisted that the middle class could greatly lessen bloodshed by backing the workers. "There is no question that much blood will be shed ere the working class wins its liberty," he said. "There is no question that much blood is being shed" in industrial accidents and massacres and in the routine death by slow torture of the poor. The longer that intellectuals and middle-class reformers tinkered with vapid reforms, "the more blood will run before liberty is achieved." If those who exercised relatively "disinterested judgment" sided with the workers, their action could "minimize the violence attending the social revolution" more "than any other single event we can imagine." A person's allegiance in the class struggle "is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of the will. Do you wish to see labor conquer, and the privilege of the classes that are paid for owning capital gradually abolished out of the world? Or do you wish to see capital and its charitable and academic minions" rule "through an eternity of 'industrial unrest'? You have only this choice. Whether you know it or not, you are on one side or the other of a fight." An individuals's choice, Eastman said, defined his or her life and personality, their very being.[192]
Eastman believed that members of the middle class would benefit from revolution even if they did not yet realize it. Masses writers occasionally claimed that professionals would join the revolution on the basis of economic interest. Workers' control of industry might appeal to an old class of independent entrepreneurs and professionals now reduced to salaried employees of large corporations. With old community standards crumbling and an impersonal market increasingly dictating choices formerly shaped by personal connections, community values, and village neighborliness, Eastman's attacks on the degradations of commercial culture might resonate with those whose status seemed endangered. In an age when vast, impersonal conglomerates dictated the lives of individuals and entire communities, the question of who would manage the industries, and in whose interest, became urgent. In 1914 Eastman hoped that rising inflation would "recruit to the ranks of revolutionary discontent, an army of middle-class mourners, who will truly profit by revolutionary changes, but might not otherwise... see it."[193]
For Eastman's middle class, a crisis of cultural authority accompanied economic uncertainty. Parvenu capitalists increasingly repudiated accepted values and community norms, and ruled by brute force. Calls for the extermination of restive workers abounded in the mainstream press. In addition, the whole structure supporting personal identity was crumbling. Historian T. Jackson Lears speaks of a pervasive "weightlessness," a feeling of unreality and a detachment from life, that afflicted large numbers of relatively prosperous individuals.[194] Such disconcerting feelings had numerous causes. As bureaucratic hierarchies replaced small farms and businesses as the predominant form of economic organization, previously autonomous individuals had less freedom to act on their own and work at their own pace. Formerly independent businessmen and professionals became dependent on the goodwill of numerous, anonymous others who constantly and silently judged them on the basis of vague and shifting criteria.[195] Those ensconced in corporate hierarchies became more sedentary and less active, enjoying less security even if more comfort. The decline of religion and its transcendental meanings undergirding life and suffering meant that individuals increasingly sought purpose in happiness or fulfillment. As old institutions, practices, and codes disintegrated under the impact of modern life and the city--as migrants from the countryside were increasingly freed from the surveillance of their families and communities--many people experienced cultural shock. Old values no longer corresponded to new realities. Other changes such as the massive new immigration and the transformation of the United States into a world-imperial power changed the very basis of America's identity.
This was not, to be sure, a change from "character" to "personality" as conceptualized by Warren Susman.[196] Individuals in rural and small-town America were not genuinely autonomous, but rigidly constrained by custom, law, religion, and public opinion. Many people escaped to the cities precisely in search of genuine autonomy. Susman's "character" demanded merely a more rigid and hence predictable form of conformity than "personality," which required a more fluid and adaptable brand. It was precisely the disintegration of the old, fixed standards of behavior that generated so much anxiety.
Eastman courted segments of the middle class by his wholehearted embrace of modernity and his interpretation of cultural and economic change as progress, science, and poetry. He urged that a class in flux and under enormous stress consider themselves builders of a new world rather than as conservators of the old. This reinforced an important part of their experience in the bustling cities full of exciting new technologies. The disintegration of old constraints and values, Eastman assured his readers, was a positive good that could liberate the individual. "Strong minds do not need any religion," he cried. "They are able to bear the responsibility and the labor of thinking and choosing among the values of life anew each morning."[197] Eastman urged that threatened elites embrace the liberating possibilities of their era rather than wallowing in what Lears calls a "therapeutic culture" characterized by narcissism, introspection, and a morbid fixation on personal health and sensual gratification. He harnessed "the cult of experience"--elite impulses towards a richer, fuller, more authentic life--for the highest enterprises of science, poetry, and social revolution, directing it away from Lears's "elusive banality" of denial, escapism, and consumerism into which it often degenerated.
Eastman urged that the new middle class embrace a culture that reflected their experience and seize the new opportunities for freer, unrestricted lives presented by the city. He favored a literature that reflected the realities urban professionals saw around them and a cosmopolitan outlook that made the entire world their province. For example, his feminism was a logical development of companionate marriage, a widespread middle-class ideal. It offered women the freedom possible only in an urbanized, industrialized economy, and proposed that men regard fully equal women as fit companions in the adventure of life. Eastman's concept of socialism as emphasizing primarily individual freedom, self-creation and authenticity rather than brotherhood or equality, also harmonized with middle-class values. However, he changed the economic meaning of freedom from individual proprietorship to collective ownership while expanding the definition of freedom to encompass the total refashioning of individual personality.
Industrialization and urbanization promised everyone a more genuine freedom, Eastman declared. The middle class, newly incorporated into bureaucratic hierarchies, should grasp that freedom on the job through collective action and throughout their lives by individual self-expression. The nature of revolutionary society was not preordained, but would be fashioned by those who made the revolution in accordance with their own sense of self. His own values would potentially win the middle class even as it alienated some workers. Unions were the conservative wing of the socialist movement in many countries. In the United States, they largely opposed socialism, while many workers remained culturally conservative. Despite Eastman's wishes, The Masses was financed mostly by the wealthy and read mostly by an educated elite.[198] A cartoon in the April 1914 issue depicted a top executive peering out of his large picture window to the city below; the caption says, "some day he will understand... that it isn't a vacation he wants--it's revolution." Thus Eastman could earnestly and realistically tell members of the middle class who were dissatisfied with the lives and society: "Your place is in the working-class struggle. Your word is revolution."[199]
One other social development provided some opening for revolutionizing the middle class. Eastman perceived the emergence of a promising new social formation, the intelligentsia, "the ministers, the professors, the literati, the doctors of this and the doctors of that--who profess to, and in some measure actually do, possess a disinterested judgment and a respectability that does not rest upon an economic basis."[200] Individual critics had, of course, existed in the past; but the urban-industrial economy required large numbers of brain workers whose main function was thinking. Previously, those with the leisure and freedom from manual labor necessary for abstract thought had consisted mostly of conservative upholders of established beliefs and institutions such as ministers, college professors, and the most successful businessmen.[201] But Eastman believed that a new critical mass of rootless intellectuals could forge itself into a catalyst for change and a community of dissenters. The new sciences of sociology, anthropology, and psychology were systematizing and institutionalizing critical reflection upon society. The Masses was unique not in its advocacy of cultural revolution--it expressed aspirations widespread in literary and intellectual circles--but in its self-description as a popular magazine of revolutionary socialism that would attract non-socialist readers.
