Communism and the Left (Page 7)

SUSAN SONTAG

The speech I gave at Town Hall has now flushed out a fascinating array of responses. Furious to find that the dreadful Soho News printed a taped--and cut--version of my speech (after I'd refused to give them the text and told them I was publishing it elsewhere), I am glad to be printed in The Nation. In their introduction, the editors write as if The Nation chose me, but It is also I who chose to have my speech in The Nation. Even Aryeh Neier cannot forbear sanctimoniously pointing out that he has expressed anti-Communist views in The Nation but would not care to have them appear in the Reader's Digest. Well, does he imagine that I feel differently?

Most of the respondents say that the issue I have raised is not a problem, or that it is a problem already dealt with. I think it is a problem, and take as further evidence of that the anger I have aroused, and the low quality of all but two of the responses. Singer complains that he has crossed the ocean for nothing and belabors me, in true apparatchik fashion, with the suspicion that I may not be of working-class origin. Hollinger, stretched out with an ice pack on his forehead, calls it much ado about nothing. Andrew Kopkind, the noted disco expert of the 1970s, reminisces about our good old days in Hanoi in 1968, and observes that truth and justice proceed "dialectically." Diana Trilling welcomes me to the ranks of her anti-Communists (thanks, but no thanks), and quarrels with me because I do not find Reagan "sincere." While most of my respondents profess to find banal homilies or a defection to reaction (plus a subscription to the Reader's Digest) in my plea for intellectual honesty, she finds "the weary rhetoric of Communist invective." (Trilling's response is the most mind-boggling of all.) The responses of Aryeh Neier and Christopher Hitchens are the only ones that I can take seriously, and I thank them for their courteous and thoughtful comment.

Daniel Singer, David Hollinger, Philip Green and Philip Pochoda insist on their "good" Communism. But the necessity of liberation struggles and the virtues of the Italian Communist Party are strictly irrelevant to what I was saying. (When I talk politics with friends in Italy who are in the party, I usually find myself in large agreement with them. They talk like social democrats; so do--am--I.) My argument is about countries in which a Communist--that is, a Leninist--party has taken power and rules. The fact that every one of these countries is a tyranny that oppresses workers and corrupts intellectual life and free inquiry seems not to have led Singer, Green, Hollinger and Pochoda to draw any conclusions about Communism as a system. It has me.

I do not find it any evidence of the virtues of the Communist tyrannies of Eastern Europe that they inspire heroic, unsuccessful revolts (1956, 1968, 1980-81). Unlike Green, I believe that "the violent suppression of organized labor" is not a feature that distinguishes the regimes of, say, Argentina and Chile from those of, say, Eastern Europe, but is, rather, a perfect description of what goes on, more intelligently, more systematically, in Communist countries. Neither the ruling elites nor the enslaved and disaffected people of Eastern Europe can be called "Marxist"; and if and when these oppressed manage to overthrow their tyrants, it will not, I fear, be to embrace an alternative of our liking. What is brewing in Eastern Europe is not democratic socialism. The centrality of a particularly fervent Catholicism to Solidarity is not an accident or an instance of cultural lag; and, in Russia, among those who are not cynics or merely demoralized, new converts to religious fundamentalism outnumber the liberals and democratic socialists a thousand to one. Green does not understand the corrupting effects of decades of Communist despotism, and of Communism's ideological bankruptcy. He asks--only rhetorically, alas: Is it now proved that we have been wrong to be hopeful that out of Communism something much better might emerge?. Yes, it is now proved. We were wrong. It is the people who live in those countries who tell us that.

Wonderful to hear, each of my respondents claims to have never been deceived by the nature of Communist tyranny. Indeed, most claim that they were always anti-Communists. But I could say the same. I was never a Communist (and therefore am not now a "repentant" ex-Communist of the god-who-failed variety) nor a Trotskyist or Maoist. Neier points out that he thought Milosz was telling the truth in the early 1950s. But I hardly thought Milosz was lying. Nevertheless, detesting the reactionary uses to which anti-Communism is put--that is, for the very reasons Neier mentions in the next paragraph of his response--I bracketed what Milosz and the other émigrés were saying. That is the phenomenon I was addressing. I was always--virtuous label--an "anti-Stalinist." But, like many people on the democratic left, I did not understand the essentially despotic nature of the Communist system (that is, a country--any country--ruled by a Leninist party). One of my points is that the word "Stalinist" is, finally, irrelevant to the discussion of Communism. Whoever limits the iniquities of Communism to Stalinism or finds hope in the "hypocrisies" of Communist leaders (who betray their "ideals"??) has really missed the point.

The response typified by Singer, Pochoda, Hollinger and Green expresses exactly the attitude I am attacking. I find it dishonest, demagogic, untrue, deeply complicitous with tyranny and, last but hardly least, not in the interests of the democratic left. Singer is perhaps the easiest to decipher. He is the man who, at the Town Hall rally, declared that although he wishes that Solidarity members had adopted the "Internationale" as their anthem, he understands why they did not; unfortunately, it happens to be the anthem of the oppressive state, the state-which-pretends-to-be-Communist. I do not wish the members of Solidarity had sung the "Internationale. " I do not think that they were mistaken in not doing so. Neither do I wish to hear it sung by the democratic movement in El Salvador, whose struggle to overthrow the tyranny backed by the American government I passionately support.

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