The politics of betrayal: Renegades and ex-radicals from Mussolini to Christopher Hitchens 9781526102720

Citation preview

The

politics of

betrayal

R enega des a nd e x- r a dica l s f r o m M usso l ini to C h r isto ph e r H itch e n s

Ashley Lav elle

The politics of betrayal

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The politics of betrayal Renegades and ex-radicals from Mussolini to Christopher Hitchens

a s h l e y l av e l l e

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Ashley Lavelle 2013 The right of Ashley Lavelle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 0 7190 8816 2  hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or thirdparty internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by 4word Ltd, Bristol

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contents

Preface and acknowledgements page vii Abbreviationsx A note on terms and sourcesxi Introduction: A road well travelled Part I:  Worlds turned upside down   Introduction to part I   1 Turncoats and collaborationists: early twentieth-century renegades   2 ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ … drop back in: 1960s ex-radicals   Conclusion to part I

1 17 19 21 39 58

Part II:  The experience of defeat   Introduction to part II   3 The First World War: a defeat borne of nationalist bloodshed   4 1960s radicals and political defeat: a lost cause?   5 The full force of the law: defeat by state repression?   Conclusion to part II

59 61 63 82 94 103

Part III:  Flawed radicals   Introduction to part III   6 Flawed early twentieth-century radicals: Mussolini, Parvus, and co.   7 Overstated radicals   8 For thirty pieces of silver?   Conclusion to part III

107 109

Part IV:  The renegade ‘mentality’   Introduction to part IV   9 Psychohistory   10 Arthur Koestler, the twentieth-century ‘sceptic’, and other Cold War pilgrims   Conclusion to part IV

167 169 173

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111 132 151 162

195 224

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vi

Contents

Conclusion225 References231 Index  253

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preface and acknowledgements

This book was conceived in part out of personal experience in radical student politics, where I witnessed several activists morph into conservatives – sometimes virtually overnight.1 I was always conscious of fellow students who had put their radical proclivities behind them to work for government or industry or who became politicians themselves, and I was curious about how, and why, it happened. When I happened across several examples of radicals throughout history who had switched sides – or who departed so far from their previous beliefs so as to constitute a revolution in their outlook – I decided to examine it more closely. This book is part of that desire to understand better the process behind radicals coming to terms with the world they live in. A number of highstandard works, I found, touched on the subject, but either these tended to submerge the question of renegacy in a bigger topic, or they pertained only to a certain political period or individual. I therefore felt that a more comprehensive exploration of the problem was warranted. After first charting the experience of various pilgrims, the book discusses some key explanations for the phenomenon of the renegade. In doing so, it challenges the popular image of the sell-out driven simply by desire for power and money (though admittedly in some cases there is undisputable evidence for these motivations – see chapter 8). It also critically assesses the more sophisticated structural analysis which positions the desertion of radical causes in the context of a reversal in the public mood for social change and in light of the setbacks suffered by political movements. The book draws on the psychohistory literature to establish if there is a ‘renegade mentality’ that 1  In the late 1990s, Duncan Pegg, a radical law student and supporter of the Marxist Socialist Worker Student Club at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, became a right-wing social democrat at the drop of a hat. He subsequently joined forces with the conservative Liberal Party-aligned students on the campus in order to control the university’s Student Representative Council (SRC). When I came across Pegg only a few years later, he had already grown into a well-fed and smug bureaucrat safely cocooned in a right-wing trade union.

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viii

Preface and acknowledgements

sees radicals afflicted with it condemning what they once believed with equal fervour, embracing a seemingly endless catalogue of causes, movements, and cures over their lifetimes. Renegades tend to be erratic, mercurial, and unpredictable, and as a result are sometimes described as political ‘adventurers’. This explains why some radicals equipped with similar ideologies and frameworks, and inhabiting the same political terrain, can go in completely different directions – their personalities, in other words, are critical variables. Rather than seeing the renegade as the product simply of material inducements or blind historical forces, the book puts the individual, the subject, and the personality in their rightful place in history, and draws attention to the interplay of institutions, interests, ideas, and psychologies. In writing this book, I have accumulated numerous debts. I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers from Manchester University Press who provided useful comments and criticisms on parts of the manuscript, as well as to two additional anonymous reviewers who carefully studied earlier drafts from beginning to end, offering many helpful suggestions for additional sources and contrasting persectives. Morgan Gibson, Natasha Cleary, and Karina Leys provided expert research assistance. A large amount of thanks are due to the inter-library loans staff at Griffith and Macquarie universities for making available a sizable range of sources to which I would not ordinarily have enjoyed access. I am also indebted to members of the Chair of Political Science, Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences, Viadrina University Frankfurt (an der Oder), in particular Gert Wegmarshaus, and to staff at the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts, University of Gothenburg, for their collegiality and research support during my visits in early 2009 where some of the ideas in the book were first presented and challenged. The book was mostly written at my previous institution, Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia). I am therefore grateful to the university’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy (CGPP) for financial assistance and teaching relief, as well as for providing a forum in which the book’s arguments – not to mention its rationale – could be probed and scrutinised. The CGPP under the directorship of Pat Weller – to whom I am personally thankful as a research mentor – fostered a productive and generous scholarly environment in the absence of which this book would be unfathomable. Griffith University also awarded me a grant of over $12,000 to enable me to conduct the research for the book, and for that I am very appreciative. I would also like to thank my former colleagues at Griffith University’s Department of Politics and Public Policy (PPP). Robyn Hollander deserves

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Preface and acknowledgements

ix

special mention for bringing to my attention the case of the British-Australian turncoat Adela Pankhurst Walsh, and Zim Nwokora likewise put me in touch with a work on the ‘renegade’ American president Barack Obama. But I owe a special debt of thanks to Gideon Baker, a great colleague and an exceedingly generous friend whose confidence I have sought for reasons well beyond scholarly matters. My friendship with Gideon undoubtedly has halved my psychologist bills! Another dear friend Haylla Rahal also has been a tremendous source of support and good times, and I am extremely fortunate to have met her. Obrigado, chief! The wisdom, insights, wit, and – most of all – friendship of Razia ‘Muffy’ Osman have also been of tremendous benefit to me in my studies of politics and life in recent years. My mother, father, and brother have all been central figures in the web of relationships that has made the book conceivable. To them I am eternally indebted. The one apology I would like to issue is to the late Christopher Hill for abusing his book title, The World Turned Upside Down (Hill, 1991), for Part I of the present volume: Hill’s formidable scholarship is important to the explanatory skeleton of the book, which I hope does his work some of the justice it deserves.2 Finally, in the course of writing the book, I have happily stumbled across numerous examples of radicals who refused to give up even when all hope appeared lost, and who battled on long after it would have been understandable for them to have called it it quits: the Tariq Alis, Noam Chomskys, David Dellingers, Chris Harmans, and Leon Trotskys, and countless other less wellknown unrepentant radicals, whose actions dwarf mere words on a page. My admiration for them has grown over the course of this research project. The book is therefore dedicated to these incorruptible fighters. May they have the last say!

2  ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, a seventeenth-century English song, has a longer history than Hill’s book, but it is him to whom I owe the debt.

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a b b r e v i at i o n s

AIM BUF ALP CCF CCNY CGPP CGT CIA CPA est FBI HUAC

American Indian Movement British Union of Fascists Australian Labor Party Congress for Cultural Freedom City College of New York Centre for Governance and Public Policy General Confederation of Labour (Confédération Générale du Travail) Central Intelligence Agency Communist Party of Australia Erhard Seminars Training Federal Bureau of Investigation House Un-American Activities Committee (also known as the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or HCUA) IRA Irish Republican Army IRD Information Research Department IRS Internal Revenue Service IWW Industrial Workers of the World NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NHS National Health Service NYSE New York Stock Exchange OAAU Organization of Afro-American Unity OSHA Occupation Safety and Health Administration PPP Politics and Public Policy PSI Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano) SDS Students for a Democratic Society SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SPD German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) SWP (UK) Socialist Workers Party (United Kingdom) SWP (US) Socialist Workers Party (United States) VSP Victorian Socialist Party WHO World Health Organization Yippie derived from Youth International Party Yuppie derived from Young Urban Professional or Young Upwardly Mobile Professional

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a note on terms and sources

A capital ‘C’ is used when referring to the ‘Communist Party’ of a particular country, while a lower-case ‘c’ is used to refer to those of a communist persuasion, which does not necessarily imply support for Stalinist Russia or any comparable regime going by the same self-description. Some leftists have regarded ‘communism’ as coterminous with the political tradition founded by the Bolsheviks (see Berman, 1996: 76). But it is employed here in a wider sense to refer to the tradition that includes some of the radical Levellers of seventeenth-century England (Hill, 1984: 29), the utopian socialist pioneers who informed Marx’s writings, such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen (Venable, 1946: 5), through Marx himself and up to contemporary exponents of communism such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek (see King, 2010), mindful though we must be of the differences in the meaning of that tradition as it has been articulated by its different adherents. The term ‘socialist’ is largely used interchangeably with ‘communist’, except where indicated, as in the case of the American New York intellectual Irving Howe, whose ‘socialism’ was essentially of the social democratic reformist stripe. Labels applied to people such as ‘radicals’, ‘revolutionaries’, and ‘conservatives’ are often used for want of a better term and are thus by no means adequate in their description of their states at various points, but they do still offer us the best way of encapsulating a political praxis at a certain stage. While I seek to avoid what Thompson (1966: 12) calls ‘the condescension of posterity’ – few of us can be supremely confident of what we would have done had we been in their shoes – when it comes to writing about the subjects’ attempts at making history, a judgement upon the decisions made by the various former radicals is unavoidable. Throughout the book I have referred to Russia and the Soviet Union largely in the same vein. The terms can be taken to refer to that part of the world spanning the pre- and post-1917 Bolshevik revolution, as well as the entity that emerged after 1991. Finally, much of the quotes used in the book precede the long overdue backlash against the sexist language omnipresent throughout much of the

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twentieth century, in particular the use of the male pronoun. Because this habit was so widespread I have chosen not to use the standard ‘sic’ after each case. This in no way is to be taken as an endorsement of this – now happily outdated – practice.

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introduction a r o a d w e l l t r av e l l e d The final struggle will be between the Communists and the ex-Communists. (Ignazio Silone, 1949: 113) In each country that has experienced a revolution a confrontation has taken place between revolutionaries on one side and reformists and future renegades on the other. (Régis Debray, 1967: 23; emphasis added)

The corpse of the radical turned renegade is strewn across the battle plains of political history. Perhaps the best-known example since the rise of organised party politics in the early twentieth century is the man who distinguished himself as a rambunctious editor of a socialist newspaper only to emerge later as the ruler of fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini. But a similar fate befell numerous other radicals around the period of the First World War and during the interwar years, including the French anti-militarist transformed into a warmonger Gustave Hervé, the Belgian Marxist cum Nazi collaborator Hendrik de Man, and the British Labour Party politician Oswald Mosley who eventually founded his own fascist movement. A significant number of American Trotskyists and Marxists (the so-called ‘New York intellectuals’) active from the early decades of the twentieth century onwards later became neo-conservatives, anticommunists, or, in some instances, McCarthyists. Numerous former 1960s radicals, too, were subsequently to find themselves ensconced in parts of the establishment in various countries, as the whiff of tear gas and the blow of the truncheon faded from memory: witness the former Black Panther Party leader, Eldridge Cleaver, who became a Republican and a born-again Christian; or the proponent of guerrilla warfare and revolution, Régis Debray, who ended up as a heavily compromised adviser to a French president. More recently in the early years of the twenty-first century, the muckraking journalist and former Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens waged a vigorous campaign on behalf of the neo-conservative imperialist ambitions of George W. Bush’s administration following the terrorist infernos of 11 September 2001. The renegade is therefore no chimera: the Italian novelist and founder member of the Italian Communist Party Ignazio Silone, himself a renegade,

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Introduction

divined that the ‘final struggle will be between the Communists and the ex-Communists’ (Silone, 1949: 113). The Marxist writer Isaac Deutscher commented that, ever since the Russian Narodnik Lev Tikhomirov published Why I Ceased to be a Revolutionary in the late nineteenth century,‘in every generation, in every decade, the weary and disillusioned, as they withdrew from the fray or changed sides tried to answer this question’ (Deutscher, 1987: 442). The spectacle of ex-fighters and rebels laying siege to their old ideals is thus an all-too-common occurrence in political life. Yet the propensity for radicals to undergo the most striking metamorphoses – to cut back across what the English revolutionary William Morris called the ‘river of fire’ – and emerge as anti-radicals has yet to be sufficiently explained.1 The few renegades who have been subjected to analysis have tended to be viewed in isolation, without the necessary comparative work enabling us to generalise about the problem. There are excellent volumes on the New York intellectuals and other Cold War renegades (see Wald, 1987; Bloom, 1986; Deutscher, 1969; Diggins, 1975), and there is some insightful work on ex-1960s radicals (Ali, 2005: ch. 11). In addition, multiple biographical sources on the stories of individual renegades are available (e.g. Scammell, 2009; Rout, 1991). But these works are invariably about a certain period, individual or milieu in politics, rather than about the phenomenon of the renegade itself. Thus we undertake here the first comprehensive study of renegades from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards.2 It was the former French radical Debray who pondered how a person can ‘get up one fine morning and renounce everything that has driven us until that moment’ (Debray, 2007: 5). The question is an important one, for if those who stand for radical political ideals are inevitably bound to renounce these views and become captured by the system they once abhorred, there would seem little hope for radicalism. Many renegades were at one time gifted radical belligerents whose loss to conservatism is immeasurable. The

1  In Morris’s case, crossing the ‘river of fire’ meant leaving behind his bourgeois class background and converting to the causes of socialism and the working class (see Thompson, 1977: ch. 7). 2  Needless to say, the renegade was not born in the twentieth century. Yet confining the book to the period since the beginning of the early twentieth century makes the project more manageable while not sacrificing too much generalisability. Moreover, we do refer briefly to the examples of seventeenth-century renegades when we draw on the approach of Christopher Hill in his The Experience of Defeat (1984).

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3

Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton describes Christopher Hitchens’ defection to the camp of the neo-conservatives as a ‘grievous’ blow to the left on account of his writing skills, debating abilities, and his encyclopaedic knowledge of world affairs (Eagleton, 2010). Most renegades were flawed but nonetheless highly talented members of political movements. On the other hand, could the left ever have relied on the wavering support of fair-weather friends such as Hitchens? Perhaps it is a case of good riddance to rotting refuse – a question we probe further in the chapters on ‘flawed radicals’ and the ‘renegade mentality’. Whatever is the answer to that question, the political impact of such voltefaces is beyond doubt: the process of beating radicals into submission is aided considerably when the words and deeds of former revolutionaries are hurled back in their face. Mussolini’s former colleague in the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI)) Angelica Balabanoff situates his historic betrayal in the context of the need of the entente powers in the First World War for a ‘demagogue who knew his revolutionary phraseology and who could talk the language of the masses’, and therefore agitate for Italy’s involvement in the campaign alongside Britain, France, and Russia (Balabanoff, 1968: 119). In other words, Mussolini’s treachery was eminently useful to powerful political forces. In relation to the communist-turned-McCarthyist Max Eastman and other New York intellectuals, Alfred Kazin commented that ‘the Cold War and McCarthy era needed them, raised them, publicized them’ (cited in Wald, 1987: 290). The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had viewed former communists as the people best equipped to battle communists (Saunders, 1999: 62). Radicals’ changing allegiances have thus made history. What would have happened had Mussolini not made his historic break with the PSI during the First World War, before becoming a fascist ruler and allying his country to Nazi Germany? In the estimation of Hitchens, the faction of ex-radical New York intellectuals contributed more to the rightward shift in US politics than the conservative Christians with whom they were often aligned (Hitchens, 1986: 52). Meanwhile, the actions of many former 1960s radicals in deriding past ventures also undoubtedly helped the revolutionary politics of those years stay frozen in that decade, as returning to the fold in later years became the fashionable thing to do (Harman, 1988: viii). This book is therefore no feelgood story: it is about dashed hopes and dreams, reversals, resignation, and betrayal. In part, its subject is the defeat of movements for radical social change, as seen through the most obvious

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manifestations of defeat: leading radical figures who give up on changing the world. But it is nonetheless an important subject, for there is little point in acknowledging the instincts for creative political theatre and spontaneous rebellion of the 1960s Yippie and anti-capitalist activist Jerry Rubin without confronting the question as to why he ended up a self-proclaimed ‘Yuppie’. Any radical movement needs the talents of a Max Eastman, who translated important works such as Leon Trotsky’s epic The History of the Russian Revolution (see Eastman, 1997). But these qualities, alas, would ultimately be put to the service of McCarthyism, which survived the political demise and ultimate death of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1957 to exact a terrible toll against the left and its organisations for years to come (Saunders, 1999: 211). The book thus seeks to provide some explanations for why dedicated and articulate radicals betray their comrades, in the process exerting an important impact on events. This book is premised, therefore, on the belief that it matters what people – and leaders – do. The notion that leaders would simply be ‘created’ by movements in their absence is just as spurious as the idea that leaders make history alone. Movements are thus critical, but so is the role of individuals within those movements, which, in a dialectical manner, in turn shape – and provide opportunities to – leaders (Lukács, 2009: 37). And so the part played by renegades in helping to determine the success – or otherwise, as it may be – of those movements has also been pivotal. To an extent, this enters into the philosophical territory inhabited by the structure-agency debate, which concerns the scope for human action and influence vis-à-vis the social structures within – and against – which people strive to make a difference. This is an important point of reference, since the question is raised throughout the book as to what capacity individuals have to resist the pressures to accommodate and to soften their radical aspirations. In terms of the degree of autonomy designated to structures and agents in making social change, it is true that people are not born into an unstructured world in which they develop structures as they like, free of biases: structures get a head start on agents. But, while structures mould people in often unseen ways and determine the circumstances in which the latter view themselves and the world, the actions and decisions of people – guided in sometimes important ways by their psychology (see chapters 9 and 10) – can be decisive in the outcome of events (Barker et al., 2001; Callinicos, 1989). As John Rees argues, the freedom people enjoy to make their own history varies considerably: ‘At the height of the revolutionary wave such freedom

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5

can be considerable, in the concentration camp it can be reduced to virtually zero’ (Rees, 1991: 30). Moreover, broader social forces determine which individuals – for better or worse – make history, when they make it, and the circumstances in which they do so (O’Lincoln, 1993: 43). An awareness of the plethora of pressures and constraints involved in political activity is an imperative – while, critically, not losing sight of the enabling factors, the opportunities, the relative autonomy of the individual involved, and their scope for influence. The challenge for all biographers, according to Woolf, is to depict the individual in their proper historical and social context without the subject disappearing altogether (Woolf, 1966: 187). Notwithstanding the problems posed by studying an ever-changing being – as Keynes asked in relation to the British Prime Minister Lloyd George: ‘Who can paint the chameleon?’ (cited in Morgan, 1988: 48) – in essence Woolf’s ambition is the one we set for ourselves in relation to the various individuals scrutinised in the following pages. An obvious matter that confronts us in view of this task is the selection of cases: readers will undoubtedly object to the presence of some individuals in the collection, and to the absence of others. Even if this is the case, it is hoped that the reader will be convinced that the case selection is sufficiently large and wide to tackle the problem. Partly we are restricted by the fact that there are many radicals and ex-radicals whose experiences we cannot distil for the purposes of positing explanations. But, as the historian Christopher Hill argued in his book on the seventeenth-century English Revolution’s subdued radicals, The Experience of Defeat, we are reliant on those who left some record of what they did and why, rather than on those who withdrew anonymously into passivity, resigned to lives of quiet desperation (Hill, 1984: 17). In the following chapters we necessarily draw only on the experience of those whom we know about, or who have issued some public testimony as to their behaviour. In any case, because they often remain vociferous political protagonists, renegades tend to be more likely to document and explain – not to mention vigorously justify – their shifting alliances. Even then, however, for the sake of brevity we are restricted to discussing a sample of cases drawn from the major movements and periods of capitalism since the beginning of the twentieth century across a variety of countries.3 In this sense, we are trying to paint 3  The reader will note that the great majority of cases studied are men. This is not a conscious choice; rather it largely reflects the sexism central to politics and society, meaning that males have not only been the leading radicals, but the leading turncoats as well.

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what Donaldson and Poynting (2007: 22), in their study of ‘ruling class men’, call a ‘collective portrait’. Inevitably in the process we encounter a wide spectrum of actors. Consider the differences between the likes of Benito Mussolini and Christopher Hitchens: one at the head of a European state during some of the major political events in the first half of the twentieth century, the other a Portsmouth-born journalist who was anointed into politics in the 1960s without ever holding political office. Both are renegades in the sense set out in more detail below of renouncing long-held faiths and betraying old causes and friends at a crucial political juncture. Parker (2006) notes that Hitchens’ imprimatur for the 2003 Iraq War had ‘confused and dismayed former comrades, and brought him into odd new alliances’. The same was true of Mussolini – albeit on a greater scale, with more calamitous consequences. In this sense, there are differences in their occupations – though Mussolini was also a journalist of sorts as one-time editor of the PSI newspaper, Avanti! – and specific political contexts, but their relationships to radical movements have considerable resemblances. Both were political players whose defections have shaped events. This is what unites the cases discussed in the book, including those commentators whose words provide intellectual ballast for various social and political interests and who therefore act as legitimators (Steinfels, 1979: 6). In most instances, the cases can be considered radical leftists and anti-capitalists of some variety, and their interactions with the state and other powerful social forces are of comparable dimensions. From socialists during the First World War such as Mussolini to the New York intellectuals in the years after the 1930s, to French radicals in the 1960s, there are remarkable parallels in the articulation of their apostasies, the reasons proffered for them, the reactions of their former friends and allies, and the factors that can objectively be teased out as explanations for their behaviour.

From radical to renegade Before outlining the book’s argument and structure, it is important to frame the discussion conceptually. The term ‘radical’ has been employed in a variety of different ways. It was, for example, used to describe the popular movement that existed in Britain between the time of the French Revolution and the emergence of the Chartists in the mid-nineteenth century. But it later

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7

became synonymous with either the Radical Whigs and Radical Tories or with members of the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, in which context the term had less progressive meaning (Cliff, 1984: 242). This book approaches radicalism quite differently as part of a left, systemic, and anti-capitalist understanding of society and politics. Historically radicalism has been defined as an approach that identifies the systems, ideologies, and power underlying specific phenomena (Engler, 2004). As Karl Marx once put it: ‘To be radical is to grasp the matter by its roots’ (cited in Macdonald, 1957: 29). Where liberals see racism and crime as separate problems capable of being remedied through legislative change, radicals see them as inseparable and as constitutive of a wider system – namely capitalist social relations – transcending acts of parliament (Gordon and Osmond, 1970: 4–5). Radicals are thus generally anti-capitalists, though not always socialists.4 Leo Marx, a student at Harvard in the 1930s, recalled being encouraged by the Marxist economist Paul Sweezy to adopt a radical stance towards the US by identifying the structural forces underpinning social problems and accepting their insolubility through legislative reform (cited in Cohen, 1993: 247). One of radicalism’s hallmarks – drawing links between issues – is reflected in Irving Howe’s observation that radicalism’s appeal to 1930s American youth sprang from its ability to provide a coherent and all-encompassing view of life (Howe, 1983: 10). This aspect of radicalism is partly due to the influence of dialectical materialism, one of whose three core elements is seeing things in totality and teasing out the relationships between the different parts of the system (see Rees, 1998: 5).5 As well as relating seemingly disconnected events, radicalism is about achieving systemic change through challenging the political structures and institutions whose legitimacy is generally assumed. Radicals are often created when activists confront roadblocks to the change they desire within the channels of mainstream political participation, forcing them to countenance more

4  This definition obviously would not apply to radicals under feudalism, as in the English and French Revolutions when favouring policies later associated with the capitalist mode of production put one at odds with the monarchy and other powerful figures in society. But the same relationship to authority figures, institutions, and social relations – as then structured – was nonetheless the same as for radicals under capitalism. Indeed, those opposed to the King and the monarchy during the English Revolution have been referred to as ‘radicals’ (Robin, 2011: 68). 5  The other two elements of the dialectic are change and contradiction (Rees, 1998: 5).

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concerted forms of resistance and rebellion (Hayden, 1969a: 29, 30). Fry (1983: x, xi) suggests that radicals have challenged prevailing belief systems and pitted themselves against ‘the powerful authorities of their day’. Thus, it has been suggested that the first radical was the angel Lucifer, who was rewarded for his rebellion against the establishment – by refusing to serve God – with his very own kingdom (Alinsky, 1989: ix). Radicals are thus usually revolutionaries. It follows that in Stalinist Russia, being a ‘Marxist’ did not necessarily make one a radical, as this did not imply confrontation with the state and ‘powerful authorities’ (unless the Marxist was of a Trotskyist or some other radical variety deemed to be ‘counterrevolutionary’). In the same way that coming into conflict with the state does not necessarily make one a radical, just being nominally a Marxist is not enough on its own to see someone subject to state coercion. In fact, in most cases being a ‘Marxist’ in Stalinist Russia was a conservative disposition, since ‘Marxism–Leninism’ had assumed the status of a state religion (see Harris, 1968; Clarke, 1950: 54).6 In the US during the Cold War, by contrast, the same person holding very similar politics was generally a radical, since they were likely – assuming their wish to translate theory into practice – to encounter significant persecution and isolation and be required to make considerable sacrifices. But even here radicalism was not immutable: some communists in the US, for example, followed the dictates from Moscow in lining up with the West’s imperialist war drive after the collapse of the Nazi–Soviet pact in 1941 and were transformed into avid patriots, supporters of incarceration of Japanese nationals, and opponents of strikes (Davis, 1986: 89, 90). In general, however, Scruton (1982: 391) highlights radicals’ hostility to the status quo and their dissatisfaction with anything less than ‘sweeping changes’. Similarly, according to Love (1988: 151), radicalism strives to subvert social relationships. Both these latter definitions are arguably deficient in light of their failure to specify the kind of change being sought, particularly given the mistaken assumption that conservatism involves hostility to change per se: if the status quo itself is hostile to conservative social forces, then conservatives will seek to challenge the status quo (D’Souza, cited in Robin, 2011: 25). With radicalism often regarded as coterminous with ‘extremism’, 6  On the other hand, acquiescing to Stalinism did not save numerous former Bolsheviks from persecution and sometimes death: see the case of Nikolai Bukharin who, despite backing down from challenging Stalin’s hold over the party leadership, was nonetheless tried in 1938 under preposterous charges and subsequently executed (Gluckstein, 1994: 251).

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some will argue that the former can also be found on the far right (Labedz, 1999: 723). Yet if we accept that the subversion of social relations is a characteristic of radicalism, then right-wingers in practice are rarely deserving of the term ‘radical’. Even under Hitler’s Nazis, (capitalist) social relations remained intact, albeit in a different form – a highly state-directed command economy – to those existing under the Weimar republic (Cliff, 1988: 212). This is also why far-left political movements have always been treated more brusquely by the state than their enemies on the so-called ‘radical’ right: the former have always represented a far greater threat to the structures of power and privilege than the latter. It is partly for these reasons that we are primarily interested in radicals on the left of the spectrum. The relevance and meaning of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ themselves, though, have been subject to some debate since at least the 1990s, as issues such as the environment and biotechnology have been regarded as less comfortable fits in a spectrum whose origins lie in the eighteenth-century French Revolution (Giddens, 1994). Yet one feature always distinguishing the left from the right has been the former’s commitment to equality, and to greater freedom and power for the majority (Bobbio, 1996: 29–31; Cohen, cited in Robin, 2011: 9). Whereas the right has always been more tolerant of the vastly unequal outcomes that flow from the uneven spread of resources marring capitalist societies, the left has generally tried to have the equal talents and abilities present at birth reflected in each person’s quality of life. Usually this attachment to equality has been presaged on a belief in the need for the circumvention of capitalist market forces, to greater or lesser degrees, depending on whether one is part of the revolutionary or reformist left. This has also undoubtedly been part of the quest for greater freedom: whereas ‘freedom’ for the right has often meant the freedom for a minority to exploit the majority economically, the left has tended to understand it in terms much more liberating for the mass of the people through freedom of access to education, resources, health care, and dignifying work, as well as in terms of the usual negative freedoms from poverty and oppression (see Harvey, 2005). The usual ‘negative’ freedoms (from poverty and oppression, for example), but also positive ones (in particular, the freedom to partake equally in the benefits of human labour), garner the support of the left. The left, of course, has not always been consistent in its attitude to freedom, evidenced by some radicals and leftists’ support for patently unfree regimes in various parts of the world. But these are the underlying articles of faith for radical leftism.

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There is an additional reason why left radical-cum-renegades are of interest. Finkelstein argues that invariably apostates move from left to right in the direction of power, rather than away from it (Finkelstein, 2008: 243). It is certainly true that apostates most commonly move in a rightward direction. Rarely do actors move from conservatism to radicalism, at least in the form described above. The examples that Robin (2011: 110) cites as proof that intellectuals can switch from right to left – John Gray and Edward Luttwak – do not refute this, since they ended up as leftists or social democrats at most, not radical and systemic anti-capitalists. There are occasional exceptions to this rule, such as the Tory capitalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was beguiled by Marxism after reading Das Kapital in 1880 (Mahamdallie, 1996: 76). Yet in his case the exception seemed to prove the rule.7 The story of renegades and ex-radicals is therefore almost always one of the radical who undertakes a rapprochement with capitalism and the status quo. All of the cases examined in the succeeding chapters are one-time radicals – whether of the communist, Marxist, anarchist, Trotskyist, anticapitalist, or pacifist variety, each tended to involve at least a systemic view of the problems of life and their stubbornness under existing political economic arrangements – whose centre of gravity moved to the right. Along the way, they abandoned their radical politics to become renegades (also known as ‘apostates’, ‘sell-outs’, or ‘turncoats’) or simply ex-radicals who had moved on to far tamer pursuits. The renegade is broadly defined as a ‘person who deserts his cause or faith for another’ (also known as an ‘apostate’ or ‘traitor’). The word has roots in the medieval Latin word renegare (‘to renounce’), and in the Latin word negare, meaning ‘to deny’ (Collins Dictionary, 1979: 1235). Similarly, an apostate, according to the Oxford Dictionary (1976: 30), is a person who leaves one’s religion or party. Almond (1954: 132) uses the terms ‘renegade’ and ‘defector’ more narrowly to refer to ex-Communist party members in Britain, the US, France, and Italy. We use these terms in a wider sense (see further below). 7  Although initially on good terms with Marx and Engels, Hyndman’s relationship with the two suffered when he plagiarised Das Kapital in a book he wrote, England for All (Gabriel, 2011: 476). Never able to let go of his upper-class roots, Hyndman accepted ‘“Tory gold” for putting up two candidates in the general election [of 1885] to split the Liberal vote and let the Tories in’ (Mahamdallie, 1996: 76). Hyndman also left the British Socialist Party over the question of the war, subsequently forming his own National Socialist Party to wage more stridently the case for British involvement (Seymour, 2008: 52).

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It is not in political discourse exclusively that we find these terms. There are some parallels with the conversion of Saul to Paul on the road to Damascus, or the transformation of Augustine from lustful sinner into shamed advocate of abstinence (Squire, 2008: 90, 103–5). Historically the term ‘apostate’ has particularly religious connotations (Mahoney, 2003), though it has arguably more political resonances in contemporary speak.8 On the other hand, the musician Bob Dylan was accused – probably unjustly – of selling out because of the commercial success and fame he achieved while lyricising the plight of the poor and the oppressed (cited in Shelton, 1986: 416–17). Despite these different usages, it is the political apostasy to which this book is devoted. The specific sense of the actor who renounces or turns away from one’s past radical views is of interest for our purposes, not the vague sense of someone who is considered unconventional, an outsider, or a maverick (e.g. Wolffe, 2010). Christopher Hill argued that the English radical William Sedgwick could rightfully be described as a renegade after 1661: he publicly turned his back on all political action, and in his written work (to some of which he dared not append his name) declared revolt to be ‘irrational and unsafe’, arguing that the cause had been corrupted from the outset – not unlike those who would later interpret Stalinism as the logical corollary of October 1917 (Hill, 1984: 115–16). The Russian Marxist and Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin described the reformist socialist Karl Kautsky as a ‘renegade’ and someone guilty of ‘apostasy’ over his renunciation of revolutionary Marxism (Lenin, 1975). Renegades and ex-radicals thus do more than merely adjust their opinions in light of new evidence or changes in the world. Their actions require scrutiny not just because of the weakness of the defences – which we examine in subsequent chapters – proffered for their reversals, but also because of the unrecognisable beings into which they are transformed compared to their radical progenitor. As the literary critic William Hazlitt put it, they amount to a ‘vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire’ on themselves (cited in Thompson, 1969: 153). Indeed, Stephen Vicinczey wryly commented that the ex-communist and novelist Arthur Koestler, who committed suicide in 1983, had killed himself twice (Cesarani, 1998: 536). As a result of the 8  One critic has used the term ‘apostate’ to describe the British Labour politician Peter Hain, who first came to prominence in the 1970s as a radical anti-apartheid activist and anti-capitalist, but ended up as a minister in the neo-liberal warmongering governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (Pilger, 2002).

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violent nature of the changes often experienced by the individual, the journey from radical to renegade consequently can be a very traumatic one involving nothing less than, in the words of William Phillips, the collapse of ‘your whole way of life’ (cited in Dorman, 2000: 67). Apostasy therefore is not just about retiring from politics, but rather about a wholesale change in class interests and perspectives. Renegades usually find themselves on the opposite side of the barricades, as was the case with the Russian Marxist Parvus whose advocacy for the German government during the First World War put him at odds with the interests of the international proletariat who would be called on to sacrifice themselves in the trenches (see chapter 1). Jerry Rubin is also a classic case of a renegade who wound up on the other side of the political equation: an anti-Wall Street protestor in 1967, he would emerge as a Wall Street stock analyst in 1980 (see chapter 2). Many renegades and ex-radicals are thus reborn as different people. In some cases this is almost literally true: the American ex-Bolshevik enthusiast Louis Fraina changed his identity to Lewis Corey before wiping references to his radical past from his personal bibliography (see chapter 1).9 In this sense, the renegade is distinct from the left-leaning labour or social democratic politician who compromises their politics under the pressure of governing the capitalist state.10 Instead, the renegade tends to take on a more permanent disposition of enmity to radicalism. This gives a sense of the potential pitfalls of attempting to generalise about renegades, who in fact come in various forms. There are, for instance, the renegades who openly acknowledge their complete break with the past, and are often vitriolic about radicalism, pouring scorn on their past comrades and their own previous ideas. Then there are renegades who profess no shame about their past political affiliations, instead arguing that times have changed, and so have they. An additional variety is the renegade who might be more properly described as an ex-radical, since they do not always publicly renege 9  It should be noted that when he changed his name to Corey, he was still at that stage committed to Marxism. 10  Witness the case of British Labour’s Tony Benn who, as a cabinet minister under the Harold Wilson and James Callaghan governments in the 1970s, accepted the logic of capital by going along with cuts to social spending and the closure of power stations (Cliff and Gluckstein, 1996: 341, 343), only to emerge in the 1990s as one of the leading left-wing critics of Blair’s New Labour. For this reason, we have largely chosen not to include among our cases social democrats who become deeply compromised while managing the capitalist system (see Herman, 1999; Callinicos, 1997).

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on their old views or deny any fundamental ruptures with their past, but still their actions no longer have any visible radical content. There is not surprisingly a certain amount of blurriness in these categories, since we are dealing with personalities and the different lights in which actors themselves cast their actions. Indeed, honesty is not what we should expect from the typical renegade if Wald is correct in identifying a defining feature of apostasy as the failure to ‘see or acknowledge the authentic nature of one’s change’ (Wald, 1987: 281). As Marx warned, it pays not to ‘judge an individual by what he thinks about himself’ (cited in Montag, 1988: 95). More definitively, what connects the different renegades and ex-radicals studied in the following chapters is their desertion of radicalism, defined as a left-wing project of emancipation designed to transcend the here and now, and which embraces in carnivalesque fashion, celebrated by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, turning the world on its head in every sphere of life, from the political and economic to the cultural and the sexual (see Stam, 1989). Radicalism is in some senses unique in politics: arguably all other projects accept and seek to work within, to greater or lesser degrees, existing frameworks and institutions. Needless to say, not all radicals have been devotees of the carnival, but the eclipse of capitalist political economy was almost always part of the plan. The question of why it is that individuals choose to give up on hopes for global liberation and systemic, transpersonal change – however different their eventual destinations – is, therefore, worthy of the devotion of a single study. As well as differing by type, there are some distinctions in the speed and extent of the unravelling of one’s radical politics. It can be a gradual, stepby-step evolution whereby one’s enfeebled radicalism eventually becomes non-existent; alternatively, as in the case of Mussolini, it can hinge largely on a single decision – in his case to support Italian involvement in the First World War (see chapter 1). The American radical who became a leading neoconservative, Norman Podhoretz, readily admitted having broken ranks in the 1960s, but denied that it was akin to a Damascene rebirth. Instead, he claims, it took between five and six years (Podhoretz, 1999: 88). Finally, as well as the speed of the process differing, so too can its endpoint. Some former radicals have become mere liberals, while others have become anti-communists, neo-conservatives, or McCarthyists. The renegade does not always join the fascist far right, but generally any residual opposition to capitalism disappears (Deutscher, 1969: 15, 10). There is, of course, a world of difference between those who shifted from radicalism to social democracy or

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green politics – frameworks within which critical attitudes to capitalism are still possible – and those who migrated to neo-conservatism or even fascism. One should not give any credence to the notion that fascists and right-wing social democrats are one and the same – the fatal mistake, of course, made by German communists in the lead-up to 1933. The process of de-radicalisation itself matters: even if it is argued that the move in an individual’s case was from radical to centre rather than from radical to right, what matters is the break with radicalism in the first place, and why it happened.

