Art Preis – Stalinists on the Waterfront

In 1947, Art Preis, author of Labor’s Giant Step, wrote a polemic against the record of the Communist Party in the National Maritime Union, one of the most militant left-led unions in the CIO. Stalinists on the Waterfront calls out the CP for its record of strikebreaking during the war, and for its slanders of the revolutionary program being put forward by the Trotskyists during the same period.

Art Preis – Stalinists on the Waterfront

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NYC Slutwalk

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Raymond Williams as Black Power Militant

From Robert F. Williams’ Negroes with Guns:

What happened and continues to happen in Monroe, N.C., illustrates an old truth: that words used in common by all men do not always have a meaning common to all men.  Men have engaged in life-or-death struggles because of differences of meaning in a commonly-used word.  The white racist believes in “freedom,” he believes in “fair trial,” he believes in “justice.”  He sincerely believes in these words and can use them with great emotion because to the white racist they mean his freedom to deprive the Negroes of their basic human rights and his courts where a “fair trial” is that procedure and that “justice” that decision which upholds the racist’s mad ideal of white supremacy.

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Ralph Ellison and Literary Anticommunism

The latest issue of Against the Current has a very interesting review by Nathaniel Mills of Barbara Foley’s new book, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.  An examination of the hitherto unstudied drafts of the novel, Foley’s book argues that it actually began its life as a novel of the Black Left.  Through a process of careful revision, however, Ellison excised the novel’s radical mooring points (which included various sympathetic Black leftist characters), and transformed its picture of ‘the Brotherhood’ (the radical organization the Invisible Man joins only to discover it is as manipulative as any other institution) from a flawed but well-meaning and decent organization into the totalitarian nightmare it is in the published version.  Foley argues, and most readers have agreed, that the Brotherhood is a stand-in for the US Communist Party, with which Ellison was closely associated in the 1930s and early 1940s.  As such, the text has become something of an anticommunist classic, using a sophisticated array of rhetorical strategies to link radical politics with white racism and ultimately promote an ideology of American exceptionalism.

While appreciative of Foley’s archival scholarship in interpreting the drafts of the novel, Mills takes issue with her reading of the finished product.  His criticisms are, I think, worth thinking about, as they raise a number of issue about form and politics that are at the center of Marxist literary criticism.  They run along two main lines.  First, he argues that Foley is mistaken in reading the novel’s portrait of the Brotherhood as a mimetic stand-in for the CP, and that the institutions and figures Ellison creates at various points in the novel are, in fact, non-representational generic archetypes.  Mills argues that this non-referentiality is politically progressive, as it allows Ellison’s critique to have a greater reach.  Second, he argues that Ellison’s insistence on the formlessness and chaos of life is not an evasion of the reality of oppression and domination, as Foley contends, but rather an insight of theoretical value for the Left.

Before considering the specifics of Mills’ first argument, I think it’s worth pointing out that it is a rather strange one for a Marxist to make.  Fredric Jameson, after all, declared ‘Always Historicize!’ to be ‘the one absolute and we may even say “transhistorical” imperative of all dialectical thought,’ and while Jameson’s word is not law, it is a sentiment Marxist critics have tended to affirm.  Mills’ argument for the progressive potential of de-historicization would read more convincingly if he at least acknowledged that he was, in fact, going against the grain of most Marxist criticism.

More substantively, there seem to me to be good reasons to read the novel as mimetically as Foley has.  Mills’ argument is ‘that Ellison doesn’t document a certain historical period, certain historical events, or certain historical institutions like the Communist Party.’  Mills offers little in this essay to sustain this argument, drawing instead on the work of John Callahan, who has written insistently on the need to distance Ellison’s representations from any immediate history.  Ellison, Callahan argues, ‘puts as much distance as possible between events of history and the imagined situations of his novel.’

Mills and Callahans’ arguments here  are buttressed by the authority of Ellison himself, who frequently castigated critics for trying to link his representations to concrete historical referents such as the Tuskegee Institute or the Communist Party.  Yet there are good reasons to believe that Ellison was, to put it simply, lying (a possibility critics of Callahan’s persuasion have curiously overlooked, given their reading of Ellison as trickster).  Take, for example, Ellison’s picture of black college the Invisible Man attends in the first part of the novel, which readers have generally associated with Tuskegee.  Ellison describes

the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave.