Radical commentators of the day, particularly Emma Goldman, had noted the emergence of an "intellectual proletariat." Goldman included in this group brain workers who worked for low wages under regimented conditions and serviced the new corporate order. Robert Minor more narrowly described it as in those educated above their station--educated individuals with dreams their material realities could only stifle.
The intellectual proletariat is a new and tragic problem in the world. Formerly social protest was a physical reaction, the despair of pinched bellies and weary hands. But now with the infiltration of education has arisen a class of senstive, beauty-loving, thoughtful young people, to whom drudgery is an Inquisition, to whom monotonous day labor is a slow and burning death.... They wish to feel and live now, to blossom with poetry and grow under the light of heaven in their own generation. They do not wish to be President, or a foreman, or a successful salesman or clerk, or otherwise rise out of the lowest caste through lifetimes of sordid striving. They wish to do a little useful hard work every day, then be free for careers of ecstasy and innocence and meditation.... No one heeds them, and even the Revolution is many years away.[202]
Reflecting The Masses' ethos of a total revolution in every sphere of life and in every aspect of human personality, Gold implicitly criticized those who "throw the anger of their thwarted dreaming into merely social movements, like syndicalism and socialism."[203]
The Masses was not, of course, edited or written by intellectual proletarians but by famous men and women who sought a venue for their most intimate creations. However, many people who lacked the creativity, discipline, or luck required for literary and artistic success shared the values of the creative geniuses who comprised The Masses; some of them flocked to Greenwich Village or similar bohemian enclaves. Still others wanted a simulacrum of adventure and rebellion amidst relatively conventional lives. Insurgent and bohemian values, if not lifestyles, spread far beyond the tiny fringe who actually embraced revolution or fled Main Street.
Eastman himself considered everyone who worked for a living as a member of the working class; but he also acknowledged very real chasms within that class. He differentiated proletarians, who sold nothing but their brawn, from the middle class, who worked for wages (called a "salary") but possessed education, skills, supervisory powers, partial autonomy on the job, and higher incomes. The Masses also published articles, particularly by William English Walling, which emphasized class divisions even within a narrowly defined working class--between the skilled, native-born craftsmen organized in the AFL and largely unskilled and unorganized immigrants targeted by the IWW. Walling suggested that the most oppressed members of both the proletariat and the professions might unite against their more privileged breathren.[204] Such speculation blurred the "objective" definition of class based solely on relationships to the means of production and introduced a vital cultural component. Recognizing this cultural aspect of class, Eastman contested for the allegiance of a large middle group by stressing both its economic interests and its own distinctive cultural values and hopes.
Eastman hoped that he could win this new middle class for proletarian and cultural revolution. His hopes were based partly on reality: the middle class was adventuresome, rebellious, and critical of existing institutions. The Progressive party and The New Republic were among their signature creations. Eastman criticized such bourgeois reformers as "literary revolutionists," "emotional idealists," and "sentimental rebels" while urging that they become "scientific revolutionists." In April 1917, just as American entry into the Great Carnage was about to destroy the organized Left, Eastman contrasted the much different fates of reform and revolution in the United States. "No measure in politics and no movement in industry is having the least success in increasing the proportion of wealth or leisure or liberty which falls to the working class" he lamented. "Their small liberty is, in fact, cut down steadily by the growth of militarism under the menace of national war..... On the other hand all the reforms which do not touch the system of caste are proceeding with a velocity the world has never seen.... Any idea which will serve the interests of people in both classes catches around the world like fire. And many of these ideas, though they are not revolutionary in motive," did "indirectly and ultimately" aid "the chances of the working-class struggle."[205] Eastman hoped to carry the progressive middle class beyond such reforms and to the proletarian revolution they advanced. Educated, relatively autonomous brain workers could, he believed, materially aid the industrial proletariat by publicizing their wrongs among influential people hitherto unaware of them and by raising funds for class-war prisoners. (Eastman himself was received at the White House before his antiwar position made him an outcast in official circles). By proclaiming the truth even on street corners, he and his cohorts could contest capitalist hegemony and mass media distortions. The educated middle class also offered workers the cachet of elite support, which oppressed groups often find indispensable for mounting their own revolt. Most workers may not read literature, but they benefit if respected authors legitimize their cause with their support. Eastman spoke widely and was well-received by strikers and other workers; leaders and the rank-and-file of many rebel causes--feminists, blacks, IWWs--respected him and wrote for his publications. He also publicized labor's wrongs to a large audience that would have been otherwise uninterested, and who would never have read a strictly working-class periodical such as The Industrial Worker.
Eastman did exaggerate the independence of this new group, which remained directly or indirectly dependent upon the large capitalists. He also underestimated the extent to which the new middle class would have a class interest and an ideology of its own, distinct from that of both the industrialists and the workers. He vastly miscalculated the degree to which even the liberal members of the middle class would truly ally themselves with the working class. Many historians have perceived a genuine divergence between managerial (middle class) and democratic (working class) progressives. At one point he realized this. Middle-class progressives, he said, could not learn that "politics is a play of interests and not ideas," and that those advocating change must align themselves with an insurgent class rather than preaching vapid ideals. "But to learn that lesson would involve a revolution in their entire habit of thought and feeling. Most of them are too old. But we can teach things to their children...."[206] Nevertheless, Eastman's appeal to the new middle class as a potential champion of economic and cultural revolution nevertheless constituted a realistic and thoughtful engagement with the social realities of his time.
Eastman was correct that the new middle class, or a portion of it, was ripe for part of his message--in particular, aspects of his countercultural living and cultural revolution. In the decades following the suppression of The Masses social revolution totally failed; yet many of the cultural changes Eastman championed have triumphed to an extent almost unimaginable in the heyday of The Masses. Cultural change has occurred far more readily than social change, even though it was equally ferociously resisted.