Structure and argument of the book The first two chapters (part I) of the book set the scene by detailing some of the more conspicuous cases of renegades and ex-radicals since the beginning of the twentieth century, from Mussolini through to Christopher Hitchens. The purpose here is to provide the reader with some grasp of the variety of puzzling transformations undergone by different characters, before going on in succeeding chapters to explore the range of explanations for their behaviour. Part II looks at one of the more influential ways of understanding the renegade: drawing on Christopher Hill’s account of the English Revolution’s defeated, we assess the proposition that renegacy is a response to lost political battles. In other words, during times of setbacks, as ruling classes reassert their authority and the winds of change blow against radicalism, some former opponents of the regime will be pulled by the seemingly irresistible rightward drift. In the third part of the book we examine the notion that renegades were flawed radicals, or that there were continuities between the radical and renegade phases of their lives. It is conceded, of course, that all radicals are flawed, if only as human beings. The point, however, is whether any identifiable flaws can hasten the radical’s journey to the right or whether there were certain aspects of their later politics that were present in their radical phase. There are often flaws inherent to their justifications – usually given post-facto – as well as flaws in their politics evident while they were still radical leftists. I also examine the proposition that becoming a renegade is, literally, about a venal individual ‘selling out’ one’s radical politics for material and power rewards. In part IV, we draw on some of the psychohistory literature to examine whether the phenomenon of the renegade is connected to personality

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tendencies and traits. Is there an identifiable renegade mentality, as some authors have asserted? Is there something about these individuals that explains why their commitment to radicalism – but not others’ – lacked durability? The structure of the book is designed in such a way as to peel back the layers of analysis of the ex-radical, from the geo-strategic global external factors to the actor’s ideology and political modus operandi, through to psycho-personal characteristics. The aim throughout is not to eliminate various factors such as an experience of defeat or radicals’ flaws before moving on to the final and peremptory explanation – the renegade mentality – but to flesh out the variety of different themes important in the many cases of different renegades, and to ascertain under what conditions they assert themselves. Without pre-empting too much the conclusions of the book, suffice it to say that there is merit in each of these explanations. None provides a satisfying explanation on its own. The experiences are so vast and varied as to defy any one theory of renegacy. My objective in this book is not to deconstruct the actions and writings of these individuals in detail, but rather to look at their overall political odysseys and the rationalisations they, and others, offer for them. Some cases warrant more attention than others because of the individual’s impact and significance, and the quality and quantity of sources available also determine to some extent the level of treatment for each person. From my organising the book in this fashion, the reader will see that I have neglected the possibility that age is a factor in de-radicalisation: as people get older, so the argument goes, their energy for radical change is gradually sapped. Reference is often made to Winston Churchill’s attributed saying that any person under thirty years of age who is not a liberal is heartless, while any person over thirty and not a conservative is brainless. Even though Churchill did not actually say this (Robin, 2011: 110), the quote has been used against radicals to equate radicalism with youthful exuberance, and conservatism with growing older. Yet this is a rather shallow explanation. The evidence suggests that age need not weary radicals: the ‘unrepentant radicals’ to whom I dedicated the book – Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, David Dellinger, and Chris Harman – all maintained their radicalism well past middle age (in Chomsky’s case, now into his eighties). Being weighed down by mortgages, careers, and childrearing responsibilities might not make it easy to retain one’s radical zeal, but there is enough to show that these things make it far from impossible.

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Part I Worlds turned upside down

One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself. (Lenin, cited in Keach, 1998: 149)

The world has always loathed Judases more than Pontius Pilates. (Freeman, cited in Diggins, 1975: 29)

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the tide. (Anonymous, cited in Wolfe, 1995: 301)

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introduction to part i

In the following two chapters we set the scene by describing the journey from radical to renegade undertaken by numerous individuals since the beginning of the twentieth century. What emerges from these opening chapters is a diversity of experiences and forms that to some degree undercuts generalisation about the origins of the political turncoat. Nevertheless, it is the job of the social scientist to paint a picture rather than fragments of a story. Thus in subsequent parts of the book we move on to deal with the explanations, factors, and themes that emerge from these cases.

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chapter

1 Turncoats and collaborationists: early twentieth-century renegades

The early part of the twentieth century produced numerous renegades whose actions were by no means marginal to the seismic political events of the time. The political crises surrounding the First World War, and ensuing uprisings in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere, provided fertile ground for radicals – and, ipso facto, renegades. Chief among the latter is the Italian socialist turned fascist Benito Mussolini, who according to his PSI colleague and mentor, Angelica Balabanoff, committed ‘the most infamous betrayal of modern times’ (Balabanoff, 1968: 44). His about-face would see him eventually pioneer fascism and renounce republicanism, atheism, and revolution (Stewart, 1928: 844). The beginnings of Mussolini’s renegacy can be traced to his shift from vehement opposition to Italy’s involvement in the First World War in August 1914 to backing intervention in October (Renzi, 1971: 190). Up until July 1914, Mussolini was a leading figure in the revolutionary wing of the PSI, and for one and a half years prior to that editor of its organ, Avanti! (White, 1992: 75). By January of 1915, the same year during which Italy entered hostilities, he had diverted his gaze to creating his own force in Italian politics, the Fascist Revolutionary Party (Mussolini, 1933: 7). This followed hard on the heels of Mussolini’s creation of his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, which espoused military action against Germany and Austria – a position for which he was subsequently banished from the PSI, never to return (Fainsod, 1935: 37). These events were nothing short of stunning. Mussolini was highly regarded among the socialist left at large, and even the influential Marxist

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theoretician Antonio Gramsci had been enamoured of him (Davidson, 1977: 67). In 1911, he had been imprisoned for campaigning against Italy’s impending assault on Libya (Bosworth, 2002: 86). Not long after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand he was still insistent on the need for revolution in Italy. Meanwhile, he feared for the downtrodden working class whose plight would outlast the war (Bosworth, 2002: 102–3). As late as the end of July he had promised a fierce uprising against any weakening of Italy’s neutrality (cited in Kirkpatrick, 1964: 57). In his metamorphosis from socialist to fascist, Mussolini passed through several phases. By the First World War’s end his socialism and preference for class struggle had been supplanted by ‘productivism’ or ‘national syndicalism’, based, according to Woolf (1966: 191), on the example of the French General Confederation of Labour (Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT)) leader Léon Jouhaux, whose later Nobel Peace Prize and resistance to fascism during the Second World War suggest that Mussolini was still some distance from the future fascist ruler into which he would evolve. As a ‘political chameleon’, Mussolini’s rhetoric and writings were almost always contradictory (Cardoza, 2006: ch. 2). Thus in 1918–19, as he laid out his fascist programme, workingclass conscious speeches complemented proposals designed to contain the discontent within mainstream political and economic channels (O’Brien, 2005: 24–5). One Mussolini could worship the state as the be all and end all, while another could oppose all states – ‘the state of yesterday, of today, and of tomorrow; the bourgeois state and the socialist state’ (Mussolini, 1933: 21–5; O’Brien, 2005: 1; Meisel, 1950: 16). Ultimately, Mussolini paid a heavy price for his perfidy. The alliance between Nazism and Mussolini’s Italian variant of fascism ensured his blame for the disastrous defeat in the Second World War and its consequences for the country and its people. His fall from grace included not just his execution but also the opprobrium of being attacked by violent mobs while his body was strung upside down in Milan next to one of his unfortunate mistresses, Clara Petacci. He acknowledged shortly before his death in 1945 that he was the most despised man in Italy (Mack Smith, 1981: xiii). It is partly this which makes Mussolini’s story potentially sui generis: given its repercussions and its world historical significance, and in light of the bloodshed and destruction wrought by his subsequent political choices, commentators appear on safe ground when dubbing his betrayal the greatest of all. Il Duce’s transformation was not, however, unparalleled, as numerous others followed analogous patterns around the period of the First World

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War and during the interwar years (Loughlin, 2003: 516). The conditions for apostasy were made ripe in part by the almost wholesale support for the First World War among socialist parties (see chapter 3). In this context, France’s Gustave Hervé also went from being a dedicated anti-war activist and anti-militarist to warmonger and national chauvinist. Author of the classic anti-patriot work My Country, Right or Wrong (1911), Hervé in his newspaper La Guerre Sociale had issued an appeal as late as July 1914 for mass demonstrations against the war (Fainsod, 1935: 21; Bowman, 1911: 6). The Frenchman had even possibly influenced the Belgian Hendrik de Man’s (see below) advocacy of a revolutionary response to the outbreak of conflict and of the use of military and general strikes as spokes in the wheels of the war machine (Dodge, 1966: 16). According to Hervé, no nation was worthy of defence, and therefore standing armies could not be justified. Foreign control imposed by armed invasion, meanwhile, was not reckoned to be inherently inferior to local rule (cited in Hyndman, 1912: 134). Anti-patriotism was simply not worth the paper it was written on if socialists lacked the courage of their convictions and opted to defend their nation during a time of foreign attack (Hervé, 1911: chapters xiv–xv). So confident was Hervé of his internationalism that he predicted heroically in 1910 that, as the world economy became increasingly integrated, nationalism would end up as a relic from a bygone era and only one ‘country’ would be left standing: Earth (Iriye, 1989: 6; Hervé, 1911: 187). Balabanoff made the observation that Hervé, prior to the war, was Europe’s ‘most bitter anti-nationalist and anti-patriot’. But from 1914 onwards he was an exponent of violent nationalism, and in 1916 he stepped forward to offer his services in defence of the nation (Balabanoff, 1968: 81, Loughlin, 2001: 6).1 Indeed, Mussolini gained sustenance from the actions of Hervé, whom he described as a ‘rabid Nationalist’ (cited in MacGregor-Hastie, 1963: 51). Hervé had, alas, succumbed to what he once regarded as the greatest hurdle confronting socialist revolution: patriotism (Hervé, 1911: 100). Russia, too, around the same time had been home to many former radicals, including Sergius Bulgakov, a self-confessed ‘living paradox’: as a young man, he had been a leading Russian Marxist, but ‘today I am here as a devoted priest of the Holy Orthodox Church’ (Bulgakov, 1937: 361). More significant perhaps was the remarkable career of Alexander Israel Helphand (‘Parvus’),

1  The short-sighted forty-three-year-old’s offer was politely declined (Loughlin, 2001: 6).

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who like Mussolini went from being an internationalist and anti-imperialist to supporting the First World War – in this case barracking for Germany, whose government saw fit to employ his services in various guises of statecraft (Deutscher, 1954: 219). A one-time collaborator with Parvus was none other than the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who developed with him the theory of permanent revolution that guided the events of October 1917 (see Trotsky, 1969). In the former red army leader’s estimation, the Parvus of yesteryear had been among Marxism’s greatest ambassadors (Trotsky, 1988: 172–3). Thus Trotsky had invested heavily in Parvus, assuming that he would be capable of resisting the tide of nationalism (Deutscher, 1954: 219). But Parvus retained little of his former comrades’ affections. Trotsky’s colleague Lenin dismissed the ludicrous notion that Parvus was still being faithful to revolutionary defeatism – which obliges a revolutionary to prioritise the defeat of her own government, hastening its overthrow from below – by channelling funds on behalf of the Tsar’s main imperial rival to Romanian socialists in an effort to win their backing for the German Kaiser (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 178; Schurer, 1959: 321). Parvus’s pro-war stance isolated him from many of his old comrades, including Rosa Luxemburg and Russian Social Democrat émigrés of both Bolshevik and Menshevik persuasions. In February 1915 he first met with the charge of renegacy by Trotsky, who published an epitaph for the zombie Parvus in the Parisian paper, Nashe Slovo (cited in Schurer, 1959: 322). While Parvus insisted on his continuing seditious aims, Cliff more accurately described Parvus as an ex-revolutionary who became ‘the unofficial adviser to the German Foreign Office on Russian internal affairs’ (Cliff, 1985: 117). Parvus was not merely working to undermine the Tsar through perverse means but was in fact a war profiteer – and therefore someone who benefited materially from the very slaughter he had once dedicated himself to averting. Parvus sought to varnish his argument for war in revolutionary coating by locating the interests of international socialism in the triumph of the country with the most matured proletariat, Germany. He envisaged an alliance between the German soldiers – pitched against the Tsar – and the Russian labouring class (Schurer, 1959: 320). Needless to say, unity at the point of a bayonet was highly implausible. The fantastic distance he had veered from his anti-imperialist politics was reflected in his comment in 1917 that, if Russia were defeated in the war and France humbled, it would be possible for Germany to amass an army capable of overrunning all of Europe (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 249).

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The example of Parvus shows how wrong it is to depict Marxists, as Howe (1970: 236) and many others have done, as ambivalent about the question of means vis-à-vis ends, for Trotsky and Lenin disagreed vehemently with the means Parvus adopted. Indeed, Trotsky, as well as drawing attention to the hypocrisy of statesmen who mouthed platitudes about the methods of the Bolsheviks while they themselves used the means of exacting maximum casualties among the enemy to achieve specific military ends – the most horrendous instances of which were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – insisted that the two were inseparable: Parvus’s means would lead to very different ends to those to which he paid lip service (cited in Deutscher, 1987: 439–40). After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Parvus enquired with Trotsky about coming to work for the new government, but was rebuffed by his former collaborator. A shattered man, Parvus denounced the Bolsheviks (Schurer, 1959: 330). This served only to underline the frailty of both his political convictions and his psyche (see chapter 9). He was subsequently to have some influence over the President of the new German Republic Friedrich Ebert. But he gradually relinquished his political and business ties before dying in December 1924 as a man remembered most of all as ‘an intriguer, a political agent, and a war profiteer’ (Schurer, 1959: 330–1). It was not long after this that the British-Australian activist Adela Pankhurst Walsh underwent a conversion that made Parvus’s shifts look like imperceptible adjustments: she moved from communism to outright fascism.2 Summers, writing in 1980, charged historians with failing to explain her reincarnation adequately (Summers, 1980: 395–6). Historians since then have made little progress on this score. Pankhurst Walsh had hitherto dedicated her life to Marxism and socialism, which she described in 1916 as ‘the only thing’ (Pankhurst Walsh, 1916), and she had the privilege of being present at the founding of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1920.3 In 1923, though no longer a CPA member, she was still a socialist, as evidenced from her speech to the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) in which she 2  She spent most of her political life in Australia, having arrived in 1914 from Britain, where she had been a suffragette campaigner. 3  Macintyre records that she left the meeting at which the party was formed on account of her crying baby, Sylvia, named after her sister (Macintyre, 1998: 18). From the CPA there was a split in 1964 as a result of the Sino-Soviet crisis, leading to the formation of the pro-Chinese Communist Party of Australia (Marxist–Leninist). References to the CPA henceforth refer to the pre-split formation, largely of the 1920s and 1930s.

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declared herself to be implacably opposed to the capitalist system, in favour of revolution, and certain that the representatives of the working class would one day govern the world with the benefit of the wealth appropriated from the ruling classes (Pankhurst Walsh, 1923: 1).According to Pugh, it was only a year later in 1924 that Adela commenced her retreat from anti-capitalism (Pugh, 2001: 370). By 1925 she had taken steps towards a reformist perspective that aimed to challenge only capitalism’s most egregious sins, and by the end of the decade she and her husband Tom Walsh – who later joined the fascist organisation, the New Guard – had left radicalism behind altogether (Coleman, 1996: 97; Pugh, 2001: 426; Muirden, 1968: 60). The same woman who had been jailed for partaking in strike activity in 1917 would later receive invitations from bosses to speak against strike action at lunchtime meetings whenever a stoppage by workers appeared imminent (Damousi, 1993: 434). Indeed, the same Adela who, after visiting the Chorlton workhouse as a seventeen-yearold, had been horrified by the social decay to which capitalism could give rise (Pugh, 2001: 103, 104), would come to marvel at the market economy, calling for every worker to become a capitalist (Pankhurst Walsh, n.d.b). By 1929 her pro-capitalism had morphed into a visceral hatred of communism that took her to the extremes of fascism. She defended the Führer as a ‘sincere’ individual whose only abiding wish was to be with the masses, and she found many things about Nazi Germany that were truly ‘admirable’ (Pankhurst Walsh, 1938b: 16; Pankhurst Walsh, 1937a: 10–13). Her sympathies for fascism and Nazism owed in part to her perception of them as bulwarks against communism (Pankhurst Walsh, 1936: 1).4 This in turn led her to back the Axis powers during the Second World War (Pankhurst Walsh, n.d.c). In March 1942, owing to her support for Japan, she was interned by the Australian government along with sixteen other members of the Australia First party – a semi-fascist organisation which she co-founded – and not released until October that year (Cannon, 2002: 240; Coleman, 1996: 164, 167). Adela’s fellow CPA member and Australia First founder Percy Stephensen had undergone a similarly baffling reconstruction. After a time in the CPA, he set sail for England to take up a Rhodes scholarship at Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1924, where he joined the Communist Party’s university branch 4  Somewhat peculiarly, just a year later she described fascism and communism as having much in common with each other, attributing the antagonism between the two to the rivalry of parties that share the same basic policy outlooks. She made it clear, however, that her sympathies lay with the fascists (Pankhurst Walsh, 1937b: 1–2).

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and participated in activities including the circulation of anti-imperialist Gandhian literature among Indian students (Munro, 1984: 34; Muirden, 1968: 18). In 1925, Stephensen helped produce a publication called The Searchlight, whose first edition foretold the defeat of the ‘whole rotten gang’ of ‘capitalist class parasites’. He expressed his confidence in the imminence of the revolution, due in less than two years’ time (cited in Munro, 1984: 38). While a student at Oxford, he translated from the French Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and On the Road to Insurrection (Muirden, 1968: 20). Stephensen was also a contributor to communist publications in both Australia and England through the 1920s (Stephensen, 1981: 21). But he returned to Australia in 1932 a profoundly changed man unconvinced of early reports of Nazi bloodshed (Munro, 1984: 198). By the mid-1930s he had become incensed by the anti-Australian propaganda with which the youth of Australia were apparently being indoctrinated under the tutelage of imported English professors (Stephensen, 1936: 104). He assumed the post of assistant editor of The Publicist, paper of Australia First in the years 1936–42 (Stephensen, 1981: 39). He agreed to work with Pankhurst Walsh to establish the organisation, whose policies were modelled on Nazi Germany’s fascism, including support for ‘national socialism; against international communism’, ‘legitimate speech; against “free” speech’, ‘responsible journalism; against “freedom of the press” ’, and ‘political education; against political apathy’ (cited in Munro, 1984: 201). A frequent correspondent with far-right extremists in Australia and abroad, Stephensen would sometimes sign off on letters, ‘Sieg Heil!’ (Munro, 1984: 265). He was thus rightly accused of being a fascist by the CPA’s Tribune – the same newspaper to which he once contributed as a freelancer (Stephensen, 1981: 21, 24). In 1942, he was interned in various camps for the duration of the war on the pretext that he had collaborated with the Japanese (Ruhen, 1965: 2; Munro, 1984: 206, 219). The records of Stephensen and Pankhurst Walsh were symptomatic of the volatility of politics in the interwar years. Similarly indicative is the case of the British former Labour leadership hopeful turned fascist Oswald Mosley. A Conservative Party politician before becoming an Independent, Mosley went on to join the left of the Labour Party (White, 1992: 47). But he charted a new course when he left the Labour Party at its 1930 conference after it did not accede to his radical Keynesian-style economic policies, including public spending to create jobs on work programmes and pension increases to encourage older workers to retire. He subsequently formed his own version of the Nazis, the British Union of Fascists (BUF), in 1932 (White, 1992: 109; Cross,

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1961; Mosley, 1968; Mosley, 1982: 65). Mosley infamously led his blackshirts against the ‘alien menace’ by attempting to march them through the heavily Jewish populated East End of London. He suffered a humiliating rebuke in what became known as ‘the battle of Cable Street’ when his followers were forced to retreat after police gave up trying to shield them from anti-fascists. The ignominy for Mosley did not stop there: he, like Pankhurst Walsh and Stephensen in Australia, was interned during the Second World War. While claiming to have shared little politically with Mussolini and Hitler except for mutual enmity towards communism, he subsequently met Mussolini on some six occasions (Mosley, 1968: 358; Mosley, 1982: 27). In fact, Mosley professed stirring admiration for the ‘great Italian’ (cited in McIntyre, 1988: 55). A striking irony was evident in the case of another renegade embroiled in the horrors of national socialism. The Belgian Hendrik de Man, whose book Die Sozialistische Idée was among the first works the Nazis destroyed after taking power, would later collaborate with Hitler’s forces in Belgium (White, 1992: 1). De Man had become a member of the Socialist Young Guard of Antwerp on May Day 1902 (Dodge, 1966: 14). But the events of the First World War rocked the outspoken anti-militarist, and so he took up arms against imperialist Germany (Balabanoff, 1968: 86; de Man, 1985: 12). In doing so, de Man showed little compunction about fighting for Belgium, despite its own grubby record as an imperialist conqueror amid the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that resulted in the ‘Belgian Congo’ (Birchall, 1998; Pakenham, 1991). His participation in the First World War – and the political impact of the war more generally – had a considerable impact on his thinking (White, 1992). Leading up to the Second World War, de Man reverted to pacifism, expressing remorse for his actions in the First World War. Yet when the Nazis overran the forces of his home country in 1940, de Man supported – as a member of the cabinet – King Leopold III’s decision to stay and cooperate with the Nazis rather than go into exile with the rest of the cabinet (Pierson, 2001: 68). This was more than just expediency: in 1941, de Man had stated his belief that ‘National Socialism represents the German form of socialism, and I recommend collaboration with Germany within the framework of a united Europe and a general socialist revolution’ (cited in White, 1992: 2). De Man was impressed by the Nazi dictatorship’s apparently successful efforts in closing the gap between rich and poor (cited in Steinberger, 1985: vi). But history was not kind to him: he spent his last years in exile in Switzerland, and in 1946 was convicted in absentia of treason against Belgium (Steinberger, 1985: vi).

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The New York intellectuals and the anti-Stalinist left A significant number of the radical New York intellectuals5 active from the early decades of the twentieth century later developed into conservatives, neo-conservatives, or anti-communists. Numbering a few dozen individuals, many of them had been radicalised in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the 1930s great depression (Isserman, 1987: 81). Former Trotskyists figured prominently among these renegades. In the wake of Stalinist terror, Trotskyism represented an obvious choice for many radical intellectuals: it allowed them to preserve their Marxist politics and at the same time disassociate themselves from the regime in Russia (Bloom, 1986: 109, 111–12; Myers, 1977: 42–3). Yet numerous one-time Trotskyist New York intellectuals became neo-conservatives or ardent anti-communists during the Cold War. The list of those New York intellectuals who once orbited the Trotskyist movement but later opted for much more conservative political commitments included Saul Bellow, James Burnham, James T. Farrell, Clement Greenberg, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Mary McCarthy, and Dwight Macdonald (Callinicos, 1990b: 2). To this list can be added the conspicuous former Trotskyist turned neo-conservative Irving Kristol (see below), the historian (and Kristol’s wife) Gertrude Himmelfarb, the writer and playwright Lionel Abel, and the Encounter editor and possible future CIA plant (see below) Melvin J. Lasky (Wald, 1987: 7). But the problem was not confined to the Trotskyist brand of radicalism. Wald writes that Sidney Hook (a former (non-Trotskyist) Marxist)6 was ‘the venerated founding father’ of neo-conservatism, while Kristol and another former radical Norman Podhoretz (neither a Marxist or a Trotskyist) were its main ideological combatants (Wald, 1987: 350). He notes that in 1972, Hook, Kristol, Podhoretz, and numerous other New York intellectuals lent their support to Republican president Richard Nixon, and in 1980 and 1984 they backed Ronald Reagan: they went from being Trotskyites to Reaganites 5  Podhoretz notes that the term ‘New York intellectuals’ was originally attributable to ‘one of us, the critic Irving Howe’, but gained much wider currency despite the fact that ‘we were not all from New York and not all of us even lived there’ (Podhoretz, 1999: 12). The individuals that follow in this section similarly are not all Jewish, nor are they all from New York, though there are often associations between them. 6  As noted above, Hook moved in Trotskyist circles and supported Trotsky at times, but was not a Trotskyist as such.

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(Wald, 1987: 270). Not a classic renegade who started out as a leftist and then moved to the right, Podhoretz started on the right, moved to the left in the 1960s and then switched back to the right, where he became a vigorous opponent of all forms of radicalism (Podhoretz, 1979: 16). Through his editorship of Commentary magazine (1960–95), Podhoretz had waged a ‘scorched-earth campaign against the New Left and counterculture’ after earlier publishing material from radical writers such as the anarchist psychologist Paul Goodman (Steinfels, 1979: 21; Glazer, 1970: 74). For Podhoretz, the turning point was his disgust at the 1960s anti-war, civil rights, and women’s movements (Hitchens, 1986: 54). Fellow neo-conservative Irving Kristol travelled so far from his Trotskyist youth that he sympathised with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against ‘communists’ and the left (Dorrien, 1993: 74; Steinfels, 1979: 30–1). Reflecting in the 1980s on his journey from socialism to neo-conservatism – a movement made up largely of ex-liberals and ex-socialists7 – Kristol had few regrets about his misspent youth, comparing being radical when young to falling in love for the first time: even the inevitable disenchantment could not erase the initial ecstasy (Kristol, 1983: xv, 4, 9). From the cafeteria (or the adjoining area known as Alcove No. 1) of the City College of New York (CCNY),8 Irving Kristol went from debating with Stalinists and other Trotskyists the complexities of world revolution and manifold points of injustice in capitalist society to acting as an influential figure in the Reagan White House (Dorman, 2000: 193). Kristol had been a Trotskyist a short while before becoming involved in the movement’s organisational politics for the first time in 1940. He joined – and then left within a few months – Max Shachtman’s Workers Party before going on to join Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party. In 1944, however, he was drafted to fight in the war, at the end of which he cut himself adrift from all radical politics (Selznick, 1995: 19–20; Wald, 1987: 350). A one-time radical and opponent of capitalism, Kristol would later become one of the system’s most loyal defenders and an admirer of the British Empire (Glazer, 1995: 3; Harries, 1995: 36). But one of his most famous utterances was his statement in a 1952 Commentary article that Americans could rely on Joseph McCarthy because he, like them, was ‘unequivocally anti-Communist. 7  For a discussion of the politics of neo-conservatism see, among others, Brown (2006), Dorrien (1993), and Steinfels (1979). 8  The Stalinists were to be found in Alcove No. 2, which housed a bigger gathering of individuals.

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About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification’ (Kristol, 1952: 229). From 1953 to 1958 Kristol was co-founder (along with Stephen Spender) and co-editor of the CIA-funded journal Encounter, jealously guarded by the agency as its most prized ‘asset’ (Wald, 1987: 351; Saunders, 1999: 314). Kristol for his own part insisted that he would never have become co-editor of Encounter magazine had he been aware of its funding ties with the CIA (Kristol, 1983: 15). This is hardly credible, since the CIA had one of its agents installed as an editor on the journal, with the possibility that either Kristol or Melvin J. Lasky, who succeeded him in the position in 1958, was the individual in question (Wreszin, 1994: 423). Lasky fitted the profile of the culprit, but the testimony of a former agent implied that Kristol was in fact the company man (Braden, cited in Steinfels, 1979: 84, 85). After Podhoretz and Kristol, the third leading neo-conservative was Sidney Hook who, like the latter, was a former radical socialist who would later back Nixon. At one point, he was regarded as America’s foremost Marxist thinker by virtue of his authorship of Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (Wilford, 2008: 73). First published in 1933 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of his death, the book set out to reappraise the thought of Marx, whom it described as ‘one of the outstanding thinkers of the nineteenth century’. Hook stressed the ‘role of activity in Marxism’ (Hook, 1933: 5, 7). His admiration for Marx’s revolutionary praxis was self-evident: Developed in the course of a lifetime of social action on the battlefield of the class struggle, it bears evidence of the occasions which provoked it and the purposes which directed it. Marx began his adult life as a revolutionist, fought like one and was exiled in consequence of being one … [H]e never lost touch with the daily struggle of the working classes throughout the world. (Hook, 1933: 20)

Yet despite having previously worked in the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, Hook steadily revised his Marxism before eventually abandoning it altogether (Bloom, 1986: 105; Saunders, 1999: 53). A one-time organiser of the American Workers Party (Hook, 1987: 150), Hook was regarded by Wald as anti-communism’s most professional agitator: the Marxist philosopher went from being a left-winger to a Cold War liberal, to a neo-conservative (Wald, 1987: 290). Hook in his later period had informed on the writer Malcolm Cowley for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and had acted as a ‘contract consultant’ for the CIA (Saunders, 1999: 54, 157). Unlike Kristol, Hook was somewhat shamefaced about his Marxist years. He rejected any

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notion of apostasy, and yet he boasted of having predated the French ‘new philosophers’ (see chapter 2) by some fifty years in drawing attention to the nefarious nature of the regime in Moscow. Hook claimed in retrospect to have been convinced that it was folly for the US to involve itself in Vietnam, but that it would have been a more compounding error to leave without the independence of South Vietnam accepted by the North, since ‘a Communist takeover would be followed by purges and bloodbaths, the establishment of death camps, and a total political terror, which is the way Communist dictatorial regimes consolidate their power’ (Hook, 1987: 4, 583). Like Hook (see Podhoretz, 1979: 7), Irving Howe claimed to have stayed true to socialist convictions of sorts. A one-time member of the (Trotskyist) Socialist Workers Party (SWP (US)),9 Howe was a literary critic and founder of the socialist magazine, Dissent. Wald (1987: 333) credits him with having had the courage to appraise his political journey honestly. Howe did not, unlike other New York intellectuals around this time, including Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Irving Kristol, openly embrace conservatism or swear off socialism altogether (Sorin, 2002: ix). In his sympathetic portrait of Trotsky published in 1978, he continued to regard the latter as a giant of twentieth-century politics – despite, by his own admission, the accumulating miles separating his own politics from those of the theorist of permanent revolution – and he disassociated himself from vulgar equations of Bolshevism with Stalinism (Howe, 1978: 193, viii, 59). He also refused to have any truck with McCarthyism (Howe, 1983: 223). But Howe renounced Marxism (Sorin, 2002: 50). A contributor to the CIA-funded Partisan Review (Wilford, 2008: 103–4), the bark of his vaunted democratic socialism, according to Podhoretz, was worse than its bite: it was indissociable from welfare-state liberalism (Podhoretz, 1979: 65). It was also unmistakably reformist (and therefore pessimistic): in Howe’s estimation, Trotsky had not anticipated the parliamentary inclinations of Western workers, who, saddled with mortgages and enjoying the comforts of consumer capitalism, would be unlikely to show any revolutionary ardour (Howe, 1978: 30). While it is true that Howe repeatedly reaffirmed his socialist aspirations, he was no longer a radical in the sense defined earlier of challenging social relations, confronting authorities, or seeking fundamental change. Indeed, in 9  Not to be confused with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP ((UK)), which unlike its namesake in the US is an unorthodox Trotskyist organisation that rejected Trotsky’s characteristation of the USSR as a ‘workers’ state’ (see Cliff, 1999).

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1981 his preferred arena of political struggle was the Democratic Party (cited in Davis, 1986: 256). Moreover, the litmus test of a radical is how she/he responds to genuine movements for change and where they align themselves between radical opponents of the system and the state and broader ruling class. Howe was a renegade, at least in relation to the 1960s movements for which he had no sympathy (Epstein, 1988: 90; Jezer, 1992: 29; Howe, 1983: 325–6). Indeed, Howe blamed the anti-war activists’ behaviour for prolonging the US occupation of Vietnam, and he held the new left generally responsible for the conservatism in America that was the hangover from the 1960s (Sorin, 2002: 246; Levy, 1994: 189). In part, the new left was simply too radical: Howe was against theVietnam War, but he was distressed by some sections of the movement’s support for a North Vietnamese victory (cited in Dorman, 2000: 149, 150). A contemporary of Howe’s who went much further was Max Eastman. A non-Jewish New York intellectual, former communist, and translator of Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution,10 Eastman became a McCarthyist and editor in the 1950s of the arch-conservative William F. Buckley Jr’s National Review (Mattson, 2002: 28–9). When the Bolsheviks achieved power in 1917 they met with Eastman’s enthusiastic acclaim. After raising money to send the author John Reed to Russia, Eastman published the latter’s articles that culminated in the famous book, Ten Days that Shook the World (Eastman, 1955: 9–10). His written work had helped achieve a wide audience for Marxism, especially in the intellectual community (Miller, 1946: 62). He took a brave stand against the First World War (Wald, 1987: 113). But by the time the Second World War came around he was crafting pro-war propaganda (Macdonald, 1957: 204). He eventually came to the view that any interference with institutions such as private property would leave modern industry and education ‘at the mercy of the naked instincts of a savage tribe’ (cited in Mills and Salter, 1977: 61). With his ringing endorsement of McCarthyism (though not McCarthy himself), Eastman crossed lines many other ex-radicals and anti-communists of this era were not prepared to (cited in Diggins, 1975: 217). He went as far as dismissing in 1952 the idea of a witch-hunt against leftists as a ruse: McCarthyism was a walk in the park compared to what the American people were capable of when their hackles were truly raised (cited in Saunders, 10  While regarded as an advocate for Trotsky in his campaign against Stalinism, Eastman claims not to have been a Trotskyist at the time when he translated his history of the Russian Revolution (Eastman, 1955: 16; Wald, 1987: 113; Myers, 1977: 10).

