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 stuff and it is thinking like this that results in reigns of terror like the Cultural Revolution, that makes Beatles records contraband, etc. And let’s not forget, as David McReynolds reminds in an e-mail forum earlier today, the Soviet Union, like many Communist countries, outlawed homosexuality at one time as a “sexual deviation” brought on by capitalism.
Not that social democrats can’t be fuddy duddies too. Reading Norman Thomas’ “Socialism Re-examined,” I was struck by a similar passage:
I know modern novels mostly through their reviews, but if I thought they portrayed the true state of mankind, I should doubt our capability of achieving a social order worth saving…It is a sick humanity which revels in sexuality, on the screen, and in the books of Henry Miller, William Burroughs and that ilk.
All politicians, revolutionary and bourgeois, would do well to stay out of the field of literary criticism. With apologies to Emma Goldman, if I can’t read pulp novels, I don’t want your revolution!