Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald

18. Marx, Stalin, and Derrida: The Continuing Tension among Marxist Theory, Soviet Communism, and the Poststructuralist Revolution

It should hardly be surprising that people’s willingness to embrace Marxist terminology and insights is often dependent on their level of comfort with the patterns and consequences of late capitalism. Ideological and economic comfort often accompanies willingness to accept a given political order, especially in the vast, if decreasing, middle-class constituency. The brutally disadvantaged poor can be a source of articulate class-based anger, and the well educated and relatively well off are often enough capable of serious political critique. But revolutionary resistance requires not only definitive alienation but also appropriate political movements and mechanisms for action. In the United States, the poor often enough suffer definitive alienation but lack access to or awareness of political opportunities. Some segments of the middle class are involved in progressive political movements, but overall they lack sufficiently motivated alienation. We are left with class divisions facilitating stalemate.

Still, one waits for signs of change that are more than wishful thinking, despite so much evidence of pervasive injustice and heedless risk to everyone’s common interests. The twenty-first century has been witness both to increasing evidence of planet-wide environmental degradation from unchecked industrialization pursued for profit without concern for consequences and to worldwide economic collapse based on commodification of the most illusory sort. When the bundled high-risk derivatives lost all their constructed value in 2008, it was clear that there really was nothing solid to melt into air, to adapt the famous phrase from the Communist Manifesto. Rather, their inherent emptiness, their hollow and willfully deceptive commodification, was merely revealed but at a huge social and economic cost.

And yet the last decade has also seen melt into air much that we thought more solid, as occupations have disappeared, communities have been financially or environmentally devastated, industrial unionization has been reduced to its weakest level since 1916, and industries such as higher education, once thought secure, have been wrenched into new (and not benign) shapes. We are in a period of accelerated change and social devastation driven by business interests. More broadly, we are surely in a new, and newly destructive, phase of late capitalism, with class disparities and inequities, at least in the United States, intensified and exaggerated. Income distribution is more unjust than it has been in decades, while the poor remain largely destined to pass on their poverty to their children. Democracy’s fantasy of social mobility has been reduced to a handful of Horatio Alger stories cobbled together for the media. If it is true, as many observers claim, that most people will no longer have lifetime occupations, then the rate of social and economic change has risen dramatically. The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism propels a “perennial gale of creative destruction,” but except for rapid technological development and the creation of disproportionate centers of wealth, it is hard to see evidence of that part that is creative amid all that is destructive.[1]

When the University of Illinois’s Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory launched “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture” in 1983—a six-week series of summer courses followed by the conference, which was the basis of the book by that title—Lawrence Grossberg and I sought to demonstrate how Marxist economic and political analysis could be applied to every cultural domain. The developments of the last decade now seem to have offered belated evidence for the success of that project, even if some core Marxist insights now circulate in a decontextualized form, severed from their roots in or engagement with Marxism.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is the most obvious example. Marxist for some and merely anticapitalist out of humanist conviction or sympathy for others, it was even subject to criticism by those ready to decry the absence of a comprehensive anticapitalist economic and political analysis. Many observers, however, did recognize Occupy’s implicit opposition to the American class system and its inventive forms of exploitation, commercialization, and proletarianization. Still, its revolutionary potential—if any—cannot be said to have been fulfilled. The movement’s moment in the sun has passed, along with the fantasies temporarily invested in it. The working class did not rise up in revolution during the Great Depression and seems even less likely to do so now. And perhaps that is the price of grounding economic protest primarily in liberal humanism—especially a belief that equal opportunity and a redistribution of wealth are universal values—as if transformative change can take hold without fundamental alterations in the existing class system. Hope for progressive change can fall short of any meaningful goal when a more radical analysis and agenda are called for. Indeed, I am always haunted by my own practical interventions—most notably four decades of union organizing—that run the risk, as a Leninist critique has always maintained, of making people more tolerant of their relative exploitation if it is moderated.