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1999: 200). In his famous work, The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich August Hayek had praised Eastman’s courage in coming to terms with what the Austrian economist had always known: that socialism constituted the antithesis of freedom. But Eastman went further than even Hayek was probably prepared to when he assessed Stalinism as qualitatively worse than fascism (Hayek, 1944: 28). Eastman maintained that he clung to core values, such as freedom, but he did not regret being a turncoat, just that it had taken him an eternity to turn his coat (Eastman, 1955: 7, 19). But Eastman was only one of a milieu of renegades that included James Burnham (Novack and Hansen, 1973: xvi; Dalin, 1989: xviii). Burnham was an Oxford-educated winner in 1983 of a Presidential Medal of Freedom under Ronald Reagan, in whose White House he was particularly influential (Burnham, 1973: 207; Saunders, 1999: 422; Smant, 1992: 1). A one-time follower of the radical leftist leader of the Toledo general strike of 1934, Abraham John Muste, Burnham eventually became a McCarthyist and editor of the National Review ((Brinkley, 1998: 226; Mattson, 2002: 28; Podhoretz, 1979: 6). He had also become a vigorous opponent of liberalism, which he held responsible for the (self-inflicted) death of the West (Burnham, 1975). He had worked full-time with the CIA in its front activities, until his hard-line stance – including sympathies for McCarthyism – proved too much even for the agency: his contract was terminated in 1953 (Wilford, 2008: 83). Burnham was a particularly bellicose anti-communist: on one occasion he advocated the use of the atom bomb on all major Russian cities, and he condoned torture in some cases (cited in Saunders, 1999: 77). Indeed, Burnham had argued for the prosecution of ‘genocidal’ war in Vietnam (Dorrien, 1993: 177). In addition, he had testified at US Department of Justice hearings in the late 1950s that Max Shachtman’s group was ‘subversive’ (Novack and Hansen, 1973: xix). The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (Burnham, 1941) had a profound impact on other renegades such as Arthur Koestler (Cesarani, 1998: 354). Burnham’s simple message was that the world was moving to a new model of social organisation, the ‘managerial society’, which would transcend capitalism and thwart the emergence of a socialist mode of production. A striking feature of the work might have been its embarrassing prediction of the demise of capitalism but for its more attractive element to Cold War ideologues, namely its refutation of Marxism and Leninism, which were now liable for the triumph of Stalinism (Burnham, 1941: 195). Indeed, in a later book, The Machiavellians, he argued that the Bolshevik revolution had led directly to the ‘most extreme totalitarian-Bonapartist government in

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history’ (Burnham, 1943: 177). The latter work became a virtual textbook among CIA planners and even played a part in the overthrow of the government of Iran in 1953, in the lead-up to which Burnham had been called on for advice by the agency (Saunders, 1999: 88; Wilford, 2008: 76). Max Shachtman himself – a victim, as we have seen, of Burnham’s change of heart – was not immune from these conservatising trends. In 1939, he had co-written an article with Burnham excoriating the likes of Eastman as outand-out renegades and privileged intellectuals who had sold out the proletariat (Burnham and Shachtman, 1939). But Shachtman, too, would ultimately be viewed in the same light as both Burnham and Eastman when his ultra antiStalinism pushed him further to the right in the 1950s and ultimately out of the Marxist tradition altogether (Brinkley, 1998: 224; Callinicos, 1990b: 55). His revolutionary politics had long since lapsed by the 1960s when he strove to reform the Democratic Party by eradicating conservative and racist Dixiecrat elements who wished to protect white supremacy in the south (Miller, 1987: 74). In the final year of his life as a right-wing social democrat, Shachtman backed Hubert Humphrey – one of the men charged by new left activist Tom Hayden with ordering the brutal police assault on protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (see below) – in his unsuccessful campaign for the party’s presidential nomination in 1972 (Novack and Hansen, 1973: xxi). His official death that year provoked the caustic remark from one Trotskyist that Shachtman’s real death had in fact been mourned many years earlier (Jacobson, cited in Drucker, 1994: 319). As with other renegades, the area of foreign affairs was a key indicator of Shachtman’s new leanings. For instance, in relation to the war in Korea, where he could not bring himself to back the US, he was far more excited by fears of a Stalinist victory, and went as far as backing intervention by the British state, since at the beginning of the conflict it was presided over by Clement Attlee’s Labour government, whose record included not just the building of the iconic National Health Service (NHS), but also spending cuts, the imposition of a wages freeze, and the use of troops to break strikes (Seymour, 2008: 135; Cliff and Gluckstein, 1996: ch. 11). Shachtman sparked great uproar on the left when he defended the Bay of Pigs invasion, causing him to be struck from a list of people speaking out against the Cuban intervention at the University of California, Berkeley in April 1961 (Isserman, 1987: 193). While he accepted that the invasion was likely to have been funded and armed by the Kennedy administration and the CIA, this was not akin to an American intervention – to which he was opposed – so he supported the aims of this ‘democratic popular

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movement’ against Castro (Shachtman, 1961; Draper, 1961). His backing of the Vietnam War took matters a step further because it was the first occasion on which he declared his full support for a conflict in which America was involved, and ironically it was one of the least popular (Drucker, 1994: 300). Sharing Shachtman’s virulent anti-communism was the Russian-born Will Herberg, the former militant atheist and Marxist who became one of America’s leading Jewish theologians. As an atheist Herberg had, upon hearing that the writer and professor Edward Sagarin was an agnostic, delivered such a stunning rebuttal of the evidence for God’s existence that Sagarin could still vividly recall the attack half a century on: Herberg’s real skill lay in ‘demolishing all arguments in favour of theology’ (Wald, 1987: 286). Yet Herberg became a practising Jew and a prominent American theologian. What made this all the more astonishing was the fact that Herberg had received little Jewish teaching from his parents, and did not have a bar mitzvah (Ausmus, 1986: 3–4). In the arena of politics, Herberg went from communism – to which he first subscribed at the age of seventeen – in the 1920s and 1930s,11 through ‘democratic socialism’ during the 1940s and early 1950s, and then on to fullblown conservatism by the 1960s (Ausmus, 1986: vii; Diggins, 1975: 138). So convinced was he initially of the scientific stature of his Marxism that he attempted to meld it with Einstein’s theory of relativity and Freudianism (Dalin, 1989: xiv–xv). Yet Herberg’s anti-communism eventually reached such a fever pitch that he accused socialists of all hues – even reformists such as the British Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald – of totalitarianism for allotting too much power to the state (Herberg, 1989a: 6, 17). It was difficult to receive such comments seriously, not just because the state under the MacDonald government was too weak even to withstand the infamous ‘bankers’ ramp’ and the economic crisis that brought his reign to an end in 1931, or because the Prime Minister split with his party to establish a national government in collaboration with the Tories and Liberals (Callinicos, 2001: 23–8; Cliff and Gluckstein, 1996: 151). More generally, it was hard to take such comments from a man whose reputation lay in putting arguments with fierce clarity and delivery, before putting opposing arguments with equally fierce clarity and delivery (Wald, 1987: 286). In many of these cases, there is evidence almost of a split personality, or at least of a line dividing the different parts of the individual’s career. This is especially 11  Herberg claimed that he disavowed Marxism in the late 1930s (cited in Diggins, 1975: 284).

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true of Louis Fraina, the American communist and promoter of Bolshevism. A founding member of the American Communist Party, Fraina had once been a collaborator of Trotsky’s, and he was considered a pioneer of American communism (Myers, 1977: 5–6). But Fraina sought to deny his radical past: he later removed offending essays he had written at the peak of his revolutionary ‘apex’ from his personal bibliography (Buhle, 1995: 132). Fraina is virtually two people: he reappeared in 1926 as Lewis Corey (Corey, 1963: 113). In a stunning about-face on his life’s work, he would conclude that the Bolshevism he once celebrated was always bound to produce tyranny. He departed so completely from much of his economic thinking that not even a crisis on the scale of the great depression permitted Marxism any relevancy. And so in 1940 Corey turned his back on Marxism, writing a three-fold rebuttal of his old beliefs for the Nation (Buhle, 1995: 158). Here the deeply disillusioned Corey would come to be sceptical of all ‘doctrinaire absolutes’; in the wake of Singapore’s fall in 1942, the main task was to defeat the Axis powers and to restore ‘democracy’ (Corey, 1942: vii, ix). He ended up, in his wife’s summation, as ‘one of the most vigorous leaders of the anti-communist liberal movement’ (Corey, 1963: 121). The irony was that the same liberal democracy for which Corey had newfound admiration tried to hound him out of his country towards the end of his life: in 1950 he suffered the indignity of being served with a deportation order, in part for his past communist activities (Corey, 1963: 124).12 The experience of Fraina is clearly distinguishable from the likes of Irving Howe, who clung to some vestiges of socialism (Dorman, 2000: 4–5). But most of the New York intellectuals and other North American left antiStalinists were united by a combination of strident anti-communism and a repudiation of Marxism and revolutionary politics (Wald, 1987: 268; Podhoretz, 1979: 7). As one New York intellectual summed it up, ‘then we believed in revolution and now we don’t’ (Macdonald, 1957: 4). But the phenomenon just described was by no means a peculiarly North American one. A case in point is the Hungarian-born novelist and political activist Arthur Koestler, a dedicated communist who faced what seemed like certain execution in Spain as a result of his support for anti-fascists in that country’s civil war (Scammell, 2009: 141). After six years active membership of the German Communist Party between 1932 and 1938, he moved on to 12  A reprieve from the state came too late: two days after his death on 16 September 1953, he received from the US Department of Justice his Certificate of Lawful Entry (Corey, 1963: 125).

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an equally resolute stance of anti-communism as a contributing author of The God That Failed (Koestler, 1949), a seminal instance of Cold War propaganda which American intelligence officials and government agencies had a strong hand in creating, as well as in distributing across Europe (Cesarani, 1998: 331; Saunders, 1999: 64–6). As is the case with so many renegades discussed in this book, Koestler completely remade his existential being, going as far as (in the words of his biographer) carrying out ‘the symbolic execution of his former self’ (Scammell, 2009: xix). Fellow renegade Sidney Hook quipped that Koestler could not be justly accused of junking dialectical materialism, since he strenuously contested what he had once staked his life on (cited in Saunders, 1999: 80). Along with Irving Kristol, Koestler was also heavily involved in the Orwellian-named Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was later revealed to have been funded and directed by the CIA during its period of operation from 1950 to 1967 (Cesarani, 1998: 331; Kovel, 1997: 165). Koestler had been an adviser to the Information Research Department (IRD), the anti-communist body established by the Attlee government in 1948 (Saunders, 1999: 58, 60). In the 1974 British general election he threw his lot in for the first time with perhaps the greatest bastion of privilege and elitism, the British Conservative Party (Scammell, 2009: 556). Yet, as we shall see in chapter 10, Koestler’s apostasy in the area of politics was merely one part of a greater whole of constant upheavals and reversals that was his modus operandi. An Australian equivalent of a New York intellectual is James McClelland, who shed his revolutionary Trotskyist politics in 1948 to become a right-wing member of the reformist Australian Labor Party (ALP). A committed atheist, McClelland did not delve as far into conservatism as other renegades such as Kristol or Pankhurst Walsh, but he did become an opponent of Marxism (McClelland, 1988: 239–40, 245). He was also later a minister in the ill-fated federal Whitlam ALP government (1972–75). But rather than attacking the conservative forces responsible for the assault on democracy represented by the ousting of that government,13 McClelland drew conservative conclusions about the dismissal, lamenting the government’s alleged anti-business bias (Australian Senate Hansard, 18 February 1976: 57). 13  When the Upper House of Parliament (the Senate) refused to pass the Whitlam government’s budget, the latter was dismissed on 11 November 1975 through an act of rank anti-democratic intrigue by Queen Elizabeth II’s representative, the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr.

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2 ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ … drop back in: 1960s ex-radicals1

The decade of the 1960s was one of heightened radical political activity in crucial centres of capital accumulation (Horowitz, 1968: v).2 The Vietnam War, in particular, provided the impetus for the explosion of anti-capitalist campaigns across the Western world (Callinicos, 1994: 63). The period saw the emergence of a ‘new left’, whose ideology centred around personal liberation, participatory democracy, anti-racism and anti-sexism, direct action, community decision-making, and environmentalism (Burgmann and Burgmann, 1998: 25). The 1960s have taken on political connotations unlike any other decade; future periods would be measured against those tumultuous years, and political actors would later be judged on their attitude to the 1960s (Stephens, 1998: viii). For some, the era constituted a watershed in capitalist history (Jameson, cited in Davis, 1988: 81). Events of the decade put the lie to versions of the notion propagated by renegades such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset of an ‘end of ideology’ consonant with disappearing social fractures and declining class conflict (Katsiaficas, 1987: 5).Yet a hallmark 1  The 1960s slogan, ‘Turn on to the scene, tune in to what is happening, and drop out’, was coined by psychologist and psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary as a countercultural message of rebellion (cited in Miller, 1987: 278). 2  It is recognised, of course, that history does not happen strictly according to neat timelines, such as ‘the 1960s’. Thus, in the US Jezer refers to the 1960s as ‘the activist period between the first Berkeley demonstrations and southern civil rights sit-ins of early 1960 and the defeat of George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972’ (Jezer, 1992: xiii).

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of the period was the flowering of resistance beyond the confines of traditional modes of class struggle: vibrant cultural, social, and sexual expression in the form of artistic and theatrical rebellion – often blurring the separation between performer and spectator – combined with more overt methods of radical agitation to produce carnivalised politics (Stam, 1988: 136). The annus mirabilis of 1968 especially was punctuated by worldwide commotion and, while that year may not have been world-changing in the sense of 1648, 1789, or 1917, nonetheless the planet was shaken (Harman, 1988: vii). It was in this respect a year unlike any of the preceding fifty: the radical left in the 1960s changed the world without wresting power from the hands of ruling classes in the West (Katsiaficas, 1987: xiii). For some members of this generation, world revolution did indeed appear ‘not only possible but actually in process’ (Greenland, 1998: 14). In the gleeful words of the American radical Abbie Hoffman, there was a ‘sense of engagement when you jumped on the earth and the earth jumped back – that sense that you were a part of history’ (cited in Raskin, 1996: 258). The period, alas, is almost as well known for the number of castaways it spawned when the period of radicalism came to an end in the 1970s – a heavy price to pay for the fact that radicals did not seize power. Chris Harman (1988: viii), writing on the twentieth anniversary of 1968, noted that the period had become synonymous with wistful reflections upon youthful dreams that were now regarded as irrelevant in the 1980s when dropping back in to the mainstream was de rigueur among former militants. One of the generation’s most notorious drop-ins, Jerry Rubin (see below), awarded the ageing 1960s generation with the dubious honour of being the first to reincarnate itself: he spotted ex-radicals in ballet classes, poker games, farms, gestalt groups, therapy and mediations sessions, and welfare lines (Rubin, 1976: 18). Tariq Ali has pointed to the numerous former 1960s radicals who abandoned revolutionary politics and shifted markedly to the right in the 1970s and 1980s, in some cases becoming establishment political figures in Western Europe – German Chancellor from 1998–2005 Gerhard Schroeder was a sixty-eighter keen to atone for past errors – and the Americas. The worst offenders among these would ‘urinate on their past’ (Ali, 2005: 9; Braunthal, 1999). A case in point is the American David Horowitz, someone Wald regards as comparable to earlier 1950s renegades who portrayed their previous actions and beliefs in a misleading light and who fashioned a career out of attacking any remaining diehards (Wald, 1987: 348). A red diaper baby and former editor of the radical left publication Ramparts in the late 1960s, he

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claimed, like so many other radicals, to have once been opposed to the charade of party-electoral politics that distracted from life’s real concentrations of power (Pearson, 1994: 253; Collier and Horowitz, 1985: 69). In 1971, he proudly edited and introduced a ‘radical’ sociology book, unique among such texts because of its hostility toward ‘the structures and institutions of society’, and which viewed the world from the perspective not of elites but of those on the lower rungs of the social ladder (Horowitz, 1971a: v). The same year, he published the revised edition of his The Free World Colossus. Not wholly dissimilar from the critiques of US foreign policy associated nowadays with the likes of the anarchist and linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, whom Horowitz would later co-author a book attacking (Collier and Horowitz, 2004), The Free World Colossus offered a take on American Cold War actions that was by its own reckoning both dramatically at odds with the official Washington version and in sync with the resistance on the campuses (Horowitz, 1971b: 5–6). Around the same time he described how the US had undermined self-determination in countries almost too numerous to mention, the most sorry case of which was, of course, Vietnam, where the empire had supported the French colonisers until their enforced retreat, and then took control of the reins in an effort ‘to defeat the Vietnamese Republic through the quisling government in Saigon’. This amounted to the ‘most savage and ruthless intervention on historical record’, all at the behest of the financial and industrial firms whose power was the real source of imperialism (Horowitz, 1969: 9–11). Horowitz had first severed ties with Marxism after the 1956 Hungarian uprising, but in the 1960s he recommitted less unequivocally to the revolutionary ideology. After ditching the left in the mid-1970s, by the end of that decade he was accusing the left of blotting out the crimes of the Soviet Union, but he still identified as a leftist unwilling to repudiate his past actions and politics completely. By 1985, however, he had essentially broken free of all his previous radical activity to declare his support for Ronald Reagan, whose troopers had assaulted Horowitz at Berkeley demonstrations while Reagan was governor of California. Horowitz went to some lengths to dramatise his apostasy by claiming a past affection for the North Korean despot Kim Il-sung and recalling fantasies about murdering police (Wald, 1987: 349; Collier and Horowitz, 1985: 69). Horowitz and his fellow renegade Peter Collier reminded their one-time radical friends of the time-honoured putdown: ‘Anyone under 40 who isn’t a socialist has no heart – anyone over 40 who is a socialist has no brain’ (Collier and Horowitz, 1985: 69). Rather than taking the view that the state had successfully acted to dismember the black

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rights movement in the 1960s (see chapter 5), impeding genuine progress in reducing racial inequalities, Horowitz argued in the 1990s that the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction against whites (Collier and Horowitz, 1997). Arguably the most infamous of North American ex-radicals is the aforementioned anti-Vietnam War activist and anti-capitalist Jerry Rubin, a pioneer in 1965 of troop train blockades in the bay area (Miller, 1987: 282). Fellow 1960s activist Gitlin writes that by 1967 Rubin ‘had risen to celebrity as leader of the militant Vietnam Day committee in Berkeley’ (Gitlin, 1993: 210). Another ex-comrade remembered Rubin as a highly gifted sociology student and a brave demonstrator who stood his ground against the police, despite his slight build (Fitch, 1995). But the same man who detested money for debasing all human relationships, and who argued that the US killed inestimably more people with economic weapons than with bombs (Rubin, 1970: 120, 123), had by the 1980s become a wealthy businessman and self-proclaimed ‘Yuppie’ (derived from Young Urban Professional or Young Upwardly Mobile Professional), a term he may well have inspired when journalist Bob Greene penned an article about him and his New York nightclub networking parties in the Chicago Tribune in March 1983 (Shapiro, 1986: 139–40). Rubin, along with other protestors, had dropped dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 1967 as part of a symbolic statement against greed (Ledbetter, 2007). Yet in an extraordinary case of irony Rubin himself moved onto Wall Street in 1980 when he secured a position as a securities analyst with an investment firm (Rubin, 1980). He was later entangled in numerous other commercial ventures, including becoming ‘a pyramid schemer’ (Albert, 2001: 194). Was this the same Rubin who burned money at a public meeting in 1968? The radical Rubin saw the capitalist economy, out of which he would later do so well, as quite simply a system of legally sanctioned theft (Rubin, 1970: 122). Showing his disdain for the patriarchal and capitalist nuclear family, he had urged in the late 1960s for the revolution to commence with children murdering their parents, only for Rubin to become a doting father (cited in Schultz, 1993: 395). In his earlier years as a radical, Rubin had in 1965 helped to coordinate an anti-Vietnam War teach-in at University of California, Berkeley, which lasted some thirty-six hours and attracted an audience as large as 30,000 (Krassner, 1993: 145; Zaroulis and Sullivan, 1984: 43). It was the anti-war movement that made him almost a household name. Along with seven others, Rubin had been charged with conspiracy to riot over the August 1968 Democratic

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convention protests in Chicago3 (Schultz, 1993: ix). He was a founder member of the Yippies (derived from Youth International Party, conceived in 1967), an organisation composed of ‘permanent adolescents’ who ‘reject careers and middle-class rowboats’ – things at which he later excelled (Rubin, 1970: 89). Like many other renegades, he despised turncoat predecessors such as Phillip Luce, consultant to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the late 1960s.4 The radical Rubin attacked the snitch Luce who had organised illegal trips in to Cuba in 1963–64 for Americans (including a rising folk singer and friend of Luce by the name of Bob Dylan), only to go on in 1965 to expose plans for guerrilla operations in the US by Cuban-trained white radicals, subsequently taking up the posts of Director of Young Americans for Freedom and lecturer at the US Air Force School of Counter-Insurgency (Rubin, 1970: 63; Chamberlain, 1967: 5; Dylan, 1963; Luce, 1971: vii, viii). Finding himself in the position years later of having to defend his own straying from the radical path, Rubin meekly responded that he would be guilty of ‘copping out if I stayed in the myth of the ’60s’ (Horstman, 1999). There was some irony in the manner of Rubin’s death as a result of being struck by a car while jaywalking on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles in 1994. As Berger (1994) sardonically observed, jaywalking was about the extent of Rubin’s rebelliousness in the 1990s. While perhaps one of the more striking examples of 1960s ex-radicals, Rubin was far from unique in making peace with capitalism and assuming a successful career and private life when the decade ended. Indeed, several of Rubin’s fellow Chicago Eight members also followed odd paths away from their radical years. Rennie Davis, for instance, was regarded by Tom Hayden (see below) as one of the Students for a Democratic Society’s (SDS)5 finest 3  The Chicago Eight protesters charged over their involvement in this demonstration included, along with Rubin: Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner. The group subsequently became the Chicago Seven when the Black Panther Seale was tried separately (see Schultz, 1993). 4  Alternately known as the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA). 5  Founded in 1960, the SDS was a radical new left student organisation comprised of numerous factions with different levels of radicalism. It played a key part in the emergence of the student movement and in resisting the Vietnam War, as well as being the focus point of activity at various times for a number of the ex-radicals studied here, including Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis. Its first convention at Port Huron in 1962 produced a founding statement that put a case for participatory democracy and attacked the racism, alienation and

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organisers (Hayden, 1988: 125). After returning from Vietnam in 1967, Davis was convinced that a demonstration at the Democratic convention in Chicago the following year was a crucial step in the anti-war effort. Accordingly, along with Hayden he was appointed by David Dellinger to open an office in the city specifically to plan the actions that resulted in his conspiracy charge in 1969 (Zaroulis and Sullivan, 1984: 176). He was also an organiser of the May Day protests of 1970, which resulted in the largest number of arrests in American history (Davis, 2003: 159). But he changed course in 1973 by breaking with the coalition of organisations that made up the 1960s movements, arguing – tautologically – that the future of humanity lay with evolution (Davis, 2003: 160). His post-radical life seemed highly unusual: after involvement for a time with the Indian teenage guru Maharaj-Ji, he became director of a think tank for inventors in Colorado, concentrating on environment-protecting inventions, and he worked for an insurance company (Schultz, 1993: 394, 396). In the 1980s he consulted for the largest American syndication of equipment leasing and real estate and ‘created comprehensive business strategies for numerous CEOs and senior executives of fortune 500 companies’. He also helped innovative technology companies get off the ground and go public, and he is founder and chairman of Foundation for Humanity (Davis, 2003: 160–1). These interests of Davis represent a quantum leap from the earlier radicalism that saw him, at the time of his Chicago conspiracy trial, excoriate the (in)justice system in America as a ‘blatant alliance between the judge and the club-swinging cop or paid informer to smash the young and oppressed’ (Davis, 1969: 191). As an alleged co-conspirator with Rubin and Davis, Tom Hayden is regarded as one of the period’s most famous radicals (Miller, 1987: 40). Hayden had indeed been responsible for some impressive and risky work in the segregated South where he challenged racism (Hayden, 1988: ch. 3). As well as being a committed activist who was violently assaulted while campaigning against racism in 1961, Hayden was the lead author of the original draft of the SDS’s founding Port Huron statement (see above) of 1962, the same year in which he would become the organisation’s president.6 Hayden had described the conservatism at the heart of American society, but which was also critical of ‘the Communist system’ (Berman, 1996: 66; Hayden, 1988: 97; Miller, 1987: 350). 6  Hayden claimed that the SDS Port Huron convention itself was the proper author of the statement, because it had substantially amended his original draft to make it more radical on questions such as American capitalism (Hayden, 1969a: 55).

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American political system in bitingly harsh terms, placing any ‘violence’ by the left in stark perspective: the soil of the American republic was fertilised by the genocide of millions of Native Americans and the horrific brutality of black slavery. In this context, foreign wars such as Vietnam were not aberrations but the norm for a ruling class hooked on extending its reach and power (Hayden, 1969a: 13). Such a system was beyond repair. At the Chicago protests he had attacked the Democratic Party’s ‘illegitimacy and criminality’ (cited in Miller, 1987: 297–8). The real conspirators in Chicago were not, he claimed, protestors such as himself but Democratic politicians such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Hubert Humphrey, and Lyndon Johnson, on whose orders the police had attacked the activists (Hayden, 1969a: 11–12). Hayden’s worldview had been influenced by C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, which depicted American society as a vastly unequal place where the few with their hands on the reins of power – largely residing in the institutions of government, the military, and the corporation – dictated the conditions of life for the many (Mills, 1959; Miller, 1987: 310). Additional inspiration for Hayden had come from the Argentine-born leader of the Cuban revolution, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (Hayden, 1988: 78, 201). But someone who once denounced the Democratic Party as a wasteland for radicals would later join and become a leading figure in that same party, which he now believed was a forum in which radicals could exert some influence (Howe, 1983: 325). In a remarkable turn of events, just eight years after protesting at the party convention – condemning its hopelessly flawed nature and pledging to undermine its legitimacy – Hayden was a candidate for the Democratic Party in the Senate (Miller, 1987: 323; Levy, 1994: 100). Serving the Democrats for eighteen years combined in the California State Assembly and the Senate from 1982 to 2000, it was ironical that on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the Chicago confrontation, Hayden was seeking his fourth term as a California state assemblyman. He reached the conclusion after his political journey that, in light of the downfall of Nixon, the system had worked just the way it should (Hayden, 1988: xv–xvii). This position was sharply at odds with the views of other radicals at the time such as Noam Chomsky, who likened the Watergate scandal to ‘the discovery that the directors of Murder Inc. were also cheating on their income tax’ (Chomsky, 1973). From being a protestor outside the party’s convention, Hayden had effortlessly moved inside. What made this all the more incredible was the miserable and reactionary record of the Democratic Party, not just on the question of race in the South – where Hayden had put his body on the line – but also on economic

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and working-class issues (Davis, 1986: ch. 2). It is hard to square the new Hayden with the one who, at the time of the conspiracy trial, declared that the system would not ‘fall because minds are changed or blown – this system will fall during a series of sharp and dangerous conflicts, life and death conflicts … When they bring the troops against us we have to show a fighting spirit in the streets’ (Hayden, 1969b: 172). Hayden has tried to maintain throughout his established political career a veneer of radicalism by, for example, appearing at demonstrations and calling for an end to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Hayden, 2011a). The former SDS president opportunistically jumped on the bandwagon of the Occupy Wall Street movement that erupted in September 2011, attempting to draw a link between the movement and his previous actions in SDS (Hayden, 2012) – from which, of course, he had long departed. Hayden’s politics today are light years from the anti-systemic politics – which elicited a brutal response from the American state of which Hayden has until his recent retirement been a leading member – of the Occupy movement (see Writers for the 99%, 2012). His conversion from radicalism is summed up not so much in his conviction that the Occupy movement could lead to the financial markets being ‘reformed’ or in his call for a ‘participatory New Deal’ that would re-regulate banks and corporations (Hayden, 2011b; Hayden, 2012). Rather, it is best indicated in his own words, written for the occasion of 1968’s twentieth anniversary, in which he described himself as ‘a “born-again” Middle American’ who re-entered the ‘political mainstream’ (Hayden, 1988: 465). Deriding one of the US’s major political parties as a radical before later embracing the same organisation is something Eldridge Cleaver also accomplished – this time on the Republican side. As the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (re-named the Black Panther Party) Minister of Information from 1967 to 1971 and one of the organisation’s three leading members,7 Cleaver fought not only for the emancipation of black Americans but also against the capitalist economic system he saw as responsible for their enslavement, since the Panthers stood for the complete reconstruction of society (Katsiaficas, 1987: 22). While the Panthers, including Cleaver, often emphasised the gun (see chapter 7), he wielded the pen with real panache. Radicalised during a stint in prison, Cleaver became the Panthers’ most charismatic 7  The other two were the founders of the party, Chairman Bobby Seale and Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton, in whose prison-enforced absence Cleaver had assumed the leadership of the party (Young, 1977: 127).

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leading member after re-tasting freedom in 1966. His contribution to jailhouse literature Soul on Ice, which sold two million copies, won him fame and notoriety virtually overnight (Kauffman and Scarlett, 1986; Cleaver, 1968; Raskin, 1998; Kram, n.d.). But Cleaver underwent some striking changes to abandon his radical political leanings. A one-time atheist, he was a Marxist who viewed society’s problems as stemming predominantly from economic and political causes. But as a born-again Christian in 1975, Cleaver eventually came round to the view that everything was spiritual (cited in Neale, 2004). The relationship between Marxism and Christianity may not be one of total antagonism.8 But arguably the step from atheist to religious zealot was a major leap: Cleaver later became a Mormon, despite the latter religion prohibiting blacks from occupying positions in its hierarchy (Rout, 1991: 260). The same man who detested America’s political system as a sham built on racism and exploitation would later opine in The New York Times that the country was ‘the freest and most democratic in the world’ (cited in Neale, 2004). In an interview conducted in the 1980s he conceded that his 1960s bête noir, the police, were indispensable elements in any modern society (cited in Kauffman and Scarlett, 1986). As a Panther, Cleaver was contemptuous of the Republican Party, laying the blame squarely at its feet for the savage police attacks on protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention. By Cleaver’s reading of events, the Republicans conspired to sabotage the Democrats’ chances of winning that year’s election by wrecking the party’s convention and associating them with the mayhem (Cleaver, 1970: 9). Cleaver was slated to teach a course at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968 to the outrage of then-Governor and future President Ronald Reagan, who feared that his students might be stirred up enough by the militant intellectual to go home at night and slaughter their parents in their beds. But in 1982, the vehemently anti-communist Cleaver was booed by Yale’s Afro-American student society for supporting Reagan, 8  Some have drawn attention to the common elements – probably overstated – of Marxism and Christianity (see Nersoyan, 1942). Engels, too, had pointed to the parallels between the rising working-class movement and early Christianity, both of which were movements of the oppressed in which hope for salvation – one on Earth, the other in Heaven – were invested (Engels, 1969: 209). For a more recent and sensitive examination of Marxism’s attitude to religion that goes beyond ‘the opium of the masses’ while at the same time defending the materialism at the heart of the method, see Molyneux (2008).

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while at his old stomping ground of Berkeley he was threatened with violence (Kimball, 2000: 215; Rout, 1991: 262). The Reagan whom Cleaver would go on to campaign for was the same California governor for whom he had previously developed a manic hatred, the same man he obsessed about, and whom he even made plans to kill (Kauffman and Scarlett, 1986; Russell, 2009). But Cleaver later ran, unsuccessfully, as a Republican candidate for office, and went as far as demanding that Berkeley City Council restore the longabandoned practice of commencing meetings with the pledge of allegiance (Kifner, 1998). Cleaver’s eventual abhorrence of social conflict – he called upon radicals and conservatives in the US to see each other not as foes but as fellow Americans and children of God (cited in Neale, 2004) – in part reflected the decline of visible struggle in America from the 1970s onwards (see Schulman and Zelizer, 2008). Yet Cleaver’s remaking also has to be seen in the context of the decline of the Panthers and the new directions of its leading members. Aside from Cleaver, who died in 1998, there is Panther founder Bobby Seale. While still involved in community organising into the twentyfirst century, he went on to publish his own cookbooks in the 1980s, including Bar-b-que’n with Bobby (Schultz, 1993: 13). He also acted as a promoter of the multinational Unilever-owned Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (UW Tacoma, 2009). Meanwhile fellow Panther founder Huey P. Newton’s well-known crack cocaine addiction eventually brought him unstuck: the once inspirational figure was shot dead on his home turf of West Oakland in 1989 by a dealer after a lengthy period of drug-induced psychosis and alcoholism (Slaughter, 2006). The party’s former Propaganda Minister and organiser of the 1968 Olympics black power protests Harry Edwards, in his later guise as a conservative sociology professor, advocated a sweep of the streets of Los Angeles to cleanse them of criminal and drug-addled black youths, who in his view ought to be put behind bars for very lengthy spells (cited in Davis, 1990: 292). Also instructive is the tale of H. Rap Brown, a Panther central committee member (Minister of Justice) who was at one point considered for the post of Honorary Prime Minister of the party (Seale, 1970: 253; Jones and Jeffries, 1998: 46). He had once voiced an essentially socialist message calling for the equalisation of wealth distribution and the death of the profit motive (Brown, 1969: 128). But Rap Brown left after a period of only four months in the Panthers, and subsequently converted to Islam under the new name of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (Mungin, 2002: 6). He is currently serving a life sentence for offences including the killing of a police officer in 2000 (CNN, 2002).

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Across the Atlantic during this period, some of the most striking cases of renegades and ex-radicals were to be located on the continent. A former 1960s radical to be ‘reincarnated’ was Joschka Fischer, whose radical youth gave way eventually to a stint as a German Green foreign minister (1998– 2005), during which time he enthusiastically supported some of the harshest social welfare austerity measures enacted in the country since the Second World War (BBC, 2003; Theil, 2003). Such was the conservative nature of the Red-Green government of which Fischer was a leading member that finance minister Oskar Lafontaine resigned essentially because his SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (another former sixty-eighter) considered his modest Keynesian policies to be anti-business (Lafontaine, 2000: 152). In its January 2001 edition, Germany’s Stern magazine published dramatic photos of the so-called ‘stick man’ – Fischer was known in his past life as a protestor who distributed sticks to break windows at demonstrations – fighting a police officer on the streets in 1973 (Harman, 2001). As a one-time member of Revolutionary Struggle and the Frankfurt Spontis, Fischer had once been an advocate of violent resistance, urging the overthrow of the capitalist system and the institution of a socialist republic (Hockenos, 2008: 4). But Fischer and fellow future Green Daniel Cohn-Bendit (see below) embarked on a reformist path in the late 1970s (Berman, 2005: 272). Fischer, meanwhile, joined the Greens in 1981 (Hockenos, 2008: 165). They increasingly became co-opted within bureaucratic structures and parliamentary politics because, according to Harman (2001), they followed Berlin Socialist German Student Union (SDS) leader and future Green Rudi Dutschke’s advice in embarking on the ‘long march through the institutions’. While Dutschke’s phrase has been subject to multiple interpretations – radical and conservative – it has plausibly been understood as meaning the undermining of institutions from within and without (Suri, 2010: 141). Moreover, the phrase was received literally by one Green MP as meaning simply the election to parliament (cited in Hockenos, 2008: 199). Increasingly, as a consequence of working within institutions, Fischer and Cohn-Bendit were forced to compromise their radical politics to the point where they were barely recognisable. Fischer and many other European sixty-eighters at one time opposed state violence, but now they were proposing state violence of the most extreme kind: they provided unstinting support for NATO’s bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in 1999, an imperialist war involving breathtaking hypocrisy on the part of the North American and European powers, and which resulted in the deaths, according to Human

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Rights Watch, of between 488 and 527 civilians (Berman, 2005: 90–92; Chomsky, 1999; HRW, 2000). Following an almost identical trajectory was possibly the world’s bestknown student radical and the symbol of the upsurge of the times, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Berman, 2005: 14). Cohn-Bendit had been expelled from France for his role in fomenting the riotous events of May 1968 (Katsiaficas, 1987: 104). He was most easily categorised as an anti-Stalinist anarchist who was not averse to violent struggle, but who was also influenced by dissident Trotskyists, particularly members of Socialisme ou barbarie (Young, 1977: 216, 269; Birchall, 2004: 5). But Cohn-Bendit also described himself as ‘more or less’ a disciple of Marx (cited in Singer, 2002: 58). He averred at the time that representative democracy was a sham and that only revolution offered the masses any prospect of controlling their destiny: he spoke of himself in the same breath as the corps of revolt in Paris (1871), in Russia (1905 and 1917), in Spain (1936), and in Hungary (1956) (Cohn-Bendit and Cohn-Bendit, 1968: 16). But Cohn-Bendit was an impatient revolutionary, believing that the long and painstaking efforts by revolutionaries to overturn capitalism through building radical movements could be substituted with less timeconsuming methods such as ‘insurrectional cells’ and ‘nuclei of confrontation’ (cited in Roszak, 1972: 5). Over forty years later, Cohn-Bendit sits as a German Green politician in the European Parliament, completely unmoved by revolutionary motivations – a strange twist in a political career that began with him, as a member of the 22 March movement, rejecting the need for leaders and political parties (Singer, 2002: 16–17, 134). Along with Joschka Fischer, he became a self-described ‘realo’ (a term for those on the right wing of the German Green Party) who believes in a ‘social market’. Given his previous views about the bankruptcy of the political system, his pursuit of a parliamentary career constitutes a fundamental rupture with his past, a point ignored by Spencer (2008: 46) in a very favourable review of Cohn-Bendit’s book published on the fortieth anniversary of 1968 in which the former argues that ‘Dany the Red’ remained true to his ‘core values’. Cohn-Bendit undoubtedly has not poured scorn on radicalism and socialism à la Irving Kristol or Eldridge Cleaver. However, he has certainly come to accept the capitalist system, abandoning his previous view that revolution – violent, if necessary – offered the only means of overcoming the imperviousness of political institutions to major social change. Four decades after 1968, Cohn-Bendit urged his remaining supporters to ‘[f]‌orget it: 68 is over – buried under cobblestones, even if those cobblestones made

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history and triggered radical change in our societies!’. In revisionist spirit, he recast the French May as a mere non-violent vehicle for ‘political expression’ that put paid to ‘archaic modes of thinking’ (Cohn-Bendit, 2008). Cohn-Bendit’s newfound belief in non-violence was ironic, given his position on the 1999 NATO bombing campaign, which saw him join with conservatives such as Otto von Hapsburg (whose heritage is traceable to the empire of the same name) to vote in support of it (Berman, 2005: 106). But some of the best-known French renegades were the (often ex-Maoist) nouveaux philosophes (new philosophers), former 1968 radicals to whom Republican President Ronald Reagan had paid homage for their opposition to collectivism and their support for the individual’s liberty against the state (cited in Seymour, 2008: 171). This grouping of individuals is often written off as a contrived media spectacle with little of the coherence deserving of the label ‘new philosophers’ (Bourg, 2007: 232–4). The phrase nouveaux philosophes was the brainchild of Bernard-Henri Lévy. Born in 1976, it referred to a group including Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, but which was led by Lévy and André Glucksmann, both of whose revisionist books flew off the shelves in 1977 (Paras, 2006: 80, 83; Lévy, 2008: 68; Christofferson, 2004: 184, 190). The latter was an ex-Maoist and ex-Stalinist as well as a prominent figure in the May 1968 rebellion who had beckoned his students into the streets of Paris for an education of an altogether different kind (Berman, 1996: 30, 265).9 In May 1968, he saw the ‘spectre of revolution’ once again stalking the continent, a welcome development: ‘It took only six months to shatter the vanity and fragility of a society prostrate before the fetishes that define it as bourgeois’ (Glucksmann, 1968a: 69). Glucksmann had initially split with communism over Hungary (1956) and the French Communist Party’s Algerian policy. His radical activity was sporadic – including engaging in anti-Vietnam War activities – up until 1968, when once more he became convinced that revolution was not a pipedream (Christofferson, 2004: 101). Although his initial radicalism after 1968 was more influenced by anarchist ideas contra the Russian Revolution and the Stalinism of French communism, he would eventually support the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 French presidential elections (Christofferson, 2004: 101; Seymour, 2008: 248). Passing through a number of phases on the way to the French president 9  Glucksmann, it should be pointed out, disassociated himself from the label ‘new philosopher’ (Bourg, 2007: 236). Lévy, for his part, thought that things were more ‘complicated’ than the phrase implied (Christofferson, 2004: 192).

