In a 1944 article, ‘I Tried To Be A Communist’, Richard Wright explains his brief involvement and disaffection with the American Communist Party. This essay was included in a 1949 collection of essays by former Communists, The God That Failed, in which they reflect on their experiences. Wright’s account is one of the most stirring, not least because he brings to it his perspective as a black man living in America at a time when racist oppression drove many blacks into the arms of the Communists. In doing so, they exchanged one form of oppression for another. Wright’s essay emphasises that he tried to be a Communist, but never really became one. Something inside him rebelled against the discipline of the Party, its intellectual pretensions, its contempt for the creative free-spirit and the inner life, its pathological need to control everything. An artist like Wright could not tolerate this for long.
I feel the same way as Wright. I tried to be a Trotskyist. I tried very hard. In the event, I gave up. It was too much for my soul to take. Sooner or later, I would have broken free from the heavy, stultifying hand of bureaucratic control and intellectual calcification. At heart, I have always been a free thinking individualist, who has jealously guarded his independence from the herd. All my life, I had successfully resisted peer pressure and retreated into my own thoughts, devouring books and dissolving myself into a world of ideas. So how did I end up joining a far-left cult which subjected me to monstrous, totalitarian control intellectually, emotionally, spiritually?
We must go back to the beginning, in the spring of 2017, at a time when I still thought of myself as a conservative individualist. In philosophy, my lode stars were Nietzsche and Carlyle. In statesmanship, I idolised Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. In contemporary politics, I despised Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party and considered myself a Conservative. I read The Telegraph and the National Review with religious devotion. Left-wing ideology was not even on my radar. And yet I must have had growing doubts about my politics. Only this explains how I could have developed any interest in Marxist socialism, and ended up joining a Trotskyist cult just months later.
I still think about what might have caused this sudden change. My father died of cancer in November 2016. In my grief, I threw myself into my studies and obsessive reading. It was a nice distraction from the outside world. Having been a staunch Eurosceptic for as long as I remember, I recall having staunchly supported Brexit in 2016, only to change my mind after some months when I was confronted with the overwhelming evidence that it had been a blunder. Ed West, a British conservative columnist who also changed his mind over Brexit, has written a very good article about this painful process of admitting that you were mistaken. I remember being disgusted at the crude populism encapsulated in things like the Daily Mail’s disgraceful ‘Enemies of the People’ headline, and the naked tribalism that had engulfed the country in the aftermath of the divisive vote.
But a change of position on Brexit was not enough to make me a socialist. There is nothing inherently left-wing about accepting that Brexit was a mistake. There must have been other things I read at that time that made me rethink my previous opinions. I recall reading a lot about the housing crisis, and the way in which market had been distorted as a result of government policy. I wondered whether a social-democratic approach might not be a better means of fixing the housing crisis. It was at this time that I was first introduced to the rival concepts of ‘negative freedom’ versus ‘positive freedom’ in liberal thought, through A-Level Politics. I thought about the seeming inadequacy of ‘negative freedom’, which involved simply letting people be and develop their personality on the basis of their own efforts, as opposed to ‘positive freedom’, which suggested that society had to provide the means by which people could individuate and flourish. This was a sharp rebuke to my rigid, classical liberal conception of the relationship between the individual and society. But the more I thought about it, the more it rung true. I thought of all of the unworthy degenerates out there, born into lives of prosperity, who had contributed nothing to the world, but gave themselves over to hedonism and an empty life of instant gratification. Meanwhile, men and women with great potential, but who had been born into great hardship, were highly unlikely to ever secure the resources they needed to flourish and reach their full potential – my own father, a native of Ghana, being a case in point. I inherited his bibliophilia and love of learning and the English language, and, had he been born in Britain and enjoyed a British upbringing with a British education, he would undoubtedly have gone on to great things. Instead, he threw in his lot with the Pentecostal movement in Ghana, and, upon moving to Britain, adopted a secular career as a postman, whilst expending all his intellectual energy on the absurdities of religious fundamentalism.