Here is a picture of the statue of Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute:

a revelation or a more efficient blinding?

As much distance as possible between events of history and the imagined situations of his novel?  Hardly.

The picture of the Brotherhood is similarly laden with referentiality.  Mills cites Callahan’s argument that ‘the Brotherhood derives a measure of significance from its similarity in some respects to the relation between American Blacks and the Democratic and Republican parties.’  This is, if anything, even less convincing than the case of Tuskegee.  For example, the Brotherhood’s leadership in the book, Jack, is written as a foreigner who poses as an American, whose duplicity is revealed when he is angered and begins babbling in a foreign tongue the invisible man sarcastically describes as ‘the language of the future.’  A few lines later, he refers to Jack as ‘a dialectical deacon,’ a phrase that both symbolically links Jack with the manipulative Black churchmen who were in charge of the college and unmistakably associates him with Marxism, an ideology that, to my knowledge, has not played a large role in either the Democratic or Republican parties.  This linkage becomes even less tenable in the epilogue, when after dreaming that Brother Jack leads a lynch mob to castrate him, the invisible man remarks that ‘Jack and the boys are waiting with their knives, looking for the slightest excuse to…well, to “ball the jack,” and I do not refer to the old dance step, although what they’re doing is making the old eagle rock dangerously.’  Here, Jack the foreigner is positioned as a threat to the nation, an operation that renders the invisible man’s position in his dream as metonym for the nation.  If the Brotherhood is an archetypal representative of American political parties, these clusters of imagery make no sense – is it Ellison’s contention that political parties in general are gangs of foreigners waiting for the slightest opportunity to castrate Uncle Sam?  If the Brotherhood is read as the CP, however, the portrait fits perfectly (to the point that Ellison’s representation can be read as one species of the hysterical anticommunism portrayed in Dr. Strangelove, where the General Buck Turgidson’s reason for starting the war is precisely the threat the communists pose to his virility).

Mills argues that while we shouldn’t read the Brotherhood as a direct reference to the CP, the portrait nonetheless is of value for the Left ‘as a warning against potential tendencies (toward political dogmatism and vanguard elitism, institutional self-preservation at the cost of revolutionary creativity, etc.) that any leftist organization should avoid.’  This is unconvincing.  For one thing, Ellison shows no sign in the novel of any sympathy for revolutionary anything, so it makes little sense to assert that his portrait of the Brotherhood is a warning against stifling revolutionary creativity.  More to the point, however, is the fact that Ellison’s portrait of the Brotherhood in the published novel is unremittingly hostile – it is totalitarian, racist organization symbolically linked with white racists.  In this context, it seems perverse to read his representation as some sort of friendly criticism.  Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Pipes, and Bernard Henri Levy make many of the same criticisms of dogmatism and elitism in revolutionary groups.  Does this mean their writings should be taken as valuable advice as well?

Mills’ second primary line of argument concerns Ellison’s insistence ‘that American society is more complicated and unpredictable than most established epistemological and political paradigms allow.’  For Mills, this point is an important one for leftists.  First, he suggests it evinces an affinity between Ellison’s picture of the United States and ‘theories of social form and process articulated by European Marxists like Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci. Both Althusser and Gramsci revised classical notions of economic determinism in order to identify the complexly overdetermined realms of the social and cultural as potential sites for revolutionary politics.’  This is not particularly convincing.  Recent scholarship on Gramsci (I am thinking particularly of Peter Thomas and Timothy Brennan) has shown that Gramsci’s thought was far more a product of Third International debates and discourses than his critical reception has allowed.  This work has rendered suspect the cliched image of Gramsci as complicator of a previously simplistic Marxism.  One could say more about Althusser’s case, including the fact that his concept of relative autonomy was formulated, in part, to explain the unavoidable fact of Stalinist barbarism while retaining the idea that the Soviet economy was a socialist one, but it suffices here to remark that the two conceptions of cultural struggle I can detect in his work are both deeply unsatisfactory.  First, Althusser’s notion of theoretical practice rewrites Marxist philosophy as part of the class struggle.  Regis Debray provided the immortal verdict on this theory with his quip ‘all we had to do to become good theoreticians was to be lazy bastards.’  The second concept, that of struggle in the ideological state apparatuses, is even more troublesome, given its provenance as a theoretical justification for the bureaucratic madness of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, as well its subsequent use in the hands of Gauche Proletarienne  as a reason for regarding reformist trade unions as repressive manifestations of the capitalist state.  In short, the analogy fails with Gramsci and leads nowhere good with Althusser.