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and his celebrity wife, Glucksmann first abandoned his anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist politics in the mid-1970s for ‘anti-totalitarianism’, then he embraced ‘humanitarianism’, before lining up in support of military and nuclear deterrence (Berman, 2005: 66–70). Glucksmann’s humanitarianism and anti-militarism, in particular, came as a surprise, given that his previous writings in the late 1960s included discussions of the inevitability of political violence, citing Mao Zedong’s famous adage that ‘power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ (Glucksmann, 1968a: 77). He had also ruminated on the contribution to military strategy and thought of the chairman, who was quoted approvingly on the subject of writers’ ‘aristocratic’, ‘decadent’, and ‘creative moods’: ‘So far as proletarian writers and artists are concerned, should not these kinds of creative moods be destroyed? I think they should; they should be utterly destroyed’ (Glucksmann, 1968b: 46). Renegades such as Glucksmann made their mark from 1976 after the publication of Lévy’s essay in June that year heralding a ‘new wave’ (Starr, 1995: 88). Lévy himself has recently remarked that his generation was the ‘last in Europe to believe in the great Revolutionary tale and … also the first to deconstruct its foundations’ (Lévy, 2008: vii). Lévy, a former student of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, had circulated among Maoists, playing a somewhat distant role over the radio during the events of May 1968. He had also been impressed by Régis Debray’s (see below) politics, and had published a book on the Bangladesh war as a Marxist (Bourg, 2007: 231; Seymour, 2008: 167). But so far to the right did Lévy travel that he described the ideal of revolution as a ‘criminal and barbarous’ one, and he located the source of totalitarianism in the mere quest to change the world (cited in Birchall, 2004: 2, 223). A contemporary of the new philosophers with a slightly different story was Régis Debray, also a former student of Althusser’s. Debray had been galvanised into action by the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, after which he and another revolutionary turned reformist Bernard Kouchner promptly made an offer – though it was diplomatically declined – of their military services at the Cuban embassy in Paris (Berman, 2005: 211). A follower of Che Guevara and the author of the guerrilla warfare manual, Revolution in the Revolution? (1967), Debray did time in solitary confinement from 1967 to 1970 in Bolivia, where as a journalist he was tortured and interrogated by the CIA and local authorities. In Revolution in the Revolution?, he envisaged socialist revolution as the culmination of armed warfare against the capitalist state and its standing army (Debray, 1967: 19). Debray was heralded in the late 1960s as ‘one of the genuine cultural heroes’ for those on the American left (Horowitz, 1968: vii).

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At his court martial in Camiri, Bolivia, he nonchalantly expressed his lack of surprise at the repression he suffered as a revolutionary, since choosing the path of the barricade over the ballot inevitably would land one in jail or, even worse, in a shallow grave (Debray, 1969: 16–17). But somewhere along the way, Debray’s revolutionary spirit ebbed. In the 1980s he served the French state under François Mitterrand as an adviser on foreign affairs and ended up peddling military hardware to odious Third World regimes (Ali, 2005: 342–3; Birchall, 2007). This was symbolic in itself: Bourg has likened Debray’s recruitment by Mitterrand to an improbable dinner invitation being extended to Tom Hayden by the Reagan White House (Bourg, 2007: 306). Aside from reforms such as the abolition of the death penalty, Debray had little to show for his compromises by way of alteration to the distribution of wealth and power in France: the Mitterrand government’s reform programme in the early part of the decade infamously concluded with the French Socialist Party implementing an austerity programme as a result of capital flight and other economic pressures (Bourg, 2007: 305; Hobsbawm, 1994: 411). Moreover, the government had been complicit in the bombing in New Zealand of Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear ship, the Rainbow Warrior, resulting in the death of a photographer (Katsiaficas, 1987: 114). Debray’s political star fell even further, however, when he participated in a commission established at the behest of the conservative President Jacques Chirac, and which recommended the banning of the hijab in schools (Birchall, 2007). For the radical Debray of the late 1960s, the political juncture of the times demanded from each person a decision about whose side they were on, ‘the side of violence that represses or violence that liberates’ (Debray, 1969: 22). It is clear on whose side Debray ended up. In his memoirs, he makes frequent references to his political renovations, asking the rhetorical question as to how he found ‘himself a jailbird at 30 and a chamberlain at 40?’. He puzzled over how it is that one can ‘get up one fine morning and renounce everything that has driven us until that moment’ and how he could have been ‘robbed … of my soul … just like that, never to return’. Indeed, Debray locates the reasons for his resignation in 1988 in the absence of anything remotely smacking of socialism – or even republicanism – passing from the lips of his political colleagues (Debray, 2007: 5, 230). But the real puzzle is how Debray could have found himself – the man who once portrayed the revolution as a battle that pitted revolutionaries against reformists and ‘future renegades’ (Debray, 1967: 23) – in this quandary to begin with.

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Across the Channel in Britain, a typical renegade of this period was Christopher Hitchens’ younger brother, Peter (Hitchens, P., 2009: 75), who like his better-known sibling was a journalist and former member of the Trotskyist International Socialists (later the SWP (UK)).10 After leaving revolutionary Marxism for the Labour Party, Hitchens resigned from the latter when he became a political reporter in 1984 out of concern about a possible conflict of interest with his party membership. He then became sympathetic to the right-wing Social Democratic Party, before he abandoned social democracy altogether in 1990: after the Berlin Wall fell and when the Soviet Bloc was collapsing, he lost faith in radicalism altogether (Hitchens, P., 2009: 57–8). The process commenced with disillusionment towards the British left, followed by his awakening to the terrible goings-on in Eastern Europe, which he attributed to a mentality shared by the centre-left parties of the West. He credits Arthur Koestler with convincing him that a social democratic stance to the right of communism was viable, a position he was forced to abandon as it dawned on him that social democrats also were headlong down the road towards full-blown dictatorship (Hitchens, P., 2009: 58). There is, of course, something very familiar about this narration of events, and it raises questions about the depth of political thinking of radicals such as Hitchens in the first place, a point we resume in later chapters. While he claims that it was not a revelatory experience, he also maintains that his observations about what was happening in Eastern Europe were pivotal in his apostasy (Hitchens, P., 2009: 76). One other notable aspect of Hitchens, true of some other renegades, is the tendency to cast past behaviour in the least favourable light: thus Hitchens informs us that while he was a radical university student, he was endeavouring to absorb as much vulgar Marxist nonsense as possible (Hitchens, P., 2009: 55). What the latter comprised, though, he does not say.

Twenty-first-century fox: Christopher Hitchens The twenty-first century’s most prominent renegade thus far has been Peter Hitchens’ brother, the former Trotskyist journalist turned neo-conservative 10  The SWP is the largest organisation in the International Socialist Tendency, which is made up of affiliates from thirty different countries (see www.swp.org.uk/links/ international-socialist-tendency).

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mouthpiece, Christopher. In the ten years prior to his death from oesophageal cancer in 2011, Hitchens erased most of his radical reputation. Witness the extraordinary juxtaposition of the radical opponent of the might of the US war machine being waged on Vietnam with the twenty-first-century Hitchens who, when asked by young people what they should do to change the world, suggested that they enlist in the US military (cited in Hollier, 2010). After first being exercised by American imperialism as a Trotskyist in the International Socialists in Britain in the mid-1960s, Hitchens would one day become, in Caldwell’s words, US imperialism’s most ‘eloquent journalistic defender’ in relation to George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 (Hitchens, 2010: 85; Parker, 2006; Caldwell, 2010). Parker asks how it could possibly be that the long-standing columnist at the Nation could end up writing for the Weekly Standard, find himself in the position of backing Bush at the 2004 presidential elections, as well as be a guest speaker at (fellow renegade) David Horowitz’s restoration weekend alongside conservative stalwarts Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh (Parker, 2006). By choice Hitchens acquired American citizenship in 2007 at a ceremony presided over by the Bush administration head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff (Wilby, 2011). For all intents and purposes, Hitchens severed ties completely with the left after 11 September 2001 when he backed Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in their crusading ‘war on terror’. But the process of distancing himself from Trotskyism, Marxism, and socialism had been gradual, beginning at least since 1975 when he left the International Socialists over the question of the Portuguese revolution (Keach, 1998: 152).11 Some maintain that he was not a neo-conservative, and that he continued to reside on the left (Rodden, 2006: 159). But Hitchens himself admitted that his greatest annoyance was with those on the left of the political spectrum (Hitchens, 2010: 409). Indeed, his vitriolic tone towards individuals on the left was representative of a trait common in other apostates, what Thompson calls a ‘peculiar and vengeful kind of bitterness which a certain kind of man finds for an idealized mistress who has disappointed him’ (Thompson, 1969: 173). His main gripe was with the leftists – the ‘Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter’ – who after September 11 drew attention to the litany of American foreign policy 11  Some say that a turning point was his departure from the UK and arrival in the US in 1981, when he stopped referring to himself as a socialist (Parker, 2006). On the other hand, a former comrade in the SWP (UK), Alex Callinicos, recalls Hitchens being pushed briefly to the left upon arrival in the US (cited in Seymour, 2008: 242).

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abuses as the precursor to the attacks on that day. Indeed, he was almost unable to bring himself to even look at his ex-comrades’ writings (Hitchens, 2008c: 183). Such writings included Noam Chomsky’s moderate reply to the Hitchens position in which the former advocated a response to September 11 that would not add fuel to the fire (cited in Cottee and Cushman, 2008b: 221). Such a position is rooted in the considerable empirical evidence demonstrating beyond doubt the central role of US foreign policy – particularly the favouritism towards Israel in its conflict with Palestine – in the anti-American sentiments that were inflamed under the administration of the globally detested President Bush (see Lavelle, 2007). Hitchens in contrast adopted the standard conservative line that the attacks were motivated by the hatred Islamic fundamentalists feel towards the ‘freedoms’ of America, with its supposedly liberated women (Parker, 2006). In fact, surveys have shown that Muslims across the world generally have much admiration for the ‘freedoms’ of the West, but believe that its women are often demeaned and degraded, and that Western ‘feminism’ has sometimes been a stalking horse for colonisation of predominantly Islamic countries (see Esposito and Mogahed, 2007: chs. 2 and 4). In backing the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Hitchens – whether intentionally or not – had clearly put some distance between himself and his earlier criticisms of the US government’s escalation of the war from Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia, a breach of the principle adhered to by administrations in the post-war years that invading countries to seek out foes was unconscionable (Hitchens, 2001: 34). Like many others, Hitchens swallowed the propaganda about Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction – one of the reasons he gives for supporting the war in the aftermath of September 11 (cited in Seymour, 2008: 11). In terms of the latter, his obsession with that event meant forgetting the lessons of the other September 11: on that day in 1973 General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Chilean government of Salvador Allende with the assistance of the CIA and the Nixon administration, a topic on which Hitchens had earlier written with some distinction (see Hitchens, 2001). In this sense, Cockburn may be wrong to say that Hitchens never wrote anything offensive to ‘respectable opinion’ (Cockburn, 2011). But, while Hitchens remained deeply critical of the US-assisted coup in that South American nation, his backing of more recent American misadventures only underlines his failure to see the connections between the two sets of foreign policies and the broader relations of power they underwrite (see chapter 7).

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In his drive to tackle what he carelessly refers to as ‘Islamic fascism’, and in his siding with liberal democracy in the alleged war between the two, he resembles closely the myriad ex-socialists who, out of revulsion at Stalinism, saw no choice but to throw their lot in with the West during the Cold War (see chapter 3). Like those embittered radicals, he also dropped his criticisms of Western imperialism and capitalism. Hitchens conveniently now argued that the true test of a radical was the willingness to tell friends and allies when they are perpetuating falsehoods (cited in Cottee and Cushman, 2008a: 4). Needless to say, this fails to give adequate account of the significance of his decision to back the neo-conservatives in invading foreign countries to engineer regime change – a decision Hitchens glossed over in his memoir (Hitchens, 2010). But it also misunderstands, of course, what radicalism has historically been about: challenging existing social relations, ascertaining the connections between phenomena, and confronting the powerful, none of which applies to Hitchens post-September 11. Hitchens’ views were hardly those of a fearless dissident: he sang in tune with the Bush administration, Congress, the mass media, and broader American public opinion (Finkelstein, 2008: 246).

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conclusion to part

1

The preceding two chapters have glimpsed the extraordinary span of experiences of renegades and ex-radicals since the beginning of the twentieth century, including socialists who embraced – or collaborated – with fascism, American former radicals who subscribed to anti-communism and (in some cases) McCarthyism and neo-conservatism, as well as numerous former 1960s radicals who ended up working for states to whose machinery of repression they had previously fallen victim. The voyages – and the endpoints – have undoubtedly differed but a common thread has been a departure from the radical and left anti-systemic politics to which they adhered in earlier phases of their lives. What also unites them has been the supplanting of radical hopes for changing the world and abolishing injustice, exploitation, and oppression by an acceptance of existing political-economic structures. Thus far there has been limited scope for outlining the political and social contexts in which these de-radicalisations have occurred. In the following two chapters, we look at the extent to which apostasy is a function of political defeat and rapidly declining fortunes for radicals.

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Part II The experience of defeat

[The] years of my life coincided with the years of socialist defeat. Step by step, we suffered a dislodgment of received ideas even as we tried to retrieve their moral core. (Irving Howe)

It is certainly the case that I am influenced by the defeats and betrayals of the last twenty and some years. These form part of the evidence for my belief that Marxism must be rejected: at every single one of the many tests provided by history, Marxist movements have either failed socialism or betrayed it. (James Burnham, cited in Smant, 1992,:10)

[The radical left] faltered, [we] lost our way, became disoriented above all by death upon death. What began as a soaring spirit suddenly was over, perhaps to be finished permanently. (Hayden, 1988: 505)

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The renegade’s origins have frequently been located in structural changes – in particular the defeat of movements for social change and lulls in the class struggle – rather than flawed theoretical systems, material temptations, or personality quirks. There is considerable evidence that renegades tend to flourish in a political climate of reaction and decline as scores are settled, more conservative ideas permeate life, and heavy state repression is meted out to radicals who dared to probe the outer limits of political possibilities. Defeated radicals often conclude either that they had fought for the impossible, that what they achieved turned out to be even worse than what they had fought against, or that they had been sorely mistaken in desiring radical change in the first place; a retreat from political activism can often be the end result (Hirschman, 1982: 93). In The Experience of Defeat, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill (1984) wrote of the English Revolution’s defeat in 1660 and its demoralising impact on radicals, many of whom – their spirits broken – subsequently surrendered to the restored monarchy. Absolute monarchy in England was history as a result of the revolution (Saville, 1994: 6). But the return of the King was nevertheless a savage blow after Cromwell had declared England a republic post-Charles I. Moreover, the restoration of the monarchy was accompanied by the gravest of political environments, as significant repression was exacted against radicals – factors, as we shall see in the next two chapters, which are influential in the proliferation of renegades. The subject of Hill’s book is how radicals dealt with the defeat of a revolution they had supported and helped to instigate. A marked shift in opinion saw opponents of Charles I lend their support to his son’s ascendancy in 1660, and repression – including imprisonment, censorship, and execution – was meted out to regicides and revolutionaries, including the Levellers, many of whom came to see the King as the lesser evil compared to the army (Hill, 1984). A similar pattern is evident in cycles of revolt and reaction ever since. The wash-up of the French Revolution – in particular the descent into bloodletting and Napoleonic dictatorship – caused many former Jacobin supporters to

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reconsider their affinity with events after 1789 (Žižek, 2008: 394). In particular, it was the employment of terror by Robespierre and the Jacobins to stave off counter-revolution that caused many erstwhile enthusiasts to blanch (Rees, 1998: 28). While writing largely about the apostasies of ex-Jacobin poets, Thompson, in a piece with much wider relevance, similarly points to changes in the real world and their impact on those who hold out hopes for a better condition for humanity, asking how radicals can retain their beliefs when the political ground is shifting out from underneath them. Once the tension between one’s radical aspirations and their realisability slackens, ‘we are at the edge of apostasy’. Can there be any other result when radical action fosters only catastrophe – ‘fraternité produces fratricide, égalité produces empire, liberty produces liberticide’? (Thompson, 1969: 174, 152). In the case of the more recent Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, Deutscher writes that the ex-communist’s revulsion at what had been done in their name was not unfounded, for there was no weightier tragedy than to see a great upheaval plunge back into horrors of the kind that produced it in the first place, and to witness the ways in which powerful ideals such as liberty are invoked to legitimise post-revolutionary despotism (Deutscher, 1969: 12). This process of defeat has been an important theme running through the renegacies of the individuals whose stories were touched on in the first two chapters. In chapters 3 and 4, we examine this relationship between apostasy and defeat – including not just outright defeat of movements and the creation of much less hospitable environments for radicals, but also the occurrence of events that confound their political prognoses. In chapter 5, we look specifically at the question of state repression and its impact on radicals’ behaviour.

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chapter

3 The First World War: a defeat borne of nationalist bloodshed

The outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 was a calamitous defeat not just for humanity at large, but also for revolutionary socialism and internationalism. An undeniably imperialist war, the conflict was one in which ‘millions of people laid down their lives to wrest a few yards of land from the enemy’ (Deutscher, 1954: 212). Rosa Luxemburg recoiled in disgust at this exhibition of capitalist barbarism: ‘Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth … an orgy of anarchy … so it appears in all its hideous nakedness’ (cited in Gluckstein, 1994: 4). The revolutionary Marxist position prior to this turn of events was that the nation state, far from representing the people, was an institution that managed their domination and oppression on behalf of capital: in the words of the German socialist Karl Liebknecht’s publication, The Chief Enemy is at Home (Fainsod, 1935: 1, 49). At its 1907 (Stuttgart) and 1910 (Copenhagen) congresses, second international members had vowed to do their utmost to avert war, to oppose their own governments in the event of hostilities, and to transform any war into civil war (Weinstein, 1967: 119; Glazer, 1961: 31). Had they been true to their word, much bloodshed could have been avoided (Gluckstein, 1994: 4). Alas, among the belligerent countries, the bulk of socialists in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, and Great Britain succumbed to nationalism and fell in behind their own ruling classes (Fainsod, 1935: 38). The only notable exceptions were the Russians and the Serbians in Europe, and the Socialist Party of America across the Atlantic (Harman, 1999: 407; Lasch, 1973: 43). To some degree this was an inevitable expression of the divergent trends of opinion within the second international

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prior to the war: those on the right such as Eduard Bernstein viewed the interests of the proletariat as bound up with the fate of the nation state and therefore supported war, whereas those on the left, led by Lenin, saw the state as an entity diametrically at odds with proletarian interests, and they sought to use the opportunity of war to hasten its downfall. The onset of the war only exacerbated these fissures (Fainsod, 1935: 7–11). Political agency was therefore crucial in this instance of defeat for proletarian internationalism, since socialist party leaderships had elected at the crucial moment to put nation before class. It is important not to overstate the nationalism that bewitched the working classes during this time (see Birchall, 1998). But there was nevertheless profound disillusionment and demoralisation owing to the apparent enthusiasm with which labour volunteered to fight an overwhelmingly capitalist war (Pierson, 2001: 175). This proved to be fertile ground for generating turncoats: in the US alone there were numerous prominent opponents of the war who, after their country entered the fray, became patriots (Weinstein, 1967: 129–30). Radical novelists Upton Sinclair and Jack London rallied to their country’s cause when Woodrow Wilson thrust the US into battle, and even the later pro-Bolshevik and founder member of the American Communist Party Louis Fraina – who was devastated by the demise of the second international following the breakout of war – was reported to be initially pro-ally (Corey, cited in Corey, 1963: 107; Myers, 1977: 4). Mussolini, among numerous others, may well have been affected by the disintegration of international solidarity at the outbreak of the FirstWorldWar and the concomitant descent into nationalism and warmongering (Renzi, 1971: 206). A previous opponent of imperialism, Mussolini now argued that Italian socialists were under no obligation to stick to their internationalist principles in the wake of the German SPD’s cowardly backing of the war (cited in di San Severino, 1923: 23). In addition, he felt that the PSI had ‘wobbled’ in its neutral stance (Mussolini, 1928: 45). Renzi comments that Mussolini, along with many comrades, became disenchanted with socialism when working-class solidarity and internationalism were cruelly exposed as myths (Renzi, 1971: 206). In December 1914, in keeping with his condescending attitudes to the proletariat more generally (see chapter 6), he suggested that the outbreak of the war revealed the weaknesses of the working class, especially the Germans who had fallen at the Kaiser’s feet. This paved the way, according to Mussolini, for other socialists on the continent to follow suit. He dwelt on the hard fact that millions of working-class people ‘are standing opposite one another to-day on the blood-drenched battlefields of

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Europe’ (cited in di San Severino, 1923: 11, 12). When asked what would have happened had the German and French socialists held out, he replied that ‘everything would have run a different course’ (cited in Ludwig, 1932: 87). Mussolini was possibly also affected by the miserable failure in the summer of 1914 of Italian socialists’ attempted uprising in ‘red week’, leading him to conclude that the toiling masses were a hopeless cause (cited in Pierson, 2001: 24). Yet the future fascist ruler was bothered not just by the proletariat’s seeming unwillingness to fight a civil rather than a capitalist war, but also by the rising rate of defections among his colleagues (Mack Smith, 1981: 24). In defending his volte-face, he pointed to the Frenchman Gustave Hervé, who had returned the compliment by comparing his own evolution to Il Duce’s (cited in MacGregor-Hastie, 1963: 51; Loughlin, 2001: 18). As an internationalist opposed to the notion that workers should kill their sisters and brothers in foreign lands purely because their rulers had commanded them to, the French history professor had drafted an article in 1901 seemingly accompanied by an image of the nation’s flag plunged into a pile of manure. Yet, after hostilities commenced, Hervé stepped forward to spill blood for the fatherland (Gregor, 1979: 162; Loughlin, 2001: 5). Like Mussolini, he was in some senses the victim of defeat, with the beginnings of his transition to national socialism traceable to the failure of the 1910 rail strike, the divisions and rivalries besetting the French left, and the reluctance of the German SPD to subscribe to Hervéism (Loughlin, 2001: 5, 14). This poses an interesting question: what would have happened to the likes of Mussolini and Hervé had the First World War been thwarted by international proletarian solidarity before the first shots were fired? It is likely that Mussolini would have found some other occasion and justification to move to the right, for it is clear that there were enough flaws in his politics and personality for this to be the case (see chapter 9). It is important not to individualise the problem too much, for Mussolini’s explanation for supporting Italian involvement was in part based on the fact that abstention would have hurt the country whichever coalition of states happened to triumph, putting the nation in an invidious position (cited in Ludwig, 1932: 86). But the cardinal sin of Mussolini here was his failure to consider the revolutionary defeatist position: for parties such as the PSI, the point was not to barrack for any set or combination of ‘national interests’, which can only ever be synonymous with the interests of the ruling capitalist class (O’Lincoln, 1991: 28). Rather it was to argue against the lunacy of workers murdering fellow workers whom they had never met in order to augment their rulers’ territories, and to transform

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the war into a battle between labour and capital to determine the fate of humankind. Had Mussolini been a little more patient, he would have seen the anti-war position pay off in the form of the Kaiser – the same monarch to whom German workers were seemingly wedded in 1914 – being ousted by revolutionary rebellion in 1918. This was the approach of the Bolsheviks, and if they achieved nothing else from the October revolution they at least removed Russia from the war, in turn helping to bring the human smoke of the First World War to an end.1 On the other hand, the Bolsheviks were not immune from the sort of backsliding displayed by Mussolini and others. As late as July 1917, much to the chagrin of Lenin – holed up in a jail cell in Zurich at the time – the Bolshevik organ Pravda adopted a position of ‘revolutionary defencism’, calling on Russian soldiers to remain at their posts until the government negotiated a cessation of conflict (cited in Trotsky, 1987: 27–9). As we know already, the former collaborator of Trotsky, Parvus, discarded his anti-imperialist politics to capitalise on the war and become a wealthy businessman and agent of the German state. To some extent, it has been argued that Parvus, too, suffered the experience of defeat. His biographers have drawn attention to the impacts on Parvus of the failure of European socialists in 1914, but also of the establishment of dictatorship in Russia in the years following the October revolution (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 281). Trotsky for his part saw his former confidant Parvus commence a downward spiral following the crushing of the 1905 revolt (Trotsky, 1988: 173). How important a factor this latter defeat was, however, is open to question, since Parvus’s key break was many years later in 1914. Moreover, he, like Mussolini, had significant problems of temperament and personality that may have bolstered his candidacy for political betrayal (see chapter 9). Other significant radicals were impacted by political defeat around this time. The events of Kronstadt in 1921, in which the Bolshevik leadership authorised the crackdown on a rebellion that threatened the future of the regime, contributed to the discontent with socialism expressed by the likes of Hendrik de Man, Oswald Mosley, and the French socialist turned Nazi collaborationist Marcel Déat. Along with the ‘new economic policy’ and the employment of autocratic methods by the Bolsheviks to snuff out discordant voices in the party, Kronstadt led these three, who were sceptical from the 1  This phrase is borrowed from Nicholson Baker’s book on the Second World War, Human Smoke (2008).

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outset, to an even more doubtful view of the merits of the October insurrection. The vistas of working-class revolution and proletarian self-emancipation that Marx envisaged seemed a dim prospect to these forlorn socialists in the 1920s and 1930s (White, 1992: 38, 195). It seems de Man was especially deeply affected by the onset of hostilities in August 1914. The proletariat – not helped by supine party and trade union leaderships – had failed to live up to his expectations (Pierson, 2001: 38, 43). De Man’s participation in the First World War and its political consequences challenged to the core his Marxist inclinations. Like Mussolini, he referred to his disappointment at the second international’s craven behaviour and its ineffectualness, as well as to the daily demonstration throughout the war of the extent to which the mindset of the proletariat – who, easily duped and co-opted by the system at the best of times, was naturally inclined to reformism – was dominated by nationalist dogma. So torn with conflicting ideas was de Man that he set sail for the US to seek out ‘possibilities for a new spiritual anchorage’ (de Man, 1985: 305, 12–13, 25).

Mother of all defeats: the tragedy of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism For many New York intellectuals and ex-communists elsewhere, the defeat of the Russian Revolution – as the dreams of peace, freedom, and liberation faded against the backdrop of civil war, famine, foreign intervention, and the failure of international socialist revolution – was exemplified in dictatorship, forced labour, and eventual connivance with the Nazis to dismember Poland and help pave the way for Hitler’s European expansion. Marxist theorising is fundamentally about political practice, but also the failure of political practice, and the Russian Revolution has been among the political failures studied by Marxist analysts going back at least as far as the French Revolution (Žižek, 2008: 3). In the place of hopes for an egalitarian democracy that snatched power from bankers, industrialists, and politicians, lodging it firmly in the hands of workers and peasants, arose a tyranny that reversed many of the revolution’s gains and presided over a new class society. In this sense, there was qualitative discontinuity between the spirit of 1917 and the Stalinist regime that claimed to be its rightful heir. As persecutor of so many leading Bolsheviks – who were forced to ‘confess’ to absurd charges in the Moscow trials of the mid-to-late 1930s – Stalin was far from the genuine

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custodian of Bolshevism and Leninism (Howe, 1978: 162). As Muggeridge put it, Bolshevism was something that ‘Stalin liquidated along with all the old Bolsheviks’ (Muggeridge, 1988: 61). The experience brings to mind William Morris’s famous statement in A Dream of John Ball: Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes, turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name. (cited in Miller, 1987: 5)

This defeat of the Russian Revolution was a colossal setback for radical forces across the globe, and its consequences were felt far beyond Eastern Europe.2 While others responded to this setback in different ways – by, for example, reaffirming their faith in the ideals of the revolution while acknowledging their trumping in this instance by a range of unremitting historical and geopolitical factors (see Rees, 1991) – one predictable response was to abandon the cause of socialism and to follow alternative political paths. In this sense, the Moscow trials were the last straw for numerous former communists and anti-Stalinists in their de-radicalisation (Wreszin, 1994: 62). This was partly true even for ex-Trotskyists to whom Stalinism’s villainy ought to have come as no surprise, since the monumental nature of the defeats and repression induced a profound depression throughout radical circles. We need to see Stalinism therefore in the wider context of the shattering of hope that marred the period. To the Moscow trials Wreszin adds a catalogue of appalling events that followed the First World War – the great depression, the rise of fascist dictatorship, and the Nazi–Soviet pact – which sounded the death knell to any remaining sanguinity about what lay ahead (Wreszin, 1994: 118). The Nazi–Soviet pact, in particular, was a crushing blow for German communists endeavouring to resist Nazism (Cliff, 1999: 75). It amounted to what the ex-communist and contributor to The God That Failed Louis Fischer referred to as a Kronstadt moment, named after the events of 1921 (described above), when the anarchist Alexander Berkman had finally been driven into the camp of anti-Bolshevism by the crushing of the revolt (Fischer, 1949: 206–7). Other factors helping to trigger a mass exodus from communist ranks around the world were Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 26,000-word 2  Cold warriors might not accept that the Russian Revolution was ‘defeated’, but that was how a significant number of leftists saw it, including many renegades discussed here. The pall of defeat also pervades Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, first published in 1937.

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speech in 1956, which outlined the extent of the crimes of Stalin, including the persecution in 1934 of former members of the Communist Party’s central committee and delegates to that year’s party congress; and the invasion of Hungary the same year of Khrushchev’s revelations (Miller, 1987: 27; Isserman, 1987: 23). In the US, the Communist Party effectively collapsed in the late 1950s under the weight of these developments, as well as heavy domestic state repression (Isserman, 1987: xii). This was in essence the story of many New York intellectuals and other North American ex-communists and ex-radicals. Isaac Deutscher has drawn attention to the similarities in the testimonies of former communists, who often commenced their political renovations by parting company with the bureaucratic corruption of Soviet socialism, only to secede from the communist tradition in toto. Communism was then presented as humanity’s most pressing danger. As Deutscher puts it, the renegade is unable to preserve the baby of communism by discarding the dirty bathwater of Stalinism. Instead, it is discovered that ‘the baby is a monster which must be strangled’ and the ‘heretic becomes a renegade’ (Deutscher, 1969: 15). For Deutscher, Arthur Koestler is a classic example of a renegade spawned by revulsion at Stalinism. Koestler regretted being caught up in the illusion of communism, to which he attached god-like status in his autobiographical essay in The God That Failed (Koestler, 1949: 55–6). The influence of Stalinism’s monstrosities on Koestler’s thinking was also evident in his classic novel Darkness at Noon, first published in 1940. In the book’s dedication to victims of the Moscow trials, Koestler reminded readers that, while the novel’s characters were his own creation, the events that brought them to life were anything but fictional.As well as painting a vivid picture of the paranoia of dictatorship, the book also encapsulated the way in which Koestler saw events in Stalinist Russia as the product of historical materialism, which, according to him, determined exactly the steps towards a socialist idyll that society would inevitably take under the guidance of the revolutionary mastermind (Koestler, 2005: 6, 20). No doubt Koestler’s version of historical materialism was in fact a neat illustration of what Thompson (cited in Blackledge, 2006) termed ‘hysterical and diabolical’ materialism: a completely mechanical and reductionist disfigurement of Marxism (see chapter 9). The book was nonetheless indicative of much ex-communist thinking on the subject, as well as Koestler’s own developing political thought. After resigning from the party in 1938 over the mass arrests and show trials, he had still held out some hope for Bolshevism. However, witnessing the display of the swastika at the Moscow

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airport to greet German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop upon his arrival to sign the Nazi–Soviet pact was the final straw (Saunders, 1999: 61). A contemporary of Koestler’s, Max Eastman, was another renegade for whom Stalinism’s crimes – and what they seemingly represented – were the turning point. Eastman had suffered directly from the apparatus of coercion constructed in Russia: the loss in the purges of the complete family of his third wife Eliena Krylenko put him directly in harm’s way (Diggins, 1975: 203). Prior to his re-emergence as a McCarthyist, Eastman claims to have been at war with himself as his growing doubts about the viability of socialism were magnified by events in the Soviet Union over a long period of time. According to Hook, Eastman brought back from a trip to the Soviet Union in the early 1920s irrefutable evidence of the extent to which the Bolshevik regime had been Stalinised, and in the process he was driven away from the radical politics hitherto central to his life (Hook, 1987: 137). He claims to have expressed enough heresies in various publications to have earned the wrath of many of his old Stalinist comrades who labelled him a Trotskyist, though not yet a traitor who had turned his back on Marxism tout court. He wrote his book, Artists in Uniform (1934), while still a revolutionary socialist (though not a Bolshevist). Although not sure exactly when it was that he lost faith in the Soviet Union, Eastman suggests that it was not long after the work’s publication. Between 1933, when he first started to harbour serious misgivings about the Soviet Union, and 1939, he arrived at the position that Stalinism was a direct product of Bolshevism. Indeed, he drew the conclusion that the Bolsheviks had, despite setting out to liberate the human mind, only imprisoned it in a cage that was even more iron-clad (cited in Lasch, 1973: 32). From this altered perspective, the revolution was flawed from the outset because it involved a dictatorial minority conspiring to take power in a fashion that could only ever lead to totalitarianism (Eastman, 1955: 15–19). He sought to remind people that both Stalin and Mussolini were socialists, as were – apparently – hundred of thousands of Hitler’s followers (cited in Deutscher, 1987: 442). Not only did Eastman ignore his own emulation of Mussolini as an ex-communist renegade, but he also blended Nazism and Bolshevism, stating that his and others’ anti-socialism was simply a reaction to events in Russia and Germany that together demonstrated the failure of socialist experiments (Eastman, 1955: 56). Analogous pressures were central to Irving Howe’s evolution from Trotskyism to reformist social democracy. He recalled that the ‘years of my

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life coincided with the years of socialist defeat. Step by step, we suffered a dislodgment of received ideas even as we tried to retrieve their moral core.’ The force of this defeat was so strong, he suggests, that only ignorant fools could fail to be influenced by it (Howe, 1983: 344). Defeat is one thing, as Upton Sinclair (2009: 18) wrote in his classic novel The Jungle, but the acknowledgment of defeat is another thing altogether. Ex-radicals such as Howe were to the fore in acknowledging their defeat. As well as the experience of the post-war boom belying many radicals’ expectations of capitalist ruin after the great depression and the Second World War (see below), anti-Stalinism was critical to Howe’s shift to the right. Howe admitted to having been influenced by Daniel Bell’s attacks on the Bolsheviks’ 1921 Kronstadt crackdown, for which Howe had initially mounted a strong defence. Bell’s comments, he recalled, ‘left a permanent mark upon my consciousness which not too many years later, led me to move in his direction’ (cited in Sorin, 2002: 22). Trotskyists such as Howe thus received a double blow to their politics in the form of persecution within the left by Stalinists (Cohen, 1993: 168–9) and the distressing sight of the continued deterioration of the situation in Russia. In addition, he was left reeling after learning of the Communist coup in Prague in 1948, which had only negative portents for democracy in Eastern Europe (cited in Isserman, 1987: 50). This disillusionment at the defeat of communist hopes for a liberated world, as well as the twisted machinations in policies emanating from the Kremlin, bred disaffection among some intellectuals with radicalism in general (Buhle, 1995: 151–2). Fear was another motivating factor: in the aftermath of the Second World War it was believed in some quarters that the Soviet Union had the capacity to overrun West European countries as far as the English Channel (Cesarani, 1998: 1). Some of the hostility towards Communist parties by former radicals in these countries was intelligible against this background. For those who still regarded themselves as socialists, according to Howe, antiStalinism mattered above all else (Howe, 1983: 205). It was not justifiable to wish a plague on both houses by uttering the slogan ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ – as the International Socialists of Britain did (Cliff, 1982) – so long as one house permitted some renovations to be made while the other positively became a penitentiary. Howe and other radicals therefore saw little alternative but to align themselves with the West against communism. This, in turn, had real practical consequences in terms of the stance adopted in post-war politics, for Howe argued that communism represented a clear and present danger requiring the foisting of barriers in the path of its advance,

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including ‘power, money, politics – not just articles in intellectual journals’ (Howe, 1983: 205–7). To many of these New York intellectuals, the threat posed by Stalinism – as great a threat as fascism – justified the decision to throw their lot in with Western capitalism. Indeed, after the war and the vanquishing of the Nazi regime, Stalin was on occasion depicted as the new Hitler. These were uncharted waters, because previously New York intellectuals had placed communism on the left and fascism on the right. According to Wald, a highly influential work in this context was Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951. Written by a fellow New York intellectual, the book found parity between Bolshevism and Nazism, and it anticipated that the Soviet Union might act in the future just as the Nazi regime did in the 1930s. Such themes dominated the thinking of many New York intellectuals, as well as colouring their judgement of almost everything else (Wald, 1987: 268–9). Despite being chiefly preoccupied with anti-Semitism and its historical roots, The Origins of Totalitarianism was alluring precisely because of its elision over differences in social systems, ideology, and history between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany: the Bolshevik and Nazi systems were essentially mutations of the same species, according to Arendt’s flawed analysis (Arendt, 1967: xiv).3 Originally employed by opponents of Italian fascism in 1923, the term ‘totalitarian’ has meant various things: Trotsky used it as a term of abuse against the Soviet Union, while Marcuse directed it against liberal capitalism (Christofferson, 2004: 4–5). But totalitarian discourse, as in the case of Arendt, often wrongly equates Nazism with Stalinism. The New York intellectuals attracted to this fallacy (see also chapter 6) were convinced that the bipolar world increasingly taking shape permitted only two choices: defending the Soviet Union and all its barbarities, or offering critical support to the ‘democratic’ system of the West (Hook, cited in Wald, 1987: 293). Censure of the US was permissible only so long as one remembered wherein lay the 3  Take, for example, Arendt’s complete misunderstanding of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which she describes as ‘no more than a forecast of a series of revolutions … which would spread from one country to the other’ (Arendt, 1967: 389). In fact, the genius of the theory lay in its resolution of the problem posed for Russian socialists by the economy’s underdevelopment, which could be overcome not by putting off the socialist revolution until sufficient capitalist development had taken place, as socialists in Russia had hitherto believed, but by the socialist revolution in Russia spreading to the more prosperous and industrious West.