I thought of how a vulgar braggart and demagogue like Trump had succeeded in rising to the top, whilst men and women of great intelligence and ability were denied similar opportunities simply due to bad luck. My classical liberal response would have been that if people were not able to weather the storms of life and enjoy success, then that was tough luck – survival of the fittest, as they say. Deep down, I knew how I was a mere generation removed from a life of grinding poverty like that my parents would have known. Their staunch support for the Labour Party was not, after all, an accident. It was not that they were passionate socialists – my mother was apolitical, my father a moderate social democrat who adored Tony Blair and strongly favoured the establishment Democrats (Hillary Clinton especially) in American politics. His ‘socialism’ was that of the semi-educated post-colonial immigrant as well as that of the devoted Christian, whose sympathy with the underdog was a given, whether they be poor or fellow immigrants like himself, but it had no room for utopianism or wishful thinking of any kind. (When Corbyn was elected Labour leader exactly a year before he died, he remarked to me his scepticism that someone so extreme could win an election. Sure enough, Corbyn led the party to two successive election defeats.)
My rock-solid libertarian faith was further eroded, if not undercut completely, when I read Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism for the first time. I had studied Wilde the playwright for my English Literature A-Level, but here, the author of The Importance of Being Earnest was speaking with cool sincerity, expressed in powerful, elegant prose, communicating a vision of humanity and of a society that lit an irrepressible fire in my soul. It is impossible for me not to quote in full my favourite paragraph from this essay, one that has stuck with me to this very day:
Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road, and encumbering them. Indeed, so completely has man’s personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship. The industry necessary for the making money is also very demoralising. In a community like ours, where property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of. Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him – in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living. He is also, under existing conditions, very insecure. An enormously wealthy merchant may be – often is – at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
Wilde expressed my own doubts and anticipated the conclusions I was coming to independently. Yes, the individual should be more than his property. Yes, capitalism had in some ways distorted real individualism. I retained my staunch individualism, but wondered whether a superior vehicle for this individualism could be found. Influenced by Nietzsche, Hayek and other thinkers, I had dismissed socialism as an ideology of the herd, which sought only levelling and social destruction. I had admired Oliver Cromwell, among other things, for crushing the Levellers, who I saw as troublemaking disrupters of the social order. Now, I was forced to revise that idea. Maybe individualism and socialism could be reconciled. My right-wing libertarianism gave way to an intellectual rapprochement with socialist ideas. I now devoured all of the socialist writings I could. I read Proudhon’s What is Property?, and was deeply impressed. I began reading Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own. I discovered stinging critiques of neoliberalism on the An Anarchist FAQ website. I looked into Post-Keynesianism. I recalled that Nietzsche had been far from an uncritical supporter of capitalism, but had looked upon it as a threat to art and culture. For someone like Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises, the businessperson was the highest form of human, but for me, making money was nothing more than a means to a end – the cultivation of the individual, something that was only possible if one was able to earn the requisite leisure time through the accumulation of wealth, freeing oneself of the burden of work. Aristotle had defended slavery on this basis, and Nietzsche echoed these ideas. I was open to all sorts of ideas – Leninism, individualist anarchism a la Stirner or Novatore, social democracy, New Deal liberalism, syndicalism.
I was by no means the first person to try to combine Nietzschean individualism with socialism – the German Social Democrats of the 19th century sought to do likewise. They were firmly rebuked by the party leadership, and informed that Nietzsche’s ideas were not compatible with Marxism. Lenin and the Bolsheviks showed some interest in Nietzsche, before deciding he was a reactionary and that his works should be banned. If only I had looked into where past attempts had ended up, before persisting with this quest.
I read Marx seriously for the first time. I had disdained Marx and Marxism. I had considered Marx to be a philistine who reduced all of life to economics and wrung all the colour and fluidity out of it like a sponge. I saw his thought as simplistic and outdated at best, malicious and murderous at worst. I placed the monstrosities of Stalinism at his door. Yet when I came round to reading The German Ideology, I was forced to revise my prejudices. The early Marx had proven himself to be a staunch defender of individuality, and, along with Engels, made the case for a socialist conception of individualism. At the same time, they rubbished the idealist conceptions of their rival, Max Stirner, whom I had come to adore. They demonstrated how the fate of the individual was dialectically tied to the rest of society, not an ‘Ego’ flying in ether, unattached to anybody. The liberation of the individual was bound up with the liberation of the whole of humankind. Marx and Engels echo Wilde:
When the narrow-minded bourgeois says to the Communists: by abolishing property, i.e., my existence as a capitalist, as a landed proprietor, as a factory owner, and your existence as workers, you abolished my individuality and your own; by making it impossible for me to exploit you, the workers, to rake in my profit, interest or rent, you make it impossible for me to exist as an individual.