The Left habitually celebrates some current—and ultimately fitful—avowedly protorevolutionary social movement as a sign of wonders to come, while yesterday’s failed insurrection is relegated to nostalgia. Since whatever is actually happening now has obviously not yet come to an end, it can be invested with hope in cocktail party conversations, academic meetings, and progressive journalism alike. I heard many such conversations about Occupy Wall Street. But then events intrude, the wind drops from rhetorical sails, and the meek vigil begins again to await the next carrier of hope. There are certainly long-term potential triggers for mass discontent. Global warming could eventually jeopardize world food supplies and make coastal areas uninhabitable, and the resulting conflicts would have a class component. In the short run, however, even rising income inequality is unlikely to trigger a revolution.

Despite that, some real progress has been made in producing the theoretical insights we need to understand our current situation, even if we find it hard to turn that insight into momentum for fundamental change. I would like to reflect somewhat further on one such theoretical toolbox—the volume Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture—because I was involved in assembling it. At the same time, I want to disrupt any generalizable theoretical claims by using an assortment of anecdotes to insist on the contingency of both memory and the work of theory. My aim in what follows is to install a certain level of discomfort with—and necessary cynicism about—theoretical reflection.

The 1983 conference on Marxism and culture was conceived in the midst of the poststructuralist revolution in theory. We tried to grapple with what Stuart Hall called “Marxism without guarantees”—that is to say, we sought to confront the tension that still haunts efforts to integrate radical real-world irresolution with a discourse that hitherto had a significant teleological component. We also knew that a viable contemporary Marxism would have to engage directly with new social movements, integrate class analysis with issues of race and gender, abandon a rigid base/superstructure model, and credit cultural work with meaningful political agency. We assumed no small series of tasks, and we recognized them as interrelated. Yet reflecting on those several goals, we have reason to think either that they have been achieved or that the discussion surrounding them has matured.

No one now engaged with critical social and literary theory would doubt that new social movements play a role in social change, even if their results can be mixed. Like it or not, both revolutionary and progressive movements can include authoritarian or repressive components and potential. The work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on new social movements, both within Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture and outside it, was central to the effort to credit their potential. We have also seen Stuart Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism borne out in the American Right’s social agenda more forcefully than any of us feared at the time. The theoretical links between class and race are now largely accepted and have certainly spread well beyond the academy. The base/superstructure model has lost almost all of its restrictive purchase on contemporary theory. And cultural work, partly by way of cultural studies, has universally acknowledged agency, even if its transformative powers are often ambiguous. The classical Marxist claim that economic interest immediately trumps cultural productivity hardly gets a hearing in the contemporary academy. And the popular press is altogether willing to speculate about the work that film, music, and other cultural forms can do.

If anything, the potential for modest social or aesthetic practices to imagine or realize resistant agency would be exaggerated within a few years after Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture appeared. Part of what Marxism is apparently necessary for is to draw political distinctions between various supposedly resistant practices. There is a great gulf between the resistance that Stuart Hall credited to black Jamaican Christianity and the resistance that John Fiske notoriously found in plastic flowers in a lower-class vase.[2] But perhaps no challenge was greater than the call to sever the link between analysis directed toward local political conditions and a set of overriding political convictions confident of eventual fulfillment.

Paradoxically, as a result of this interconnected agenda we were already engaged with a certain decoupling of some of Marxism’s key concepts. As I suggest above, Marxism as a tool kit could embrace a critique of capitalism and empower class analysis without reducing cultural phenomena to economic analysis or overlaying the base/superstructure dogma on every cultural practice. The understanding of new social movements meant that it was no longer necessary to adhere to a belief in fixed class fractions. If the project was paradoxical, that is because on one level we were weakening Marxism as a necessarily interlocked body of concepts while simultaneously trying to make some of its components more influential. Yet Perry Anderson and Fredric Jameson, among others at the conference, insisted on Marxism’s teleological truths. Without some confidence in Marxism’s prediction of a workers’ rising, they argued, Marxism really wasn’t Marxism. Others, certainly including the organizers, had no faith in the capacity of any theory to make confident long-term historical predictions or even to adopt them as plausible goals. With poststructuralism very much part of my intellectual life before the conference began—and now long since thoroughly integrated into my DNA—it is only with a mix of incredulity and nostalgia that I can recall this as a positional struggle at the time, but it was. Some participants, I should add, notably Gaijo Petrovic (1927–93), sought to suture the conflicting impulses by integrating Marxist humanism with poststructuralist theory, thereby retaining at least a cluster of revolutionary impulses while casting them into doubt.