Countercultural lifestyles (what we may loosely call bohemianism) entered the mainstream as individuals and small groups tried experimental lifestyles on a voluntary, piecemeal, and often temporary basis. These lifestyles were not adopted by a majority at one specific time, but won popularity slowly and in forms compatible with important aspects of old practices. Eastman's own experience suggests this; despite the problems he encountered in The Masses community and in his relationships with women (and, as we will discuss below, his friendship with black poet Claude McKay), Eastman achieved more of his own values than he would have had he waited until a majority agreed with him. Less daring individuals could retain more of the traditional forms of life while altering their content; companionate marriage was a contemporary example of this. But such innovative, experimental lifestyles disproportionately benefitted elites who possessed the leisure, education, and wealth to seize new opportunities, and who associated new lifestyles with rising incomes and new products. The middle class, although buffeted by change, usually benefits from it; its members often see innovation as a positive good they can control. They see change not so much as an externally imposed threat, as workers often do, but as manageable progress. The costs are imposed on the less powerful. In the 1920's the advertising industry consciously refashioned values to sell consumer products; but it simultaneously reassured consumers that the new values were fully compatible with the old.[207] The corporations, of course, were far richer than the radicals; a single advertising campaign might cost more than The Masses' budget for an entire year.
Elites can risk cultural and lifestyle change because they possess a respectability and power that rests on their social and economic position. The downtrodden own little except their sense of cultural identity, which undergird their communities and personalities. Conduct that would disgrace a worker might glamorize a member of the elite. Behavior disreputable in the subjugated groups might seem au courant among prestigous elites, who impart their own status to new modes of living and change the very meaning of respectability simply by embracing new lifestyles.[208] Self-confidence facilitates innovation and defiance of conventional notions of respectability. Being avant-garde can bolster the position of the elite; the very fact that they can flout conventions with impunity is but another token of their power. Genuine aristocrats whose position is established and guaranteed by birth are often notoriously flamboyant, idiosyncratic, contemptuous of public opinion, and experimental in lifestyle compared to the repressed and straight-laced bourgeoisie, whose social position is defined by wealth and conduct (both of which are far more precarious and malleable than birth). In the United States, many subordinate groups (workers, African Americans, women) have remained notoriously conservative in values, conduct, religion, and morality. Outcast groups, as Henry May has observed, must break into the dominant respectable culture before they can think of breaking out of it.[209]
In the 1920s consumer capitalism fostered alternative conceptions of the self and more liberated lifestyles, simultaneously taming subversive ideals to sell products. As the relatively fixed and traditional life and value-system of the village collapsed, members of the middle class redefined themselves by their possessions. They were encouraged to refashion themselves according to what was purportedly their own chosen image, but was in fact most often a new set of values imposed by corporate capitalism. Offered a dizzling array of consumer choices, however, many of the well-to-do demanded at least some opportunity for genuine self-expression and self-creation based on the fullness of the human spirit rather than on mere products. Encouraged to value an individualism defined by purchases, some professionals demanded more. The prosperous tourists who crowded Greenwich Village in search of a risk-free, ersatz, and effortless liberation earned the contempt of real writers and bohemians, but nonetheless illustrated an epochal change in cultural values.
Eastman himself was not, however, the avatar of the consumer culture or the frivolous, irresponsible bohemianism of the twenties. This notion, used by the Communist party to slander Eastman in the twenties and thirties, has ironically found uncritical acceptance among academic historians completely unsympathetic to radicalism of any sort. But Eastman's version of "the cult of experience" genuinely subverted consumer capitalism. For Eastman, the life of poetic realization required leisure, education, and a detachment from worldly cares; the pursuit of money, power, and status signified its death. Science was the praxis of revolution rather than an engineering technique for making a better mousetrap. Poetry, science, human relationships, the enjoyment of literature and art, the fullness of life, the cause of revolution--every activity and state of being valued by Eastman undermined the pursuit of money and consumer goods. Through all of his intellectual peregrinations, Eastman disdained "the horrors of a full-time job"; as he knew, the living of life and the making of a living rarely synchronized. Many intellectuals originally critical of consumer capitalism became its apologists and helped domesticate subversive ideas into the adjuncts of corporate capital and state power. Eastman and his ideals, however, remained independent of capital and its state.[210]
A second kind of cultural change, what we have called cultural revolution, has also progressed since Eastman's heyday. Blacks, women, workers, and to an extent lesbians and gays, have won a much greater social acceptability and a formal, legal equality in American society. Yet the incorporation of these groups into the body politic and into American culture has been unaccompanied by the larger economic changes that would give authentic meaning to their legal equality. In many respects the condition of these groups has markedly deteriorated in recent years. American capitalism has proven capable of formally incorporating formerly outcast groups without changing its basic structure. Wealth and power remain as thoroughly concentrated in as few hands as ever. Tens of millions of Americans--disproportionately female and minority--lack adequate food and medical care while millions of others have attained wealth "beyond the dreams of avarice." Unions have been effectively destroyed in the private sector; workers are increasingly poor, unorganized, and demoralized. A coherent resistance to these atrocities, such as has existed in most periods of American history, is nowhere in evidence.
Incorporation of hitherto excluded groups into capitalist society could have contradictory effects depending on how it occurs. Integration can bolster the system by taming dangerous groups, focusing struggles of the dispossessed upon cultural issues and the "politics of identity" rather than on class conflict, and forcing workers to fight among themselves for artificially scarce resources such as jobs and income. Under different conditions it can embolden insurgents with success, prepare them for further assaults on privilege, and, by destroying old self-definitions based on race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and nationality, encourage workers to see themselves as members of a class rather than as members of culturally-defined groups. The actual meaning of reform depends on its context, on what else is happening in society. Most reforms can be achieved in many ways, and the distribution of benefits and costs depends upon the specifics.
In the United States, the incorporation of excluded groups has had conservative effects because the tiny minority of property-owning elites has largely determined that context. The progressive bourgeoisie fosters or tolerates reforms because it feels that it will gain from them. As Eastman often reiterated, enlightened self-interest motivates progressive capitalists. The elites define the terms of debate, its vocabulary and its limits. If they cannot forestall a change, they can usually determine its form and impact. Their control of the economy and thus of the political state ensures this. Of all the possible ways of making any particular reform, the elites will chose that most advantageous to them; the insurgents, grateful for any change and incapable of really forcing changes against the intransigent opposition of the ruling class, predictably acquiesce.
The incorporation of blacks, women, and gays into the American workforce has not disturbed the profits on capital. It has benefitted primarily the elites of those groups--those who have assimilated middle-class values and want simple inclusion in the system rather than fundamental change. Social integration is thus in its way conservative, and has strengthened the existing order by including potential dissidents and affording capitalists new reservoirs of both consumers and exploited labor. The costs of inclusion are imposed upon the less educated and less powerful of both the old culturally-defined dominant group and the newly included ones. For example, poor and working-class whites lose most by the admission of blacks to the workforce; elite whites are scarcely affected except for gaining a new source of labor and an improved public image in an increasingly international economy. Meanwhile, huge masses of blacks, having no social function (even that of exploitable labor), are regarded as virtual untermenschen, labelled as pathological and disfunctional "super-predators," and demonized as promiscuous, lazy, drug-addicted, and welfare-dependent. Many blacks are even worse off than they were in the days of segregation. Middle-class blacks have fled the urban ghettoes, abandoning an underclass that is poorer, more vulnerable, and more demoralized than ever. Poor whites, buffetted by the whirlrwind cultural change fostered by technological advances and globalization, and blaming economic dislocation and decline on importunate minorities, provide steady recruits for conservative business and political elites who use cultural anxieties to throttle unions and lower wages. Racial integration, therefore, has perhaps benefitted the capitalists who own and rule the United States more than any other group.