When, therefore, the bourgeois tells the Communists: by abolishing my existence as the bourgeois , you abolish my existence as an individual ; when thus he identifies himself as a bourgeois with himself as an individual, one must, at least, recognize his frankness and shamelessness. For the bourgeois it is actually the case, he believes himself to be an individual only in so far as he is a bourgeois.
But when the theoreticians of the bourgeoisie come forward and give a general expression to this assertion, when they equate the bourgeois’s property with individuality in theory as well and want to give a logical justification for this equation, then this nonsense begins to become solemn and holy.
…Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach morality at all.
They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general”, selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.
Communist theoreticians, the only Communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the “general interest” is created by individuals who are defined as “private persons”. They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the “general interest”, is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian “negative unity” of two sides of the contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.
At this early stage, Marx and Engels were only just coming round to the conclusion that this emancipation of humankind was only possible through a workers’ revolution, for the proletariat were the only class in history that stood in for the whole of wretched humanity, in its toils and its sufferings. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had demonstrated that increasingly, society was divided into two main classes, and all the intermediate classes that had existed before had either been destroyed, or were doomed to destruction, and would become proletarianised. This seething cauldron of exploited and discontented persons would then explode and enact bloody vengeance on the exploiters, redeeming the whole of humanity by bringing about a communist society that would restore the lost humanity of the toilers, and create a freer, more just world.
It was too good to be true. Echoes of Christianity can be clearly discerned – ‘The first shall be last and the last shall be first’. Alan Woods was rather fond of quoting that Bible verse. I told myself I had outgrown religion, having rebelled against the religious instruction of my childhood and declared for atheism, and found intellectual substance for my stance in the polemics of Hitchens and Dawkins. Yet here I was on the cusp of rediscovering a new religion – the secular doctrine of Marx and Engels, who promised salvation to the world through a socialist revolution.
I was left reeling from the Marxian assault on my consciousness. I retained my romantic fondness for Stirner, and identified more with utopian socialism than with the dogmatic insistence of Marx on his own, ‘scientific’ approach. But the heart gave way to the head, and I was forced to see that Marx was speaking sense. Even now, I still think Marx had it right in certain key aspects vis-a-vis Stirner, though at heart I will always be closer to Stirnerite anarchism than Marxist collectivism in my sympathies.
There was one key advantage to Marxism – it allowed me to have my cake and eat it too. I could be a convinced individualist, and simultaneously believe in the need to liberate the whole of humanity from slavery and tyranny, for my freedom was bound up with the freedom of the toilers of the world. A lonely, alienated teenager, I was freed from my self-absorption and linked up with a wider struggle. I was no longer imprisoned in my narcissistic longings, but was filled with excitement at the potential to link up with others fighting for a better tomorrow. The dichotomy between the individual and society would be destroyed forever under socialism, and their interests become merged into one.
I will not pretend that it was some great sympathy for the poor and oppressed of the world that turned me into a Marxist. It was an entirely intellectual affair. My imagination was stirred by the idea of a world in which life meant more than mere money-making and pleasure-seeking, the sleepy, bourgeois, Western lifestyle that I had come to view with disgust as leading to what Nietzsche called ‘the Last Man’. It is no accident that I had read Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man in December 2016, having retrieved a copy from my Sixth Form library. Despite the book’s reputation, I did not interpret Fukuyama as a triumphalist. The latter section of the book is an intense discussion of Nietzsche, Hegel and Plato, and the challenges that liberal democracy will face internally. For having created a historically unprecedented levels of material prosperity, the worry is that this will leave certain people dissatisfied with mere equality and material well-being. They will seek more, and may well resort to violence and conflict in order to get their way and attain the higher purpose that the bourgeois world cannot give them. Fukuyama dedicates much of the book to a discussion of ‘megalothymia’, the state of desiring, not mere equality and recognition from our peers, but outright superiority to others. (Recently, he has cited Trump as an example of this.) Fukuyama understood from his reading of philosophy, as I did, that human nature cannot be fulfilled by bread alone. I could not accept a vision of life revolving around the marketplace. I wanted something grander, more heroic. This was what led me to my idiosyncratic Nietzschean-Marxist socialism.
