Rush Limbaugh makes a good living denouncing the allegedly immense power of the left in American life. It would be comforting for me, as a confirmed pinko ideologue, to believe Limbaugh’s fantasy of leftist omnipotence. But alas, most leftist organizations in this country would have a hard time organizing a good picnic, much less the Revolution.
With little influence in the wider world, most left groups these days concentrate on “propaganda” work–they still use the old term–among their vaguely sympathetic peripheries. These groups–most with membership rolls in the low hundreds, if that–go to enormous effort to produce and distribute newspapers (usually once or twice a month), many of which (given the extraordinarily meager resources of their sponsors) are surprisingly thick and surprisingly slick.
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Some of the smaller sects have little more than a newspaper to attest to their existence, and these papers may have circulation lists not much longer than their mastheads. Among the most radical groups, though, newspapers are pretty much de rigueur; Lenin had one, you see, and so every aspiring Leninist group, no matter how small, feels obligated to put out its own version of the truth. The titles of the papers ring changes on an old tune: Socialist Worker, Revolutionary Worker, Fighting Worker, Workers Vanguard, Workers Truth, Workers World. (As Dwight Macdonald once observed, originality in nomenclature is not one of the American left’s strengths.)
The more visible Revolutionary Communist Party (“Mao more than ever!”) recruits among anarchists and cultural radicals, and the leaders do their best to keep up with the youngsters. But they try a little too hard, and the RCP paper Revolutionary Worker often comes across as a parody–the language a mixture of Maoist dogma, 1960s-era countercultural slang, and an imaginary dialect that the editors must suppose to be the language of today’s youth. The editors don’t ask their readers to join them in the Revolution–they call for us to “get down for the whole thing.” (During a subscription drive, they asked readers to “get down with the drive to subscribe.” ) In the midst of the past election season the paper offered “straight talk on the voting thang.” More advanced young revolutionaries can read Chairman Bob Avakian’s “Democracy: More Than Ever We Can and Must Do Better Than That.”
At times, the Spart diatribes achieve a kind of poetry. My favorite leaflet concerns an alleged brawl between the Canadian equivalents of the Sparts and another Canadian Trotskyist group called the International Socialists (or IS). Bearing a classic Spart headline (“Protest I.S. Thug Attack on Trotskyists! I.S. Draws Blood Line in ‘Death of Communism’ Frenzy”) the pamphlet is all but unintelligible, though the language, if not always coherent, is vigorous. It describes the fight (which broke out at an International Socialist forum the Sparts were picketing) as a lurid melodrama: “Our comrades . . . were surrounded by dozens of I.S. supporters . . . who quickly went berserk. Six I.S.ers slammed a leading comrade to the floor while McNally seized him around the throat and throttled him.” (There is a certain plausibility to this tale: more than a few among the left have felt the occasional impulse to throttle a Spart.)
To the casual observer much of this behavior may seem bizarre, but there is a certain logic to the Spartacist game plan. The world of American Trotskyism has always had a certain hothouse atmosphere to it. Throughout the years, Trotskyists, perpetually small in number, have put a premium on keeping their program correct, on protecting the “clarity” of their line from any deviations (bourgeois deviations, of course) that might come from prolonged exposure to the complexities of the world.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Peter Hannan.