The feminist movement has had similar effects. Working class families increasingly need two incomes to survive; women's "liberation" into low-paying, dead-end jobs (with a second shift awaiting most wives at home) has not benefitted them as much as it has professional women, who have genuinely gained new opportunities. Even for middle-class women, however, "liberation" often means the drudgery and wage-slavery of the old male role rather than the poetic life that Eastman envisioned. Women, as well as men, work longer hours (Americans on average work a whole month more per year than they did twenty years ago) for less pay. Professional women earn substantially less than men and encounter difficulty supporting a middle-class lifestyle on their own. Thus the problem of genuinely equal relationships among the economically unequal sexes persists. As millions of women are left without well-paying jobs or the support of a husband, increasing numbers end up in grinding poverty, either at servile and oppressive jobs, as welfare recipients, or on the streets. Meanwhile, most men have seen their wages plummet because of bipartisan policies on trade, taxation, and the economy; working-class men have lost their cherished roles as "protectors" and "providers," and consider themselves worse off in every way. The ruling elites insure that women are blamed for this catastrophe.
White male workers have organized, if at all, against those below them on the social scale rather than against the elites who truly control their destiny. The inclusion of blacks and women has intensified the competion of workers against each other, as individuals and as members of culturally defined groups, on the job market and in the political arena. (More accurately, this competition now threatens white male workers as well as everyone else.) Americans, especially workers, have a group and collective consciousness in almost every area of life except the economic, where they see themselves as individuals. American workers usually identify with their race, gender, ethnic group, religion, and nationality, but not with their class; they act as group-defined persons in their neighborhoods and in the voting booth, but as individuals on the shop floor. They are anti-class collectivists. They cherish their ethnic, racial, gender, and national identities as their only secure possessions. These identities provide security, a sense of meaning and belonging, an illusory sense of mastery, and a compensation for the degradations of work and leisure. It is precisely because these identities confer a sense of power (and, for white men, some semblance of it), that workers hold onto them so tenaciously, whereas the elites with real power can dispense with the artificial trappings provided by cultural identities when it profits them.
Eastman, however, insisted that economic freedom must underlie all other forms of liberty, he insisted that class-conscious revolution, he said, was an indispensable ingredient in the success of any other social improvement. Contravening Marxist orthodoxy, he denied that economic liberty was sufficient, and ceaselessly maintained that class-conscious workers must strive for the freedom of women, of blacks, immigrants, and all the nations of the earth. He demanded that every individual attain the freedom to realize life vividly, to become a poet, to formulate his or her own life and personality, even as he aided culturally-defined liberation movements by oppressed groups.
Because Eastman viewed proletarian revolution as foundational, and because he sought to win an educated, middle-class adherence to the cause of the workers, his ethos could not long survive the demise of the IWW and the Socialist party, and the flight of middle-class progressives from radical flirtations of any sort. Eastman always insisted that only a class-conscious workers' movement could hope to attract any large following among the middle class. He could not fulfill his self-appointed role as helpful auxiliary in the movements of the oppressed unless these other groups developed solid, self-active, autonomous organizations that first mobilized their own constituencies. Echoing Debs, Eastman insisted that neither individuals, nor a party, nor well-wishing outsiders, could save the workers (or by implication any other group); they must save themselves. Yet Eastman upheld his core values for decades after the demise of The Masses and its succesor, The Liberator, and turned conservative only after long experience with an official "revolutionary movement" that caricatured, repudiated and destroyed everything that the lyrical left had valued.
Eastman was that rarity, an intellectual who did not apotheosize Mind, Intellect, or the intellectuals. He always said that the people, and not the intellectuals, should rule. His support for revolutionary change--whether the IWW, the Socialist party, the feminist movement, black liberation, or, later, the early Communists and then of Trotsky--was always critical support, the only kind a true intellectual should offer. He never succumbed to orthodoxies or truckled to power. Eventually he found himself an outcast from a revolutionary movement that demanded such subservience.
In the values he espoused and the constituency he wooed, Eastman represented an essential component of any successful revolutionary movement. Other essential components, however, did not materialize on the necessary scale, or were crushed. In many ways it was not the working class that held the future in its hands in 1912, or represented the wave of the future; it was the new middle class of clerks, managers, professionals, and "brain workers" generally which has been the fastest-growing class in the twentieth century. Eastman's appeal to that class represented a thoughtful engagement with some of the central social forces of his time. War, repression, and revolution tested Eastman's mettle and challenged his understanding but merely energized his commitment and reaffirmed his fundamental values. The maelstrom of bloodbath abroad and Red Scare at home shattered Eastman's world, but not his world-view.