I read more and more Marx through the spring and summer of 2017. It was not quite an overnight conversion. I struggled with it, resisted it, argued online with Marxists about what I felt were the shortcomings of their ideology. I didn’t want to label myself a ‘Marxist’, and I preferred to remain a free-thinker. I dabbled with critics of liberalism from the right as well – Oswald Spengler being one example. I must have read a copy of Prussianism and Socialism that I found online, and I recall trying to read an abridged version of his incomprehensible The Decline of the West. But I could not bring myself to accept right-wing ‘post-liberalism’, much in vogue now among some of my peers. It was too declinist, too pessimistic. Reading Roger Scruton’s biography a few months ago, I was intrigued to see that he had discovered Spengler at a similar age, and that he, too, had ultimately rejected his philosophy for similar reasons.
It was a great spiritual struggle, but in the end I nominally accepted Marxism. By that time, I had come across the IMT website on the Internet by pure chance, and started reading its articles. I had applied myself to reading writings by Lenin and Trotsky, and threw myself into anything I could find about Marxism vis-a-vis the USSR. I was convinced that it was state capitalist, on the basis of an orthodox Marxist reading, the sort of interpretation adopted not just by ‘centrist’ Marxists like Kautsky but left-communists like Bordiga. When I joined the IMT, a mixture of peer pressure and my own reading convinced me that this was incorrect. Little did I know that upon joining this rotten sect, these heady days of intellectual discovery and spiritual freedom would come to a shrieking halt. The moment they wrapped their tentacles around my mind, they were able to shut down all the pathways along which an original idea might develop, their hidebound doctrine filling my synapses with psychological cement. Here I was at last, a convinced Marxist, and not just any Marxist, but a Trotskyist Marxist. It was a terrible mistake, and it had all happened because of an accident – a summer’s intellectual experiment that went wrong. The disaster of the next two and a half years was all so avoidable.
I tried to be a good comrade. I tried very hard. But in the end, it was not good enough. I wasn’t good enough. Not for these people, anyway. When I first joined, I retained a degree of cockiness bordering on contempt for the other comrades in my branch. After all, I had read so much more of Marx than even they had. They had nothing to teach me. Their seeming suspicion towards me was probably justified. Certainly I was more open than perhaps was politic about my continuing fascination with Nietzsche. Deep down, I knew that my Marxism was more intellectual than anything else, and few people are more hated in the Marxist universe than intellectuals. As Richard Wright put it in his account:
During the following days I learned through discreet questioning that I had seemed a fantastic element to the black Communists. I was shocked to hear that I, who had been only to grammar school, had been classified as an intellectual. What was an intellectual? I had never heard the word used in the sense in which it was applied to me. I had thought that they might refuse me on the ground that I was not politically advanced; I had thought they might say I would have to be investigated. But they had simply laughed.
I learned, to my dismay, that the black Communists in my unit had commented upon my shined shoes, my clean shirt, and the tie I had worn. Above all, my manner of speech had seemed an alien thing to them.
“He talks like a book,” one of the Negro comrades had said. And that was enough to condemn me forever as bourgeois.
Wright never fit in with the Communist Party, just as I never fit in with the IMT. He was too critically-minded, and this is the last thing they wanted. An intellectual was too wedded to his own ideas, and too difficult to control and subject to party discipline. In other words, he had his own mind. My branch distrusted me for continuing to read Nietzsche, and resented the fact that I was not a naive know-nothing who could be appropriately moulded. Here is another experience Wright had:
‘Word spread in the Communist Party that I was taking notes on the life of Ross, and strange things began to happen. A quiet black Communist came to my home one night and called me out to the street to speak to me in private. He made a prediction about my future that frightened me.