I had a certain fondness for Petrovic, in part because of his personal history. He was in the Yugoslavian resistance in World War II and was captured and tortured by the Nazis. When a group of feminist participants, still operating with purist 1970s motivations that not only conceived gender dichotomously but also gave the redress of wrongs against women absolute priority, protested his failure to address their concerns in his course, I called them into my office and asked them to grant him some quarter. Petrovic came to me the next day and said, rather to the point, “I’ll take care of myself. If I told the Nazis nothing under torture, do you think I cannot handle some American students?” As might be expected on the basis of this anecdote, Petrovic’s mutual interrogation (or dismantling) of Being and revolution, categories respectively philosophical and political, was altogether degendered. In other words, he played Being and revolution against one another without considering how gender might bear on either category. But that does not mean implications for the purchase gender has on social change cannot be read into his essay: “Are revolutions condensed fragments of social progress or are progress and revolution basically as different as the constant repetition of the improved old and the free creation of the qualitatively new . . . ?”[3] It is easy enough to insert feminism into this question, asking whether progress in gaining women’s rights serves or undermines the revolutionary overhaul that the patriarchal gender system requires. In the frenzy of political conviction, we often demand that others make the same commitments we do, though there are other indirect ways of interrogating current politics. What some wanted Petrovic to do in his class, however, was to make an explicit act of witness, and that he was disinclined to do. In any case, at that time we were still in a moment in which some, including Jameson, could say that the effort to address feminist concerns would have to await the revolution.

Decades later, it is often assumed that poststructuralism and historical conviction or certainty have been sutured, with poststructuralist doubt dominant not only for feminism but also for deconstruction and other key bodies of recent theory. But in fact, a certain aporia all too often lodges itself in the space between two sets of assumptions in theorized political analysis today. There are reasonably practical and straightforward ways to avoid this, first of all by characterizing political advocacy as a choice and an act of contextually based will rather than as an application of reliable universal principles. But even that decision requires vigilance, as there will be no lack of inducements in both the academy and the public sphere to claim universal application for one’s values.

Equally problematic—and an equal disavowal of poststructuralist principle—is a tendency to put one set of concepts under Derridean erasure and treat another set as unshakeable. Thus, in Marxist political readings of contemporaneity, a universalizing notion of justice for the poor, Third World populations, and the working classes will be set against pervasive deconstruction of First World capital and political power. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture already put at least some implicit pressure on such tendencies by way of Spivak’s conclusion—troubling to many—that there were many contexts in which the voices of oppressed peoples might indeed be silent or ineffective and in Hall’s suggestion that despised concepts such as patriotism should not have their meanings ceded to the Right. Indeed, if the opponent’s key terms and concepts could be rigorously deconstructed, they could also be repossessed and repurposed. Interestingly enough, Hall’s provocation to rethink and rearticulate concepts such as patriotism, pretty thoroughly demonized on both the Marxist and non-Marxist Left, has never really been adopted.

Although in the book’s introduction we acknowledged that self-reflexiveness about Marxist critical practice was a relatively recent phenomenon, we felt confident that poststructuralism had given Marxists “the vocabulary with which to begin theorizing their own determination.”[4] Thus, we urged that “the very categories of power in Marxism—such as domination, class struggle, ruling and ruled classes—have to be rethought,” and we cited essays in the book showing that process under way.[5] Marxism, we added, “cannot escape the critique of essentialism carried out by contemporary critical theory.”[6] Unfortunately, we were either naive, optimistic, or simply wrong. One could plausibly argue that we have in fact lost some ground on that front in the intervening decades. In what now seems painfully understated, we warned that “questioning the relationship between criticism and its object is especially difficult for any body of theory that, like Marxism, is committed to political critique and opposition.”[7] That said, it may be that a certain level of political passion generates reflexive blindness. Postcolonial scholars are often skeptical about Third World nationalism, whereas those who simple invoke postcolonial categories unreflexively may be unable to achieve the same distance.