Eastman addressed a professional and middle class in transition. The dislocations of industrial, monopoly capitalism threatened much of the middle class, squeezing them between the Scylla of powerful new industrialists, bankers, and railroad men, and the Charybdis of a restive working class. Small businessmen, farmers, and formerly independent professionals found themselves culturally and economically imperilled by two classes that had scarcely existed fifty years ago. National conglomerates controlled by distant, anonymous directors with no community loyalties threatened the "island communities" that had characterized the United States. In the late nineteenth century, local elites sometimes supported local workers against absentee owners of large corporations. By the twentieth century, however, industrial capitalism threatened the cultural identities, the very sense of self, of the old independent businessmen. William James declared that "the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers." Before World War I, the Appeal to Reason and similar publications catered to displaced members of the old middle class, especially those in rural areas and small towns. Simultaneously, Eastman forged a philosophy for a sophisticated urban audience, troubled but also allured by new social and cultural developments.[189]
Amidst crisis, Eastman claimed, these middling groups must side with either the workers or the capitalists. Marx had declared that class position determined the outlook of most people whose vital interests were at stake; he acknowledged that people in the middle could exercise relatively free and disinterested judgment. Eastman acknowledged that the middle groups had distinct interests but asserted that they could not achieve their goals without allying themselves with one of the two great classes struggling for supremacy. He further said that proletarians would not constitute an absolute majority for another generation, if ever. But if the proletarians "stood unitedly for their own economic interest, if they stood for the Social Revolution, millions of people whose economic interest is indifferent, or not strongly, or not in the long run, opposed to the revolution, would stand with them. The hope of the class struggle lies not in the evolution of a pure proletarian majority, but it lies in the evolution of pure class consciousness in those who are proletarian" and "drawing a line of battle between these classes clearly and without compromise." Eastman said that "every battle line passes through the center of thousands of the souls of thousands of people, but when the battle rages these people will have to take their stand upon one side or the other. In this fact lies the promise of the social revolution."[190]
The Ludlow massacre confirmed Eastman in his analysis. He interviewed local residents along the entire social spectrum and found that "they have adopted into their breasts the hate or love which their financial necessities dictated." Abstract phrases such as justice, love, and democracy "a little too fragile for service in a time of blood," collapsed. Eastman admitted that special circumstances defined the Colorado situation and that opinions might not so precisely follow class lines elsewhere; he advocated more empirical research on the relationship of class position and ideology. "A little more verification, a little less assertion" would bolster "the health of the Socialist hypothesis." (The Bolshevik Revolution soon strengthened Eastman's confidence in the Marxian theory.) Yet Ludlow definitely proved that "when the class line is once fightingly drawn, all other divisions of society sink into obscurity, and every man, woman, and child is compelled to take a militant stand. I suppose the line between mining capital and mining labor passed through the very middle of some people's lives. They had interests both ways. But they were forced to move. You cannot stand on a red-hot line."[191]
The middle class could intervene in the class struggle and decisively affect its outcome, Eastman believed. Although he sometimes proclaimed and at other times denied that working-class victory was inevitable, he always insisted that the middle class could greatly lessen bloodshed by backing the workers. "There is no question that much blood will be shed ere the working class wins its liberty," he said. "There is no question that much blood is being shed" in industrial accidents and massacres and in the routine death by slow torture of the poor. The longer that intellectuals and middle-class reformers tinkered with vapid reforms, "the more blood will run before liberty is achieved." If those who exercised relatively "disinterested judgment" sided with the workers, their action could "minimize the violence attending the social revolution" more "than any other single event we can imagine." A person's allegiance in the class struggle "is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of the will. Do you wish to see labor conquer, and the privilege of the classes that are paid for owning capital gradually abolished out of the world? Or do you wish to see capital and its charitable and academic minions" rule "through an eternity of 'industrial unrest'? You have only this choice. Whether you know it or not, you are on one side or the other of a fight." An individuals's choice, Eastman said, defined his or her life and personality, their very being.[192]
Eastman believed that members of the middle class would benefit from revolution even if they did not yet realize it. Masses writers occasionally claimed that professionals would join the revolution on the basis of economic interest. Workers' control of industry might appeal to an old class of independent entrepreneurs and professionals now reduced to salaried employees of large corporations. With old community standards crumbling and an impersonal market increasingly dictating choices formerly shaped by personal connections, community values, and village neighborliness, Eastman's attacks on the degradations of commercial culture might resonate with those whose status seemed endangered. In an age when vast, impersonal conglomerates dictated the lives of individuals and entire communities, the question of who would manage the industries, and in whose interest, became urgent. In 1914 Eastman hoped that rising inflation would "recruit to the ranks of revolutionary discontent, an army of middle-class mourners, who will truly profit by revolutionary changes, but might not otherwise... see it."[193]
For Eastman's middle class, a crisis of cultural authority accompanied economic uncertainty. Parvenu capitalists increasingly repudiated accepted values and community norms, and ruled by brute force. Calls for the extermination of restive workers abounded in the mainstream press. In addition, the whole structure supporting personal identity was crumbling. Historian T. Jackson Lears speaks of a pervasive "weightlessness," a feeling of unreality and a detachment from life, that afflicted large numbers of relatively prosperous individuals.[194] Such disconcerting feelings had numerous causes. As bureaucratic hierarchies replaced small farms and businesses as the predominant form of economic organization, previously autonomous individuals had less freedom to act on their own and work at their own pace. Formerly independent businessmen and professionals became dependent on the goodwill of numerous, anonymous others who constantly and silently judged them on the basis of vague and shifting criteria.[195] Those ensconced in corporate hierarchies became more sedentary and less active, enjoying less security even if more comfort. The decline of religion and its transcendental meanings undergirding life and suffering meant that individuals increasingly sought purpose in happiness or fulfillment. As old institutions, practices, and codes disintegrated under the impact of modern life and the city--as migrants from the countryside were increasingly freed from the surveillance of their families and communities--many people experienced cultural shock. Old values no longer corresponded to new realities. Other changes such as the massive new immigration and the transformation of the United States into a world-imperial power changed the very basis of America's identity.
This was not, to be sure, a change from "character" to "personality" as conceptualized by Warren Susman.[196] Individuals in rural and small-town America were not genuinely autonomous, but rigidly constrained by custom, law, religion, and public opinion. Many people escaped to the cities precisely in search of genuine autonomy. Susman's "character" demanded merely a more rigid and hence predictable form of conformity than "personality," which required a more fluid and adaptable brand. It was precisely the disintegration of the old, fixed standards of behavior that generated so much anxiety.
Eastman courted segments of the middle class by his wholehearted embrace of modernity and his interpretation of cultural and economic change as progress, science, and poetry. He urged that a class in flux and under enormous stress consider themselves builders of a new world rather than as conservators of the old. This reinforced an important part of their experience in the bustling cities full of exciting new technologies. The disintegration of old constraints and values, Eastman assured his readers, was a positive good that could liberate the individual. "Strong minds do not need any religion," he cried. "They are able to bear the responsibility and the labor of thinking and choosing among the values of life anew each morning."[197] Eastman urged that threatened elites embrace the liberating possibilities of their era rather than wallowing in what Lears calls a "therapeutic culture" characterized by narcissism, introspection, and a morbid fixation on personal health and sensual gratification. He harnessed "the cult of experience"--elite impulses towards a richer, fuller, more authentic life--for the highest enterprises of science, poetry, and social revolution, directing it away from Lears's "elusive banality" of denial, escapism, and consumerism into which it often degenerated.
Eastman urged that the new middle class embrace a culture that reflected their experience and seize the new opportunities for freer, unrestricted lives presented by the city. He favored a literature that reflected the realities urban professionals saw around them and a cosmopolitan outlook that made the entire world their province. For example, his feminism was a logical development of companionate marriage, a widespread middle-class ideal. It offered women the freedom possible only in an urbanized, industrialized economy, and proposed that men regard fully equal women as fit companions in the adventure of life. Eastman's concept of socialism as emphasizing primarily individual freedom, self-creation and authenticity rather than brotherhood or equality, also harmonized with middle-class values. However, he changed the economic meaning of freedom from individual proprietorship to collective ownership while expanding the definition of freedom to encompass the total refashioning of individual personality.