“Intellectuals don’t fit well into the party, Wright,” he said solemnly.
“But I’m not an intellectual,” I protested. “I sweep the streets for a living.” I had just been assigned by the relief system to sweep the streets for thirteen dollars a week.
“That doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “We’ve kept records of the trouble we’ve had with intellectuals in the past. It’s estimated that only 13 per cent of them remain in the party.”
“Why do they leave, since you insist upon calling me an intellectual?” I asked.
“Most of them drop out of their own accord.”
“Well, I’m not dropping out,” I said.
“Some are expelled,” he hinted gravely.
“For what?”
“General opposition to the party’s policies,” he said.
“But I’m not opposing anything in the party.”
“You’ll have to prove your revolutionary loyalty.”
“How?”
“The party has a way of testing people.”
“Well, talk. What is this?”
“How do you react to police?”
“I don’t react to them,” I said. “I’ve never been bothered by them.”
“Do you know Evans?” he asked, referring to a local militant Negro Communist.
“Yes. I’ve seen him; I’ve met him.”
“Did you notice that he was injured?”
“Yes. His head was bandaged.”
“He got that wound from the police in a demonstration,” he explained. “That’s proof of revolutionary loyalty.”
“Do you mean that I must get whacked over the head by cops to prove that I’m sincere?” I asked.
“I’m not suggesting anything,” he said. “I’m explaining.”
“Look. Suppose a cop whacks me over the head and I suffer a brain concussion. Suppose I’m nuts after that. Can I write then? What shall I have proved?”
He shook his head. “The Soviet Union has had to shoot a lot of intellectuals,” he said.
“Good God!” I exclaimed. “Do you know what you’re saying? You’re not in Russia. You’re standing on a sidewalk in Chicago. You talk like a man lost in a fantasy.”
“You’ve heard of Trotsky, haven’t you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you know what happened to him?”
“He was banished from the Soviet Union,” I said.
“Do you know why?”
“Well,” I stammered, trying not to reveal my ignorance of politics, for I had not followed the details of Trotsky’s fight against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, “it seems that after a decision had been made, he broke that decision by organizing against the party.”
“It was for counter-revolutionary activity,” he snapped impatiently; I learned afterwards that my answer had not been satisfactory, had not been couched in the acceptable phrases of bitter, anti-Trotsky denunciation.
“I understand,” I said. “But I’ve never read Trotsky. What’s his stand on minorities?”
“Why ask me?” he asked. “I don’t read Trotsky.”
“Look,” I said. “If you found me reading Trotsky, what would that mean to you?”
“Comrade, you don’t understand,” he said in an annoyed tone.
That ended the conversation. But that was not the last was not the last time I was to hear the phrase: “Comrade, you don’t understand.” I had not been aware of holding wrong ideas. I had not read any of Trotsky’s works; indeed, the very opposite had been true. It had been Stalin’s National and Colonial Question that had captured my interest.’
Conversations like the one recounted by Wright remind me of all the times I was discouraged by members of the organisation from seeking intellectual nourishment outside the sect. Wright’s conversation with a group of Communists trying to dissuade him from resigning reminds me of my own experience raising doubts about the sect:
The next night two Negro Communists called at my home. They pretended to be ignorant of what had happened at the unit meeting. Patiently I explained what had occurred.
“Your story does not agree with what Nealson says,” they said, revealing the motive of their visit.
“And what does Nealson say?” I asked.
“He says that you are in league with a Trotskyite group, and that you made an appeal for other party members to follow you in leaving the party.”
“What?” I gasped. “That’s not true. I asked that my membership be dropped. I raised no political issues.” What did this mean? I sat pondering. “Look, maybe I ought to make my break with the party clean. If Nealson’s going to act this way, I’ll resign.”
“You can’t resign,” they told me.
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“No one can resign from the Communist Party.” I looked at them and laughed.
“You’re talking crazy,” I said.
“Nealson would expel you publicly, cut the ground from under your feet if you resigned,” they said. “People would think that something was wrong if someone like you quit here on the South Side.”