More important than this Marxological esoterica, however, is the fact that in Ellison’s novel, the fluidity and complication he emphasizes  are linked to an ideology of American exceptionalism.  We have already seen how the invisible man stands a metonym for the United States in his vulnerability to the castrating fanatics of the Brotherhood.  Ellison goes much further than this, however, in his deployment of tropes of American exceptionalism.  In his reflection on his grandfather’s words, the invisible man declares that his grandfather, who he concludes was right after all, ‘must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence.’  For the invisible man, the lesson of his experiences is that ‘we had to “say yes” to the principle, lest they [Brother Jack and the others who have manipulated the invisible man] turn upon us and destroy both it and us.’  Ellison’s affirmation of American exceptionalism in these pages is directly linked to his conception of America as chaotic and complex.  As he remarks, “America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it remain so.”  This affirmation of American diversity is expressly linked to a repudiation of Jack and his ilk: ‘Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states.’

Finally, it’s worth noting that Mills proposes Ellison’s picture of complexity as a remedy for what is effectively a straw man.  He argues that ‘One must recognize the struggles of these oppressed as both literally contained by power and exceeding the grasp of power. Invisibility is both delimiting and freeing, just as oppression also contains within it (dialectically, or what Ellison might call “chaotically”) the potential for freedom.’  The idea that the oppressed are not completely defined by our oppression is one that, as far as I can tell, is universally accepted on the Left today.  Indeed, it seems to be axiomatic to any conception of Left politics that oppression is never total and complete, and people will always resist.  If this weren’t true, there would be little point in doing anything besides working for Goldmann Sachs.  In his argument for Ellison’s utility on this front, Mills ultimately assents to the caricature of the Left that informs Ellison’s novel.

In conclusion, I think it is worth considering the importance of Mills’ arguments in the broader context of revolutionary criticism.  Though as the preceding paragraphs indicate, I am quite unsympathetic to the substance of his claims, I think Mills raises crucial issues about the political valences of texts and the ways revolutionaries can relate to them.  To my mind, Ian Birchall put this point most succinctly in his review of Terry Eagleton’s work in the 1980s.  Eagleton, he said, insists on the subversive  moments lurking in all texts, which Marxist critics have been too eager to write off in favor of blanket denunciations of reaction.  Birchall noted while Eagleton was right that all texts are contradictory, this did not imply that all texts were politically equal.  The French censors recognized as much when they banned Sartre’s work but not Camus’.  This seems to me to be correct.  Invisible Man is obviously a great novel, and there are numerous moments within it that pose questions Leftists have to answer.  But we will most assuredly get the answers wrong if we imagine they are posed in an innocent way.  Recognizing the dominant political ideology of a novel is a necessary step in attempting to seize any insights hidden within.

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Baldwin v. Buckley

Whenever I’m feeling down, I watch this.  James Baldwin thoroughly flays William F. Buckley in a debate at the Oxford Union in 1965.  The Union supported Baldwin’s position 544-164.

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Baldwin in London

‘Everybody knows, no matter what the professions of my unhappy country may be, that we are not bombing people out of existence in the name of freedom. If it was freedom we were concerned about, then long, long ago we would have done something about Johannesburg, South Africa. If we were concerned with freedom, boys and girls would not, as I stand here, be perishing in the streets of Harlem. We are concerned with power, nothing more than that. And most unluckily for the Western world, it has consolidated its power on the backs of people who are now willing to die rather than be used any longer. In short, the economic arrangement of the Western world proved to be too extensive for most of the world, and the Western world will change its arrangements, or its arrangements will be changed for them.’

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James Weldon Johnson on Humanitarian Imperialism

From the New York Age, March 22nd, 1919.

Civilizing the ‘Backward Races’

One way in which the powerful nations justify themselves for taking the lands which belong to other people is to declare that they do it in order to carry civilization to these benighted races.