Industrialization and urbanization promised everyone a more genuine freedom, Eastman declared. The middle class, newly incorporated into bureaucratic hierarchies, should grasp that freedom on the job through collective action and throughout their lives by individual self-expression. The nature of revolutionary society was not preordained, but would be fashioned by those who made the revolution in accordance with their own sense of self. His own values would potentially win the middle class even as it alienated some workers. Unions were the conservative wing of the socialist movement in many countries. In the United States, they largely opposed socialism, while many workers remained culturally conservative. Despite Eastman's wishes, The Masses was financed mostly by the wealthy and read mostly by an educated elite.[198] A cartoon in the April 1914 issue depicted a top executive peering out of his large picture window to the city below; the caption says, "some day he will understand... that it isn't a vacation he wants--it's revolution." Thus Eastman could earnestly and realistically tell members of the middle class who were dissatisfied with the lives and society: "Your place is in the working-class struggle. Your word is revolution."[199]
One other social development provided some opening for revolutionizing the middle class. Eastman perceived the emergence of a promising new social formation, the intelligentsia, "the ministers, the professors, the literati, the doctors of this and the doctors of that--who profess to, and in some measure actually do, possess a disinterested judgment and a respectability that does not rest upon an economic basis."[200] Individual critics had, of course, existed in the past; but the urban-industrial economy required large numbers of brain workers whose main function was thinking. Previously, those with the leisure and freedom from manual labor necessary for abstract thought had consisted mostly of conservative upholders of established beliefs and institutions such as ministers, college professors, and the most successful businessmen.[201] But Eastman believed that a new critical mass of rootless intellectuals could forge itself into a catalyst for change and a community of dissenters. The new sciences of sociology, anthropology, and psychology were systematizing and institutionalizing critical reflection upon society. The Masses was unique not in its advocacy of cultural revolution--it expressed aspirations widespread in literary and intellectual circles--but in its self-description as a popular magazine of revolutionary socialism that would attract non-socialist readers.
Radical commentators of the day, particularly Emma Goldman, had noted the emergence of an "intellectual proletariat." Goldman included in this group brain workers who worked for low wages under regimented conditions and serviced the new corporate order. Robert Minor more narrowly described it as in those educated above their station--educated individuals with dreams their material realities could only stifle.
The intellectual proletariat is a new and tragic problem in the world. Formerly social protest was a physical reaction, the despair of pinched bellies and weary hands. But now with the infiltration of education has arisen a class of senstive, beauty-loving, thoughtful young people, to whom drudgery is an Inquisition, to whom monotonous day labor is a slow and burning death.... They wish to feel and live now, to blossom with poetry and grow under the light of heaven in their own generation. They do not wish to be President, or a foreman, or a successful salesman or clerk, or otherwise rise out of the lowest caste through lifetimes of sordid striving. They wish to do a little useful hard work every day, then be free for careers of ecstasy and innocence and meditation.... No one heeds them, and even the Revolution is many years away.[202]
Reflecting The Masses' ethos of a total revolution in every sphere of life and in every aspect of human personality, Gold implicitly criticized those who "throw the anger of their thwarted dreaming into merely social movements, like syndicalism and socialism."[203]
The Masses was not, of course, edited or written by intellectual proletarians but by famous men and women who sought a venue for their most intimate creations. However, many people who lacked the creativity, discipline, or luck required for literary and artistic success shared the values of the creative geniuses who comprised The Masses; some of them flocked to Greenwich Village or similar bohemian enclaves. Still others wanted a simulacrum of adventure and rebellion amidst relatively conventional lives. Insurgent and bohemian values, if not lifestyles, spread far beyond the tiny fringe who actually embraced revolution or fled Main Street.
Eastman himself considered everyone who worked for a living as a member of the working class; but he also acknowledged very real chasms within that class. He differentiated proletarians, who sold nothing but their brawn, from the middle class, who worked for wages (called a "salary") but possessed education, skills, supervisory powers, partial autonomy on the job, and higher incomes. The Masses also published articles, particularly by William English Walling, which emphasized class divisions even within a narrowly defined working class--between the skilled, native-born craftsmen organized in the AFL and largely unskilled and unorganized immigrants targeted by the IWW. Walling suggested that the most oppressed members of both the proletariat and the professions might unite against their more privileged breathren.[204] Such speculation blurred the "objective" definition of class based solely on relationships to the means of production and introduced a vital cultural component. Recognizing this cultural aspect of class, Eastman contested for the allegiance of a large middle group by stressing both its economic interests and its own distinctive cultural values and hopes.
Eastman hoped that he could win this new middle class for proletarian and cultural revolution. His hopes were based partly on reality: the middle class was adventuresome, rebellious, and critical of existing institutions. The Progressive party and The New Republic were among their signature creations. Eastman criticized such bourgeois reformers as "literary revolutionists," "emotional idealists," and "sentimental rebels" while urging that they become "scientific revolutionists." In April 1917, just as American entry into the Great Carnage was about to destroy the organized Left, Eastman contrasted the much different fates of reform and revolution in the United States. "No measure in politics and no movement in industry is having the least success in increasing the proportion of wealth or leisure or liberty which falls to the working class" he lamented. "Their small liberty is, in fact, cut down steadily by the growth of militarism under the menace of national war..... On the other hand all the reforms which do not touch the system of caste are proceeding with a velocity the world has never seen.... Any idea which will serve the interests of people in both classes catches around the world like fire. And many of these ideas, though they are not revolutionary in motive," did "indirectly and ultimately" aid "the chances of the working-class struggle."[205] Eastman hoped to carry the progressive middle class beyond such reforms and to the proletarian revolution they advanced. Educated, relatively autonomous brain workers could, he believed, materially aid the industrial proletariat by publicizing their wrongs among influential people hitherto unaware of them and by raising funds for class-war prisoners. (Eastman himself was received at the White House before his antiwar position made him an outcast in official circles). By proclaiming the truth even on street corners, he and his cohorts could contest capitalist hegemony and mass media distortions. The educated middle class also offered workers the cachet of elite support, which oppressed groups often find indispensable for mounting their own revolt. Most workers may not read literature, but they benefit if respected authors legitimize their cause with their support. Eastman spoke widely and was well-received by strikers and other workers; leaders and the rank-and-file of many rebel causes--feminists, blacks, IWWs--respected him and wrote for his publications. He also publicized labor's wrongs to a large audience that would have been otherwise uninterested, and who would never have read a strictly working-class periodical such as The Industrial Worker.