I was angry. Was the party so weak and uncertain of itself that it could not accept what I had said at the unit meeting? Who thought up such tactics? Then, suddenly, I understood. These were the secret, underground tactics of the political movement of the Communists under the tsars of Old Russia! The Communist Party felt that it had to assassinate me morally merely because I did not want to be bound by its decisions. I saw now that my comrades were acting out a fantasy that had no relation whatever to the reality of their environment.
“Tell Nealson that if he fights me, then, by God, I’ll fight him,” I said. “If he leaves this damn thing where it is, then all right. If he thinks I won’t fight him publicly, he’s crazy!”
I was not able to know if my statement reached Nealson. There was no public outcry against me, but in the ranks of the party itself a storm broke loose and I was branded a traitor, an unstable personality, and one whose faith had failed.
My comrades had known me, my family, my friends; they, God knows, had known my aching poverty. But they had never been able to conquer their fear of the individual way in which I acted and lived, an individuality which life had seared into my bones.
I, too, was threatened with moral assassination if I dared to challenge the organisation and committed the mortal sin of walking away from the Truth of Trotskyism. I didn’t care. I was determined to break free. It wasn’t always like that though. I spent two and a half years in the sect, tormented by bounded choice. When some comrades in my branch ganged up on me halfway through to hound me out of the sect, I made the mistake of not resigning, but practically begged for a second chance. I identify with the figure of Ross in Wright’s story:
Toward evening the direct charges against Ross were made, not by the leaders of the party, but by Ross’s friends, those who know him best! It was crushing. Ross wilted. His emotions could not withstand the weight of the moral pressure. No one was terrorized into giving information against him. They gave it willingly, citing dates, conversations, scenes. The black mass of Ross’s wrongdoing emerged slowly and irrefutably. The moment came for Ross to defend himself. I had been told that he had arranged for friends to testify in his behalf, but he called upon no one. He stood, trembling; he tried to talk and his words would not come. The hall was as still as death. Guilt was written in every pore of his black skin. His hands shook. He held on to the edge of the table to keep on his feet. His personality, his sense of himself, had been obliterated. Yet he could not have been so humbled unless he had shared and accepted the vision that had crushed him, the common vision that bound us all together.
“Comrades,” he said in a low, charged voice, “I’m guilty of all the charges, all of them.”
His voice broke in a sob. No one prodded him. No one tortured him. No one threatened him. He was free to go out of the hall and never see another Communist. But he did not want to. He could not. The vision of a communal world had sunk down into his soul and it would never leave him until life left him. He talked on, outlining how he had erred, how he would reform.
This struggle session is akin to what happened to me when my comrades turned on me not once, but twice, during my time in the organisation. Like Ross, I couldn’t just walk away and leave, because I had surrendered my whole identity to the group, and allowed myself to be subjected to their judgement. I cannot believe that I gave such monsters such power over me. Like Ross, the feeling of brotherhood I had developed from being in the sect overpowered my critical faculties, and I forced myself to give assurances of reform so as to remain in the group. It wasn’t worth it. I saw that in the end. I embraced my fate as a petty-bourgeois intellectual, doomed to life outside this group, which was killing my enthusiasm for life and dulling my creative senses. Yet I could easily have ended up like Ross, and remained in this hell for another five to ten years.
I joined the International Marxist Tendency as a passionate libertarian socialist, influenced by Nietzsche as much as Marx, and my idealism and energy was manipulated and used to turn me into an unthinking clone of the organisation. The staid orthodoxy of Trotskyist dogma was imposed upon my mind as a kind of mental straitjacket, forbidding any free thought. All the reasons why I had become a socialist in the first place were almost forgotten, as I was gradually ‘educated’ out of my petty-bourgeois prejudices. But I had not abandoned my old ideas completely. A spark still remained. It is ultimately this pre-cult self that I activated in finding the strength to resign and desert this organisation. I reminded myself that I had become a socialist precisely to liberate humankind, and to bring about a world of greater individual freedom, not less. When it became clear to me that Trotskyism would not bring about this world, I had no choice but to abandon it.