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greatest threat to freedom of thought (Bloom, 1986: 229–30). Remarkably, in defending American ‘democracy’ these erstwhile radicals seemed to forget the bloody constitutive foundations of the republic – including the genocide of Native Americans, the mass enslavement of blacks, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos during the conquest of their country, and savage repression visited upon the working class (Kolko, 1976: 288). Moreover, they had clearly wiped from their memory traditional radical critiques of liberal democracy as a system in which a tiny minority of bankers and industrialists own and control society’s productive resources, giving them unrivalled political and economic power (see Callinicos, 1997). This could not be dismissed as mere history, given the connections – noted by, for one, the 1960s radical Tom Hayden (see chapter 2) – between these events, the Cold War and (later) Vietnam War, and state persecutions of radicals. Despite these facts, only a few intellectuals were able to survive the post-war years without dislodging their principled opposition to both Stalinism and Western capitalism and imperialism (Wald, 1987: 295). The Russian-born American Will Herberg, alas, was not one of these. He, too, had broken with Marxism largely over the question of Stalinist Russia, in the wake of which socialists would no longer be chided merely for possessing naive and utopian ideals: critics could now point to the atrocities committed by Bolshevism and Stalinism and impute socialists with malign intentions (Herberg, 1989a: 3–4). Such critics could now rightly claim, Herberg suggested, that in really existing socialism there could be found the most grotesque form of despotism imaginable (Herberg, 1989a: 4). Elsewhere he put the explanation for his abandonment of Marxist politics in very simple experience of defeat terms: In my case, it was the course of the Russian Revolution and the development of events in Europe, culminating in the triumph of Hitler … Put to the test, the Marxist faith failed. It proved itself incapable of explaining the facts or sustaining the values that gave meaning to life, the very values it had itself enshrined as its own ultimate goals. It could not meet the challenge of totalitarianism because it was itself infected with the same disease. (Herberg, 1989b: 24)

Herberg’s estrangement began with supporting Jay Lovestone4 and Bukharin in the latter’s contest with Stalin for control over the future direction of the 4  Lovestone himself had an ignominious destination as an ex-communist and assistant to the FBI in its efforts to infiltrate the Communist Party (Kovel, 1997: 165).

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Soviet state, which culminated in the latter’s victory in 1929 and Bukharin’s ousting from his position of chairman of the Comintern’s executive committee. Yet through the 1930s Herberg continued to sympathise with Marxism, and to laud the contributions of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. His rupture with communism was over, inter alia, the Nazi–Soviet pact, the Russian invasion of Finland, the Second World War, and the Stalinist line propagated by the Comintern. ‘Socialism’ and ‘democratic socialism’ in 1938 were substituted for communism, and Herberg now discovered Marxism’s intrinsic ethical flaws and its anti-human spirit (Ausmus, 1986: 7, 10, 15). While still referring to himself as a Marxist as late as 1943, by 1940 his conclusion was that social democracy, Marxism, and Bolshevism had all been shown up, and none could be relied upon to lay the groundwork for socialism (cited in Ausmus, 1986: 18–19). He is thus a typical example of the former communist (described by Deutscher above) who eventually disposes of the socialist baby along with the bathwater of Stalinism. The evils of Stalinism were similarly instrumental in the post-war evolution of the one-time SWP (US) leading member and Trotskyist Max Shachtman, whose fixation with Stalinism – a condition, common to New York intellectuals, which Irving Howe had diagnosed as ‘Stalinophobia’ (Wilford, 2008: 72) – led him to regard as lesser evils social democratic movements that backed US hegemony against the Soviet Union (Drucker, 1994: 192). It was clear that the class nature of the Soviet Union and the issue of whether its foreign policy could be described as imperialist were key points in Shachtman’s and fellow ex-Trotskyist James Burnham’s debate with Trotsky, and such points of contention were to play an important part in setting the two adrift from Marxism altogether (Novack and Hansen, 1973: ix–xi). Shachtman, Burnham, and Martin Abern specifically split with the SWP’s (US) position of supporting the Soviet Union against imperialist attack after the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact and the beginning of war on the continent (Kerry, 1977: 20). In announcing his break with Marxism and the Workers Party, Burnham cited the gulf between Russia’s status as a ‘workers’ state’ and the stark reality of dictatorship and inequality blighting the country (Burnham, 1973: 208). In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham had described Stalinism as the worst form of dictatorship ever constructed by human hands – worse even than Nazism – and he referred to evidence of economic inequalities in Russia more pronounced than in the archetypal free enterprise society of the US (Burnham, 1941: 46–7). Indeed, Burnham explicitly linked his rejection of Marxism with the awful abuses committed in its name, and he singled out

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the defeats and betrayals suffered at the hands of Stalinism as reason enough for having nothing to do with Marxism henceforth (Burnham, cited in Smant, 1992: 10). Similar factors disillusioned the pioneer of American communism and Bolshevik supporter Lewis Corey, including Stalin and Hitler’s mutual carveup of Poland, the communist treatment of non-communist leftists in the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow trials, and the proof emerging of the extent of Stalin’s terror machinery. The Bolshevik revolution was now rotten from the beginning because the violent capture of power could never succeed and could only ever be the harbinger of perfect dictatorship. While at this point he held to the view that expectations of capitalist decline were not baseless in light of the great depression, Marxism could offer no alternative because Russia had demonstrated with extraordinary clarity how revolution results in totalitarianism (Buhle, 1995: 158). What eventuated in Russia could not be explained away by harsh economic and political conditions, but was in fact the product of Marxism itself (Corey, 1940: 245–6). Corey did not entirely discount the Bolsheviks’ initial achievements, but their neglect of democracy was a fatal flaw in his eyes (Corey, 1942: 102, 105). In a statement tendered to the FBI, Corey claimed initially to have become disgruntled at the paternalism characterising Russia’s relations with sister organisations such as the American Communist Party (cited in Corey, 1963: 112). But in a Bureau stenographic report, he related how the purges of 1936–37 were the initial step in his break with communism. From the reports he read of Bukharin’s trial, in which the latter reaffirmed his faith in the party and Stalin, Corey deduced the key problem to be the obsession with party loyalty – ignoring the context of Bukharin’s reaffirmation. In the event of this episode, he now felt that it was open season on all values and beliefs (cited in Corey, 1963: 116). This phenomenon of intellectuals stripped of their radicalism by events in Russia was by no means a North American or European oddity. The British-Australian Adela Pankhurst Walsh is yet another case of a radical for whom Marxism and socialism were beyond rehabilitation after plans for emancipation and freedom went awry post-1917. In 1919 she had written approvingly of the progress being made there (cited in Coleman, 1996: 88). But she later recalled that what ‘changed my views’ were the ever more frequent reports emanating from the Soviet Union about the absence of democracy and freedom of expression, as well as her observations of the political practices of communist parties in other parts of the world – persuading her that the Bolsheviks had mounted a coup in 1917 to the detriment

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of the country and its people (Pankhurst Walsh, n.d.a, 21–2. In a revealing passage, she identified three ways in which socialists tended to respond to developments in Russia: some turned a blind eye to what was happening, while others had founded the Trotskyist fourth international in order to restore socialism to its pre-1914 glory. She counted herself, however, among the majority of ex-socialists who had taken a third course and, having realised that the first Marxian party to stage a revolution had produced only diabolical results, had chosen ‘other paths’ (Pankhurst Walsh, 1938a: 29). Within ten years actual existing socialism was grim enough to convince her that she could not continue to call herself a socialist, for Russia was no longer a synonym for liberation, peace, and equality, but was instead a country of oppressed beggars (Pankhurst Walsh, 1929). The phenomenon of the radical aghast at the way in which their revolution had delivered largely what they set out to abolish was reflected in Pankhurst Walsh’s claim that in Russia all the things in life she had fought against – exploitation, poverty, and unemployment – were rampant (Pankhurst Walsh, n.d.a: 22). By dissolving into bloodshed and recriminations, the Russian Revolution now seemed doomed to suffer the same fate as its French predecessor (Pankhurst Walsh, 1923; Coleman, 1996: 96). Her embrace of fascism obviously provides a key point of departure from the endpoint of many of the American ex-radicals described above, who often harboured antipathy towards communism and fascism in equal measure. But once communism was determined as the main enemy, it was not illogical for Pankhurst Walsh to enlist the help of its most bitter foe, fascism.

The post-war political and economic contexts Accompanying the political defeats described above is usually a political climate much less congenial to radicals, characterised by a shift in the balance of forces in favour of conservatives, as well as the more general re-establishment of political hegemony after a period of challenge. History is normally written up in terms favourable to its victors (Isserman, 1987: xiii). Radicals who do not succeed have to cope with the intellectual repercussions of their defeat, as their ideas no longer have the currency they once enjoyed. Just as the radicals of seventeenth-century England struggled to survive in an inhospitable environment associated with the restoration of the monarchy, radicals at other times have faced an uphill battle to maintain their rage.

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It is generally true that apostates move with the political wind, not against it. In the case of many of the New York intellectuals, they had always fought doggedly in their political pursuits, but after their final intellectual recalibrations they rested at a place where their ideas and the prevailing political winds were roughly in sync (Bloom, 1986: 273). Even if during political downturns radicals do not become fully fledged renegades devoted to assailing their former selves and their old friends, they cannot go on as before. As purveyors of collective action involving their fellow citizens, they are constrained by the moods and sentiments of those around them. They cannot organise demonstrations and expect to get the same turnout, nor talk the same radical language against the system and expect solidarity as they once did during the years of surging resistance. If they do continue for a time in their old radical ways, they may be ostracised. Demonstrators generally wish to command the attention of bystanders and to make their protest significant enough to generate media coverage. However, they also wish to draw observers and listeners in to their concerns, allowing the activists to enjoy some measure of protection from the public (Schultz, 1993: 84). But during a political slump, activists have fewer expectations of being able to draw in bystanders and of attracting viewers, readers, and listeners. The ensuing sense of despair and hopelessness can lead many to question the merits of their radical ideals and to see possibilities only in more mainstream channels of participation. Misjudgements can have comparable effects. In the US, the economic crisis of the 1930s was a boon for radicals. Capitalism was teetering on the brink of collapse, and established political actors appeared flummoxed by the depth of the downturn. In such a climate, people were prepared to countenance more radical political alternatives, as publications and meetings were convened to adopt radical critiques and solutions (Bloom, 1986: 43). Yet, in a kind of experience of defeat, the post-war political climate did not turn out as many radicals had expected – the capitalist economy did not tumble into the abyss. In fact, the so-called golden age phase (1950–73) constitutes the most impressive period of expansion in capitalism’s history (Maddison, 2001: 125). This seemingly miraculous post-war revival posed problems for radicals because the relative affluence gave many working-class people less reason to absorb their ideas for change. Moreover, it was an unexpected turn of events in the sense that many had prophesied crisis and decline following the war (Drucker, 1994: 185, 189). Confusion set in among radicals as a result, and slowly but surely Marxism was replaced by more moderate programmes of

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social democracy or democratic socialism as influences on the left (Howe, 1983: 106–8). A central issue here is the question of what happens to radicals when their predictions fall foul of reality. In their study, When Prophecy Fails, Festinger et al. (1956) investigated the phenomenon of religious groups convinced of the imminent demise of the Earth, but who were – needless to say – confounded by events. Such groups were in fact not dissuaded easily, and in some cases actually stepped up their proselytising after events failed to unfold as expected (Festinger et al., 1956). There were resemblances here to the position adopted in 1945 by the founder of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon (Glazer, 1961: 49). Trotsky had earlier predicted that the Second World War would be followed by a new revolution that erased Stalinism; if not, socialism would be proved unviable. Unable to accept the latter proposition or that Trotsky had been plain wrong, Cannon surmised that, because Stalinism remained intact, the war must not have ended. Yet aside from this spectacular case of what Callinicos (1990b: 29–30) argued constituted a case of a Popperian conventionalist stratagem constructed to avoid coming to terms with unpalatable political truths, what is apparent in the case of many former radicals is the opposite: they abandoned their radical belief systems shortly after their prognostications of capitalist ruin appeared out of step with reality. Arguably their rush to judgement was a little too hasty, as we discuss further in chapter 6. The way in which defeat of political expectations can lead to apostasy is perfectly illustrated in the example of Lewis Corey. In his case, in addition to the reign of terror in Russia, it was the non-event of capitalism’s cataclysmic failure that pre-empted his fall-out with radicalism (Buhle, 1995: 21). Corey, in this sense, was a false prophet of economic doom. The post-war economic expansion had played havoc with many a radical’s sense of direction, but Hook praises Corey for being the first Marxist to comprehend that the advent of the welfare state had made Marxism next to worthless as a guide to the workings of the modern capitalist economy (Hook, 1987: 182). The 1930s economic crisis only for a time led Corey to regard capitalism as a humanitarian disaster, with the subsequent economic upturn confirming his view of the obsolescence of Marxism (Buhle, 1995: 118). False expectations of a collapse led to the abandonment of the intellectual framework within which such a collapse was apparently anticipated. Needless to say, with the benefit of hindsight, such a position seems absurd as the world deals with the fallout of the global financial crisis that commenced in 2008, and which simultaneously – in a way not seen since the great depression – demonstrated

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capitalism’s crisis-prone nature and Marxism’s relevance to understanding it (see Harman, 2010). Hook claims that a major flaw on his and other leftists’ part was the failure to anticipate capitalism’s ability to recover and continue expanding, as well as the related transformation of much of the working class into the middle class (Hook, 1987: 5). This was a flawed yet common proposition to be advanced by left-leaning intellectuals in relation to the post-war boom and its social consequences (e.g. Kirchheimer, 1966: 244–8; cf. Callinicos and Harman, 1987). Furthermore, the radicals who were persuaded by the strength of the post-war boom to accept capitalism ignored the reality of its origins: rather than reflecting the virtues of the system, the boom years that eclipsed the great depression were the result of the contradictions of the Second World War and all its unimaginable horrors (Kolko, 1976: 155). Also, Hook makes no mention of the end of the post-war boom and the return of economic crisis in the 1970s, when all the old intractable problems of capitalism re-entered the political lexicon (Hobsbawm, 1994: 406). The likes of Hook and Fraina were not the only renegades whose rightward slides were hastened by post-war economic trends. Podhoretz argues that any account of the actions of many ex-communists and ex-Trotskyists must factor in Marxists’ flawed Armageddon scenario surrounding the post-war period, the failure of socialist revolution, and the absence of revolutionary élan on the part on the proletariat (Podhoretz, 1999: 183). Thus, for these New York intellectuals, false prophecies were again influential. In relation to his own final break with radicalism, Podhoretz pointed not just to the ascendancy of Stalinism and the fact that revolution occurred in retrograde Russia rather than, as expected, in the prosperous West, but also to the fact that conditions in the advanced capitalist nations were improving for workers, not deteriorating (Podhoretz, 1979: 46). Again, what is glaringly absent here is any acknowledgement of the watershed moment – apparent five years before the publication of Podhoretz’s Breaking Ranks (1979) – of international recession in 1974 after a quarter century of expansion (Barraclough, 1974). On the other hand, Podhoretz’s comments have to be interpreted sceptically, for he had embraced radicalism in the 1960s – long after the commencement of the post-war boom – and then discarded it for reasons seemingly unrelated to economics (see chapter 8). As difficult a period as the post-war one was for radicals, this was due not only to unforeseen economic trends but more generally to a less congenial political environment, which included ongoing state persecution (see

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chapter 5). There were significant implications arising from this climate for the New York intellectuals in terms of their principles as well as their own personal fortunes. Many were pressured to move to the right because their long-standing anti-Stalinism did not necessarily offer them protection: the anti-communism of the era threatened communists, ex-communists, and noncommunist radicals alike. The New York intellectuals could not oppose the McCarthyists by dismissing out of hand the threat of the Soviet Union because they, too, were anti-communists. Instead, they were forced to develop their own (‘liberal’) brand of anti-communism. On some occasions the distinctions were not clear, as in the case of Max Eastman, who became an avid supporter of McCarthyism. For many other New York intellectuals, it was now believed that their previous position of opposing Stalinism in tandem with loyalty to radicalism and the left was untenable. Forced to make what they believed was a choice between Stalinism and the West, they plumped for the latter (Bloom, 1986: 210–11). A similar context also may have played an important role in shaping the politics of the British-Australian renegade Adela Pankhurst Walsh. Her trajectory followed broader trends in politics in Australia, where record levels of strike activity following the First World War and the formation of the CPA in 1920 constituted markers of radicalism that were followed in the later part of that decade – the period around which Pankhurst Walsh repudiated communism and Marxism – by emphases on class compromise and a more general decline in radical political activity (Pugh, 2001: 425; Milner, 1988: 266, 268). Coleman notes that Pankhurst Walsh’s left-wing critics were a minority in the ‘Empire-oriented climate’ of Australia in the 1930s (Coleman, 1996: 127). Just like the New York intellectuals’ reorientations, Adela’s new beliefs were now consistent with powerful interests in a way none of her previous attachments had been, as various sectors of the ruling class in Australia were prepared to condone quasi-fascist political organisations in reaction to the wave of strikes and the great depression. These conservative groups shared with Pankhurst Walsh a strong anti-communist inclination (Damousi, 1993: 433–6). Similarly, her collaborator Percy Stephensen on his return from Oxford in 1932 confronted a very different political scene from the one he left behind in 1924. When he departed Australia he had been fired with enthusiasm for revolution, but upon his return he came face to face with the growing fascist New Guard organisation and with the populist Jack Lang, on to whose nationalist and isolationist style Stephensen latched with great vigour (Munro, 1984:

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116–7). One account has the turning point for Stephensen as the defeat of the 1926 British general strike, into the thick of which he had thrown himself as a communist, resulting in the monitoring of his activities by the secret service. Yet the defeat of the strike, which disheartened him and many others, was pivotal: Stephensen limped on as a communist for a few years but his soul was no longer in it. During his last year at Oxford he elected not to renew his financial membership of the Communist Party (Munro, 1984: 45). The balance of class forces clearly had altered, affecting radicals everywhere. In reference to the Trotskyist turned right-wing Australian social democrat Jim McClelland, Greenland alludes to the changing complexion of class relations in Australia leading up to his desertion of Trotskyism in 1948. Citing Anatol Kagan, he suggesting that intellectuals such as McClelland were talented agitators who thrived during radical upsurges, but who struggled during challenging periods of political downturn to maintain their hope and optimism. For Kagan the revolutionary intelligentsia is less directly affected by the vagaries of capitalism at the point of production and therefore more susceptible to shifting political tides than the more loyal and stable proletariat. So long as revolution remained highly improbable, it was going to be difficult to retain the radical affinities of the likes of McClelland (Greenland, 1998: 179–80). McClelland was also, however, troubled by the Trotskyist unconditional defence of the Soviet Union (cited in Greenland, 1998: 184), suggesting that he may have succumbed to similar pressures exerted on ex-Trotskyists elsewhere, including Shachtman and Burnham (see above): defending Russia in the anti-communist hysteria of the times was a bridge too far.

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4 1960s radicals and political defeat: a lost cause?

After the 1960s rebellions, hope and resistance soon gave way to despair and retreat: as Mike Davis has observed, the eclipse of this radical period in the US was characterised by downturns in levels of political activity, splits within organisations such as the SDS, mass state repression targeted at the Black Panthers and others, and, most crucially, a steep decline in class struggle (Davis, 1986: 222–3). Tom Hayden recalled the ‘death upon death’ inflicted on the left (Hayden, 1988: 505). Hirschman noted the extraordinarily abrupt shift in sentiment within the space of just ten years after 1968 (Hirschman, 1982: 3). The same theme of defeat is repeated in the writings of Tariq Ali, who applies Christopher Hill’s Experience of Defeat approach to the numerous 1960s radicals who abandoned revolutionary politics and shifted to the right following the end of the Vietnam War, the collapse of other social movements, and capitalism’s stabilisation (Ali, 2005: ch. 11). The failure to achieve revolutionary change prompted many radicals to doubt their faith in Marxism (Docherty, cited in Stephens, 1998: 3). Peter Collier and David Horowitz, in describing their own startling evolution into Reaganites, emphasised the importance of the end of the Vietnam War, which provoked much soul-searching (Collier and Horowitz, 1985: 70). Ex-Ramparts editor Horowitz in particular was also demoralised by the decline of the Panthers, in whom he had invested some hope for real change and with whose founder Huey P. Newton he had built up a strong relationship. He was subsequently a significant player in the publishing of an article in the media by a journalist who detailed alleged Panther atrocities, including the brutal murder of party bookkeeper Betty Van Patter in 1974 (Pearson, 1994: 252, 288).

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Some of those who did not veer as far to the right immersed themselves in much more sedate campaigns. Middle-class and single-issue projects increasingly superseded the grander black power and women’s movements of emancipation (Davis, 1986: 179). Because history is recorded by the victors, the decade of the 1960s came to be understood as a puerile and nonsensical aberration that gave way to more responsible political activity (Stephens, 1998: 2). Covering the same period, Harman (2001) argues that the tendency of some former European militants to embrace more consensual forms of political participation such as parliamentary politics had roots in political defeats and strategic setbacks. Key actors among this 1960s generation, rather than seeking to harness the aggregated economic power of the working class, instead pursued a flawed political strategy involving small-scale individualist tactics that isolated militants from the proletariat. Those German radicals who believed that capitalism would not be defeated by skirmishes with police in the streets turned to even more violent methods (e.g. the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction), while still others opted for elite party politics (Harman, 2001). In the latter category were Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, whose trajectories were richly ironic: the impatient desire to scupper capitalism with ultra-militant tactics – the superbly fit Fischer had engaged in weekly drill sessions involving street-fighting, stone throwing, hostage freeing, and later Molotov cocktail hurling (Hockenos, 2008: 118) – was followed eventually by a parliamentarist strategy even less likely to deliver tangible results. Fischer and fellow future Green Daniel Cohn-Bendit (see below) embarked on a reformist path after deciding that their previous revolutionary politics had reached an impasse (Berman, 2005: 272). The level of violence in which Fischer had participated – including the serious burns to a police officer caused by a petrol bomb thrown at a demonstration in May 1976 – shocked him into changing tack (Hockenos, 2008: 120–1). But this was a problem wider than Cohn-Bendit and Fischer. Harman writes of the despair and demoralisation that set in around the mid-1970s, and of the activists fatigued from frenetically campaigning almost unceasingly from the late 1960s onwards: the energy expended and the sacrifices made seemed worthwhile so long as the movements were gaining momentum. But when the direction was reversed, lethargy set in: it was most evident in Italy after the June 1976 elections, in Spain after the consolidation of the post-Franco (1975) regime, in Britain following the overt decline in class conflict in 1975, and in the US over the course of the Democratic administration (1977–81) of

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Jimmy Carter. In this context, radical political activity now seemed increasingly futile (Harman, 1988: 346). Defeat is therefore not simply the product of blind historical forces and the reactions of state authorities, factors beyond the control of individuals: radicals can help engineer their own defeat, which in turn can generate the conditions for renegacy. The new left, for instance, has been widely critiqued – from the left as well as from the right. Alan Brinkley has argued that it failed to build the organisational or institutional capacity to survive in the long term (cited in Mattson, 2002: 5). Isserman points to lessons arising from the experience of the new left, including the necessity of patient, longterm movement building, the need to work for limited goals with others of a different political persuasion, the importance of representative organisational structures, and the non-negotiability of civil liberties (Isserman, 1987: 219). Meanwhile, some regard the 1960s counterculture as too superficial to have challenged the status quo seriously and to have withstood capitalist commodification (cited in Mattson, 2002: 12). The role of leadership was evident also in France, where the predominantly Communist trade union officialdom had deliberately set out to separate workers and students, who obeyed union officials’ demand for them to leave factories where they were stationed in solidarity with workers in May 1968 (Katsiaficas, 1987: 109–10). Important here was the role of organised labour, which the new left has (often unfairly, according to Levy (1994)) been criticised for ignoring – or even worse affronting – with some of its behaviour. More specifically, the former Weatherman Mark Rudd controversially argued that the dissolution of SDS and the emergence of his militant organisation were major mistakes that led not only to the deaths of three of his comrades,1 but also to the winding up of the anti-war movement just when the conflict was raging: ultra-militancy produced only isolation and defeat (cited in Hoffman and Simon, 1994: 345).

1  Initially a faction of SDS in 1969, the Weathermen – named after the Bob Dylan lyric ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’ from the song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ – morphed into an organisation (renamed Weather Underground) dedicated to armed struggle against military, corporate, and political targets in an effort to overthrow the political-economic system and imperialism (Berger, 2006). Underground members Ted Gold (aged twenty-three), Diana Oughton (aged twenty-eight), and Terry Robbins (aged twenty-two) were all killed in a bomb blast in a New York townhouse while wiring a massively powerful explosive device on 6 March 1970 (Varon, 2004: 173–4).

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Whatever the merits of these criticisms, it is clear that the state or wider social conditions were not solely responsible for the petering out of the new left in the early 1970s (Levy, 1994: 5). In addition to the influence of strategic decisions, the broader underlying political assumptions of activists undoubtedly also contributed to this outcome. For instance, there were demoralising consequences for the Maoist radicals arising from the machinations in China itself and in Pol Pot’s Cambodia (backed by China), as well as from the eventual war between China and Vietnam over Cambodia. Former Maoist radicals chastened by these events often shed not only their commitment to Maoism but also their opposition to capitalism as a whole. Ex-Maoists in some cases changed virtually overnight, with most retiring to political inactivity, while still others became new philosophers. The memberships of large Maoist organisations in Germany and Spain had dwindled by the early 1980s (Harman, 1988: 348, 350–1). It was not just the discovery of the reality of ‘socialist’ China and Vietnam, however, that turned radicals against socialism. According to the new left radical turned neo-conservative Ronald Radosh, his first-hand experience with the results of the Cuban revolution under the leadership of Fidel Castro was the critical factor in his turn to the right. He recalled his encounter with the real Cuba, which included the absence of free trade unions, poor working conditions, and the degrading treatment of mental health patients (Radosh, 1989: 14–16). Radosh may be given to the kind of frenzied rhetoric that characterises some other renegades (see chapters 9 and 10): in his radical phase he once called the black rights activist and campaigner Bayard Rustin a ‘toady of fascism’ (cited in Levy, 1994: 114). But Castro and his regime’s foreign policy orientations in relation to Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan disillusioned other ex-radicals of the same era, including Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Collier and Horowitz, 1985: 72). What started out as a promising Third World revolution that overthrew a US-backed tyrant eventually emerged as yet another tinpot dictatorship. Even in the case of Vietnam itself, while the anti-war movement had been a key factor in the radicalism of the era, the defeat suffered by the American empire has been seen in some quarters as only a partial one: the anti-war movement was unable to prevent the wholesale destruction of the country (Jezer, 1992: 241). This was a lopsided view of events.2 Nevertheless, when 2  Jonathan Neale (2000) argued that three factors were crucial to the US government’s withdrawal: the resistance of the Vietnamese themselves, the public opposition in the US, and a revolt among American troops.

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the war ended so did the movement, and according to Harman those who had been students in 1968 were often the first to turn away from the factory jobs they had taken on during the struggles. But they were followed by many genuine workers who often gave up their revolutionary beliefs or exited political circles altogether. Political agency mattered considerably, as in the case of workers swayed by the shift to the right that was advocated by the reformist leaders who dominated labour movements (Harman, 1988: 347, 349). In a similar vein, Alain Badiou contends that one reason why former French Maoists such as André Glucksmann converted to a conservative ideology was that they had misdiagnosed the political juncture from 1966 to 1973 as a ‘revolutionary’ one. When that revolution was seen to have failed, they abandoned radicalism accordingly (Badiou, 2008: 126–7, 130). Badiou’s assessment of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the advanced capitalist countries as a nonrevolutionary period was correct, at least in the sense described by Lenin, who argued, inter alia, that for revolution to occur it was necessary not just for the ruling class to be unable to rule in the old way, but also that the exploited classes be unwilling to accept being ruled in the old way (cited in Cliff, 1985: 62). This misdiagnosis combined with disappointment at the ruling classes largely being able to rule in the old way. Intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach, and Philippe Sollers were part of this backlash against Marxism as a result of the same disappointment (Christofferson, 2004: 20). The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre also gave public backing to the likes of Glucksmann (Berman, 2005: 77). Foucault, in particular, began to see a connection between Marxism and the gulags (Callinicos, 1999: 279). Foucault’s thoughts are difficult to summarise, but he was never a Marxist. On the other hand, he had reread key Marxist texts and had been radicalised into using some Marxian concepts and rhetoric by the events of the 1960s, including the Vietnam War, only to slide away from these and express approval of the new philosophers as the tempo of the struggles slackened (see Paras, 2006; Christofferson, 2004: 50, 68, 192, 198). According to Ryan, central to the new philosophy was the belief that revolution never changes anything, and that the old Master is invariably restored in a new guise (cited in Starr, 1995: 15). Along similar lines, Debray has argued that all May 1968 accomplished was the modernisation of French capitalism and the ascendancy of the cult of individual achievement (Debray, 1979: 46; Bourg, 2007: 36). This was ironic, given that Debray’s own political evolution belied any regrets he might have had about such a development. His criticism could also be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy: Debray et al.’s shift to the right meant that May

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1968 and the associated commotion did indeed appear to have achieved little, since many of the period’s key protagonists had readily come to terms with what they once opposed. In addition, such commentary by Debray served to deflect attention away from his own behaviour: his depressing conclusions helped justify his ingratiation with the French ruling class under Mitterrand. Meanwhile Glucksmann’s rejection of anything smacking of Hegelian grand theorising and his pursuit of pragmatism were undoubtedly borne of a deep pessimism about the future, which in part flowed from the negative outcomes of the set-piece battles of the era (Paras, 2006: 84–6). Referring to explanations of the defeat of the May movement, Starr labels these the ‘logics of failed revolt’, as they deal with the events beginning with the revival of radicalism in 1965 and ending with the abandonment of Marxism embodied in new philosophy. The French radical intelligentsia had commenced a gradual split with Marxism and Leninism after Khrushchev’s speech in 1956. Halted temporarily in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the process of estrangement from Marxism continued with the post-war boom ending economic crisis of 1973–74 and the publication of the Nobel prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in French in June 1974, which detailed the extent of the Soviet Union’s forced labour camp system. Starr frames this within a wider French historical pattern of radical euphoria alternating with political depression (Starr, 1995: 2, 4, 8). André Glucksmann had urged his intellectual compatriots to read The Gulag three months before it was published in French, certain as he was that some sixty million deaths in the camps were caused by ‘the logical application of Marxism’. Fellow new philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, too, was convinced that the ramifications of the book were wide enough to ‘overturn our ideological landscape and reference points’ (cited in Christofferson, 2004: 102, 105, 186). Several other developments combined to induce French intellectuals – not to mention many of their English-speaking counterparts – away from Marxism. These included the initiation of the so-called second Cold War in the late 1970s, the repression of the Solidarno´sc´ movement in Poland in December 1981, the rise of postmodernism – with all its hostility to grand narratives and objective truths – and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the East European Stalinist regimes in the early 1990s (Callinicos, 1999: 261). Others have argued that The Gulag’s publication, the failure of 1968, and the disappointments of Third World radicalism conspired to produce in France an anti-totalitarian perspective on communism and revolutionary politics (Christofferson, 2004: 2).

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In explaining these developments, Badiou, like Harman, focused on the strategic flaws of some 1960s militants in France, who believed that ideas and disruptive violent incidents were enough to trigger a social revolution. The defeat of this strategy to achieve widespread change led them to abandon their radical political goals altogether. When Badiou asked such former activists why they left radical politics, one replied that ‘I realized one day that the country was quiet’, while another related that it was because ‘we understood we were not going to take power’ (Badiou, 2008: 126–7). This recalls the Australian communist-turned-fascist Pankhurst Walsh’s pursuit of ‘other paths’ after communism was seen to have unleashed only catastrophic results. Comments about the country falling silent speak to the shift to a more somnolent political setting. Harman writes of the way in which militant radicals were affected by this: whereas many working-class militants had previously been willing to consider the ideas espoused by revolutionaries, they were now more tempted by arguments about the impracticality of wage increases, less inclined to take strike action in a period of intractable unemployment, and more generally taken by reformist measures. Appeals to workers for action and solidarity increasingly fell on deaf ears. At the same time, members of the revolutionary left could only look on helplessly as sales of their publications fell precipitously (Harman, 1988: 349–50). This changing political-social context is essential for understanding Jerry Rubin’s transition from Yippie to Yuppie. Though Rubin’s experience has largely been glossed over in serious studies of the period, it is important.3 While perhaps an extreme case, Rubin is emblematic of the de-radicalisation of the American revolutionary left in the wake of the 1960s. Rubin himself has nominated the death of mass political action after 1970 – along with the break-up of his long-term relationship with his girlfriend – as the main factor in his change in direction (Rubin, 1976: 1). The post-1970 state of affairs was drastically out of step with the period leading up to 1968, when the movement was on the ascendancy and protest rally numbers were escalating from hundreds to thousands (Rubin, 1971: 102; see also Schultz, 1993: 13). By 1969, membership in the SDS, after splitting into several factions, had collapsed from 100,000 to 2,000 (cited in Sorin, 2002: 242). By his own 3  For example, in 343 pages, Rubin rates just one mention in Berman’s (1996: 235) book on the ‘the political journey of the generation of 1968’, a subject matter which merits compulsory study of the ex-Yippie. Stephens (1998) devotes considerable attention to Rubin’s activities as a radical, but says almost nothing about his post-radical phase.