Eastman did exaggerate the independence of this new group, which remained directly or indirectly dependent upon the large capitalists. He also underestimated the extent to which the new middle class would have a class interest and an ideology of its own, distinct from that of both the industrialists and the workers. He vastly miscalculated the degree to which even the liberal members of the middle class would truly ally themselves with the working class. Many historians have perceived a genuine divergence between managerial (middle class) and democratic (working class) progressives. At one point he realized this. Middle-class progressives, he said, could not learn that "politics is a play of interests and not ideas," and that those advocating change must align themselves with an insurgent class rather than preaching vapid ideals. "But to learn that lesson would involve a revolution in their entire habit of thought and feeling. Most of them are too old. But we can teach things to their children...."[206] Nevertheless, Eastman's appeal to the new middle class as a potential champion of economic and cultural revolution nevertheless constituted a realistic and thoughtful engagement with the social realities of his time.
Eastman was correct that the new middle class, or a portion of it, was ripe for part of his message--in particular, aspects of his countercultural living and cultural revolution. In the decades following the suppression of The Masses social revolution totally failed; yet many of the cultural changes Eastman championed have triumphed to an extent almost unimaginable in the heyday of The Masses. Cultural change has occurred far more readily than social change, even though it was equally ferociously resisted.
Countercultural lifestyles (what we may loosely call bohemianism) entered the mainstream as individuals and small groups tried experimental lifestyles on a voluntary, piecemeal, and often temporary basis. These lifestyles were not adopted by a majority at one specific time, but won popularity slowly and in forms compatible with important aspects of old practices. Eastman's own experience suggests this; despite the problems he encountered in The Masses community and in his relationships with women (and, as we will discuss below, his friendship with black poet Claude McKay), Eastman achieved more of his own values than he would have had he waited until a majority agreed with him. Less daring individuals could retain more of the traditional forms of life while altering their content; companionate marriage was a contemporary example of this. But such innovative, experimental lifestyles disproportionately benefitted elites who possessed the leisure, education, and wealth to seize new opportunities, and who associated new lifestyles with rising incomes and new products. The middle class, although buffeted by change, usually benefits from it; its members often see innovation as a positive good they can control. They see change not so much as an externally imposed threat, as workers often do, but as manageable progress. The costs are imposed on the less powerful. In the 1920's the advertising industry consciously refashioned values to sell consumer products; but it simultaneously reassured consumers that the new values were fully compatible with the old.[207] The corporations, of course, were far richer than the radicals; a single advertising campaign might cost more than The Masses' budget for an entire year.
Elites can risk cultural and lifestyle change because they possess a respectability and power that rests on their social and economic position. The downtrodden own little except their sense of cultural identity, which undergird their communities and personalities. Conduct that would disgrace a worker might glamorize a member of the elite. Behavior disreputable in the subjugated groups might seem au courant among prestigous elites, who impart their own status to new modes of living and change the very meaning of respectability simply by embracing new lifestyles.[208] Self-confidence facilitates innovation and defiance of conventional notions of respectability. Being avant-garde can bolster the position of the elite; the very fact that they can flout conventions with impunity is but another token of their power. Genuine aristocrats whose position is established and guaranteed by birth are often notoriously flamboyant, idiosyncratic, contemptuous of public opinion, and experimental in lifestyle compared to the repressed and straight-laced bourgeoisie, whose social position is defined by wealth and conduct (both of which are far more precarious and malleable than birth). In the United States, many subordinate groups (workers, African Americans, women) have remained notoriously conservative in values, conduct, religion, and morality. Outcast groups, as Henry May has observed, must break into the dominant respectable culture before they can think of breaking out of it.[209]
In the 1920s consumer capitalism fostered alternative conceptions of the self and more liberated lifestyles, simultaneously taming subversive ideals to sell products. As the relatively fixed and traditional life and value-system of the village collapsed, members of the middle class redefined themselves by their possessions. They were encouraged to refashion themselves according to what was purportedly their own chosen image, but was in fact most often a new set of values imposed by corporate capitalism. Offered a dizzling array of consumer choices, however, many of the well-to-do demanded at least some opportunity for genuine self-expression and self-creation based on the fullness of the human spirit rather than on mere products. Encouraged to value an individualism defined by purchases, some professionals demanded more. The prosperous tourists who crowded Greenwich Village in search of a risk-free, ersatz, and effortless liberation earned the contempt of real writers and bohemians, but nonetheless illustrated an epochal change in cultural values.
Eastman himself was not, however, the avatar of the consumer culture or the frivolous, irresponsible bohemianism of the twenties. This notion, used by the Communist party to slander Eastman in the twenties and thirties, has ironically found uncritical acceptance among academic historians completely unsympathetic to radicalism of any sort. But Eastman's version of "the cult of experience" genuinely subverted consumer capitalism. For Eastman, the life of poetic realization required leisure, education, and a detachment from worldly cares; the pursuit of money, power, and status signified its death. Science was the praxis of revolution rather than an engineering technique for making a better mousetrap. Poetry, science, human relationships, the enjoyment of literature and art, the fullness of life, the cause of revolution--every activity and state of being valued by Eastman undermined the pursuit of money and consumer goods. Through all of his intellectual peregrinations, Eastman disdained "the horrors of a full-time job"; as he knew, the living of life and the making of a living rarely synchronized. Many intellectuals originally critical of consumer capitalism became its apologists and helped domesticate subversive ideas into the adjuncts of corporate capital and state power. Eastman and his ideals, however, remained independent of capital and its state.[210]
A second kind of cultural change, what we have called cultural revolution, has also progressed since Eastman's heyday. Blacks, women, workers, and to an extent lesbians and gays, have won a much greater social acceptability and a formal, legal equality in American society. Yet the incorporation of these groups into the body politic and into American culture has been unaccompanied by the larger economic changes that would give authentic meaning to their legal equality. In many respects the condition of these groups has markedly deteriorated in recent years. American capitalism has proven capable of formally incorporating formerly outcast groups without changing its basic structure. Wealth and power remain as thoroughly concentrated in as few hands as ever. Tens of millions of Americans--disproportionately female and minority--lack adequate food and medical care while millions of others have attained wealth "beyond the dreams of avarice." Unions have been effectively destroyed in the private sector; workers are increasingly poor, unorganized, and demoralized. A coherent resistance to these atrocities, such as has existed in most periods of American history, is nowhere in evidence.
Incorporation of hitherto excluded groups into capitalist society could have contradictory effects depending on how it occurs. Integration can bolster the system by taming dangerous groups, focusing struggles of the dispossessed upon cultural issues and the "politics of identity" rather than on class conflict, and forcing workers to fight among themselves for artificially scarce resources such as jobs and income. Under different conditions it can embolden insurgents with success, prepare them for further assaults on privilege, and, by destroying old self-definitions based on race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and nationality, encourage workers to see themselves as members of a class rather than as members of culturally-defined groups. The actual meaning of reform depends on its context, on what else is happening in society. Most reforms can be achieved in many ways, and the distribution of benefits and costs depends upon the specifics.