A recent example of a poststructuralist project grounded in a Marxist attention to the dynamics of state power, relations between wealth and poverty, and avowedly fundamental issues of justice—and that purports to put these categories in the context of perhaps the single most charged contemporary political debate—gives us cold evidence of how far we have and have not come in realizing the self-reflexiveness we heralded nearly thirty years ago. The argument of the 2013 collection Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics, edited by Gianni Vattimo and Michal Marder, is structured by all these fault lines. One key line of argument is that Zionism is an outdated movement because it is grounded in a nineteenth-century European model of the nation-state that has exhausted its efficacy. It is simply an act of faith on the part of the authors that nations as we know them, including the United States, are about to wither away: “What is known as the form nation-state is nearing its exhaustion.”[8] At least on the theoretical level, nationalism would appear to be subjected to what is fundamentally a Marxist form of deconstruction. But the desirability of a Palestinian state running from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River is held out as an unimpeachable value, an unqualified manifestation of historical justice. Palestinians are to be granted justice, as the editors write, because they are “victims of the metaphysical, onto-theological, and neoliberal state machinery, invested in keeping its despised, destitute, denigrated Others stateless and hence traceless.”[9] While the editors assert that “all metaphysically inspired ideologies deserve to be deconstructed,” they do not honor the principle where the devotion to Palestinian rights and statehood are concerned.[10] They fault Zionism for claiming a connection to the land that is “transhistorical and unitary,” but their vision of Palestinian statehood is no less transhistorical and metaphysical.[11]

The obvious problem that the editors and contributors to Deconstructing Zionism face is that the father of deconstruction, despite some ambivalence, appears overall to have been a Zionist. The solution, predictably, is to say that this was one thing Jacques Derrida got wrong. But the terms in which contributors fault Derrida are revealing. “Derrida does not,” Christopher Wise writes, “deconstruct the Israeli ‘Law of Return,’ nor does he defend the Palestinian ‘Right of Return.'”[12] Of course, deconstructing one and defending the other are hardly balanced enterprises from a rigorously deconstructive perspective, but the discrepancy is justified because justice is on the side of the Palestinians. “What makes Israel ‘unacceptable’ as a state is its racist-colonialist-anti-egalitarian original sin.”[13] Contributors also fault Derrida for sympathizing with the religiously messianic tradition in Judaism, and they quite justifiably note how disturbing such convictions can be among West Bank settlers. But nowhere in the book is the equally disturbing messianic strain in Islamic jihad, or those Palestinians who subscribe to its ideology, taken to task. “To overcome the prison-house of religion, the nation, and the state is one of the most basic necessary conditions for resolving the Palestine/Israel conflict,” writes Walter Mignolo, but religion, nationalism, and the commitment to statehood are central to both parties in the conflict.[14] The only contributor who seems to suspect that this may be both a philosophical and a political quandary is Judith Butler, though she does not register the awareness here. In Parting Ways, however, she makes it clear that she believes that Palestinian nationalist ambitions should be honored because, unlike Israelis, they have never had a state of their own. That is not, in my view, a compelling argument, but at least she realizes that there is a problem to address in suggesting that we need to evolve beyond commitment to the nation-state, which was then endorsing Palestinian nationalism.[15]

Interestingly enough, several of the contributors to Deconstructing Zionism are quite sound when they look at some of the major Western powers to lay out the dynamics of late capitalism. As Slavoj Žižek writes,