In leaving the IMT, I retained my socialist convictions. I was determined to hold onto them, and not gravitate back to bourgeois liberalism, for fear of proving the organisation’s leadership right – they had warned me, after all, that I was headed on a path that would lead me away from Marxism. But I didn’t care. If Marxism was not compatible with freedom, then I would drop Marxism. But I would have to do my own thinking and reading on the matter. I would not be force-fed a ‘correct answer’ by a cult, and made to parrot it unthinkingly.
In the end, I gave up on Marxism altogether. I accepted Leszek Kolakowski’s criticisms of Marxism – specifically, the view that the individual and society could be brought into perfect harmony with one another, as expressed by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. Where Stirner had been right, and Marx wrong, was in acknowledging that the interests of society and the individual would always be in tension. Marx and Engels preferred to attribute any clash between the individual and society as alienation caused by class society, that would be overcome by communism. As Leszek Kolakowski put it in his essay, ‘The Marxist Roots of Stalinism’:
The point is that Marx really did consistently believe that human society would not be ‘liberated’ without achieving unity. And there is no known technique apart from despotism whereby the unity of society can be achieved: no way of suppressing the tension between civil and political society except by the suppression of civil society; no means of eliminating the conflicts between the individual and the ‘whole’ except by the destruction of the individual; no way toward a ‘higher’, ‘positive’ freedom – as opposed to ‘negative’, ‘bourgeois’ freedom – except through the suppression of the latter.
…I suspect that utopias – visions of a perfectly unified society – are not simply impracticable but become counter-productive as soon as we try to create them by institutional means. This is because institutionalized unity and freedom are opposing notions. A society that is deprived of freedom can be unified only in the sense that the expression of conflicts is stifled: the conflicts themselves do not go away. Consequently, it is not unified at all.
Kolakowski is not the only person to have come to this conclusion. In her book The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gormick interviews a former member of the American Communist Party, Jim Holbrook, who gave this as his reason for leaving the party:
“As time went on, I began to see that something was wrong in the Party. Just as I had seen that something was wrong when I was a boy. And, just as it had happened before, so now I wanted to know why. And, once again, that desire to know why became necessity. Finally, of course, I knew, and then there was no way not to know, and I had to go. The Party’s understanding of Marx and of the revolution that we were working for involved-deeply-the tension between the individual and the collective. The Party never understood how vital this tension was, never paid attention to it. Over and over again, insistently, bullheadedly, deludedly, it sacrificed the individual to a false notion of the collective and its needs. The aberration of the individual advances the life of the collective. If that aberration is consistently destroyed the collective becomes arid, dead, dries up the life within it. And that is precisely what happened to us, what we did to ourselves…But all that took a long time in the knowing, a much longer time than it had taken me to realize I was a socialist.”-pp.83-84
Thanks to Leszek Kolakowski, I had hit upon what it was that made Marxism impossible and undesirable, and resolved the inner turmoil within myself as I strove, throughout my two and a half years of membership, to reconcile my libertarian instincts with the discipline of ‘the Organisation’. A weight had fallen from my shoulders. Finally, I was free. I didn’t have to believe in all this anymore. I no longer had to torture myself. I now had to decide what I believed instead. If not Marxism, then social democracy? Was it back to my right-wing libertarianism? Even now, almost two years after leaving, I am still working things out, and I don’t feel the need to rush into a fresh set of dogmas. What I do know is that liberal democracy is a thousand times preferable to totalitarianism in any form, and that I cannot conceive of any transition to a ‘better society’ that involves the suppression of the individual in the name of the collective, that allows for the imposition of thought control over free minds.