In the United States, the incorporation of excluded groups has had conservative effects because the tiny minority of property-owning elites has largely determined that context. The progressive bourgeoisie fosters or tolerates reforms because it feels that it will gain from them. As Eastman often reiterated, enlightened self-interest motivates progressive capitalists. The elites define the terms of debate, its vocabulary and its limits. If they cannot forestall a change, they can usually determine its form and impact. Their control of the economy and thus of the political state ensures this. Of all the possible ways of making any particular reform, the elites will chose that most advantageous to them; the insurgents, grateful for any change and incapable of really forcing changes against the intransigent opposition of the ruling class, predictably acquiesce.
The incorporation of blacks, women, and gays into the American workforce has not disturbed the profits on capital. It has benefitted primarily the elites of those groups--those who have assimilated middle-class values and want simple inclusion in the system rather than fundamental change. Social integration is thus in its way conservative, and has strengthened the existing order by including potential dissidents and affording capitalists new reservoirs of both consumers and exploited labor. The costs of inclusion are imposed upon the less educated and less powerful of both the old culturally-defined dominant group and the newly included ones. For example, poor and working-class whites lose most by the admission of blacks to the workforce; elite whites are scarcely affected except for gaining a new source of labor and an improved public image in an increasingly international economy. Meanwhile, huge masses of blacks, having no social function (even that of exploitable labor), are regarded as virtual untermenschen, labelled as pathological and disfunctional "super-predators," and demonized as promiscuous, lazy, drug-addicted, and welfare-dependent. Many blacks are even worse off than they were in the days of segregation. Middle-class blacks have fled the urban ghettoes, abandoning an underclass that is poorer, more vulnerable, and more demoralized than ever. Poor whites, buffetted by the whirlrwind cultural change fostered by technological advances and globalization, and blaming economic dislocation and decline on importunate minorities, provide steady recruits for conservative business and political elites who use cultural anxieties to throttle unions and lower wages. Racial integration, therefore, has perhaps benefitted the capitalists who own and rule the United States more than any other group.
The feminist movement has had similar effects. Working class families increasingly need two incomes to survive; women's "liberation" into low-paying, dead-end jobs (with a second shift awaiting most wives at home) has not benefitted them as much as it has professional women, who have genuinely gained new opportunities. Even for middle-class women, however, "liberation" often means the drudgery and wage-slavery of the old male role rather than the poetic life that Eastman envisioned. Women, as well as men, work longer hours (Americans on average work a whole month more per year than they did twenty years ago) for less pay. Professional women earn substantially less than men and encounter difficulty supporting a middle-class lifestyle on their own. Thus the problem of genuinely equal relationships among the economically unequal sexes persists. As millions of women are left without well-paying jobs or the support of a husband, increasing numbers end up in grinding poverty, either at servile and oppressive jobs, as welfare recipients, or on the streets. Meanwhile, most men have seen their wages plummet because of bipartisan policies on trade, taxation, and the economy; working-class men have lost their cherished roles as "protectors" and "providers," and consider themselves worse off in every way. The ruling elites insure that women are blamed for this catastrophe.
White male workers have organized, if at all, against those below them on the social scale rather than against the elites who truly control their destiny. The inclusion of blacks and women has intensified the competion of workers against each other, as individuals and as members of culturally defined groups, on the job market and in the political arena. (More accurately, this competition now threatens white male workers as well as everyone else.) Americans, especially workers, have a group and collective consciousness in almost every area of life except the economic, where they see themselves as individuals. American workers usually identify with their race, gender, ethnic group, religion, and nationality, but not with their class; they act as group-defined persons in their neighborhoods and in the voting booth, but as individuals on the shop floor. They are anti-class collectivists. They cherish their ethnic, racial, gender, and national identities as their only secure possessions. These identities provide security, a sense of meaning and belonging, an illusory sense of mastery, and a compensation for the degradations of work and leisure. It is precisely because these identities confer a sense of power (and, for white men, some semblance of it), that workers hold onto them so tenaciously, whereas the elites with real power can dispense with the artificial trappings provided by cultural identities when it profits them.
Eastman, however, insisted that economic freedom must underlie all other forms of liberty, he insisted that class-conscious revolution, he said, was an indispensable ingredient in the success of any other social improvement. Contravening Marxist orthodoxy, he denied that economic liberty was sufficient, and ceaselessly maintained that class-conscious workers must strive for the freedom of women, of blacks, immigrants, and all the nations of the earth. He demanded that every individual attain the freedom to realize life vividly, to become a poet, to formulate his or her own life and personality, even as he aided culturally-defined liberation movements by oppressed groups.
Because Eastman viewed proletarian revolution as foundational, and because he sought to win an educated, middle-class adherence to the cause of the workers, his ethos could not long survive the demise of the IWW and the Socialist party, and the flight of middle-class progressives from radical flirtations of any sort. Eastman always insisted that only a class-conscious workers' movement could hope to attract any large following among the middle class. He could not fulfill his self-appointed role as helpful auxiliary in the movements of the oppressed unless these other groups developed solid, self-active, autonomous organizations that first mobilized their own constituencies. Echoing Debs, Eastman insisted that neither individuals, nor a party, nor well-wishing outsiders, could save the workers (or by implication any other group); they must save themselves. Yet Eastman upheld his core values for decades after the demise of The Masses and its succesor, The Liberator, and turned conservative only after long experience with an official "revolutionary movement" that caricatured, repudiated and destroyed everything that the lyrical left had valued.
Eastman was that rarity, an intellectual who did not apotheosize Mind, Intellect, or the intellectuals. He always said that the people, and not the intellectuals, should rule. His support for revolutionary change--whether the IWW, the Socialist party, the feminist movement, black liberation, or, later, the early Communists and then of Trotsky--was always critical support, the only kind a true intellectual should offer. He never succumbed to orthodoxies or truckled to power. Eventually he found himself an outcast from a revolutionary movement that demanded such subservience.
In the values he espoused and the constituency he wooed, Eastman represented an essential component of any successful revolutionary movement. Other essential components, however, did not materialize on the necessary scale, or were crushed. In many ways it was not the working class that held the future in its hands in 1912, or represented the wave of the future; it was the new middle class of clerks, managers, professionals, and "brain workers" generally which has been the fastest-growing class in the twentieth century. Eastman's appeal to that class represented a thoughtful engagement with some of the central social forces of his time. War, repression, and revolution tested Eastman's mettle and challenged his understanding but merely energized his commitment and reaffirmed his fundamental values. The maelstrom of bloodbath abroad and Red Scare at home shattered Eastman's world, but not his world-view.