Where Žižek fails, like so many of the other contributors, is when he places late capitalism in a dichotomous relationship with an oppressed or utopian Other. Then his judgments become either bizarre or unreliable, as when he asserts (inventing a category to prove that ethnic and racial othering is now capitalism’s preeminent value) that “what is increasingly emerging as the central human right in late capitalist societies is the right not to be harassed, which is the right to be kept at a safe distance from others,” or when he finds Israel guilty of “ethnic cleansing at its purest.”[17] The desire not to be near other ethnicities, of course, does not obtain in his idealized multicultural Palestinian society. Meanwhile, one would have thought that the Bosnian Genocide of 1992–95 represents ethnic cleansing at its purest. We may conclude that key projects taken up by Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture—to encourage self-critique and a credible fusion of Marxism and poststructuralism—remain ongoing and is fundamentally incomplete.

The Modern Language Association’s guide to graduate study called Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture “an epoch-creating book,” and within a few years the American edition issued by the University of Illinois Press sold over thirty thousand copies. Macmillan published a separate British edition, but without the luminous red dust jacket and paperback cover, based on a special ink that had abalone shell mixed in it. The ink is a nightmare to apply, because it is sticky and the paper tends to lift up and stick to the print roller. It was something of a private joke—a vivid neo-Marxist red produced by an elaborate postmodern technology—though people who asked about the color (and many did) got the explanation. I frequently think of these things when picking up a copy of the book. As a physical object, the book testifies to the political context of its inception. Although the book was to be published by the University of Illinois Press, the contract we negotiated gave us responsibility for its design. Working with the designer David Colley, a colleague from the School of Art and Design, we adopted an insistent design that would help prevent readers from abstracting the book itself from material history. After a good deal of experimentation, we chose an industrial typeface and layout that might have been used for a 1950s Soviet five-year plan. The design thus forced a dialectic between contemporary theory and Soviet culture. Indeed, the book really does not look like any other book I know; the cover was distinctive enough so that its design won an award.

Within the progressive segment of humanities and social science disciplines, then, the book was influential, but sober political self-reflection would have forced a deflated view of what, if any, political impact the book or the other work of its contributors could have on the general political culture. This was brought home in the most dramatically inflated fantasy about the American establishment’s likely response to the project when one of our speakers insisted that none of us would make it through the final conference weekend alive. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), she repeatedly announced, would kill us all with sniper fire. I got her to risk appearing on stage only after that session’s moderator, my partner Paula Treichler, agreed to scan the audience for snipers nonstop. I never doubted that the CIA was in attendance; I just doubted that it felt so threatened by us. We were concluding two months of relentlessly taking ourselves seriously. This was not the only moment when we recognized that a reality check was necessary if politics was not to succumb to losing sight of reality. There were many others.

The only real local protest came when the janitors refused to clean the restrooms for a bunch of communists, a silent protest that was only revealed when I complained that the restrooms were filthy and piled with trash. I was reminded that this was, after all, the Midwest and that this was not the most self-evident venue for the subject matter. Indeed, there was an eerie disconnect every time we surfaced from our debates and remembered where we were. At least in the middle of Illinois, the working classes were neither ready to join the revolution nor eager for any advice we might offer. But this little demonstration of class resistance only amounted to a more overt (and chastening, if absurd) version of the attitude we could have found among working Americans almost anywhere in the midst of the Cold War. As we remarked in the book’s introduction, radical politics remains vexed by the question of “whether the working class is to be the source of revolutionary struggle.”[18] I was reminded of that again when Henri Lefebvre remarked, in what has remained my favorite line of the conference, that “I cannot believe what cheap wine these American Marxists drink.” It was not a moment of solidarity with proletarian culture. Theory and culture were always intertwined, not infrequently with comic effect.