Adopting this slogan as a principle, the powerful nations seem able to commit the most high-handed robberies and outrages, and at the same time salve their consciences over with the thought that they are spreading civilization.

It was Bernard Shaw who wrote in one of his plays that there is nothing so good or so bad that you will not find an Englishman doing it, but that you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. Shaw says that when an Englishman wants a thing, he never tells himself he wants it. He waits patiently until there comes into his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who have got the thing he wants. He says that an Englishman will do anything, but that he always has a principle to justify it. He will bully you on manly principles, he will fight you on patriotic principles, he will rob you on business principles, and he will enslave you on imperialistic principles.

The ability to find a ‘moral’ principle to justify whatever you want to do is of tremendous advantage to a nation. Through it almost any kind of action can be made to pass as respectable. In fact, if the principle is properly promoted almost any kind of action can be made to gather up a sort of religious fervor as it goes along.

A colossal blunder made by Germany at the beginning of the war was that she failed to find a ‘moral’ issue on which to strike. England waited until she felt she was called upon to ‘save martyred Belgium.’ America waited until she felt she was called upon to ‘make the world safe for democracy.’ It is strange but true that men will fight harder for an ideal than for a fact. (For confirmation of this statement see histories of the various religious war.) Germany started out without a beautiful ideal couched in a high-sounding phrase, and was therefore handicapped all through the conflict. She had no point around which to rally spiritual forces; she had no club with which to compel one-sided opinion. Anyone might oppose a war for conquest, but how many could open their mouths against a war to ‘save martyred Belgium’ or to ‘make the world safe for democracy’?

The powerful nations of the world have followed this same moral process in dealing with what they term that backward races. They set up an imaginary ideal, and then proceed to commit all the cardinal sins in the name of sustaining that ideal.

Generally, the first step is to send out a missionary to give these ‘heathen’ people a religion which they did not ask for, which they do not particularly stand in need of, and which, when they get it, does not bring them anything near like all the good which they have been led to expect.

Then some ‘heathen’ who is not impressed by the superiority of the religion of England and Germany and Belgium over that of his own land and fathers shies a stone at the mission house. Thereupon the home government of the missionary sends a warship to protect him and put down the ‘native uprising.’ Protecting the missionaries usually results in taking all the land and all its wealth and resources away from those to whom it rightly belongs. This is done even if natives armed only with assegais have to be mown down with machine guns. And it is all done for the preservation of civilization.

No self-respecting nation could start out with the avowed purpose of murdering these natives and robbing them; but in the name of such lofty principles as the spread of Christianity and civilization anything may be done.

What is behind all this burning zeal which the powerful nations have to civilize the ‘backward races’ of the world? Is it a desire chiefly for the welfare of these races? Not at all; it is solely a desire on the part of these nations to fill their own coffers. And does this civilization which they carry do the people to whom they carry it any good? Very little, if any. At least, it costs these races many times what it is worth to them; and it is certain that most of the world would may equally as much to get rid of it.

The powerful nations are in the habit of pointing to one of these lands and saying, “Look, before we went in these people did not even wear shoes or derby hats or starched collars, they had no factories, they had no railroads. See how the import and export trade of the island has increased!” That is only one-half of the story. For the privilege of wearing derby hats and stiff collars and working in factories and on railroads the native has become a slave toiling to pay dividends to foreign stockholders.

This has been the case with Porto Rico. This island has belonged to the United States since the close of the Spanish war; and, according to figures, its prosperity has multiplied many times over. Its import and export trade has almost doubled in the past four years, being $79,509,549 in 1914 and $137,683,304 in 1918; and yet, the condition of the natives has grown steadily worse. The natives are poorer to-day than they were four years ago.

Things have come to such a pass that a resolution has been introduced into the Porto Rico legislature calling upon the United States Congress for remedial legislation. This resolution declares: “The American people are completely ignorant of the true, deplorable position and condition of the people of Porto Rico which have been caused by economic financial organization imposed by an illegal system of land ownership and absent and resident corporations and individuals combined.”

What happened to Porto Rico will happen to Haiti. Railroads and factories will be built, the custom figures will be increased, and the Haitian who once cultivated his little plot of ground for his own benefit will find himself a wage slave working for the benefit of stockholders who do not live on his island. And he will no doubt seriously question whether he has gained anything, even if he has learned to wear shoes, derby hats and stiff collars.