If there is anything I have learnt from my experience, it is to never let go of my passionate belief in human freedom and the worth of the individual. It is this that made me interested in Marxism in the first place, and it is this conviction that I shall carry with me until the day I die. I accept that I am some sort of liberal-conservative, not by choice but by virtue of who I am. I’m an individualist, a sceptic, a rebel, a heretic, and I’m proud of that. Better to be a petty-bourgeois intellectual than a proletarian demagogue or a deracinated Leninist fanatic. I believe that Western civilisation is good and worth preserving, not simply the culmination of centuries of white male oppression. I believe that society should be geared towards the good of the individual and towards helping him to make the best of himself. I believe that ‘positive freedom’ has its uses as a concept, but should always be subordinated to ‘negative freedom’, for freedom from the state is more essential to a free existence than the intervention of the state in the name of a higher ideal, necessary that may be on occasion, as it was in New Deal America in the 1930s, and as it was on the part of the Allies during WWII and the fight against Nazi barbarism. If there is anything that all men should be able to agree on, it is that bloodthirsty dictatorship in the name of ‘positive freedom’, of the kind that has led to millions of deaths in the 20th century in places like Maoist China, Stalinist Russia and Communist Ethiopia, is far worse than neglect by a weak or imperfect liberal democracy, as we see with present-day America with its ramshackle welfare state, its decaying inner cities, its rioters and its polarised population. Ask any man if they would rather be a poor man in America or an ordinary citizen of a communist dictatorship, and all sane men will respond that they would prefer the former. If nothing else, I am a consistent anti-totalitarian.
My kindred spirits range from George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Irving Howe, Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, E.P. Thompson, Michael Foot, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey on the left to Winston Churchill, Irving Kristol, William F. Buckley, Leszek Kolakowski, Mario Vargas Llosa, H.L. Mencken, Richard Pipes, and Robert Conquest on the right. I despise the bourgeois despotisms set up in the name of the market (like Pinochet’s Chile) almost as much as I despise the far more murderous despotisms set up in the name of Marxist socialism (like Castro’s Cuba). Neither the tyranny of the marketplace, or the tyranny of the state, can attain for man a worthwhile and dignified existence. Instead, we must accept that every civilised society will be a compromise between the two, and that this conclusion is the result, not of a lack of political imagination or a cowardly cringing before the status quo, but as human nature itself has decreed it, and has placed us at this world-historical juncture where we now stand, in which the world is divided into imperfect but civilised and open societies, and unhinged barbarisms where the power of the state is used to subordinate all the citizenry to a utopian vision that is not shared by the majority of the citizenry. It is not an act of cowardice, but an act of bravery, to stand up for our way of life, despite all of its many flaws, against those who are forever promising something better, but have only brought about misery and slavery whenever they had half a chance to implement their schemes.
I accept the irresolvable and immutable tension between the individual and society, and have come to welcome this as not only natural, but desirable. For without sceptics, doubters, heretics and other such types, no society can progress, but is doomed to stagnation. It is for this reason that J.S. Mill argued powerfully for the protection of the dissident in society – a bourgeois prejudice that Marxists can do without. When the Marxists-Leninists hijacked the ship of state and proclaimed that they were pressing full-steam ahead to socialism, they made it clear that they had no place for dissenters in their ranks. All those who could have corrected their errors were thrown overboard, leaving only cowed conformists, unable or unwilling to tell the captain that, in his delusion, he was steering them straight into an iceberg that would sink them all beneath Fate’s pitiless waves. Lenin and Trotsky cooperated in shooting and throwing overboard a great many of these aforementioned dissenters. When the inevitable happened, they had no one but themselves to blame. When all critical thought, in a political organisation or a society, is stifled, you can hardly complain when the result is the complete demoralisation of the masses.
Marx and Engels saw the tension between the individual and society as a sociological and ontological flaw created by capitalist society, that would be eliminated under socialism. Individual and collective interests would merge into each other and become one and the same. I used to buy into that beautiful dream. I no longer do. I find it terrifying. And I now see The German Ideology not as a great defence of socialist individualism, but as representing the elimination of the individual in the name of the collective, under the guise of championing individual freedom. Anyone can agree that the flourishing of the individual is dependent to some extent on society, but that does not mean that a society will ever be created in which the two become one. They will forever be distinct spheres. Liberal democracy has simply belatedly recognised a fact that has become increasingly apparent over the centuries, from the time of the Ancient Romans and Greeks until now.
I tried to be a Trotskyist. I tried to be a Marxist. I tried to believe. But in the end, my resolute soul, torn in two directions, would not allow me to be. And I am glad that I listened to my heart and deserted this false banner, to defend true individualism. I am so happy to be free.