For me, the theoretical advances that the conference and the book brought into being will always be colored by these experiential moments. And I’m not sure it is different for anyone who has negotiated academic communities while advocating for a politically inflected viewpoint or has significant public activist engagement in his or her personal history. The possibility for civil rights progress for me is always set against my first and only experience of being on the Washington Mall among a decisively integrated mass audience: the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In some ways, the experience of the crowd matters even more to me than Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech. In the same way, I cannot think of possibilities for the organized Left without testing them against a series of anti–Vietnam War demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

For me, even though the red ink has dried and even though the material evidence of organization for change has been more fitful, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture retains both continuing relevance and a certain stickiness, its cultural arguments remaining entangled with what we used to call “actually existing socialism.” It was often necessary at the time to claim a decisive separation between Soviet communism and Marxism, despite the fact that the possibility of real-world revolutionary change haunts even the most abstract application of Marxist theory. In order to help some African attendees get travel support to attend the events, for example, I had to generate letters of invitation that removed references to Marxism in the conference title and description. Jameson and Anderson would have asserted that a Marxism without totalizing historical convictions about the eventual triumph of the proletariat was not really Marxism at all. Jameson famously opened his presentation by declaring:

And he concluded by insisting that “it seems unlikely that anyone who repudiates the concept of totality can have anything useful to say to us on this matter, since for such persons it is clear that the totalizing vision of socialism will not compute.”[20] Nancy Fraser would soon fault Jameson for a “presentation of the question of totality, which seemed to me rather irresponsible,” but Darko Suvin would applaud his “refusal to equate totality with totalitarianism,” which of course alluded to the Soviet elephant in the room.[21] Jameson, to be sure, recognized both the contingent nature of progress and the destabilizing character of postmodern culture, but he also believed that a viable Marxism required both long-terms goals and a predictive confidence about their achievability. That said, all of us certainly felt the lesser need to imagine alternative futures and plot contemporary alliances that might facilitate fundamental change. Strategies to promote social, political, and economic goals, however, are often voided by emerging historical realities that their advocates do not anticipate. None of us would have predicted at the time that the teaching profession would be increasingly proletarianized on the long way to world revolution. And I think that imagining the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, even though 1991 was less than a decade away, was beyond any of us.

History is not always unpredictable. Many observers before 1939 saw World War II coming, even if they could not imagine the scale of death and destruction it would wreak, let alone the Holocaust. Yet most often history, even in the short run, surprises us. Thus, allowing a long-term utopian goal to color short- or medium-term expectations carries risks of irrational thinking. Hall’s Marxism without guarantees enables local analysis without hitching it to predicted outcomes.

When the conference proposal was being reviewed by academic committees, I steadfastly refused any necessary relationship between Marxist theory and Soviet communism or any other privileged form of social organization. Indeed, I considered colleagues who challenged Marxist theory by citing oppressive Soviet, Cuban, or East German practices to be seriously mistaken about the nature of Marxism. And yet, I was not above exploiting the connection when necessary. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) gave us a grant to cover tuition and expenses for faculty members from elsewhere attending the whole eight weeks. When a diminutive local administrator refused to sign off on the grant because the NEH didn’t provide indirect costs, I lifted him up in the air and firmly declared, “We’ve invited some of the world’s most remorseless revolutionaries here. Do you realize what’s going to happen when I tell them you won’t let them get reimbursed for their costs?” I set him down, and he signed.

The relationship between Soviet communism in particular and Marxist theory remains a burden, in some ways a more difficult one now than at earlier moments. This problematic relation was, of course, the historical topic that first brought Alan Wald a broad national reputation, due to his still-classic 1987 book, The New York Intellectuals, and its thoroughly researched study of the anti-Stalinist Left. In an ecumenical move that could not easily have been anticipated, Wald went on from there to become an impeccable authority on the creative work produced by Americans closely identified with the Communist Party. I refer of course to his magisterial trilogy Exiles from a Future Time (2002), Trinity of Passion (2007), and American Night (2012). The reach of those three books is still wider, to be sure, but they include subtle readings of writers whose political allegiances have not always seemed so subtle in retrospect.

