View all notes
When I ask her if she feels she sacrificed her life to the Communist Party, Maggie’s face loses its now-blurred appearance, the blue eyes clear and spark. She leans forward on the couch, one hand on her hip, her mouth breaking into her irrepressible smile, and she says: “Sacrificed my life! Of course not. Hon, we were in the world-changing business. You can’t get much better than that. What’s better? Money? Position? Are you kidding?”
Immediately, she entered into a state of conflict from which she never seemed to emerge: when she was playing the piano she felt guilty because of all the people starving to death in the world, and when she was at Party meetings she felt uneasy because she knew she wasn’t really very good at being a Communist and longed to be back at her piano. She couldn’t talk about Beethoven with anyone in the Party, and she couldn’t put the Party out of her mind when she was listening to Beethoven. The split in her hovered on a scale of evenly balanced tension. Then the scale tipped: she gave up music.
sad
“And, of course, you mustn’t forget, the life was exciting, very exciting. We felt—he did, and I did, too—like we had our hands on ‘the throttle of history,’ as we used to say. That’s an extraordinary feeling. When Hitler rose to power and all those lost, floundering liberals were wandering around saying ‘How could it happen in cultured, civilized Germany?’ we knew. That was a tremendous comfort. We were inside the circle of light, unlike those poor benighted others in the dark outside. They had to contend with the existential dilemma of a crumbling civilization. Not us. That, of course, was the other side of the coin. Not one of us knew what the hell was going on inside ourselves, but we all could explain the world.
“But there is one thing about those days I am sure of, one memory I have that sticks like glue. I began haunting the movies on Forty-Second Street like every other miserable unemployed bum in New York in those days. I never even looked at the marquee to see what was playing. I simply bought a ticket every day and plunged into that fabled darkness. Then not only was ‘realife’ suspended, but very soon I began feeling wonderfully anesthetized. One day a Russian movie came on the screen. It was Eisenstein’s Strike. Inside of ten minutes I felt something electrifying was happening on that screen. And inside of twenty minutes I realized I was in the presence of a new world, a place where some new sense of human life was stirring. And it stirred me, it stirred me deeply. I came out of that movie feeling alive for the first time in months, maybe years, maybe my whole life.
“I went back to City, walked into the library, and got out every book I could find on contemporary Russia. Then I calmly walked out of the school, went back to my room, holed up, and began reading. I don’t think I came out of that room for a week.
Rindzer falls silent. Glances out his window. Plays with the venetian blind behind him. Looks around his book-lined office. Then he says:
“So for me there’s no politics anymore. The years when I was a Communist, bar none, were the best of my life. The relation for me between the personal and the historical was intense, deeply felt, fully realized. Now, I live an entirely personal life, removed from the larger world. I feel no interest in anything beyond my work. I work hard, I’m proud of the work I do, I consider it an obligation to take as much responsibility for the medical profession as I can, but that’s it. The world is smaller, colder, darker by far for me than it was when I was a Communist. . . . That’s a funny thing to say here, isn’t it?” He laughs, waving his hand toward the brilliant Arizona afternoon. “I’ve made my peace with my life, but I have no illusions that I live a life of larger meaning.”
“Marxism stirred me deeply,” Grace says, leaning back in one of her two chairs, crossing her long, blue-jeaned legs on her low table. “It struck chords in me as deep as the remembrance of New England. It transformed the memory of those isolated human efforts, made my parents’ lives a thing of beauty. Simply understanding their lives through Marxism lent them a beauty in my eyes. Clarity, purpose, seeing them in the larger design, that was beautiful to me. The act of understanding was an act of creation. The discovery through new materials, so to speak, of the hidden content.
“Marxism was the transforming stuff, the new color, the new space, the new texture, the one that brought to the surface the life until then obscured. Do you know what that means? That’s what the artist waits a lifetime for, that newness, that particular discovery that catalyzes inner sight, makes you ‘see’ like you’ve never seen before. . . .
The afternoon is fading, the brilliant north light vanishing from the studio. Grace and I replace our coffees with scotch. We remain silent for a bit in the gathering darkness. Then Grace lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, and says:
“I guess I’m an old-fashioned ideologue. For me, discipline is freedom, ideology is specific, organization is crucial. Without these tools, these structural means, I don’t know how to perform or produce. I sense that there is a new world out there, a new and important idea forming itself, perhaps even a new step in the human struggle is being taken with this cry of ‘consciousness.’ I sense it, but I don’t feel it. It doesn’t speak to me in my gut. It doesn’t give me new sight. . . . So I make my quilts and my pots. Here in the studio I fashion a kind of structure I understand and within which I can function. And that’s it. That’s how an ideologue without an ideology goes on.”
“I’ll tell you what a Communist is,” Lanzetti said. “An organizer goes into a factory. He works with the men, begins giving them leaflets, points out what’s happening at work, suggests relationships the workers didn’t see before. A worker becomes interested in what the organizer is saying. He begins coming to a few meetings. He begins to read. He gets a little larger sense of things. He begins to think about capitalism. He learns about slavery and feudalism. He sees a pattern to this thing. He starts to feel history. Now he begins to see his life not only in terms of the corporation, or the sonofabitch over him, or just this lousy life that keeps pissing on him. He sees a system of oppression older than God and he feels himself part of something bigger than he ever knew existed. It eases his heart, gives him courage and stamina, he’s politicized.
“All this time he belongs to the CP. Now, let’s say he moves. Drops out of meetings, gets to a new town. Delays looking up the Party. They don’t go looking for him. He doesn’t pay his dues, he’s dropped from the rolls, he’s no longer in the Party. Time passes. He doesn’t feel like going to meetings. Times change. He drifts away. Now, you tell me, what is that man? I’ll tell you what he is. That man is a Communist! And for the rest of his life he’s a Communist. Wherever some shitty thing is happening and he’s anywhere near it he is going to respond in a certain way and act on a certain understanding. And men like him are everywhere. These are the Communists, these are my people, my children, my own. . . .
While the established pundits struggled to make sense of the world, a new cohort of activists and writers emerged with a scavenged explanation: class conflict. The reason no one could figure out if America was in crisis or out of one is because its effects were uneven, and by design. This was heresy in a twenty-first-century America, where socialism had been disproven. We were taught to locate ourselves near the end of history's long arc toward justice, a "You are here" dot sliding along the asymptote between the way things are and the best we could hope for them to be. And yet, stuff kept happening.
American institutions are used to measuring risks only to bury them under a pile of equations and hedge bets that are supposed to synthesize certainty. The risks one accepts to engage in acts of resistance can't be offset, but if it's any consolation, the risk management models haven't worked very well anyway, certainly not for carbon emissions or the housing market. And if we're not shielded from those risks - ecological catastrophe, economic collapse, etc. - the way we thought we were, then the equation changes. There is no safe baseline for comparison. Life becomes a question of what kind of risk we'd rather take: the frying pan or the fire.
Count my vote for the fire. I can think of no life more cowardly and dishonorable than one spent shoving and piling other, poorer people between me and the rising tide. Compared to the certain knowledge that that is what is required from Americans in the twenty-first century, what is there to risk? Status quo. "Out of the frying pan, into the fire" makes the first step to liberation sound like a pointless exercise, but there's no other route on offer, and the alternative could easily be just as bad depending on who you are, even in the short term. Better to risk it.
i like the bravado, and i also like how this is similar to a passage from my own book lol