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reckoning, Rubin was far from alone in struggling to adjust to the mood that set in across the left in the 1970s. He saw himself, along with thousands of others, as part of a 1960s movement that failed to cope with the changing times. Underscoring the comments of Harman (see above) about the intensity of activity among members of the far left, Rubin reports that during most of the latter half of the 1960s he was completely absorbed day in, day out with organising troop-train blockades, demonstrations at Berkeley, a march on the Pentagon in 1967, the Democratic convention protests in Chicago in 1968, followed by the conspiracy trial. The sense that during the height of the movement there was no time for the consciousness-raising and self-help craze he went through in the early 1970s is reflected in his comment that activists were simply far too preoccupied to think about cultivating friendships (Rubin, 1976: 5, 9). For Rubin, the personal and the political combined to rock his world: the end of the movement coincided with Rubin’s break-up with his long-term girlfriend and the loss of many of his personal contacts. He now saw little choice but to adapt in order to survive. Beaten protestors such as him were thus required to engage in a process of reflection, rethinking, and renewal. Rubin writes of the growth of a ‘new consciousness movement’ that flourished in the US in the context of the vacuum created by the collapse of radical politics. A plethora of self-help and spiritual offerings were now available to those who had deserted the streets, including yoga, meditation, sex-therapy, Erhard Seminars Training (est), women’s consciousness groups, and preventative medicine and body awareness. Rubin moved a long way from systemic explanations of political behaviour and became convinced of the idea of changing the world by changing one’s self: personal meditation could even prevent war. This, he admits, was a dramatic reversal of his previous thinking as an activist when, for example, he saw psychotherapy under capitalism as a self-indulgent device for patching people up temporarily to be thrown back into a system that bruised and battered them. Whereas 1960s activists stressed the large extent to which their life circumstances were shaped by external institutions and broader relations of power, the 1970s saw the dominance of the idea that your world is what you make of it (Rubin, 1976: 17, 19, 27, 39, 202). This was an idea, as we have seen, that captured Rubin’s fellow Chicago conspiracy defendant, Rennie Davis. Gitlin likened this overall to the response of the defeated Native American Sioux in 1890 who came to believe that practising the ghost dance would drive away the white invader: defeat in the material world diverted people to the spiritual realm. In the case of

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1960s activists, many of them no longer had sufficient stamina to keep challenging the system, so instead they poured whatever energies they had left into spiritual and other private pursuits (Gitlin, 1993: 424–7). Some unfortunate radicals even became ensnared in religious cults and drug addiction, while more fortunate ones pursued the traditional preoccupations of bourgeois society in the form of careers and family lives (Cleaver, K., 2006: xxiv). In addition to political cycles, economic ones helped to shape the experience of defeat. The return of economic crisis in the mid-1970s destroyed the assumption of continued economic expansion and prosperity. Economic pressure – the standard coercive mechanism of capitalism – was exerted on activists to act responsibly and find gainful employment, as competition intensified for the lucrative job postings in law, medicine, or academia once forsaken by 1960s radicals (Gitlin, 1993: 423). Rubin recalled how the economic depression drove some activists back into their parents’ businesses (Rubin, 1976: 90–1). Whereas the advent of the post-war boom had been a contributor to the apostasy of earlier ex-communists, this time the collapse of the boom had a comparable effect, mutatis mutandis. The return of economic crisis was worse for students embarking on a college education after 1973 because this time there was no Vietnam War to act as a focal point for radicalism (Gitlin, 1993: 423). As a result of all these changes, many 1960s radicals became disoriented in the 1970s and beyond. Unintelligible except in this context is the decline of the Black Panther Party and the trajectories of leading members Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver. The latter, in particular, was disheartened by the Panthers’ divisions, which led him to question the ability of social and political movements at all to achieve liberation: he turned instead to that rock of stability, the force proven time and again capable of withstanding every challenge humankind could muster, God (Cleaver, 1979: 77). When Cleaver departed America’s shores in 1968 to avoid prosecution over his involvement in a gun fight with police earlier that year that left seventeen-year-old fellow Panther Bobby Hutton dead,4 this represented a turning point for him in a series of episodic flirtations with new and more right-wing political and social causes (see chapter 10). Cleaver had endured an experience of defeat of a somewhat different kind as a result of time spent in Communist countries such as 4  He was shot dead, according to Cleaver, with his hands raised as he attempted to surrender to police after a shoot-out in Oakland on 6 April, two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr (Rhodes, 2007: 134; Booker, 1998: 344).

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Cuba and the Soviet Union while on the run from 1968 to 1975. He baldly stated in 1982 that he commenced his ideological shift to the right ‘because I recognized that what we were into in the BPP [Black Panther Party] and “movement” was exhausted, had run its course’. What gives this statement greater authenticity is the fact that it was not designed for public consumption but was made in a private letter to fellow former Panther Bobby Seale (Cleaver, E., 2006a: 282). In a 1986 interview with Reason, he recalled that his experience abroad involved a clash between his individualist instincts and the police states which in these countries stifled all hopes for freedom. This was a jolting encounter that led him to re-examine the politics to which he had been committed for years as a Panther and a Marxist. Cleaver’s attacks on the despots of these systems and their flimsy justifications with reference to ‘transient’ phases of dictatorship, after which the state would gradually wither away, undoubtedly had a familiar ring to them (Kauffman and Scarlett, 1986). Moreover, this was not a dissimilar experience from that suffered by fellow ex-1960s radicals Ronald Radosh, who had visited Cuba and been horrified by what greeted him (see above). In addition to the more general sense of lost bearings described above, political defeat had other consequences, according to Rubin: upon realising that the blows inflicted on the system were not fatal, radicals often turned on each other (Rubin, 1976: 8–9). There were numerous schisms and break-ups that reflected the impasse, such as the public spat between Panthers Newton and Cleaver that ended with their complete and permanent separation (Berger, 2006: 157; cited in Kauffman and Scarlett, 1986). Such confrontations were not simply ego-driven power-plays but involved important strategic considerations, including the roles in the organisation of the underground movement and armed struggle, of which Cleaver and the chapters of the party expelled by Newton in 1971 – those in Los Angeles, New York, and the International Section of the Party – were vocal advocates (Umoja, 2001: 4). Whatever their source, such recriminations undoubtedly helped smooth the passage to renegacy. While there had been tensions between the two Yippies as far back as 1968, Rubin eventually parted company with his main collaborator Abbie Hoffman – whom the former accused of remaining stuck in a 1960s time warp – and the two remained antagonists up to the latter’s death in 1989 (Hoffman and Simon, 1994: 307; Zaroulis and Sullivan, 1984: 184; Jensen and Lichtenstein, 1995). Even Hoffman, however, rode the ups and downs of the movement, and he cut a crestfallen figure in the aftermath of the 1960s. As Fronner (1996: xv) noted, the loss of his raison d’être

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in the 1970s ultimately contributed to the decision by Hoffman, a sufferer of bipolar disorder, to swallow a fatal overdose of sleeping pills – a metaphor for the death of a movement in which he was a prominent figure (Raskin, 1996: 257–8). Hoffman’s was not the only suicide among despondent former 1960s radicals. The French former guerrilla warfare advocate Régis Debray was reborn in the context of rapidly receding prospects for guerrilla struggle and the execution of Che Guevara (see chapter 8) as well as more generally the intellectual misery of the times, evidenced by what happened to his mentor and Marxist scholar Louis Althusser, who strangled his wife to death and killed himself – figuratively, not literally – in 1980. His political being died: in the years after he killed his wife he was committed to a mental asylum and suffered ill-health (physical and mental) before dying in 1990. In addition, one of Debray’s friends jumped to his death from a high-rise building,5 while another drowned in the Seine (Debray, 2007: 15).6 Such were the times that a former Chicago Eight conspirator in the 1980s was relieved merely ‘to reconfirm that we’ve survived’ (cited in NYT, 1988). One who did not survive was the folk singer, Phil Ochs, who helped Rubin and Hoffman define the meaning of Yippiedom, only to fall into a steep decline following the Chicago protests: plagued by severe depression, bipolar disorder, alcohol abuse, and homelessness, he hanged himself at his sister’s house in April 1976 (Brown, 2011). As was noted earlier, none of this means that political agency played no role, nor that the end of the 1960s revolt was some external world that crashed down upon activists. For instance, the victory of Richard Nixon – the man synonymous with butchery in Indochina – in the 1972 presidential election was a crushing blow for anti-war activists, akin for some to the day the 1960s came to a shuddering halt (Hoffman and Simon, 1994: 201). On the other hand, how great a setback this development was depended on whether one had illusions in his rival George McGovern, or whether one failed to see Nixon’s relative political weaknesses, reflected in his demise only two years later. Indeed, the Yippies had thrown their support behind McGovern for president, which undeniably inflated what was at stake in the contest: only a few years before, Hoffman and Rubin had foresworn the meagre fruits to be 5  This is probably a reference to the French scholar and activist Nicos Poulantzas, who ended his life in this manner in 1979. 6  Debray had – preposterously, according to Birchall (2007) – claimed a 20 per cent suicide rate among the far left in France.

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gained from participating in the electoral-political system (Jezer, 1992: 234; Hoffman and Simon, 1994: 187). Agency also asserted itself insofar as gnawing feelings of regret dogged many activists, many of whom felt a sense of failure. Despite the importance of the 1960s and all its achievements, the epoch did not realise the fundamental changes in social structure associated with history’s great revolutions (Raskin, 1996: xxxi). This sense of failure in turn provided the impetus for many radicals to revert to milder political aspirations.

Christopher Hitchens: defeat postponed? Perhaps the most prominent twenty-first-century renegade, Christopher Hitchens was among those who gradually eased away from revolutionary socialist politics in the aftermath of the 1960s. Sharing some similarities with the fortieth anniversary reflections of another sixty-eighter, Dany Cohn-Bendit (see chapter 2), Hitchens still declared himself a ‘sixty-eighter’ (soixantehuitard) in 2008. But he added that, while he believed at the time that he was part of something momentous, it eventually dawned on him that he had been an eyewitness to the beginning of the end of socialism (Hitchens, 2008b). This partly reflects the schizophrenia of Hitchens, who wanted to maintain his connection to radicals (e.g. Trotsky) and radicalism (as embodied in 1968) – however tenuous and contrived – while at the same time live and work as a cheerleader for twenty-first century neo-conservatives. On the other hand, his final break with radicalism did not come until 11 September 2001, indicating additional complexities to his apostasy (see chapters 7, 8, and 10). But before exploring some of these other dimensions to renegacy, it is worthwhile first to examine the impact of state repression on radicalism.

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chapter

5 The full force of the law: defeat by state repression?

State repression has been an important aspect of the experience of political defeat, as we saw cursorily with the discussion of Christopher Hill’s work on the English Revolution. For most of the radicals discussed throughout this book, state repression was part of their lived experience (Fry, 1983: x–xi). Indeed, any discussion of state responses to radicalism serves as a reminder of the lengths to which rulers will go to protect their fiefdoms from any breakouts of resistance, and it is important to highlight this repression given the relative lack of seriousness with which it has been treated by scholars (Davenport, 2007: 1). The extent of state repression of radicals – because they represent a threat to the existing order – provides solid evidence for Marxist theories of the state, whether that state in modern times goes by the label of ‘communist’, ‘liberal’, or ‘fascist’: the mobilisation of the state to isolate and crush radicals reveals its intrinsic hostility to a fairer and more just order, let alone a change in social relations.1 Lenin was correct to say that, when stripped of all their ancillary functions, states are fundamentally ‘bodies of armed men which have prisons, etc., at 1  There are competing Marxist approaches to the state (see Poulantzas, 1969; Miliband, 1973; Jessop, 1982; Harman, 1991). The approach to the state adopted here is a relatively orthodox one: the state represents the interests of capital, and while capable at times of granting reforms to the working class – either through pressure placed upon it by direct action and/or because economic conditions permit them – its general purpose is to implement laws favourable to capital accumulation and the continuation of the system facilitating that accumulation.

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their command’, and which are designed physically to see off any challenge to the ruling class (Lenin, 1970: 10). In carrying out this function successfully, the state has helped create the circumstances for apostasy by occasioning an ‘experience of defeat’. The means rulers have utilised to maintain their rule have often been divided into two main categories: ‘fraud’ and ‘force’. The former includes the less overt techniques employed to ensure conformity through a mass media that reifies capitalist social relations, as well as the more general intellectual and cultural hegemony maintained by the ruling class as a result of its dominant position in society (Herman and Chomsky, 1994; Gramsci, 1989: 12–13). As Marx and Engels famously noted, the ruling ideas churned out by the institutions of the state and capital are the ideas of the ruling class, and the class which commands the physical means of production also governs the intellectual means (cited in Venable, 1946: 161). ‘Force’, the subject of our main focus here, has differed little in substance – notwithstanding some insidious initiatives by the FBI in the 1960s and 1970s (see further below) – in modern times compared to the period of the English Revolution. The methods used against the Chartist movement in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century included mass arrests, incarceration, and transportation (Saville, 1994: 70). Similar techniques around the period of the First World War were deployed against members of the Australian Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who were framed by the police for arson, imprisoned, suffered the outlawing of their organisation, and in some cases were deported once their jail terms finished (see Burgmann, 1982). Stalin ordered the arrests of some five million deemed opponents during the great terror of 1937–38, with around 800,000 put to death, and the majority of the rest dispatched to prison or labour camps (Brooker, cited in Hague and Harrop, 2007: 350). Chairman Mao, too, as well as being responsible for up to eighty million deaths, was adept at methods of forced compliance, witchhunts, and mass programmes of persecution against perceived dissidents (see Chang and Halliday, 2005). Some notable renegades in the early part of the twentieth century had indeed been victims of state repression. Mussolini claimed to have been jailed on eleven separate occasions, though in typical fashion he dismissed his time in jail as a character-building experience that allowed him the pleasure of reading Cervantes’ Don Quixote! (cited in Ludwig, 1932: 45). Parvus endured a spell in prison for his part in the 1905 Russian Revolution, an experience with which he did not cope so well (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 96–7). The New York intellectual turned McCarthyist Max Eastman faced trial for

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sedition during the First World War for publishing anti-war statements in his The Masses (Weinstein, 1967: 164). The British-Australian communist and future fascist Adela Pankhurst Walsh was also a victim of the state. At one protest against the First World War she was arrested under the wideranging War Precautions Act (Smart, 1995: 282). During the 1917 New South Wales general strike she was imprisoned for agitating on behalf of the stoppage (Milner, 1988: 266). Furthermore, her drift towards conservatism occurred in the aftermath of a strength-sapping battle to save her husband from being deported by the federal government in 1925 over his involvement in a seamen’s strike (Dickenson, 2004: 56, 57). Such methods of repression were mirrored by the US state around this time. Government and law enforcement agencies employed various measures to crush American radicals in the 1920s, and then later in the Cold War period under the aegis of McCarthyism. The newly formed American Communist Party was the victim of brute state force courtesy of the Wilson administration, which targeted IWW and Socialist Party opponents of the war through the use of the recently crafted Espionage Act (Weinstein, 1967: 160). Wilson’s Quaker Attorney-General Alexander Palmer initiated raids of communist properties in late 1919 and 1920, resulting in the arrest of some 6,000 militants as part of the first ‘red scare’ (Lukács, 2009: 100). According to Buhle, the Palmer raids and the First World War-era ‘red scare’ constitute arguably the most extreme persecution of radicals in the history of the republic (Buhle, 1992: 646). It was no coincidence that 1919 represents one of the most explosive years in history as measured by levels of rebellion and resistance across the globe (Kovel, 1997: 15). This was in part due to the political consequences of the Russian Revolution, which instilled fears in the minds of US planners of a worldwide attraction to a Bolshevik model that sought to vest power in the toiling masses (Chomsky, 1993: 18). The Wilson administration, which after witnessing the rise of soldiers’ and workers’ councils in Germany had feared the impact these might have on the ideas of returning black soldiers, played its part in crushing local resistance by orchestrating mass arrests of hundreds of American IWW leaders; in the North-west lumber industry it went as far as establishing a rival union (Chomsky, 1993: 18; Weinstein, 1967: 47). One IWW organiser, Frank Little, was lynched and castrated by vigilante allies of the government (Buhle, 1992: 647). Gitlin has argued that the state repression dished out to radicals during this period was comparatively much worse than that suffered by activists in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Wilson administration

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engaged in censorship, prosecutions, raids, and strike-breaking through the use of the military (Gitlin, 1993: 81). Some thirty-five states implemented anti-‘red’ legislation in the few years leading up to 1920 (Kolko, 1976: 282). By mid-1920, this state assault on communist labour activists had effectively quenched the flames of radicalism (Kovel, 1997: 22). As we saw earlier, the right-wing political climate of the Cold War years forms part of the explanation for why many former communists and Trotskyists became anti-communists. The range of measures used against communists during the late 1940s and 1950s was extremely wide, and included the prohibition of merely teaching the merits of overthrowing the government, the trying of radicals for the same crime in different jurisdictions, and the sacking, deportation, and denial of passports. In New York State, meanwhile, even leisure pursuits amounted to subversion: communists were denied fishing licences (Isserman, 1987: 4). As an accused government agent, the ex-Marxist Lewis Corey suffered indirectly from the state repression that formed part of this climate: the allegation emanating from the Finnish journalist Santeri Nuorteva, who in turn heard the claims from a US government spy, might have been slanderous, but the atmosphere of heavy government harassment and infiltration of communists rendered such a charge less incredible (Buhle, 1995: 93). Corey also did jail time in 1919 for his part in opposing the First World War as a member of the Socialist Party, and there were also attempts to have Fraina deported in late 1952 and early 1953, though this occurred some time after his renunciation of Marxism (Corey, 1963: 107, 124–5).

State repression in the 1960s and 1970s Notwithstanding Gitlin’s earlier claim about the savagery of the state during the years around the First World War vis-à-vis the 1960s and 1970s, radicals during the latter period certainly paid heavy prices for their attempts to restore some justice and fairness to the world. French radicals, for instance, had to contend with the reality of increasing numbers of their comrades languishing in jail cells, forcing them to rethink their political strategies (Bourg, 2007: 60). But the levels of repression were particularly severe in the US compared to Western Europe in terms of raw numbers of casualties and state-sponsored killings (Katsiaficas, 1987: 164). Our discussion below will consequently be focused on the American experience.

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Ex-radicals such as the Yippie turned Yuppie Jerry Rubin and future Democratic politician Tom Hayden both received five-year sentences – overturned on appeal two and a half years later – for crossing state lines to cause a riot in Chicago in 1968 (Goldberg, 1987). Rennie Davis, as well as being convicted along with Rubin and Hayden for his part in Chicago, for his troubles had his skull cracked open by police at the same demonstration (Hayden, 1969a: 163). Also enduring stints in a prison cell to give them plenty of time to rethink their options were the Guevarist turned Mitterrand aide Régis Debray and ex-Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who it was suggested came clean upon his return to the US precisely to avoid returning to jail. Hayden detailed the arrests and violence endured by radicals during this period, including: • the murder of twenty-eight activists and the arrest of 31,000 people during the southern civil rights movement of 1960–68; • the killing of 188 people, the injuring of 7,612, and the arrest of 52,920 in the midst of the black revolts of 1965–70; and • the slaying of fourteen, the injuring and expulsion of thousands from their colleges, and the carrying out of at least 26,358 arrests in the context of the campus and anti-war protests. In total, there were at least 100,000 arrests of protestors during the 1960s in America, the nation often regarded as the most free in the world (Hayden, 1988: 505–6). These barbarities were not without effect. Despite being at loggerheads with 1960s radicals, Howe accepts that state repression was among the various causes of the collapse of the new left (Howe, 1983: 325–6). It was this collapse, of course, that seduced so many activists away from radicalism. Jacobs argues that chief among the factors causing disillusionment with the protest movement in the early 1970s was the counterinsurgency of the state, emblematic of which was the FBI’s COINTELPRO, codename for the Bureau’s counter-intelligence programme aimed at left-wing radical organisations (Jacobs, 1997: 161). The SWP (US) was targeted specifically under the program (Fields, 1988: xiii). According to attorney Brian Glick, the operation employed four main methods: infiltration, psychological warfare, harassment through the legal system, and extra-legal force and violence. The FBI conducted surveillance, including phone tapping, the interception of mail, and following activists. Its agents also infiltrated organisations to disrupt their operation. COINTELPRO spread lies and deceit about members of

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organisations, and arrested people for petty offences with the intention of clogging them up in the judicial system, in the process diverting them from protest activities (cited in Berger, 2006: 62–3). The FBI went as far as writing pamphlets in the guise of the Panthers inciting blacks to murder cops (Krassner, 1993: 125). In an anonymous letter to Martin Luther King Jr, the FBI had threatened him with the release of bugging tapes revealing salacious information about his personal life, and called on him to do the only honourable thing in the circumstances and end his life (cited in Churchill and Wall, 1988: 56–7). Phoney letters, purportedly from radical organisations, were also sent to members and non-members to generate political divisions (Fields, 1988: 172). Bogus alternative publications were created to split the movement with more conservative opinions. Indeed, so pervasive was the culture of spying that in one case an FBI agent was spied on by other FBI agents, who had no apparent knowledge that the person on whom they were spying was one of their own (Berger, 2006: 69). Laws were also introduced to empower agencies to persecute radicals. The CIA, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the FBI compiled data on more than 10,000 black and anti-war leaders (Kolko, 1976: 282). Congress legislated in 1967 to outlaw travelling interstate to promote rioting in the context of rebellions in black communities following defiant anti-racist speeches by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leaders such as H. Rap Brown.2 The so-called Chicago Eight fell foul of these same laws (Berger, 2006: 66). Prosecution was thus an important tactic used against radicals to clear effect: more than a hundred grand juries, convened by Nixon’s Justice Department prosecutor Guy Lee Goodwin, whom journalists dubbed the ‘Witch-Finder General’, resulted in over 400 indictments against a range of movement groups (Berger, 2006: 160; Sullivan, 2008). Political, religious, and countercultural radicals were demoralised and frustrated by COINTELPRO and the more general harassment by the FBI, the army, and other government and local police intelligence agencies (Schultz, 1993: 399). Beyond the Chicago Eight, many other activists during the 1960s were tried, including the Boston Five, the Oakland Seven, and the New York Panther Twenty-one (Raskin, 1996: 182). Jerry Rubin recalled how FBI/ police repression generated a culture of fear and paranoia in the movement (Rubin, 1976: 90–1). 2  Rap Brown later joined the Panthers, and the SNCC merged with the same organisation (Booker, 1998: 342).

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The creation of dissension was effective. COINTELPRO had helped open a rift between Panther leaders Newton and Cleaver by fabricating letters and statements designed to inflame relations between the two (Churchill and Wall, 1988: 40–2). Moreover,‘an enormous amount of documented evidence of governmental interference’ had come to light showing the role the FBI had played in the dissolution of the SNCC (Forman, 1990: xv). Meanwhile the departure of Rap Brown – who had been shot in the face by a Cambridge police officer – from the Panthers was due partly to government interference and the treatment he suffered, including being tried in court in fourteen different parts of the US and being kept under virtual house arrest in New York city from 1967 to 1970 (Mungin, 2002: 6; Forman, 1990: 504, 542). His subsequent conversion to Islam occurred while he was serving time in jail for armed robbery. Rap Brown’s Panthers, in particular, felt the full brunt of state power, with most of the leadership either executed, jailed, put on trial, or in exile (Katsiaficas, 1987: 118). Churchill counts a minimum of twenty-seven Black Panthers and sixty-nine American Indian Movement (AIM) activists murdered between the years 1968 and 1976 (cited in Berger, 2006: 63). Sheer state brutality was used to snuff out activists and terrify others into submission. In response to uprisings in Detroit, Newark, Atlanta, and Cincinnati, revenge by the state was swift, with forty-five people killed in Detroit alone as authorities restored the status quo (Katsiaficas, 1987: 74). State responses to the uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968 included the massing of troops to protect federal buildings, machine guns being mounted on the Capitol balcony and the White House lawn, and the concentrated occupation of ghettoes by police, the army, and the national guard. The cold statistics included forty-six deaths, approximately 21,000 additional casualties, and 20,000 incarcerated (Katsiaficas, 1987: 78). The flawed militancy of organisations such as the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army – an underground offshoot of the Panthers – was unthinkable except in the context of state killings of radicals and the more general intolerance of protest. Four students were killed and nine wounded by the national guard at Kent State University in 1970, and within ten days police murdered six blacks – in a cruel twist of irony – at a protest against police brutality in Augusta, Georgia, while state and local police killed two and wounded twelve black students in demonstrations at Jackson State University in Mississippi (Berger, 2006: 8–9). The national guard were called out fully to more than a hundred schools across the US in response to protests coinciding with those at Kent State against the American invasion

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of Cambodia (Berman, 1996: 91; Katsiaficas, 1987: 3). At the Attica State Penitentiary on 13 September 1971, state authorities shot dead thirty-nine inmates and hostages over a prisoners’ rights revolt (Jacobs, 1997: 138). When not simply murdering activists, the state strove to beat them off the streets. The Pentagon demonstrations in October 1967 had been brutally crushed with authorities’ tactics ominously marking the beginning of a new phase in which the state upped the ante against demonstrations in any form (Jacobs, 1997: 6). At the Chicago Democratic convention protests, demonstrators – not to mention members of news crews in the way – were infamously on the receiving end of a ‘police riot’ as they were charged and clubbed relentlessly. In preparation for the demonstration, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had garnered over 20,000 law enforcement officials, comprising 12,000 police, 5,000–6,000 members of the national guard, and 6,000–7,000 Army troops packing rifles, bazookas, and flame-throwers (Katsiaficas, 1987: 80). In addition to these more traditional techniques put to use by the state, increasing numbers of black radicals were diagnosed as schizophrenic by way of explanation for their ‘deviant’ and ‘anti-white’ political behaviour, allowing them to be confined in prison-like facilities such as the notorious Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (Metzl, 2009). The extensive application of such forms of repression undoubtedly helped to shape feelings of hopelessness on the left in the 1970s. It undoubtedly also played a role in weakening movements, in part indirectly because it provoked debate about how to respond: Weather Underground supporters exalted militancy for its organising and mobilising potential, while Progressive Labor (a Marxist antiSoviet group) argued for more educative approaches that would not isolate the movement (Jacobs, 1997: 7). Thus state repression helped cause schisms within the movement that reduced its likelihood of success, consequently disillusioning activists, who turned to other avenues for solace. Repression itself need not have precipitated a decline. According to Jerry Rubin, repression was indispensable to the growth of movements, since it transformed demonstrations into all-out wars that forced people to take sides (cited in Halstead, 1978: 406). This rather glib and one-sided statement, typical of Rubin, ignored the climate of fear and paranoia created in movements – acknowledged by Rubin himself, as we saw above – by state repression. But even Tom Hayden believed at the time that rising rates of repression would likely call forth a revolutionary conflict: repression was unavoidable, and the question was whether it would be successful in marginalising the movement or if it would merely foster further anger and discontent

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(Hayden, 1969a: 16). Indeed, it was the responses to (the inevitable) state repression that were arguably critical: recall Harman’s analysis of the fatal tactic of left militants who responded to provocation by increasingly militant methods rather than attempting to link their radical aspirations with the struggles of other social movements and the economically powerful working class. The adoption of more militaristic methods by some undeniably contributed to division within the movement. The methods of radicals, too, in part determined the successes of state repression: according to Forman (1990: 538), the Black Panther Party’s lazy approach to recruitment, organisation, and internal security made it vulnerable to ‘infiltration and frame-ups’. Structure and agency thus both contributed to the role of state repression in effecting defeat.

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conclusion to part ii

What these different commentaries – on political defeat, deteriorating political climates for radicals, and state repression – have in common is an emphasis on transformed contexts, things external to the radical that make it more difficult for them to maintain their hostility to the status quo. Such an approach makes obvious sense: most renegades emerge during times of growing conservatism and setbacks for those challenging institutions of power. This would seem consistent with Marxist materialism in one sense: if being determines consciousness, then negative changes in these radicals’ environments would hasten a reassessment of one’s beliefs (Sennett, 1977: 252). But their apostasies were radically anti-Marxist in the sense that the essential context within which these former activists reformulated their beliefs had not changed: it was still a world of state and capital, of haves and have-nots, of dictatorship in the workplace, and of impotence to challenge that dictatorship through the ballot box. Why these renegades no longer held most of these things to be true is what we continue to explore over the course of the remainder of the book. Yet it is quite clear that this largely structural explanation is far from sufficient: the Trotskyist turned neo-conservative Irving Kristol, for example, had even as a radical been aware of the reality of what was happening in the Soviet Union, but this did not prevent him from being an anti-Stalinist radical. He went from being a radical of some description in 1941 to not being a radical at all by the end of the war (King, 2004: 255, 256). Despite Kristol’s claims to have been dogged, along with other New York intellectuals, by the question of whether there was a relationship between Marxism–Leninism and Stalinism, it is difficult to see how the pattern of his changing allegiances could be put down simply to the experience of defeat (cited in Dorman, 2000: 17). Kristol may have been influenced by the rightward tide of the Cold War. But other radicals, such as the Chicago Eight defendant David Dellinger, who opposed wars in which the US was a participant from the Second World War right through to the Iraq War in 2003, saw out this period with undiminished radicalism (Dellinger, 1993; Carlson, 2004).

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Similarly, the experience of defeat explanation raises the question as to how 1960s radicals such as Tariq Ali, Chris Harman, and Alain Badiou weathered the darker times of the 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decade of the twentyfirst century without losing their anti-capitalist politics. Individuals do have the capacity to resist the rightward tide, and do not automatically succumb in overwhelming situations. In this spirit, Maddison and Scalmer put forward five means by which activists can avoid apostasy brought on by political defeat: 1. maintaining a historical consciousness through an affinity with important landmarks, including May Day, International Women’s Day, and Hiroshima Day; 2. taking a longer-term perspective and seeing defeat as a normal part of the ‘cycle of protest’ that may again in the future be reversed to become an upturn; 3. partial acceptance of political defeat (with notable psychological connotations), leading to altered political behaviour and strategies; 4. chaotic sensibility – avoiding self-blame for everything that goes wrong and recognising the limits of one’s own influence over setbacks; and 5. having an activist identity by making political activism a core part of a person’s makeup (Maddison and Scalmer, 2006: 230–45). Helpful as such suggestions are, they portray apostasy as something that can be kept at bay with a few simple tools. Given the dramatic scale of the reversals undertaken by the individuals – and the kind of forces involved, including at times massive repression from well-resourced state agencies such as the police, armed forces, and the FBI – it is a case of easier said than done. This is also true in relation to the important role played by individuals’ psychology – a factor ignored by Maddison and Scalmer – in the process (see chapters 9 and 10). Maddison and Scalmer (2006) are right, however, to see political defeat as not always wholly negative: Lenin, for example, believed that defeat in 1905 in Russia paved the way for victory in 1917 (cited in Lukács, 2009: 94). While one should be wary of teleological interpretations of events that see defeats in retrospect as merely temporary setbacks on the road to certain triumph (Callinicos, 1990b: 64), it may be the case that yesterday’s defeat is the dress rehearsal for tomorrow’s main event. While there is unambiguous evidence of state repression helping to divide and weaken movements, it is hard to link many cases of radicals’ turn to

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conservatism directly to repression. Mussolini did suffer state persecution prior to exiting the PSI, but his jailing for anti-war agitation preceded his eventual abandonment of radicalism by several years. After being victimised as a radical by the state, the British-Australian Adela Pankhurst Walsh became involved in far-right movements that saw her interned during the Second World War, so state repression seems unlikely to have been what warded her off radical political activities. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, time in jail and harassment by state authorities appear to be subordinate as important influences over the rightward shift of former 1960s radicals such as Rubin, Hayden, Debray, and Cleaver (whose time in jail in any case largely preceded his radicalisation). In the latter’s case, his split with Newton – mirrored by the splitting of the central committee over the expulsion of Cleaver and the whole international section – was only partly the work of the FBI, and has to be seen in the context of the Panthers’ general ideological divisions and spats, not to mention almost fratricidal warfare that erupted in the early 1970s and which included grisly killings and retaliatory executions. These were reflected in accusations levelled against Cleaver that he was an agent in the FBI’s COINTELPRO programme, but also in the earlier departure from the Panthers by Stokely Carmichael in 1969 over disagreements relating to power, ideology, and relations with white activists (Cleaver and Gates Jr, 1997: 305; Young, 1977: 129; Rout, 1991: 206; Johnson III, 1998: 402; Cleaver, K., 2006: xxi). In Cleaver’s case, fellow 1960s radical Jonah Raskin is mistaken to dismiss Cleaver as simply a ‘chameleon’ who adopted whatever stance fitted the changing times (Raskin, 1998). As we shall see in chapter 10, the extraordinary – and often bizarre – range of causes and enterprises that Cleaver championed cannot be put down merely to changes in the American and global political scenes. In order to explain the diverging paths of radicals, the influence of subjective factors thus needs to be considered, including theoretical weaknesses or flaws on the part of the individual. Possibly there are certain aspects of a radical’s politics that increase the likelihood of them losing their lustre for revolutionary change. Or perhaps there are significant continuities between the radical and renegade. To these questions we now turn.

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Part III Flawed radicals

Mussolini the socialist was as imperious, fiery, dictatorial, and disdainful as is Mussolini the fascist. (Megaro, 1938: 333)

I have never considered myself to be an ‘ex-Trotskyist’ in the sense that some people conceive of themselves as ‘ex-communists’. The experience was never that important to me. (Irving Kristol)

In addition to all his other ambitions, this revolutionary was torn by an amazing desire to get rich. (Trotsky on Parvus, the ‘Marxist millionaire’)

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introduction to part iii

In the following part of the book we study renegades as potentially flawed radicals, or as radicals whose break with radicalism upon closer inspection becomes less of a leap. This is an important avenue to explore, given that the structural pressures frequently cited to account for renegacy were shown to be critical, but insufficient. Such flaws should not be confused for the most basic human variety: all humans are flawed, and therefore all radicals are flawed individuals prone to errors. Rather, we are referring specifically to flaws such as constitutive theoretical weaknesses, ideological confusion, conservatism, or streaks of authoritarianism already present in their radical phase, and which may therefore have been ingredients in their slide rightwards. We try to establish if there are continuities between the different phases of the individuals’ lives – consistencies that are perhaps significant enough for the distinctions between ‘radical’ and ‘renegade’ to collapse altogether. Possibly there are also individuals whose prior radicalism simply has been overstated. In chapter 6, we examine the flaws of radicals in the early twentieth century, as well as those of some New York intellectuals and other ex-radicals active at a slightly later time. Chapter 7 begins by looking at the question of ‘overstated radicals’, before moving on to tackle the weaknesses of 1960s radicals. This is followed by a study of the political flaws of the more recent renegade, Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 8 continues the theme of flawed radicals – in the sense this time of radicals corrupted by financial and power motivations.

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chapter

6 Flawed early twentieth-century radicals: Mussolini, Parvus, and co.

There were glaring flaws, continuities, and ideological muddles in the case of the most infamous of renegades, Benito Mussolini. Here is a striking case of a deeply flawed radical for whom an experience of defeat – in the form of the failure of socialists and the working class to prevent the First World War – was arguably necessary, but not sufficient, for him to shift from international socialism to national fascism. Countless others, needless to say, did not respond to the shattering consequences of the war by founding their own fascist movement. In fact, many managed to retain their socialist politics – a clear case in point being Mussolini’s one-time PSI colleague Angelica Balabanoff (see chapter 1). On the other hand, perhaps Mussolini’s politics were distinguishable from Balabanoff’s in important respects. Doriot Pels’ view that fascism stands in close ideological proximity to socialism might offer an explanation (Pels, 1993: 76). This followed Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s earlier contrasting of the political centre to the totalitarian left and right, which came together via an extremism that goes round in a circle (cited in Kovel, 1997: 142). Yet such an explanation for Mussolini’s apostasy is highly problematic, for it ignores the empirically observable breaks that he made, the outrage and bewilderment these shifts provoked among fellow Italian socialists, and his subsequent repression of former PSI colleagues such as Antonio Gramsci, in whose case he personally intervened to ensure that the latter was given a twentyyear stretch in jail (Bosworth, 2002: 223).1 Moreover, Mussolini declared 1  Gramsci served ten years before dying in 1937 only days after his release.