Although the first fissures in Communist Party loyalty came in the 1920s, the more public defections came in the following decade. Like a surprising number of others in the international community, many Americans of varying political persuasions thought that the confessions accompanying the 1936–38 Moscow show trials were genuine and uncoerced. In 1939, Communist Party members justified the Nazi-Soviet Pact as a way to avoid involvement in a destructive imperialist war; later they saw it as necessary to buy time to prepare for German aggression, even though that required bracketing the brutal Soviet takeover of half of Poland and Eastern Europe, with its widespread murder of intellectuals and political activists. The later mortality numbers in the Gulag have generally been overshadowed by the Holocaust, in part because the Holocaust has for the last few decades been widely understood not only in terms of numbers but also by way of a great many stories and human testimonies that have helped shape public memory. Of course, it is also true that significant numbers of Gulag prisoners survived, whereas few who ended up in the Nazi camps did. And the industrialized and genocidal character of the Holocaust still sets it apart.

The victims of the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s, however, remained largely de-cathected numbers for many intellectuals, at least until Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands documented the famine in gruesome detail and recounted the Soviet state’s Orwellian arguments justifying its actions. That was surely Stalin’s most ambitious mass murder project, despite the tiny fraternity of surviving members of the Stalinist Left who deny it. I had a conversation with a member of the Modern Language Association’s Radical Caucus years ago in which that member complained that claims that Stalin murdered thirty million were horrendously and inexcusably inflated; he only killed twenty million. The implication seemed to be that this qualification pretty much let Stalin off the hook.

In March 2013, Radical Caucus leader Grover Furr sent an unsuccessful letter to the New York Review of Books asserting that “there was no ‘intentional killing [by] starvation of millions of Ukrainians’ by Stalin.” I am quoting from the letter as he distributed it on listservs. This was, he continued, a “myth, which originated with pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists in the 1950s.” Since Stalin established the policies and defended them when widespread starvation escalated, I suppose this argument hinges on splitting hairs about “intentional” and about Stalin’s personal responsibility for the major initiatives of the Soviet state in general and Beria’s People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs in particular. I suppose the same goes for Furr’s claim that “Stalin did not ‘attempt’ to ‘eliminate much of the Polish leadership,'” either in the 1940 Katyn forest massacre or at other points, where either “attempt” or “much” are the relevant hairs. As for myself, I find that I can no longer consider comparisons between Hitler and Stalin that treat them as equivalently totalitarian dictators to be bankrupt remnants of McCarthyism. That is not to deny that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were vastly different political systems, but it is to recognize that these two different regimes of terror share exceptional histories of mass murder—and thus to legitimize reflection on why that was the case.

I remain attracted to the romance of communism, as Vivian Gornick called it, in its founding decade, to the artistic outpouring within the Soviet Union during the 1920s, and to the utopian ambitions of American Communists in the 1920s and 1930s, but I can no longer argue that the distortions and depravities of Stalinism were simply consequences of capitalist antagonism and aggression toward the Soviet Union. That said, the communism in the heads of many American Communist Party members in the 1920s and 1930s was not the communism that all too soon took form under Stalin after 1927. Nor is the Marxism in the heads of late twentieth-century theorists, however haunted by history, fully congruent with the history that played out in Europe from the 1930s to the fall of the Soviet Union. And I should say clearly here that the basis of my attraction to Soviet communism from 1917 to 1927—and to the work that American communists did through the 1930s—is the evidence of the utopian “cognitive mapping” that artists did during that period, which is that same political-aesthetic investment that Jameson advocated in the 1983 conference.

We know from Communist Party USA (CPUSA) records discovered in Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union that the Comintern was centrally controlled and that it sent its US affiliate rather explicit directives. But CPUSA members nonetheless to some degree made of these orders what they would—psychologically, motivationally, argumentatively, politically, and culturally. Many Communist Party members took possession of the practices that played out—as with the Party’s emphasis on race—and made them their own. Thus, as Irwin Silber details in Press Box Red, the Daily Worker took it upon itself to be the only national paper tracking Negro League baseball scores.[22] And when disputes developed, they also acquired American inflections and cultural articulations.

