Prudish Socialists
Steadily making my way through Si Gerson’s books, I’m surprised (although I’m not sure why) by instances of prudishness of our revolutionary heroes. In his “History of the Three Internationals,” William Z. Foster spends a hundred pages after the end of the Third International to ruminate on then-contemporary issues. This material is all, essentially, Party-line, what with the impending crisis of capitalism (in 1954), the imperialist Social Democrats and so on. Within it, this passage manages to stand out as uniquely wrong-headed: In the field of culture there is likewise a general retrogression throughout the capitalist world, above all in the United States, with its cultural mess of pragmatism, psychoanalysis, neo-Malthusianism…with its swamp of “comic” books, oceans of sex, crime and horror stories, printed and on the radio and television. Foster was 73 when he wrote this, and he sounds like a nagging grandpa. But, sadly, this is Party line […]