Workshop 4

HOW TO UNDERSTAND AND INTERNALIZE THE FAILURE OF THE OLD LEFT AND THE NEW LEFT TO HUMANIZE SOCIETY, IN ORDER NOT TO REPEAT THE SAME MISTAKES?

 

I feel an affinity with people who struggle to oppose political injustices and make everyone’s lives better. I feel deep empathy with those who want to be politically active but do not see what they can do and how to do it without compromising their integrity and values. To them—my closest friends and associates throughout life—I bring here an alternative for politically active living that is not as far remote from what would be considered sane by social science standards as the mindset of current “mainstream” political activism.                                                           

The alternative is truly revolutionary for both active members of radical parties and organizations and good-intentioned would-be activists who do not know the way to social change that would not fail to make a difference or degenerate into power corruption and violence.

Before I go into specifics, I ought to justify my conviction that the past and current trends of political change are doomed to fail. To change the political reality, they must change—we must change.

I have lived through the Old Left and the New Left in my lifetime. Here is an example of each:

 

THE OLD LEFT

"Who would the righteous not assist for the sake of righteousness?

What medicine tastes too bad for the dying?

What vile deed would you not commit to root out vileness?

If you could finally change the world,

what would you be too good for?

Who are you?

Sink in the filth

Embrace the butcher, but

Change the world: it needs it!"

 

 

This poem by Bertolt Brecht brilliantly exemplifies the moral basis, the direction, and the means of action of the Old Left. Brecht is considered one of the best, most creative playwrights of the last century. He himself “embraced the butcher” in the last years of his life. He left Germany after Hitler came to power and, after World War II, left the United States and returned to East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (DDR), which was in the Soviet orbit behind the “Iron Curtain.” It was the DDR that in its constitution inscribed the words "Exploitation of man-by-man is hereby abolished for all time". Then it incarcerated its people behind barbed-wire walls and shot those who attempted to escape. Brecht did not live to see the Berlin Wall tumble down.

The poem embodies the basic doctrine of the Old Left that the world must be changed, the change must be revolutionary by war, and the goal justifies the means. If Brecht remained faithful to his resolve to support the Soviet regime, he, the righteous man, must have seen the vile tyranny of the DDR as a means used “for the sake of righteousness.” Righteousness he understood as defending the cause of those who “could finally” change the world that absolutely needed it—and did. The justification for what was called the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was that the Russian Revolution did not change the whole world but only part of it. The still-unchanged capitalist world was up to destroy the new “socialist” world, so as long as the imminent threat was there, the dictatorial butchery and the sinking in filth were justified.

 Brecht, like millions of righteous good-intentioned people, fell victim to his talent of weaving beautiful tapestries of verbal threads while forgetting that they are human beings who would have to make them real. He committed that “intellectual sin” Aldous Huxley so clearly described as quoted earlier, “indulging instead in oversimplification, overgeneralization, and over-abstraction.”

Brecht could not possibly know if the “medicine” for “rooting our vileness” he prescribed to the dying man was not poison. Exterminating vileness in the world is not possible because “vileness” exists in the hearts and minds of normal people. A violent revolution (“butcher”) can kill people, not change them. A person who is not afflicted by over-abstraction can never find themselves in the situation Brecht put them: having to decide to “sink in filth”—commit vile deeds—or else miss the opportunity to root out vileness. This dilemma would not present itself to a person who knows that “power to the people” means that some leaders will have the power to control those people and that power corrupts, and there is no good reason to believe the victorious revolutionary leaders will use their dictatorial power less villainously.  

Communism attracted many great good-intentioned people like Brecht, the French philosopher of existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre, the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, the eminent British playwright George Bernard Shaw, the great French novelist Romain Rolland, the African-American writer Richard Wright, the world-famous singer and activist Paul Robeson, and many more. In the reality of the millions killed in World War I and the terribly exploited and impoverished masses, the vision of future equality with no rich and poor and the international brotherhood of men of all races attracted millions of good-intentioned people. They could not conceive that leaders of the movement that so strongly condemned the inequities of the old world could be blind to their imperative to be different once they come to power. 

On the Brechtian idea of “embracing the butcher” for a better future, Bertrand Russell argued, “Since the distant consequences of actions are more uncertain than the immediate consequences, it is seldom justifiable to embark on any policy on the ground that, though harmful in the present, it will be beneficial in the long run.” Russell is a good case in point because while he is remembered as a philosopher, in contrast to most big names in that field, he was not abstract-minded. His philosophy strongly focused on real people; their principal motivation; their real drives and instincts; and their relentless quest for power. His purpose in evaluating philosophical and political ideas was one: their contributing to human happiness or misery. For Marxists, the fundamental concept in social science was Das Kapital, money. Russel knew better:

 

"The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. It is only by realizing that love of power is the cause of the activities that are important in social affairs that history, whether ancient or modern, can be rightly interpreted. . . . Equal cooperation is much more difficult than despotism, and much less in line with instinct."

 

Russell had a conversation with Lenin in 1920, and he minded him as a person, not just his philosophy or ideology. On that meeting, he wrote, “When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poor peasants against the richer ones, ‘and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha! ha! ha!’ His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.”

In sum, the Old Left failed miserably to “root out vileness” and “change the world” because, first and foremost, it did not have the faintest idea that to correct the iniquities of the old world, one must put an end to Psychological Exploitation, over-abstraction being its main venue. Without it, the human reality of exploitation by power and control is bound to prove right John Kenneth Galbraith’s saying “Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true.”

 

THE NEW LEFT

The mindset of the New Left was not different from that of the Old Left. What was different was that the New Left did not come to power; it could disintegrate peacefully in Western democracies. The following clipping from the Liberation, magazine of the American New Left, is the evidence I hold to justify my present project of offering you an alternative.

 

"The women’s movement experience pushed us into some fruitful struggling against our competitive upbringing, but the old ways are hard dying. Correct-lining, snap judgments and labeling make us lose the exploration of real differences in a haze of rhetoric, personal attack and counterattack. When we’re preoccupied with our fear of being labeled, our ability to think critically gets suspended".

       "Right\wrong thinking impedes critical thinking and creativity. I am sad at how often I have seen this dynamic play itself out in discussions. Marx, or Third World revolutionaries, or the Panthers or some other authority is defined as “Right.” Anyone who questions what the authority says is at best “wrong” and at worst “counterrevolutionary.” The discussion degenerates into a biblical exegesis, with different sides swapping quotes and impressions.  Facts and experiences that don’t fit “the line” are ignored. Real differences are obscured in barrages of rhetoric, while new events are jammed into old categories. So much for our ability to respond creatively to changing conditions."

—Betty Doerr and Vicki Legion, “Letter to a Movement,” Liberation, July–August 1974.

 

Having read it, I decided to do all I could so that experiences such as these will nevermore be the fate of good-intentioned social activists. Thirty years later, I met Vicki Legion and found that nothing of political consequence was left of her youthful revolutionary zeal. In considering alternatives to interpersonal dynamics in political organizations, I looked into applied behavioral science for ways to prevent, as much as possible, correct-lining, snap judgments, labeling, party-lining, barrages of rhetoric, and the rest.