If the choice were put before me, I would much prefer to be robbed and enslaved under the sign of the skull and cross bones of a pirate than under the principle of ‘spreading civilization.’

 

If you want to hear more about James Weldon Johnson’s radicalism, come to my talk at Historical Materialism 2010 on November 13th!

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Baldwin on Palestine

I apologize for the rather meager fare which has been on offer here of late. A post is coming soon, I promise, on Richard Wright, communism, and the blues. Until then, here’s a passage from James Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head (1978), in which he addresses the subject of terrorism.

I was traveling before the days of electronic surveillance, before the hijackers and terrorists arrived.  For the arrival of these people, the people in the seats of power have only themselves to blame.  Who, indeed, has hijacked more than England has, for example, or who is more skilled in the uses of terror than my own unhappy country?  Yes, I know: nevertheless, children, what goes around comes around, what you send out comes back to you.  A terrorist is called that only because he does not have the power of the State behind him – indeed, he has no State, which is why he is a terrorist.  The State, at bottom, and when the chips are down, rules by means of a terror made legal – that is how Franco ruled so long, and is the undeniable truth concerning South Africa.  No one called the late J. Edgar Hoover a terrorist, though that is precisely what he was: and if anyone wishes, now, in this context, to speak of “civilized” values or “democracy” or “morality,” you will pardon this poor nigger if he puts his hand before his mouth, and snickers – if he laughs at you.  I have endured your morality for a very long time, am still crawling up out of that dungheap: all that the slave can learn from his master is how to be a slave, and that is not morality.

Reading this passage today, one is struck by the force of its prescience.  Twenty years before 9/11, Baldwin utterly eviscerated Bush and now Obama’s pious apologias for the War on Terror.  The contemporary relevance of the passage, however, can obscure its own context, which is just as notable.  Baldwin’s emphases here, on stateless peoples and hijackings, make it clear that the occasion for his reflections is the Palestinian struggle, which during the 1970s especially took the form of hijackings meant to draw international attention to the occupation.

Palestine came to be a prominent issue during the Black Power years, as Black radicals who identified with anticolonial movements embraced the Palestinian struggle against Israel.  This embrace led to allegations of anti-semitism (which were not always unjustified) against Black Power figures, ultimately culminating in Johnson Publications’ decision to shut down Black World, an important Black cultural and political journal, over a supposedly anti-semitic article about Zionism.  In this context, Baldwin’s writings on the subject, though brief, display a remarkable clarity of focus, as he unhesitatingly declares that Israel represents imperialism, not Jewish self-determination.

Thus in 1972, in his essay “Take Me to the Water,” Baldwin recounted his reasons for not settling in Israel when he became an expatriate in the late 1940s:

And if I had fled, to Israel, a state created for the purpose of protecting Western interests, I would have been in a yet tighter bind: on which side of Jerusalem would I have decided to live?

Here Baldwin displays an awareness that, in 1948, most of the Left still lacked.  When he made the decision to flee the United States, Baldwin realized he could scarcely accomplish his goal by settling in a country then replicating our own bloody frontier days.  Indeed, Baldwin’s clarity on this question stands out from almost any analysis on the Left during the period of Israel’s birth, with the notable exception of Tony Cliff.

Baldwin’s most substantial writing on Palestine came in 1979, with his “Open Letter to the Born Again.”  This letter was occasioned by Jimmy Carter’s dismissal of Martin Luther King’s former aid Andrew Young from his position as ambassador to the UN because of his decision to meet with a PLO delegation.  Baldwin is again clear on the circumstances of Israel’s birth:

Jews and Palestinians know of broken promises.  From the time of the Balfour Declaration (during World War I) Palestine was under five British mandates, and England promised the land back and forth to the Arabs or the Jews, depending on which horse seemed to be in the lead.  The Zionists – as distinguished from the people known as the Jews – using, as someone put it, the ‘available political machinery,’ i.e., colonialism, e.g., the British Empire – promised the British that, if the territory were given to them, the British Empire would be safe forever.

But absolutely no one cared about the Jews, and it is worth observing that non-Jewish Zionists are very frequently anti-Semitic.

