Communism: The Dream that Failed - Research Group Meetings

The Group, having completed its intensive research on Karl Marx the man, turned to the allure of twentieth-century communism, primarily in America. The December 10th meeting raised a large number of questions along these lines, including: Why were so many people drawn to communism in the 1930s and 1940s? What did so many see in Marx and the Soviet experiment? Why were so many seduced by Stalinism? Why did they strive to justify Russian communism despite the crimes of Stalin? Why in the end did almost all of them become disillusioned? What made some people willing slaves of the Marxist movement? Why there was such a sharp dichotomy between what people said and did? Why did some find it to be the best-of-all-worlds to be a capitalist-Marxist? Why did some people become unconscious hypocrites? Why do many Freudians maintain a Marxist man-is-good position in public? There was a tendency to return to the questions of what people wanted from Marx and what in him dazzled so many.

Many different answers were provided for all of these questions. What follows are only a few. Among Marxists envy was a powerful emotional motivation. Jews drawn to Marxism had a powerful expectation it would spell the end of anti-Semitism. To young American leftists in the 1930s and 1940s the appeals of communism were an intellectual cover for sexual freedom, belief in a perfect country in Russia, a sense of intellectual and moral superiority to bourgeois society, and a martyrology as well as justifiable aggression against the “class enemy” and those who did not agree with them. There was also the special sense of being part of a secret society and a heroic masochistic element in Marxism. These appeals were extraordinarily powerful to many people. The perfect society Marxists sought need not be real, but it was in their heads. The belief system short-circuited the superego. On a personal level it helped some adjust to America. Immigrants and children of immigrants were the first generation to go to college where they felt very uneasy. They wanted to transform America into a perfect society like the Russia of their fantasy. Humans blind themselves for the dream, and this impulse among Marxists was quite strong. There was the right fit between what the Soviets offered and what many aspiring intellectuals needed. In the Marxist mind opposites were in absolute coexistence.

This participant depicted communism as a means of Americanization for a largely immigrant membership. At the most extreme, in the late 1920s 90 percent of the American Communist Party was in the sections speaking foreign languages. I also suggested there are both capitalist and socialist inclinations in all people. The capitalist impulse comes from the two year old in all of us saying “ME!” “ME!” “ME!” “I WANT WHAT I WANT WHEN I WANT IT.” (Note that the capitalist impulse starts out as pure id.) The socialist impulse comes from three sources: from our recollection of getting according to our need in the womb, from our mother saying “share with your siblings and playmates” and from our envy of others and fear of others’ envy. The first socialist society was in the womb.

Some individual Marxists were examined. Joe Slovo, who immigrated from Lithuania to South Africa at age nine, never lost his belief in Marxism. It was what inspired him to take on and have some success as a communist enemy of Africaner apartheid and ally of Nelson Mandela. The late Irving Howe was suggested as another example of an individual attracted to Marxism. He was a professional socialist who had the applause of the world. Howe’s first language was Yiddish, yet he became, for awhile, somewhat anti-Semitic. In the end he held to liberalism and socialism while becoming quite successful.

The January 28th meeting represented, in my view, the Forum small group seminars at their best. In it, a member probed with great emotional and intellectual honesty the origins of his attraction to Marxism and the reasons he, as a very young man, rejected the Soviet Union version of communism as not really Marxist.

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Abstracts

“Swartout’s Stress Reactions and an Early Indian War”

Roeloff Swartout, first Sheriff of Wiltwyck (Kingston, N.Y.) and a relative of the author, played a crucial role in the Second Esopus War (1665). As part of a biographical study of this migrant from The Netherlands to New Amsterdam, the author is examining the ways in which earlier trauma preconditioned him to help provoke this early Indian war.

The presenter is a trustee of The Holland Society of New York and has recently given up academic appointments to devote his time to writing. Most of his books have been on obsession and creativity.

“The Non-Rationality of Nationalism”

See our December issue for a brief article by our presenter, Lee Shneidman of Adelphi University, on the non-rationality of nationalism.

“Love and Work in Margaret Mead”

Margaret Mead (1901-78) was an innovator in the human sciences whose special field of interest was psychological anthropology.

At age 23, she went half-way around the world by herself to conduct her still famous study of Samoan adolescence.          She was a pioneer in gender studies, and was one of the first to propose that gender is a social construct. By the age of 50, she had become a well-known popularizer of anthropology.   She married and divorced     three                 times    and      enjoyed intimate relationships with men and women. She raised her daughter with the aid of a surrogate mother in a cooperative household from which she was often absent.       Yet, Mead’s autobiographical writings are strikingly unreflective about all of these unusual choices. A reading of documents regarding her family background offers a means to explore this extraordinary personality and her work.

The presenter is an historian and documentary film maker working on a book and film on this extraordinary anthropologist.

“Towards a Psychobiography of Linus Pauling”

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In a forthcoming biography, Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science, Ted Goertzel examines the psychological factors which explain Linus Pauling’s (1901-1994) varied and seemingly incongruous life history. He was awarded Nobel prizes for chemistry and for peace. He got a hostile U.S. government to see the harmfulness of nuclear testing and a closed-minded Soviet government to realize that they were corrupting science with dogma. At the peak of his prestige and renown Pauling shocked his friends and admirers by launching a crusade to prove that Vitamin C was a cure for the common cold and a preventative and treatment for all kinds of diseases, including cancer. While expecting to get a third Nobel award for medicine, he went from scientific hero to lonely crank.

In the book, using original data gathered by his own parents in the 1960s, Goertzel probes Pauling’s childhood experiences. He also