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fascism to be categorically opposed to socialism, which by 1919 was ‘dead as a doctrine: it existed only as a hatred’ for supporters of the First World War like himself. Whereas socialism believed in economic equality and collective happiness, according to Mussolini, fascism scoffed at these notions and accepted the ‘immutable, beneficial and fruitful inequality of mankind’ (Mussolini, 1933: 8, 14). The notion of a U-shaped political spectrum – where the far right and far left eventually cohabit – is flawed in a similar way to ‘totalitarianism’, devoid as it often is of important historical and ideological analyses of communism vis-à-vis fascism (see Kershaw, 2000: ch. 2). As we noted earlier, Stalinism and communism are distinct phenomena, and whatever the Russian workers’ state eventually became under Stalin, it was far removed from the 1917 Russian Revolution – a movement of hope for ‘peace, bread and land’ and which aimed to empower workers and peasants. Fascism, in contrast, was (in Germany at least) a counter-revolutionary movement expressing the interests of monopoly capital in suppressing an assertive labour movement through the mobilisation of the anguish and despair of the petite bourgeoisie and other social classes, who were encouraged to vent their frustrations on Jews, communists, gays, the mentally ill, and the handicapped (Gluckstein, 1999). Indeed, one does not have to peer very far into the writings of Leon Trotsky, an inveterate Marxist and socialist, to glean a sense of the horror with which he observed the Nazis’ ascendancy, and to witness his urgency in imploring the German workers’ movement to heed the threat Hitler posed not only to the proletariat but society at large (Trotsky, 1971). Clearly, he saw few commonalities between fascism and his classical Marxism. German fascism, in particular, invoked anti-Bolshevism as a key part of its ideological makeup, and a key point of contrast between Nazism and Stalinism was the former’s object of total annihilation of one ethnic section of the population (Kershaw and Lewin, 1997: 7–8). Mussolini’s fascism was, therefore, not rooted in his Marxism. But one does not have to accept the totalitarian comparative framework to agree that Mussolini’s actions and ideas as a radical may have prefigured his later politics. Whether Mussolini was really a Marxist, for instance, is open to question. As a young man he carried a medallion of Marx’s portrait (Ludwig, 1932: 44). On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Marx’s death he penned a lengthy review of the man whom he celebrated as an activist, whom he regarded as scientific and realistic, and whose work Mussolini believed demonstrated the ferocity with which capitalists would fight tooth and nail

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to defend their system (cited in Bosworth, 2002: 67). Apparently a portrait of the author of Das Kapital adorned the wall of the radical Mussolini’s office (Mack Smith, 1981: 15). Yet a schoolmate of Mussolini’s, Rino Alessi, alleges that Mussolini was never a Marxist in the sense of his political ideology, as is distinct from his admiring the exile from Trier (Kirkpatrick, 1964: 36). Mussolini explained that his admiration for Marx rather than Marxism was related to the fact he was a man of ‘profound critical intelligence … in some sense even a prophet’ (cited in Ludwig, 1932: 44). Mussolini’s colleague Angelica Balabanoff recalls Il Duce as being poorly schooled in Marxist literature, having read only the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Balabanoff, 1968: 45–6). Mussolini presented himself during both socialist and fascist phases as a man of ‘action’, not of doctrine, of practice, not of theory. Indeed, his fascism was developed on the run with primacy placed on the need for ‘action’ and ‘faith’ above all else, and it would be several years after breaking with the PSI before even vague principles of fascism would be rolled out. Moreover, neither monarchy nor republicanism was preferred, since it was the state – to which everything else was relative – that was key (Mussolini, 1933: 7–10, 20–25). In his ‘autobiography’,2 he maintained that he had only ever used one book, ‘life lived’, and that he had just the one teacher, ‘day-by-day experience’ (Mussolini, 1928: 34). To the extent that he read at all, Mussolini drew haphazardly on different thinkers, moving easily between Marx, Georges Sorel, Friedrich Nietzsche, the socialist nationalist Charles Péguy, the French syndicalist Hubert Lagardelle, as well as anarchist thought – dispensing with each of them after a time (Woolf, 1966: 190; MacGregor-Hastie, 1963: 29; Mussolini, 1933: 7–8). He also had much affection for Machiavelli, commencing a doctoral thesis on his compatriot at the University of Bologna (Stewart, 1928: 845). He described The Prince as ‘The Ruler’s Handbook’, a text he had ‘attentively re-read’ along with anything else Machiavelli had written (Mussolini, 1975: 26). The famous work had first been read to him by his father as a young boy, and he was reunited with the book again when he was forty (Ludwig, 1932: 55). Pierson argues that in Mussolini’s hierarchy of thought Marx dominated Nietzsche for a time but then the latter was used to paint Marx in a particular 2  His ‘autobiography’ was in fact ghostwritten by the Mussolini sycophant Richard Washburn Child, American Ambassador to Italy under the administration of Warren Harding (Megaro, 1938: 12; see Child, 1928).

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light, emphasising heroism and individual initiative – central tenets of his fascist politics (Pierson, 2001: 23).3 Even on the question of the First World War elasticity was evident: Mussolini had expressed sympathy for a pro-war position in early 1914, prior to the onset of hostilities, and so the break in October 1914 was not necessarily the fork in the road it was widely interpreted to be (cited in O’Brien, 2005: 32–4). Combined with the resolute and unmistakably anti-war positions laid down around the same time cited in chapter 1, this fact may simply point to the duplicitous, untrustworthy, and shifty nature of the man (see chapter 9). As well as being theoretically sporadic and somewhat of a dilettante, Mussolini was always autocratic in his approach and condescending towards the masses (Balabanoff, 1968: 45–6). Mussolini had referred to himself as early as 1903 as an authoritarian communist (cited in Mack Smith, 1981: 7). Of the younger Marx who had initially been influenced by the French conspirator Blanqui and the older one who was later opposed to the conspiratorial approach to gaining power through the highly centralised party, it was the former who most attracted Mussolini (Megaro, 1938: 106; McLellan, 1980: 52, 195). Indeed, Mussolini suggested that it was ‘inevitable that I should become a socialist ultra, a Blanquist, a communist’ (cited in Ludwig, 1932: 43–4). As a nineteen-year-old in 1903 Mussolini had been a fan of the French revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf and his conspiracy of the equals (Bosworth, 2002: 50). While by no means the first socialist to be accused of authoritarianism, it was clear in Mussolini’s case that not only were ideas subordinate to ambition, they were employed in a highly selective manner (Pierson, 2001: 23). The Sicilian deputy Giuseppe De Felice4 could see why Mussolini switched sides relatively easily: being more concerned with the long-term picture of revolutionising Italy, he had few interests in the day-to-day struggles of the working class (cited in Woolf, 1966: 190). Thus the radical Mussolini who tacked a pragmatic use of theory on to a burning desire for power and authoritarian tendencies was the predictable prelude to the fascist Mussolini. 3  As Stewart (1928: 856) writes, the irony is that the Bolshevik supporter Sorel would never have endorsed fascism (he died in 1922 before Mussolini’s rise to power). Sorel, though impressed by Mussolini’s mastering of the craft of politics and even attracted to aspects of his political character, was against fascism in Italy, was opposed to the First World War when Mussolini supported it, and disclaimed responsibility for Mussolini (Meisel, 1950). 4  Not to be confused with the historian of fascism, Renzo De Felice, referred to elsewhere in this book.

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It may therefore be that fascism was just one phase – albeit the ultimate one – among several through which Mussolini progressed in his political excursions. One impression of him was that he cared less for whether it was a socialist or fascist flag that he flew, just so long as he was the one flying it. Great consistencies abound, for the radical socialist Mussolini was as much of a controlling dictator as was the fascist Mussolini (Megaro, 1938: 333). One belief in which he claimed to have kept faith over time was the necessity of ‘a great sacrifice of blood’ in order for Italy to achieve the greatness it deserved (Mussolini, 1928: 33). At the very least, his absence of ideology or core belief left him vulnerable to shifting sands – in his case the outbreak of the First World War and European socialist parties’ rallying to nationalism – for he displayed a propensity over his whole career for indecision and vacillation, and was frequently forced into decision-making by circumstance (R. De Felice, cited in Woolf, 1966: 190). Just as there were continuities linking Mussolini’s radical and renegade phases, it has been argued that there were several consistencies over the course of the career of Gustave Hervé, the French anti-nationalist turned patriot who opposed war but volunteered to fight during the First World War. Loughlin, arguing against common interpretations of the latter part of the former professor’s career as representing a complete rebirth, identified many constant political traits: patriotism, ethnocentrism, anti-Germanism, asceticism, anti-materialism, idealism, internationalism, as well as ambiguity in relation to anti-Semitism. Also, Hervé was always given to theatrical flourishes and conspiracies as a radical. Hervé himself lends some support to this interpretation, confessing to being a patriot – one prepared to lay down his life for the nation – prior to first becoming an anti-patriot (Hervé, 1911: 19). Even the provocative image accompanying his 1901 article, thought to be the French tricolour implanted in a dung heap, was less anti-nationalist than first thought: it was actually revealed to be a flag of the local regiment of troops commemorating a Napoleonic victory (Loughlin, 2001: 37, 10–12). Like some of the New York intellectuals (see below), he was a false prophet: recall his heroic prediction of the obsolescence of nationalism made just a few years before the First World War. Such disastrously wrong forecasts cannot but have raised internal doubts and challenged his self-belief. Continuities and flaws may also be apropos in terms of accounting for the behaviour of the Belgian Hendrik de Man, the former Marxist who cooperated with the Nazis after their invasion of Belgium during the Second World War. Given that he had no time for the Bolsheviks and their resolute opposition to

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a war in which he had participated, perhaps it was not surprising that de Man cooperated with the viscerally anti-Bolshevik Nazis (Dodge, 1966: 44). Even when committed to overturning the capitalist system, de Man remained a man of bourgeois tastes and trappings, the product of a thoroughly privileged upbringing in Antwerp courtesy of a well-heeled Flemish family (Pierson, 2001: 32; Dodge, 1966: 1). Like some other notable socialists who fought in the First World War, his background was one of affluence (White, 1992: 11). De Man may even have been motivated by a desire to remake the world in the image of his genteel home setting (Dodge, 1966: 5). According to Pierson, this bourgeois background shaped the kind of socialism de Man envisaged. It also clouded his judgement, leading him to understate the threat posed by European fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, and it was closely connected with his isolation from the very working class on whom his socialism was supposed to rest (Pierson, 2001: 32, 74). Indeed, like Mussolini, he had a derisive attitude to the people, whom he saw as obsessed with accumulating useless items and joining the ranks of the capitalist class (Dodge, 1966: 35–6, 100, 111). De Man also shared some of Mussolini’s political elasticity: his initial advocacy in 1903 of general and military strikes against the outbreak of war was quietly shelved in 1906 in favour of a vague commitment to the fostering of a proletarian consciousness (Dodge, 1966: 16). De Man himself could not even say why he decided to enlist in the war effort on 3 August 1914, though he rationalised it on the grounds that Belgium was the victim of an unjust attack: socialists in Belgium and anti-war socialists in Germany were united, he believed, in opposition to German militarism. To a degree this represented a point of similarity with the Frenchman Gustave Hervé, who even as a radical held strong anti-German sentiments that arguably helped him make the transition from dedicated anti-militarist to war enthusiast (Loughlin, 2003: 518). Awarded a British Military Cross and a Belgian Croix de guerre, de Man was cold-blooded and clinical when it came to doing what he was ordered to on the battlefield (Dodge, 1966: 39–40). The example of de Man in fact showed the folly – exhibited also by Parvus with different results – of approaching the question of the war from the standpoint of any one nation’s interests, as difficult as it is to establish the latter by consensus among the ruling class at any time. There was a certain naivety on the part of de Man that enabled him to believe that a Nazi victory would presage socialism in Belgium because it would signal the end of the rotting cadaver of the parliamentary system (Pierson, 2001: 69–70). This was somewhat reminiscent of the complacency in relation to

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Hitler shown by German Communist leaders who believed that their turn to rule would come after the Nazi leader. De Man was deluded enough to believe Lloyd George’s promise that the First World War would be the last war, in the process showing no real understanding of the imperialist drives to war inherent to capitalism (de Man, 1985: 282). On top of this, he displayed considerable illusions in the Wilson administration – which he was convinced was above Realpolitik in its involvement in the First World War – and became subsequently disillusioned when Wilsonian idealism did not live up to its promise in dealing with European national politics (Dodge, 1966: 47).

‘The god that failed’, and other disillusionments It is further apparent with renegades in different contexts that the ground was laid for their later trajectory by what they thought and did while they were still nominally radicals. Evolving global political economic contexts and state repression do not adequately capture the complexities of belief and action that contributed to the predicament of many former Trotskyists beleaguered by the one-time red army leader’s prognoses, including the prediction that capitalism would not survive the Second World War. The development of ostensibly socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and, to an extent, China also presented problems for Trotskyists. The Soviet Union was considered by many Trotskyists still to be a workers’ state, but these new regimes were all but identical in form to that of the mother country (Wald, 1987: 296). If these new regimes were socialist, then Trotskyists had some explaining to do in relation to how they came into being without the occurrence of revolution – or at least a proletarian one in the case of China – as had happened in Russia (Cliff, 1999: 16–18). The Palestine-born British socialist Tony Cliff, who developed the theory of ‘state capitalism’ to explain Russia under Stalin,5 5  Cliff had described the Soviet Union as ‘state capitalist’: far from workers owning the means of production, it was held in the hands of the state bureaucracy. Workers were exploited in the sense of being deprived of the fruits of their labour, while the Soviet Union in relation to the rest of the world was akin to an enterprise in a Western capitalist country that jostled with other capitals: forced to compete for survival, the exploitation of workers, and other forms of oppression, such as the overturning of laws facilitating abortion, were rational from the perspective of the interests of the new Russian ruling class for whom building up the country’s industrial base was top priority (Cliff, 1988). All this made a nonsense of notions that Russia was a ‘workers’ state’.

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remained a Trotskyist (of the unorthodox variety) throughout the post-war years and up until his death in 2000. But he identified four false predictions Trotsky had made before he was cut down by a Stalinist henchman in 1940: 1. that Stalinism would collapse at the conclusion of the war; 2. that capitalism was an ailing system incapable of revival, and which was destined to deteriorate further, in the process making more inroads into working-class living standards; 3. that, in line with the theory of permanent revolution, successful uprisings would occur in Third World countries only through the leadership of working-class power (cf. Cuba and China); and 4. that revolutionary socialism’s prospects were bright relative to those of Stalinism and reformism (Cliff, 1999: 8–12). All of these, of course, proved drastically wrong. It was in his conviction that a terrible collapse was bound to follow the great depression that Trotsky was most vulnerable to the accusation of economic fatalism (Callinicos, 1990b: 19, 20). He had also made the crucial mistake of believing that however bankrupt socialism in Russia had become, only a political and not a social revolution was required to remedy the situation (Trotsky, 1973: 38). The major flaw in this position, with significant consequences for the ability of Trotskyists to effect a dialogue with wider layers of the population, was the idea that in any conflicts between the West and Russia the left must side with the latter on account of its status as a ‘workers’ state’ (Macdonald, 1957: 18). Undoubtedly the flawed nature of such positions played a role in some Trotskyists’ decision to abandon not only Trotskyism but also Marxism, since the two were intimately related. Perhaps more importantly, as we have seen, numerous Trotskyists clung – farcically in some cases – to these predictions, as in the case of those who denied at the end of the war that hostilities had actually ceased (Callinicos, 1990b: 30). There were further dispiriting effects flowing from the tendencies towards splits and mutation, as well as organisational rigidity and hierarchy, in Trotskyist groups (Myers, 1977: ix–xii). Such flaws cannot have helped the cause of Marxists and the radical left more generally, since they only seemed to illustrate the poverty of their political praxis. Thus a central problem for these radicals – and one that they failed to surmount – was how to construct a viable defence of Marxism and Trotskyism in the wake of Stalinism. Ironically, retaining a left anti-communism worthy

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of its name required Marxism: the Marxist tools of critique would have enabled much more effective attacks on the nature of the Soviet Union, and allowed for a better comprehension of the actions and motivations of its ruling bureaucracy (see Harman, 1976). But the obsession with Stalinism flowed logically into anti-communism, in part because Stalinism was now regarded as a descendant of Bolshevism – and therefore of revolutionary Marxism. For New York intellectuals, this constituted a rebuttal of their stance that Stalinism was a betrayal of Marxism (Wald, 1987: 268). As we have already seen, there were sophisticated critiques of the Soviet Union mounted within the framework of classical Marxism, and political economists such as Michael Kidron had developed plausible hypotheses in relation to the surprising strength of post-war capitalism based, in part, on a reading of Marx himself as well as of specific Cold War geopolitical tendencies, including high arms spending (e.g. Cliff, 1988; Kidron, 1970). Reducing Stalinism to the root of all evils was a major part of the problem, and it, more than anything else, defined the New York intellectuals (Rahv, cited in Saunders, 1999: 162). As Callinicos observed, the strain of Stalinophobia that afflicted the likes of the Trotskyist cum Vietnam War supporter Max Shachtman was virulent enough to land him in the lap of the state department (Callinicos, 1990b: 73). The fascination with Stalinism in fact revealed a very limited understanding of the complexity of the post-1930s global political terrain. The problem, therefore, with the New York intellectuals lay not in their reappraisals per se, which were necessary in light of the successes of Stalinism, the post-war boom, and the failure of the Trotskyist groups to grow. Rather, the issue was their abrupt discarding of Marxism in the absence of any consideration of a viable alternative systemic theory (Wald, 1987: 309–10). This may be explained by their frequent lack of serious ideological engagement, reflected in the fact that among the New York intellectuals there were few theorists as opposed to commentators (Howe, 1970: 228). But, perhaps more importantly, they were characterised by aloofness from actual social movements and political organisations, not to mention the working class itself – all of which served to deprive them of certain disciplining effects on their political practice. Margolick commented that, as students, ‘their notion of direct action seems to have consisted of cutting class; when they took to the streets, it was usually to head to a bookstore’ (Margolick, 1998). As we noted earlier, intellectuals are more vulnerable to changing political environments than the more rooted proletariat. This may help explain the flippancy of some New York intellectuals in speedily abandoning their radical politics.

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As we shall see below, a comparable sense of superficiality is apparent in those who renounced ‘the god that failed’. Similar criticisms can be made of the Australian Trotskyist turned right-wing social democrat Jim McClelland, who displayed considerable flippancy in his split with Trotskyism, which occurred very suddenly: one night while on his way to a Trotskyist meeting, he got cold feet and decided against attending at the last minute. Thoughts of this kind had been circulating in his head for some time, but this was the eureka moment other renegades experienced (McClelland, 1988: 77). McClelland countered the Trotskyist position on the Second World War – that it was an imperialist war, but that socialists should nevertheless defend the world’s first workers’ state – by suggesting that the Trotskyists were content for Hitler to succeed in his goal of global domination, and he made the astonishing claim that Trotsky had failed to grasp the essence of fascism (McClelland, 1988: 46). The latter was a breathtakingly ignorant remark in light of Trotsky’s foresight in relation to the threat posed by Hitler and the Nazis (see Trotsky, 1971). Moreover, it is unclear why his not unreasonable disagreements with Trotskyist analyses necessitated a complete break with radical politics, systemic critiques of capitalism, and a revolutionary strategy – all the things in which he had invested up until then. The same willingness to throw away many years of commitment to radicalism – with little objective justification – was evident in those former worshippers of ‘the god that failed’. As a contributor to a book of the same title, the Hungarian-born novelist Arthur Koestler’s journey can – on the surface at least – be explained by reference to this most simple of phrases (Scammell, 2009: 101). Unlike some other ex-radicals in the Cold War years, Koestler was not a Trotskyist but a Stalinist, making him intrinsically flawed as a radical. One can only become disillusioned if one has illusions in the first place, and Stalinists in the West entertained plenty of these in relation to what was happening in Russia. They also were seemingly unmoved by the abominable advice issued from the Kremlin in relation to, for example, the Chinese revolution in the late 1920s (see Deutscher, 1970: 316–38). Moreover, Koestler, like some other renegades such as Mussolini, dealt with theory at a shallow level, having only skimmed Marxist texts in a desultory manner (Cesarani, 1998: 72). Rather than confront these flaws and examine the process by which they came to be fooled, the mea culpas of apostates such as Koestler were often accompanied by the disclaiming of personal responsibility for challenging political problems and the assigning of blame to an ideology, a party, or a ‘failed god’ (Thompson, 1969: 173).

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These lapsed socialists and Marxists proved very easy to budge from their radical perches: as Tariq Ali (2009) has pointed out, even if it is accepted that the Russian debacle demonstrated the failure of socialism, the switch to liberal capitalism hardly made sense given the vast and innumerable failures of the latter – evident in two world wars, the great depression, the rise of the Nazis, and colossal poverty and inequalities. The spirit of the Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett’s words, ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (cited in Žižek, 2008: 361), seemed utterly alien to these easily dissuaded radicals. The proponents of ‘the god that failed’ thesis were evidently far more forgiving of the sins – both of omission and commission – of capitalism. There is a sense here in which the renegade – particularly the variety who flips from creed to creed – is a rather flighty character. Many of the socialists who became virulently anti-socialist in the aftermath of Stalinism were in this category, incapable of interpreting one of the decisive events of the twentieth century other than in the one-dimensional terms of socialism’s failure. In fact, their solution to the problem was to stop worshipping God and to start condemning Satan (Hobsbawm, 2003: 217). Perhaps there are some personal failings that might account for why these ex-radicals fell victim to a Manichean view of the world and so readily accepted the equation of Stalinism with the socialism to which they had dedicated, in some cases, much of their lives. Christopher Hitchens cited the example of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) operative who, after his leader quipped in response to news that a pregnant woman had been killed in a blast that it was a case of two for the price of one, instantly deserted the organisation and became an informer for the British. This was his Kronstadt moment, it seems. While it is perfectly understandable to be repulsed by the inhumanity of such a remark, there is something decidedly odd about going from being a committed Irish republican to aiding the British in its imperialist domination of Ireland, and in such rapid fashion. If one despicable remark is all it takes, then there is arguably something more deeply flawed about the individual’s political makeup. And though the IRA operative might not have been a radical in the sense outlined at the beginning of the book,6 Hitchens claimed that the story of the left in the twentieth century is littered with such examples (Hitchens, 2010: 406–7). More than 6  On the other hand, Katsiaficas (1987: 36) includes the IRA among a group of leftist, radical, and militant organisations of the 1960s and 1970s that also included the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army of the US, the Red Army Faction in West Germany, and the Red Brigades in Italy.

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likely, he was speaking for himself, since he pointed to the film-maker Michael Moore’s defence of Osama bin Laden as innocent of the September 11 attacks until proven guilty as a pivotal moment in his breach with the left (cited in Hollier, 2010). Such epiphany-induced conversions are even less convincing than those drawn out over many years and involving incremental adjustments. They point to a slipshod political method, and suggest a lack of depth and rigour on the part of the radical concerned. Commenting on the startling shifts in the stances of the leading Bolshevik thinker Nikolai Bukharin in Russia in the years following the revolution – which saw him swing from the far left of the party to the extreme right over a number of years – Gluckstein suggests that two things were at work: the changing political context (the objective), and Bukharin’s political method (the subjective). In the case of the latter, he was particularly marked by an inability to think dialectically, which led him to overgeneralise, to think in a highly one-sided manner, and to ignore the nuances and contradictions present in political phenomena (Gluckstein, 1994: 58). There are some similarities here with the typical renegade, who also appears unable to see things dialectically, or to appreciate the complexity of events that had transpired in Russia as well as the broader contours of Cold War politics. An ignorance – or disdain – for the dialectic was, according to Trotsky, precisely the flaw that led astray numerous renegades and New York intellectuals, including Shachtman, the Trotsky translator turned McCarthyist Max Eastman, the Marxist philosopher turned FBI informant Sidney Hook, and the one-time Musteite who became a full-time CIA consultant James Burnham. Singling out Shachtman, Trotsky commented wryly that he may well have been convinced that understanding dialectics was not critical to the political conclusions one drew, but the political conclusions Shachtman drew demonstrated clearly his failure to understand the dialectic (Trotsky, 1973: 46–8). The one-sidedness of his thinking, for example, was evident in his declaration in 1950 – as the Western world was entering capitalism’s hitherto most successful phase (Maddison, 2001: 125) – that the capitalist mode of production and its parasitic owners were all but finished (Shachtman, 1962: 34). Burnham, meanwhile, has been described as abstract by a former fellow Trotskyist, who recalled disabusing him of the notion that workers were not racist. This was shocking news to Burnham, who was a workerist in the sense of believing in proletarian infallibility. This made him a ‘naive intellectual’, one who ‘could write abstract articles … He entered without any experience

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in life. No wonder he’s ended up all the way on the right now’ (cited in Le Blanc, 1995: 80). Eastman, too, had shown clear signs of one-sidedness in his thinking as a radical, particularly the idolatry he displayed towards Lenin, whom he credited with an extraordinary range of qualities (cited in Diggins, 1975: 22). There is at times a messianic tone to his description of the Bolshevik leader whose ‘monumental practicality’ and ‘resolute factualness … combined as almost never before with a glowing regard for poor and oppressed people, anxiety over their freedom, devotion to the idea of their entrance into power’ (Eastman, 1955: 10). Eastman even went as far as composing a poem in Lenin’s honour (cited in Diggins, 1975: 22). Lenin himself undoubtedly would have cringed at the thought of such cultish behaviour. Eastman had described Trotsky in similarly lovestruck terms (cited in Diggins, 1975: 24). In light of the polar opposite stands he came to adopt, he appeared a close fit with Deutscher’s characterisation of the Cold War renegade who saw the world in black and white terms, before seeing it in white and black terms (cited in Diggins, 1975: 424). Just as Eastman had worshipped Lenin as godlike, other ex-radical intellectuals had elevated socialism to the status of a god. Authors of The God That Failed evidently did not have a problem with viewing communism as heaven on earth when they were radicals (Crossman, 1949: 3). Impressionability similarly allowed the Cold War anti-radical converts to be easily swayed by certain texts: according to Wald (1987: 268), influential writers included Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon, 1940), George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932), and Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951). Thus Sidney Hook and Max Shachtman speak of the ‘totalitarian’ state uncritically (Hook, 1987: 31; Shachtman, 1962: 32). Reflecting on his flaws as a radical, Hook confessed to being guilty of uncritically accepting the claims of socialism (Hook, 1987: 175). The ex-Trotskyist literary critic Irving Howe similarly winced in retrospect at his own lack of capacity for independent thought, recalling the way in which he had fallen totally under the sway of socialist ideas (Howe, 1983: 36). Koestler – arguably in a category of his own when it comes to gullibility – perhaps went furthest in his admission by recalling the magic of being undisturbed by facts as he interpreted his world through the myopic lens of dialectical materialism (Koestler, 1949: 34). On the question of the grave mistakes committed by radicals such as himself, Hook goes on to list three reasons for what happened. The first was

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ignorance of the reality – and, importantly, an unwillingness to seek it out – of the Soviet Union. He insists that if only he and other New York intellectuals had known in the late 1920s and early 1930s what they knew just a few years later, then they would not have swallowed hook, line, and sinker what they read and were told. The second reason he puts forward for their failure to recant sooner relates to the mistakenly held assumption that capitalism was bound to implode through barbarism and war. Why or how they came to believe this is not explained. Third, the failure of the Soviet Union to organise a campaign to prevent Germany from the descent into fascist tyranny was also critical. It is easy to see the paltriness of this analysis: he paints a less than flattering – though probably caricatured – picture of himself in his radical phase. Also, one cannot help but wonder whether his weak critical thinking skills followed him into the conservative stanza of his career, providing a link between the two. While denying having exorcised any of his core beliefs, he admits not only to making major political misjudgements but also to being prey to personality flaws such as ‘dogmatism’. Thus when he visited the Soviet Union he went along completely convinced of the righteousness of the socialist path being trod by the party leadership. On top of this, socialists such as himself had prior to the First World War understood none of the pitfalls of state ownership (Hook, 1987: 31, 123–4, 175–6, 596–7). Regrets? He had a few, it seems. Like other renegades such as Adela Pankhurst Walsh (see below), Hook wrongly equated socialism with state control, failing to acquaint himself with the classical Marxist tradition and its much more sophisticated approach to what ought to comprise socialism vis-à-vis capitalism (Callinicos, 1991). What prevented Hook from accepting the true nature of the Soviet regime, he revealed in a striking passage, was the realisation that this would, ipso facto, mean a break with socialism, which in turn would unleash all manner of anxieties in him (Hook, 1987: 124). Thus the simplistic reduction of socialism to the Soviet Union was a major part of the explanation for his disavowal of the former. Max Eastman similarly underwent a Damascene conversion from communism to anti-communism that defied intellectual rigour. While his conversion predated the publication of The God That Failed, there are some similarities in the way in which his volte-face took the form of a ritual involving an idol’s fall from grace. And, like the French new philosophers heavily influenced by Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Eastman (cited in Hook, 1987: 141) was entranced by Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), although this might have had

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something to do with the Austrian economist’s flattering of the ex-socialist (see chapter 1). Eastman was able to pinpoint the exact moment when he outed himself as an anti-socialist. He recalled doubts accumulating over a number of years, but the watershed moment occurred at a cocktail party (!) in 1941 when he was asked whether, in spite of developments in Russia antithetical to democracy, he still considered himself a socialist. He answered firmly in the negative because by this stage things were worse than under the Tsar, and the Bolsheviks by their actions in 1917 were culpable (Eastman, 1955: 18–19). The revolution was now the equivalent of original sin, as he saw it. All the workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors who made the revolution were presumably just following the orders of Lenin and Trotsky, the basis of whose authority to command millions was not clear: Eastman thus forgot that revolutions are made ‘out of desire, not duty’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1990: 344). Yet Eastman went further by suggesting that the dictatorial methods of Lenin and his party were not wholly to blame for the disaster that eventually befell Russia. The problem was rather deeper and lay in tendencies innate to humans – including hierarchical and violent dispositions – and which were antithetical to Marxist principles of solidarity and equality. Any attempts to rid the world of class inequality would succumb to these tendencies. It was to this pitiful ahistorical human nature explanation to which Eastman had ultimately resorted (Eastman, 1955: 108).7 This was a steep fall for a writer once capable of quality scholarship and brave political stands. But this experience also raises numerous questions to which Eastman – along with many other renegades – does not really attempt to provide an answer, including how he managed to get it so wrong. At least Lewis Corey had the courage to try towards the end of his life to work out how he had fallen for Leninist dictatorship (cited in Corey, 1963: 128). Eastman instead ignored these questions, as well as the one about what should have been done in October 1917: abstracting the problem in the way he did nullified the need for any judgement about what happened in Russia and the various forces at play. Should the Bolsheviks have left the vacillating Kerensky government in power so that peasants and workers could continue to be liquidated on the battlefields of the First World War (the Bolsheviks were the only Russian party committed 7  There is evidence that violence in fact played little part in the primitive societies which account for the vast bulk of human history, and therefore it cannot be argued that there are dominating and exploitative tendencies inherent to humans (see Fromm, 1974).

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unequivocally to bringing the troops home), giving opportunist strongmen of the ruling class such as General Kornilov an open invitation to make their move? (Rees, 1991). On the question of whether there was an alternative course of action to that which the Bolsheviks took – or even what political options were available in 1917 – Eastman and other ex-communist renegades are curiously silent. He dismisses in an instant those who, in explaining the decline of the revolution and the rise of Stalinism, point to the primordial nature of Russia’s economy or the fact that it was hemmed in by Western powers keen to wipe out the virus of Bolshevism before it spread (Eastman, 1955: 108). Eastman’s complete change of heart is odd for another reason: he had visited the Soviet Union in the early 1920s and had seen at first hand its disturbing aspects. While he was indeed troubled by what greeted him there, as well as hopeful about other characteristics of it, what horrified him most was the emergence of a doctrinal Marxist religion that fused the church and state indissolubly. Yet in the years immediately following his trip he held doggedly to the view that the October revolution constituted a gargantuan human achievement. And so it was not until almost twenty years after embarking on that journey that he reached the conclusion that he could no longer be a socialist. As we saw in chapter 3, it was in 1933 that he first claimed to have expressed serious reservations about the Soviet state, but it was a further eight years (see above) before he finally disowned socialism. Eastman has no real explanation for why he wasted so much precious time (Eastman, 1955: 11–12, 14, 19). But Eastman was not alone in fiddling while Leningrad and Moscow burned. Arthur Koestler, too, was tortured by the question as to why it took him six long years of activity in the Communist Party before the realities of the regime finally hit home. As his biographer Cesarani (1998: 145) commented, notwithstanding everything he had seen and experienced in Russia in 1932– 33, Koestler remained faithful to the Soviet Union. Indeed, he showed more faith in this instance than he probably did in anything for the remainder of his life (see chapter 10). Koestler’s reckoning with the truth came almost twenty years after others had registered the realities of what was happening in Russia (see below). Koestler the dilettante more generally displayed some of the amateurism of other renegades, for he was spooked after his near-death experience in the Spanish Civil War and, given the stakes involved in being a communist at this political juncture, he therefore no longer wanted to be one (Cesarani, 1998: 142). The simple notion that Bolshevism equalled unbridled tyranny also resonated with the American former communist Lewis Corey. Liberated from his

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former identity as Louis Fraina, Corey the ex-Bolshevik partisan flipped over to the view that the Russian Revolution was imperilled from the very outset, and that a violent seizure of power – no matter how much it was undergirded by support and participation by the majority of the population – would only ever result in distilled dictatorship. Employing the baby and bathwater analogy, Buhle argues that Corey became convinced that the baby was possessed, meaning that a new baby had to be adopted: in his case the infant was liberalism. Again, this displayed little understanding of the material conditions in which the Russian Revolution was lost. The analysis that followed was one in which the world was interpreted as the opposite of what it was only a short time ago, with little allowance for nuances and subleties – the very things which Marxism is often lampooned for lacking. Thus, in the quarter century prior to his death in 1953, adoration turned into rancour as Corey violently opposed the political convictions he had spent his life eloquently defending (Buhle, 1995: 157, 148). Radicals like Corey who converted to more conservative ideologies seemingly because of what happened in the Soviet Union often adopted the most clichéd postures. A case in point is Will Herberg, the Marxist and atheist turned Jewish theologian, who regarded socialists in his post-Marxist phase as totally amoral and as people guided in their judgement of right and wrong only by the edicts of the party leadership (Herberg, 1989a: 14). His flawed caricature of Marxism was on display again when he described economic forces as the determinant of anything and everything, the equivalent of divine intervention for keepers of the faith (Herberg, 1989b: 23). This stylised portrayal of Marxism left out the variable critical to classical Marxism, human agency, and did not allow for the array of possible outcomes depending on the intervention of political actors (see chapter 9). If Herberg saw Marxism in this way, is there any wonder that he rebelled against it? Moreover, as is the case with other renegades, the question arises as to why he did not renounce it earlier. Probably this was because, like other renegades such as Pankhurst Walsh (see below), he entertained significant illusions about Russia post-1917. As late as 1925, years after the devastating effects of civil war, famine, foreign intervention, and deindustrialisation had taken their toll on the new state, Herberg argued that the pay and conditions of miners in Russia were superior to those of their brethren in the US. He maintained in dramatic style that oppression and exploitation were rapidly being sent to the dustbin of history as ‘all toilers, young and old alike, are engaged, shoulder to shoulder, in the gigantic … inspiring task of laying the foundation of a new society’ (cited in

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Ausmus, 1986: 5). Herberg, it seemed, had taken a very long time to absorb what had happened in Russia: as late as 1934, on the seventeenth anniversary of the revolution, he was enamoured of Stalin’s five-year plan and the policy of forced collectivisation, which he felt was a necessary measure (cited in Diggins, 1975: 154). Moreover, not unlike some deluded Trotskyists cited earlier, Herberg became quite giddy as he held to a rather catastrophist view of the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street crash that began on 24 October 1929, believing that it was the beginning of the end for capitalism (Ausmus, 1986: 14). Another false prophet, Herberg exhibited some of the same weaknesses in method of other renegades, including the tendency to one-sided thinking and carelessness in analysis. What is evident in many of these cases is a lack of reflection upon what it says about them that they could have been so easily taken for a ride, as many of them clearly believed they were. But perhaps more importantly, what does it reveal about them that they could now be vitriolic opponents of what they once defended so vehemently? Among the renegades surveyed here there is no self-examination of this kind. Commentary tends to be confined to selfblame for believing such absurdities in the first place. The features of Marxism that made it so beguiling are rarely revealed. Some of the psychological and personality characteristics bound up with such complete rebirths are explored in chapters 9 and 10. But here it is important to see the flaws in the radical that allow their thinking to be so easily transformed in fundamental ways. Take Sidney Hook’s claim that the emerging bipolar world allowed only two possibilities – backing the Soviet Union’s totalitarianism or lining up with, however critically, Western liberal democracy (cited in Wald, 1987: 293). This Manichean formula only revealed the limited range of Hook’s thinking: surely there were options for radicals other than choosing between two conservatisms – the pro-market conservatism of the West and the Marxist–Leninist religious conservatism of the East (see Harris, 1968). The International Socialists, as we noted, found it possible to reject Trotsky’s assessment of the Soviet Union as a ‘workers’ state’ – arguing instead that it was a form of state capitalism – without junking Marxism and their opposition to Western capitalism: ‘Neither Washington, nor Moscow but International Socialism’ became their leitmotiv (Cliff, 1982). This enabled opposition to both the American invasion of Vietnam and the Soviet aggression against Afghanistan – comparable attempts by rival imperialists to police their spheres of the globe. Even the British socialist turned anti-communist Malcolm Muggeridge, in one of his clearer-sighted moments, managed to