Baldwin goes on to speak of Europe’s history of anti-semitism, the civilizational links between the Inquisition and Franco.  The situation in Palestine, he makes clear, is not the result of terrorism or Jewish malfeasance, but European imperialism:

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of Western interests.  This is what is becoming clear (I must say it was always clear to me).  The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’  and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years…The collapse of the Shah not only revealed the depth of pious Carter’s concern for ‘human rights,’ it  also revealed who supplied oil to Israel, and to whom Israel supplied arms.  It happened to be, to spell it out, white South Africa.

Baldwin’s sharp sense for geopolitics, his grasp of the gulf which separates Jewishness from Zionism, and his willingness to locate the source of the problem in 1948 (‘for more than thirty years’) all would put him on the Left edge of the Palestine solidarity movement today.  Thirty years ago, in the United States, he must have felt as if he resided in the most desolate political wilderness.  Studied today as a writer of sexuality and gender, or of civil rights, Baldwin’s international radicalism remains in the hinterlands.  Those of us struggling too make good on his vision of real justice in the Middle East have a right and a duty today to claim Baldwin’s voice for our side, and in doing so help bring his radicalism the recognition it deserves.

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Resources

Or, things with which to waste your time.

The premiere intellectual journal of the New Left, Radical America began as an effort of SDS members to come to terms with the United States’ radical past.  It quickly evolved into much more than that, becoming a general journal of the movement which engaged with questions of contemporary strategy and tactics as well as providing a base for the importation of European Marxist theory.  A number of its early contributors would go on to become prominent academics, such as Mark Naison, Linda Gordon, and its founder, Paul Buhle.  Thanks to the good folks at Brown University, nearly all issues are available to download for free.

The Israeli Left Archive contains an incredible amount of material on various manifestations of the Israeli Left from the sixties to the present, a great deal of it in Hebrew. Organizations such as the Israeli Black Panthers and Women and Black are here, along with the Israeli Socialist Organization, or Matzpen, whose analysis of the class nature of Israeli society has been crucial in the positions of a number of contemporary socialist groups, in particular those of the International Socialist Tendency.

The Bureau of Concerned Asian Scholars began as a Left journal of Asian Studies, founded by students and faculty upset with the dominance of the field by State Department scholars and dollars.  Continuing today as Critical Asian Studies, its early issues contain a wealth of articles on both Asian radicalism and US policy on the continent.

Socialist Register is an annual collection put together by the Canadian Marxists Leo Panitch and Colin Leys.  The journal features contributions from leading socialist theorists around the world, from Ellen Meiksens Wood to Aijaz Ahmad to John Berger.  The editors have been generous enough to put the entire back catalog of the journal online for free.  There are a number of formerly rare and wondrous articles here.  Two excellent starters are Norman Geras’ classic “Seven Types of Obloquy: Travesties of Marxism” and Rob Beamish’s “The Making of the Manifesto,” which reconstructs in detail the political and intellectual context in which the Communist Manifesto was written.

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James Baldwin on History

Baldwin in Paris

If I had to pick a favorite writer, it would probably be James Baldwin.  His 1972 essay, “Take Me to the Water,” is simply one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing that I’ve ever read.  It’s a long, angry meditation on race and history, ranging from the killings of Malcolm and Martin to France and Algeria.  While all of Baldwin’s writings engage the question of oppression and what it does both to its perpetrators and its victims, in this essay he is exceptionally clear on what the existence of oppression means for history.  In the quote below, he compresses his argument into a few sentences.  He begins by talking about Faulkner’s relationship to Southern history:

He is seeking to exorcise a history which is also a curse.  He wants the old order, which came into existence through unchecked greed and wanton murder, to redeem itself without further bloodshed – without, that is, any further menacing itself – and without coercion.  This, old orders never do, less because they would not than because they cannot.  They cannot because they have always existed in relation to a force which they have had to subdue.  This subjugation is the key to their identity and the triumph and justification of their history, and it is also on this continued subjugation that their material well-being depends.  One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same as seeing that, for millions of people, this history – oneself – has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.  It is not so easy to see that, for millions of people, life itself depends on the speediest possible demolition of this history, even if this means the leveling, or the destruction of its heirs.

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