Tracking that mix of theoretical commonality and differences in cultural practices remains a part of the negotiations that Marxism continues to have to undertake. We set it aside, however, in what we considered the next stage of the same intellectual project, a major conference and publication of its proceedings in Cultural Studies. That book was still more successful at over fifty thousand copies sold, but the project both lost and gained something from efforts to decouple political analysis from an explicit Marxist signifier. As a result, American cultural studies gained thousands more academics committed to it but became a far less politically incisive movement. If objections to mutually interrogating Marxist theory and communist history are designed to insist that Marxism can be a decontextualized philosophical theory, perfectible in the abstract, then the comparison between the two books stands largely in opposition to that claim. Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak,” certainly the most widely debated essay in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, comes to a theorized real-world conclusion that some found a betrayal of their utopian dreams about class identity, for in many contexts, she argues, the subaltern cannot speak.[23] Whatever its teleology, Marxist theory not only needs to be tested against contemporary realities and necessities but also needs to be reformulated in light of historical developments.

Some of the Marxist political options that were alive at earlier moments have now passed into the abyss of historical marginality. I think that both Alan Wald and I have had to confront this recognition, Alan in his definitive research into the anti-Stalinist Left and then into writers strongly identified with the Communist Party itself, and myself as I came to know many surviving members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Being on the anti-Stalinist Left—perhaps with a Trotskyist identity—had political valence for a time. But in the United States, it is now largely an antiquarian interest. Maoism has some acolytes but, again, no broad cultural purchase, and China now pursues a rather different economic agenda. Cuban communism faces an uncertain future. So we are left with the shadow cast by the former Soviet Union, and perhaps with a conversation I long considered politically illegitimate.

The American veterans of the Spanish Civil War are now almost all dead, and their engagements with Stalinism and/or their disengagements from it varied. Some left the party in 1939, but many remained until Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” denouncing Stalin’s purges at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. Others remained loyal to the Party throughout their lives. None could forget that as they faced fascist troops in Spain, it was most likely a Soviet rifle they held in their hands.

When I first met Milt Wolff, the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, in the 1990s, he leaned forward, put his hand on my knee, and asked, “Can you believe the terrible things they’re saying about poor old Joe Stalin these days?” Indeed I could. And I couldn’t tell if it was a taunt or a test. So I waffled and replied that I believed some of them. In his autobiographical Spanish Civil War novel Another Hill, Wolff has his own character summarily (without any military proceedings) execute an American deserter during the Ebro campaign in Spain in 1938. The man kept leaving the lines, leaving his comrades vulnerable, then returning and doing it over again. The question for me was whether it was really Wolff himself or someone else who had fired the fatal shot. When I questioned several vets who were nearby at the time, they all took responsibility: “I did it.” I was witnessing a collective instance of personal and political loyalty that lasted more than half a century. There is, after all, no statute of limitations on murder. Even though the shooting took place in Spain, not in the United States, a certain solidarity and courage was on display.

Many veterans took their secrets with them to the grave. Despite the close personal friendships I had developed with them over years, there were some things about Spain they would not address. What did the security service really do or not do? Family members in the CPUSA at the time were equally closemouthed. I also came to know party members who followed orders and abandoned their families to go underground for years during the worst days of McCarthyism, seeking to keep some remnant of the Party alive. I have simply never met other people with this level of political discipline, sustained over half a century and more. So that is one part of the communist legacy that Marxist theory cannot easily cast aside. I have no reason to believe that a true revolution would require any less discipline or any less courage.

In the midst of the Great Depression, it was altogether possible to believe that capitalism was coming to an end—that its economic engine was broken and could not be fixed. It may be possible to believe this once again, though capitalism’s death throes could yet outlive us. The most reliable short-term predictions would include a further concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and an increasing exploitation of working people. The possibility of vast population dislocations from environmental destruction looms as nature confronts us with prospects more apocalyptic than anything else in the modern era, yet the revolution is not at hand. Recognition of capitalism’s capacity to eviscerate daily life may well increase. We will need Marxism to help inform that recognition and make it articulate, and thus the legacy of Marxist theory survives. Its methodologies remain useful, applicable, viable, and timely. But the political experience of the Red decade of the 1930s and its aftermath also has its lessons for us. We dismiss either the chastening or the inspiring ones at our peril.