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develop a more sophisticated position by drawing attention to the likenesses in both hemispheric systems, thereby avoiding uncritically siding with the West (cited in Hunter, 1980: 192–3). The Stalinophobia of many New York intellectuals left them seemingly oblivious to any alternative to liberal capitalism and the dictatorship of the manager. The flawed equation of Stalinism with Leninism was not peculiar to former American radicals. The British-Australian communist turned Nazi sympathiser Adela Pankhurst Walsh came to see Bolshevism in the late 1920s as dedicated to eliminating free thought in every area of life, including politics, religion, philosophy, and industry (Pankhurst Walsh, 1929: 1). The Australian branch of the Women’s Guild of Empire, which she founded in 1929, was stridently opposed to communism, described by the guild as a ‘doctrine of blood and tyranny’ (Women’s Guild of Empire, n.d.a: 1). But it was hard to take her seriously, given that in 1916 she had described socialism as ‘the only thing’ (Pankhurst Walsh, 1916). Indeed, Pankhurst Walsh was only disillusioned because of the profound illusions she displayed in relation to the state of Russia as late as 1919, when in language that betrayed the one-sidedness of her thinking, she claimed that strikes had ceased, women and children were on the cusp of liberation, and production was expanding ‘wonderfully, joyously, until, with open hands, the Russian workers offer to those still in the hungry, bleak thrall of capitalism, their stores of food and clothes’ (cited in Coleman, 1996: 88). She was in fact seriously misguided. Russia in 1919 had been far from the communist nirvana she depicted after civil war, famine, foreign invasion, and deindustrialisation, which constituted together a deep economic, social, and political catastrophe (Rees, 1991: 29–45). By 1920, when the civil war was coming to a close, there was a well-founded belief in parts of the Marxist left that the workers’ state, the proletariat itself, and the revolution were already hopeless causes (Gluckstein, 1994: 32, 44). In 1921, editors of the Workers’ Council in the US had concluded something very similar about the trumping of socialism in Russia and the wholesale destruction of the workers’ state – just two years after Pankhurst Walsh had waxed lyrical about the country (cited in Weinstein, 1967: 256). Perhaps this was too hasty a judgement, given that the prospects of socialism in Germany – one of the countries in which the Bolsheviks had placed hope that it might provide economic respite to Russia, so long as it underwent a workers’ revolution as opposed to its actual bourgeois republican one – were not quite extinguished until at least 1923 (Harman, 1997). And Pankhurst Walsh could not have been expected to

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be up to speed with every development in Russia. But she should at least have been abreast of the seriousness of the problems that made a mockery of her portrait of the country. Like the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, she was unable to think dialectically and to see the opportunities, challenges, and contradictions of the emerging state. A starry-eyed impression lulled her into a false sense of security, so that when the truth finally emerged she was pushed over the edge into apostasy. In assigning the blame for everything to communism, Stalinism, and Bolshevism, Pankhurst Walsh was guilty of the tendency described by Thompson of the renegade to attribute all responsibility to a failed god rather than confronting personally difficult and complex political situations. She was not inclined to look to her own faults, including her assumption that state ownership was the beginning and end of socialism. Flaws in her thinking as a radical were therefore again critical to her later digressions. Just as some former French Maoists seemingly needed only to be acquainted with Solzhenitsyn to become new philosophers (see below), all Adela appeared to need was evidence of the state of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s in order to depart from a lifetime’s commitment to radicalism. Recall the brazen flippancy of her statement about following ‘other paths’ after her initial chosen path of communism was deemed to have failed (Pankhurst Walsh, 1938a: 29). In addition to these methodological weaknesses, there were some political continuities between Pankhurst Walsh’s different phases. Among the most important of these was her support for the white Australia policy, which speaks to her entrenched racism.8 Her advocacy of a ‘real Anglo-Saxon alliance’ between Britain and Germany during the Second World War was partly grounded in eugenics and racial purity, which help explain her support for the Nazis (Pankhurst Walsh, n.d.c; Coleman, 1996: 79; Damousi, 1993: 425, 432). Being a racist may not have prevented her from identifying as a radical in earlier years, but if there were some important continuities through the 8  The Immigration Restriction Act (1901), known as the white Australia policy and enacted after Australia was federated as a nation in 1901, restricted immigration to white Europeans (predominantly British and Irish) and allowed for the deportation of non-whites such as Pacific Islanders who had been imported into Australia in the late 1800s as virtual slaves. The policy – administered via a discriminatory language test barring anyone who could not speak a European language nominated by the officer giving the test – reflected Australian ruling-class agendas, such as maintaining the sanctity of white British capitalism in an Asian region, building a racially homogenous society in order to guard better against social unrest, and developing a modern economy with local labour (Griffiths, 2006).

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different phases of her life, then her move to the right becomes less of a leap than first thought. Moreover, there were enduring attitudes on her part to women’s issues and sexuality (Dickenson, 2006: 154). Even as a communist she expressed opposition to greater labour force participation by women – their proper place being in the home – and there was almost a puritanical streak in her views on sexuality, which she believed capitalism had corrupted. Communism, as she saw it, would rescue women from wanton desire as well as from prostitution (Macintyre, 1998: 26, 89). Such views were by no means commonplace in the socialist movement at the time (e.g. Kollontai, 1971). They did sit comfortably, however, with her later pro-family conservatism. It is notable that the two aspects of her politics present throughout her radical phase – racist support for the white Australia policy, and a conservative position on women – were expressed in the politics of the Australian branch of the Women’s Guild of Empire, which aimed, inter alia, to bolster the family as an institution, and to ensure the continued development of Australia within the bounds of the British Empire (Women’s Guild of Empire, n.d.b.: 1). Adela’s fellow Australian communist turned fascist Stephensen was also a racist radical. The Oxford Rhodes scholar advanced arguments about imperialist economic competition underpinning the First World War, and predicted that the rest of the twentieth century would be characterised by pitched battles between the colonised peoples and their colonisers. Yet this was something Munro argued was critical to Stephensen’s later nationalist and fascist views because, while he stood up for the rights of Aboriginal Australians early on, he believed that socialism provided the only effective insurance against the white race being usurped by a ‘rising tide of colour’ (Munro, 1984: 38–9; Munro, 2002). Witness also his unfounded confidence – expressed in the mid-1920s – in the imminence of the revolution, due in less than two years’ time (cited in Munro, 1984: 38). Such false prophecies by radicals, as we have seen, have often been accurate guides to their future waywardness.

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7 Overstated radicals

The radical and renegade thus may not always be the indivisible species they first appear to be. A closer inspection of the radical’s politics can reveal important continuities through the years, or at least flaws in their politics that could conceivably explain their affinity with conservatism, if not their apostasy. In other cases perhaps the radicalism of the individual in question is simply overstated. Norman Podhoretz, for instance, is regarded as one of American neo-conservatism’s key ideologues (Wald, 1987: 350). Yet he started out not as a Trotskyist, as has been claimed, nor even as a radical or a Marxist: rather, he started on the right, moved to the left in the 1960s, and then reverted to right-wing politics (see King, 2004: 251; Podhoretz, 1979: 16). According to Hitchens, what Podhoretz had in common with other defectors was his tendency to overstate the extent of his previous radicalism: he had been, in reality, no more than a liberal Democrat (Hitchens, 1986: 54). Before his shift to the left in the 1960s, Podhoretz had been deployed by the US army to Germany to oversee a compulsory lecture series on ‘Democracy vs. Communism’. This suggested strong antecedents to his anti-communism. In a long confessional written in 1963 in the self-indulgent style that was to become a hallmark of his, he had admitted his racism as a young Brooklyn boy towards black Americans, about whom he asked of himself: ‘Now that Brooklyn is behind me, do I fear them and envy them and hate them still? The answer is yes, but not in the same proportions and certainly not in the same way.’ Mixed race couples, meanwhile, still sickened him to the core (Podhoretz, 1963: 99, 100). On the defining issue of Vietnam, Podhoretz had only privately been critical of the war. In any case, his position was essentially

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dovish: rather than seeing the war as an unconscionable crime, he regarded it as antithetical to American interests and as unwinnable (Dorrien, 1993: 161). Hitchens (1986: 56) rightly judges his post-radical Why We Were in Vietnam to be an apologia for American actions in Vietnam, given that the book’s central premise is to legitimise the best of US intentions that foundered on a less idealistic reality (Podhoretz, 1982). Podhoretz’s fellow neo-conservative Irving Kristol has had much made of the youthful Trotskyism that predated his middle-age Reaganism (Krauthammer, 2005). But in reality he was a member of a group representing the ideas of the Russian revolutionary leader probably only for a matter of months. Kristol never thought of himself as an ex-Trotskyist, since the experience meant little to him (cited in King, 2004: 256). Seemingly a conservative even as a radical, Kristol always appeared to be on the right regardless of the political ideology to which he was attached at the time (Hodgson, 2009). Some have gone as far as arguing that, even as a Trotskyist, he was never a Marxist (DeMuth and Kristol, 1995: xiv). This proposition at face value seems untenable given that Trotsky was first and foremost an exponent of Marxism. But it might have some truth in the sense that what motivated Kristol principally as a leftist was opposition to Stalinism, which Trotsky personified (Selznick, 1995: 20–1). Kristol often did not feel at home among the Trotskyists, who were much more liberal in their attitudes on questions like intimate relationships: Kristol, by his own admission thoroughly bourgeois in this area, conducted a very traditional courtship in relation to his future wife Gertrude Himmelfarb (cited in McCarthy, 2009). Fellow New Yorker James Burnham similarly sought to downplay in retrospect the extent to which he was committed to Trotskyism and Marxism up to the early 1940s. He also denies being a ‘typical’ Trotskyist: he was unconvinced, as we have already seen, of the merits of dialectical materialism. What drew him to Trotskyism were the seismic events of the great depression and the ascendancy of the Nazis, which persuaded him that capitalism was imperilled, and that socialism offered the only viable alternative. The Trotskyists, with their revolutionary organisations, offered the strategy to make it a reality (Burnham, cited in Smant, 1992: 14). This fits with Diggins’ characterisation of Burnham as someone attracted to Marxism more out of political exasperation at the negative consequences of liberal capitalism than out of any great belief in the former, which if true only raises more questions about his subsequent reversion to the latter. In addition, he felt a great deal of unease about core tenets of Marxism, including egalitarianism, social justice, and a classless society (Diggins, 1975: 169).

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The overstatement of radicals in this period is not confined, however, to Kristol and Burnham. The number of American Trotskyists who went on to become neo-conservatives, for instance, has been subject to considerable exaggeration, and some neo-conservatives have mistakenly been described as having Trotskyist heritage (King, 2004). Many prominent neo-conservatives, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Henry Jackson, Joshua Muravchik, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz, were never Trotskyists (Seymour, 2008: 146). As one neo-conservative has admitted, some fellow ideologues were one-time Trotskyists or Marxists, but most were merely disgruntled right-wing Democrats who reacted badly to the party’s apparent leftward shift in the 1970s (Boot, 2004: 20). It has been suggested that key members of the New York intellectual cohort were not very radical at all, their political activity being confined to esoteric discussion in cafeterias rather than genuine class conflict (Margolick, 1998). Across the Atlantic, Labour politician turned fascist Oswald Mosley is another example of a renegade with a questionable radical past. Indeed, it is open to question whether Mosley can be classified as an ex-radical at all. Mosley was in fact a British Conservative Party politician before moving to the left and joining the Labour Party. Mosley claimed to have been drawn initially to the Conservatives over their patriotic chest-beating during the First World War (Mosley, 1968: 90). Mosley had a great-great-grandfather who had been a Whig member of Parliament during the historic electoral reform of 1832 (White, 1992: 13), but his landed aristocratic background made the Conservative Party a natural home (Cross, 1961: 9, 11). Elected to Parliament in 1918, his maiden speech evinced few signs of radical socialist politics: it attacked bureaucracy and sang the praises of private enterprise and individual initiative. There were few signs here of his later affiliation with socialists in the Labour Party (White, 1992: 31–2). Indeed, as a Conservative Party MP he promoted his own curious brand of political philosophy, ‘socialistic imperialism’. This significantly predated Mussolini and Hitler’s espousal of such ideas (Mosley, 1968: 91). Racism and imperialism may thus have been two enduring traits in Mosley. His leisurely pursuits and hobnobbing tendencies also earmarked him as a man of privilege, as he was frequently spotted swanning about in fast cars, at polo games, and at parties (White, 1992: 37). His own father described him as a spoilt parasite (cited in McIntyre, 1988: 49). Mosley’s break with the Conservative Party occurred because of its heinous crimes in Ireland, and its betrayal of the war generation (Mosley, 1968: 164). After his return at the 1922 election as an Independent, he later joined the

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Labour Party. Even then, however, there was the possibility of him throwing his lot in with the Liberals. It is highly probable that his decision not to do so was, in addition to any sense that the older establishment parties were unsuited to the times, borne partly of pragmatic calculations about his political career. For the balance of power in the House of Commons was shifting – Labour won government for the first time in 1924, convincing Mosley that it could be a vehicle for the achievement of his leadership dreams – and his own support was declining among Conservative voters in his electorate of Harrow (Mosley, 1982: 49–51; McIntyre, 1988: 49). It was partly on these grounds that Trotsky cuttingly dismissed Mosley as an ‘aristocratic coxcomb’ with only careerist motivations for jumping ship to Labour (cited in Mosley, 1982: 159). The socialism to which he committed as a Labour politician after being elected at a by-election in Smethwick in 1926 was notably vague (Mosley, 1968: 172). His Keynesian proposals, first advanced at an Independent Labour Party Conference and Summer School in 1925, were not too radical for Lord Keynes himself to endorse (Mosley, 1982: 61, 127).1 But this was the peak of Mosley’s left socialism before he ventured back to the right. Moreover, his socialism incorporated the worship of heroic leaders, prefiguring his later fascism (McIntyre, 1988: 55). His true colours were shown during the 1926 general strike, which Mosley strenuously opposed for reasons including its apparent unconstitutionality and because it interfered with his views about how change ought to be achieved (Skidelsky, 1975: 156). His decision to leave Labour and later to form his own fascist movement must therefore be understood against this background of conservatism and his tendencies to ideological and political manoeuvring (see chapter 9). But it is that same background of conservatism that makes him out of place in a group of First World War-era renegades comprising Mussolini and de Man (Loughlin, 2003: 516).

Flawed 1960s radicals: gulags, radical stuntmen, and other maladies The French radicals who re-emerged as new philosophers in the mid1970s had, like the contributors to The God That Failed, shifted between 1  Keynes in his most radical mood endorsed the ‘socialisation’ of investment if necessary to address capitalism’s destructive boom-slump patterns, but he mistakenly believed that this could be achieved incrementally without serious negative consequences for capital (Harman, 1996: 48–9).

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fundamentally different systems of thought and practice too easily to be credible. As with the latter, evidence of events in Eastern Europe – on the surface, at least – smoothed the process of transition considerably. Seemingly the straw that broke the camel’s back was Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which by detailing the scale of the Soviet labour camp system sent the left into a tailspin of self-doubt and questioning (Paras, 2006: 81). With the French publication of the book in June 1974, Berman suggests that probably no piece of literature has had more influence on political attitudes and events in such a short space of time (Berman, 1996: 274). Just as the authors of The God That Failed only needed to have the lid lifted on what was happening in Eastern Europe to renounce radicalism, Badiou comments that coming into contact with the work of Solzhenitsyn was all some former Maoist radicals required in order to embrace conservatism (Badiou, 2005: 134–5). Of course, it was more complex than this: the pen and the sword came together, with Solzhenitsyn’s work coinciding with events in China and Cambodia to challenge their socialist ideals (Bourg, 2007: 251). But the fragility of their radical carapaces is portrayed well in Badiou’s remark that one card did not work, so they simply drew another (Badiou, 2008: 130). Solzhenitsyn himself became a god of sorts to the new philosophers who assumed control of the cultural and analytical pages of Le Monde – after first having rejected left Marxist critiques of Stalinism (Ali, 2005: 341). Moreover, the crimes of the latter had been known for decades, and The Gulag Archipelago unveiled few things that were not already common knowledge (Seymour, 2008: 166). It was not, according to Christofferson (2004: 113), a ‘revelatory text’, with its influence stemming instead from the French Communist Party’s attacks on the book and its author. Its relevance to the class struggle in France also was not immediately clear. But for ex-Maoists there were deeper flaws, in particular their illusions about the regimes in China and Vietnam. The Maoist revolution of 1949, a peasant-based nationalist revolution, was in fact neither socialist nor Marxist in its intentions or results (Harris, 1978). When the truth finally dawned on them, it had a traumatic effect (Harman, 1988: 348). The same can be said of those American radicals such as Ronald Radosh, Peter Collier, and David Horowitz, who were profoundly dismayed by the turn of events in Cuba: they had misunderstood from the beginning the nature of the revolution – carried out by an elite few guerrilla fighters, rather than the mass of the population – whose leadership was dominated by the anti-communist Fidel Castro, a man content to run his own nationalist fiefdom rather than instigate international

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socialist revolution (see Cliff, 1986: 13–15; Anderson, 2010). But it was unclear why the retraction of support for the East European regimes, China, or Cuba required the abandonment of well-founded criticisms of Western capitalism and imperialism (Harman, 1988: 348). Maoism had also been a previous attraction for the ex-Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, for whom the nauseating sight of the chairman pressing the flesh with Richard Nixon in 1972 was too much to stomach – which if true only raises the question as to why Cleaver later sought to represent the party of Nixon in congress! (Rout, 1991: 161). Cleaver is a renegade with an especially chequered radical past and one who displayed important continuities between the different phases of his life. It was apparent during his time as a leading member of the Black Panther Party that he was comfortable with hierarchy and authoritarianism, essential – though not sufficient – conditions for his later association with elite Republican politics. Upon his return from a trip to Vietnam, Cleaver concocted the story that he had been authorised to act as sole mediator in all communications between the Vietnamese and American anti-war and anti-racist movements, insisting that without his imprimatur visits to the country by leftists were impermissible (Dellinger, 1993: 255). More generally, Cleaver could only have been disillusioned by his living experience in Cuba and the Soviet Union (see chapter 4) if he had held illusions about their socialist qualities in the first instance. He was naive enough to believe initially that the Cuban state under Castro would assist the Panthers’ struggle for black power. But no sooner had he arrived in Cuba than he was disabused of this notion, as he discovered the racist nature of the regime and its underrepresentation of blacks (Cleaver and Gates Jr, 1997: 296, 302–3). Furthermore, what is odd is the way in which Cleaver had first been greatly impressed with what he observed in places like Cuba, the Soviet Union, and North Korea – in whose ruler Kim Il-sung (the godfather of one of his children) Cleaver had glimpsed extraordinary capacity for insight, strategising, and tactical nous – before he cottoned on to their democratic deficits and turned against them. From a rose-tinted perspective he would lurch to an equally lopsided dismissal of Cuba as an ‘Alcatraz with sugar cane’. There is evidence here of the lack of capacity for dialectical thinking apparent in other renegades including Pankhurst Walsh and some Cold War ex-radicals: indeed Cleaver admitted that he might have opined on ‘the god that failed’ if others had not beaten him to it (Cleaver, 1979: 122, 132, 187). There are some parallels here with fellow former Maoist, the Frenchman Bernard-Henri Lévy, who from being a cynic towards dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn and a

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defender of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc went on to become in the same year (1975) a staunch critic of the regimes in these countries, while at the same time expressing new-found admiration for The Gulag Archipelago (Seymour, 2008: 167). While perhaps a Maoist, Lévy was not all that politically aggressive, having never favoured a revolutionary transformation of society. His image as a representative of upset radicals was therefore selfcultivated and contrived (Christofferson, 2004: 97). This suggests that Cleaver’s flaws were partly rooted in Maoism itself. In one sentence in Soul on Ice, Cleaver professed his desire to become a ‘Mao Mao’ seven times consecutively (Cleaver, 1968: 19). Apart from indicating his eccentricity (see further chapter 10), this statement of Cleaver’s is open to multiple interpretations.2 What is clear, though, is that his attraction to Maoism was shared by the Panther leadership, which sought to apply relevant aspects of the Chinese ruler’s politics to their own battles (Seale, 1978: 160). Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale distributed Mao’s Little Red Book to students from outside the gates of the University of California, Berkeley campus, advocating that free speech activists such as Mario Savio take a leaf out of the book of the red guards (Seale, 1970: 103). In the process, the Panther leaders – like the French ex-Maoists described above – showed little understanding of the Maoist revolution. They also ignored the insidious role played in the cultural revolution of 1966–76 by the red guards, many of whom were in fact bitter enemies of free speech (Chang and Halliday, 2005: 506). This attraction to Maoism among Panther leaders was consistent with their top-down methods, reflected in Newton’s assumption of the title ‘Supreme Commander’ (Cox, 2001: 121). Increasingly adopting Mao’s organisational approach as well as his rhetoric, the mass expulsion of twenty-one New York members in 1969 came with the justification that, in the pecking order of the party, the individual was always subordinate to the collective, the minority subordinate to the majority, the lower level subordinate to the higher, and the mass of the membership subordinate to the Central Committee (cited in Cleaver, 1979: 112; Rout, 1991: 145). Furthermore, the militarism and violence associated with Maoism appealed to lumpenproletarians such as Cleaver, a rapist and convicted attempted 2  The reference to ‘Mao Mao’ could possibly be: Cleaver simply paying homage to the chairman; a take-off of the Mau Maus, an anti-colonial Kenyan movement of the 1950s and 1960s; an allusion to the New York street gang of the 1950s going by the same name as the latter; or a reference to the Samoan honeyeater, the maomao.

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murderer (Rout, 1991: 178). Newton – initially at least – and H. Rap Brown were fervent supporters of Mao’s famous adage that ‘[p]olitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ (cited in Cleaver, 1969a: 85; Brown, 1969: 144; Mao, 1938).3 Having once believed in the transformative power – equivalent to large-scale military battles abroad – of a single bullet, Cleaver was later criticised for taking the party in a militaristic direction against Newton’s wishes (Kauffman and Scarlett, 1986; Hilliard, 2006: 127, 128). In comparison to the more conservative traditional black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr, the Panthers – founded in Oakland in October 1966 – represented a radical and anti-capitalist alternative that understood the limits of both black nationalism and the scope for peaceful change within the system: proletarian internationalism and class struggle were guiding ideological forces in the party (Seale, 1970: 92–3; Cleaver, 1979: 87). The party undoubtedly contained many activists dedicated to ending racism in America.4 Offering heroic and militant resistance to a racist American state, their emphasis on self-defence through arming themselves – in part, a product of a historical constitutional contingency in the US – no doubt stemmed from the need to mount a defence against the violence visited upon blacks by the police: such was the original motivation behind the establishment of the party by Seale and Newton (Seale, 1978: 153). But it was a flawed strategy that would never have succeeded against the armed might of the US state – a fact reflected in the distribution of casualties between Panthers and police heavily skewed in the latter’s favour (Young, 1977: 243). An attempt to ally with the economically oppressed white working class against the capitalist social relations whose wheels in the US were historically greased in large part by the exploitation of black labour was never made with any seriousness. The party was characterised by a vanguard mentality (Cleaver, 1979: 90). This in turn militated against building a mass working-class membership. In addition, Panther leaders, including Cleaver, entertained a rather rosy view of the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat (Rout, 1991: 141). The party leadership also tended to be dedicated and brave, but young and 3  Newton later dropped his obsession with guns to focus more on uniting the left (Young, 1977: 244). 4  By 1969, the Panthers had chapters in forty-five cities across the US. Membership estimates at the party’s height range from 2,000 to 5,000, though this number would undoubtedly have been far higher if it had permitted whites to join (Katsiaficas, 1987: 74; Pearson, 1994: 173; Murray, 2005: 135).

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politically inexperienced (Churchill, 2001: 113). In sum, it was not just state repression, but also internal factors that helped kill the Panthers (see Johnson III, 1998). But Cleaver had his own peculiar flaws. The radical Cleaver was often thuggish, puerile, and misogynistic, and his socialist politics were decidedly vague (Rout, 1991: 43). Cleaver had helped call the ‘Preerection Day’ celebration, in which he advocated ‘pussy power’ – a sexist slogan used widely in the party leadership and even by some Panther women, and which limited female members’ role to providing sexual support to male members – and alliances with people in the mould of the infamous prohibition-era criminal Machine Gun Kelly. He also threatened to assassinate the children of San Francisco’s Democratic Mayor Joseph Alioto, and was alleged to have participated in the torture of another Black Panther member, who subsequently required psychiatric treatment (Pearson, 1994: 150, 162, 163; Jones and Jeffries, 1998: 33; Murch, 2010: 264, 233n.). Cleaver’s leadership of the Panthers during Seale and Newton’s absence in 1968 had not been a success: his hyper-militancy, his erratic anarchism, and his misogyny (see below) combined to destabilise the party. It was the police who murdered Bobby Hutton, but it had been Cleaver’s idea to ambush them in the lead-up to the gun-fight that put Hutton in the firing line on that fateful night of 6 April 1968 (Murch, 2010: 165–6). Cleaver was highly misogynistic (another reason for later finding comfort among Republicans and Christian fundamentalists!). Prior to joining the Panthers in February 1967, he was a rapist who confessed to using the crime against white women in retribution for centuries of black oppression (Jezer, 1992: 218–19; Cleaver, 1968: 14–15).5 The rapes allegedly continued during his time as a Panther (Newton, cited in Hilliard, 2006: 155–6). The ferociously jealous Cleaver also beat his wife and Panther Communications Secretary Kathleen Neal, and had her lover disappear (Marvin X, 2009: 38–9). None of this prevented Cleaver from lecturing other party members about the wrongs of exploiting Panther sisters (cited in Matthews, 1998: 282–3). More generally, he gave the impression that the task of liberating blacks was the exclusive preserve of men, with women relegated to the status of followers (Roszak, 1972: 65). In this sense, Cleaver was at home in the Panthers, whose culture of misogyny has been the subject of some scholarly and popular discussion (e.g. Jones and Jeffries, 1998: 33; Rhodes, 2007: 107–10; Matthews, 1998). 5  Cleaver first perfected his rape technique on black women in the ghettoes (Cleaver, 1968: 14).

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Despite claiming to have mended his chauvinist ways once he was married and had children, the so-called Christlam church (see chapter 10) Cleaver founded in 1980 espoused deeply sexist ideas at the same time as he mounted a defence of wife-batterers (Rout, 1991: 257). One of Cleaver’s close acquaintances and admirers was the Yippie turned Yuppie Jerry Rubin.6 While undoubtedly an original and witty radical in the 1960s, Rubin was also a deeply flawed one. Jensen and Lichtenstein (1995) point to the continuity evident throughout Rubin’s three phases – the radical, consciousness-raising, and capitalist chapters of his life – as he sought to utilise the media to convey himself to the public through extreme, attentiongrabbing methods. Rubin’s preference was for individualistic stunts and acts of political theatre aimed at garnering media coverage, rather than mass organising and patient movement building. He believed that spontaneous radical and militant action could unleash the forces necessary to realise lasting change. Indeed, history could literally be changed in a second (Rubin, 1970: 37). True as this sometimes may be, where this left activists in terms of planning and strategy was unclear. But for Rubin, stunts such as fronting a congressional hearing in an American revolutionary uniform could be effective in defeating repression (cited in Lasch, 1980: 83).7 His bent for theatre was partly due to the fact that the printed word could not be relied upon, since he believed people did not like to read (cited in Halstead, 1978: 165). Not surprisingly fellow activists chided him for believing that such spontaneous acts of rebellion could overturn apparatuses of the state and the economic power of capital, when he should have been linking up with working people in factories and offices, where real power lay (Peck, cited in Levy, 1994: 55). Needless to say, political theatre was an essential feature of the carnival politics of the 1960s. But denying the power of the printed word was deeply misguided if only for its ignorance of the fact that the interests of capital and 6  Cleaver wrote the introduction to Rubin’s Do it! Scenarios of the Revolution (Cleaver, 1970: 7). In turn, Rubin exclaimed: ‘We Are All Eldridge Cleaver’ (Rubin, 1970: 245). Cleaver also nominated Rubin as his vice-presidential running mate when the former ran for president with the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968. The relationship between the two subsequently soured, however, as Cleaver accused Rubin and other white radicals of endorsing the psychedelic drug culture (cited in Rout, 1991: 148–9). This was rather hypocritical of Cleaver, given his own predilections for drugs, which may have cost him his life (see chapter 10). 7  When he was subpoenaed to appear before the HUAC in August 1966, Rubin donned an American revolutionary soldier costume to highlight the continuities between himself and the republic’s founders (Rubin, 1976: 78).

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the state are served by books, articles, and news media consumed by the masses in large quantities, demanding in response radical opposition through written analyses and calls to action. Moreover, written reflection and discussion, rather than theatre, was required in the wake of the 1960s when society moved to the right. Such points were ignored by Rubin and his collaborator Abbie Hoffman who revelled in media celebrity, in the process tailoring their stunts to the mass media’s wafer-thin conception of newsworthiness (Gitlin, 1993: 235–7). Fellow Chicago Eight defendant Tom Hayden argues that the Yippies eschewed more substantial contributions to debate such as the Port Huron statement (Hayden, 1988: 203). While praiseworthy of Hoffman’s talents as a grass-roots community campaigner, Jezer nonetheless suggests that in the period after 1967, the amount of organising going on paled into insignificance compared to the amount of agitation being conducted (Jezer, 1992: xiii, 110). According to fellow anti-Vietnam activist Fred Halstead, style was more important to Rubin than adopting a political programme (Halstead, 1978: 56). Undoubtedly Rubin would have agreed with this assessment. Rubin’s radicalism therefore was propelled by the attention his theatrics generated during the 1960s. When that period came to an end, Rubin’s antics were no longer of interest to the media, and the base that sustained his activism withered away: put simply, the type of radical he was played an important role in the phasing out of his radicalism. In light of his obsession with the media – Rubin admitted that ‘I love to play with the media; it is a big toy and I am a media freak’ – in the changed political and social climate of the 1970s and 1980s, he cultivated an image likely to attract media interest, that of the former dissenter returning to the fold (Rubin, 1976: 93; Jensen and Lichtenstein, 1995). The case of Rubin lends support to the connection Gitlin draws between the individuals who were erratic in their protest activity and those who resumed more mundane pursuits when the lights of the 1960s dimmed (Gitlin, 1993: 420). Accompanying his delight in media stunts and attention-seeking was Rubin’s disdain for theory and ideology. Rubin attacked the left’s fetish for ‘theoretical bullshit’ and long, uninspiring meetings (Rubin, 1970: 115). In his semi-autobiographical writings, it is notable that he makes little mention of any intellectual influences on his politics, books he had read, or political figures to whom he was indebted. His ‘socialism’ and his ‘Marxist’ politics were very vague, though he did show some interest in Castro’s Cuba and its ‘Christian ideal of fellowship’ (Rubin, 1976: 74). By his own reckoning, he was not even as radical as the former Beatle John Lennon, with whom he struck up an instant rapport when the latter arrived in New York in 1971, and whose own

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radicalism was episodic, superficial, and contradictory (Goldman, 1988: 436, 439, 440). Indeed, when asked about how he became a radical Rubin answered that rebellion was good fun, while being in the establishment was unappealing and boring (cited in Kohn, 1972: 302). In this way, his later Yuppieism could also be pitched as something new, fun, and exciting. It was in part the ideologically (and politically) nebulous nature of Rubin’s politics that enabled his Yippieism to merge so easily with Yuppieism. The sometimes banal nonconformity of the Yippies was expressed in its slogans – ‘We will burn Chicago to the ground!’, ‘We will fuck on the beaches!’, ‘We demand the Politics of Ecstasy!’, ‘Acid for all!’, ‘Abandon the Creeping Meatball!’ – and it is doubtful whether they constituted a political organisation at all (cited in Gitlin, 1993: 235). Indeed, the Yippie concept had apparently been conceived while Rubin, Hoffman, and Paul Krassner were on an acid trip on New Year’s Eve 1967 (Leary, 1990: 268). Rubin’s disregard for theory and organisation was a serious flaw that contributed to his break with radicalism, and which made it difficult for him to survive the transition – as a radical, at least – to a post-1960s world. Theory was most needed when the political tide turned. This is not to say that Rubin’s critique of much of the left’s predictable approach to organising was without merit, or that his individual acts of rebellion were never telling, effective, or humorous. Like most renegades, Rubin was a flawed but nonetheless gifted and articulate radical, and one who suffered, too, at the hands of state repression (see chapter 5). Yet, without a substantial political-ideological framework on which to draw to help him comprehend the shift to the right, he was vulnerable to the drop in political temperature. He was also isolated without an effective political organisation that could regroup and rethink strategies in response to developments and setbacks, the very kind of permanent radical organisation for which he had put the case back in 1965 (cited in Halstead, 1978: 71). Tom Hayden, who went on to become a politician in the Democratic Party after previously declaring its bankruptcy as a forum for radicals, also displayed some standout consistencies in his politics. In terms of his later involvement with the Democratic Party there was, in truth, considerable continuity: after being invited to the home of Democratic presidential aspirant Robert Kennedy to mull over issues such as racism and poverty, Hayden apparently came away satisfied with Kennedy’s ideas for uniting the anti-war movement, blacks, and the working class to secure the presidency (Jezer, 1992: 137). It was after meetings with Kennedy that Hayden had advocated in 1967 the cessation of bombing rather than complete American withdrawal (Newfield,

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cited in Miller, 1987: 287). Hayden was a close friend of the Kennedy family, a relationship that fellow activists looked at askance. He was close enough to Robert to believe that single-handedly he could have averted the state brutality meted out to protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention (Hayden, 1988: 263–4, 325). He also believed that, were it not for the Zionist Kennedy’s 1968 murder at the hands of his pro-Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan, Robert would have ended the war in Vietnam and closed an angst-ridden chapter in American politics (cited in Zaroulis and Sullivan, 1984: 419). Indeed, he seemed mesmerised by Robert, whom he thought would have been capable of overcoming the anguish of post-1960s America (cited in Levy, 1994: 178). Hayden’s views about Kennedy were held in spite of the generally lamentable role he had played in relation to the US occupation of Vietnam. In 1962, as Attorney-General under his brother and President John F. Kennedy, Robert had located the solution to the conflict in American victory, and he had solemnly promised to remain in Vietnam until that happened. He also backed the escalation of the war effort under President Lyndon Johnson, stating in 1965 that he was against withdrawal lest the latter be a source of encouragement to China (cited in Chomsky, 1993: 107–8). In relation to JFK, whereas other radicals had viewed him as simply another establishment politician, Hayden had put much faith in the man who had in fact worked to demobilise the civil rights movement and who had conspired with the FBI to undermine its leaders and have them arrested (Glazer, 1970: 75; Brinkley, 1998: 214; Brown, 1969: 61). When the President was shot dead in 1963, Hayden wept in St Patrick’s Cathedral, before standing guard around Kennedy’s coffin along with other friends and family (Brinkley, 1998: 214). This was despite being profoundly disturbed by the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, which estranged Hayden – temporarily at least – from the Kennedy clan (cited in Miller, 1987: 164). It was indeed astonishing that he entertained such illusions about the man who was partly responsible for bringing the world to the brink of destruction, but who also gave the go-ahead to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Being seduced by the capabilities of any one individual in the first place, it should be noted, is anathema to radicalism’s emphasis on structures and institutions and the limited capacity of presidents and prime ministers to outwit the system. Hayden’s fawning admiration for Democratic figures such as the Kennedys was qualified with statements about the importance of organisations such as the SNCC exerting pressure on the political elites, and with concerns about the Democrats’ historical alliance with Southern racists (Hayden, 1988: xviii, 45, 100). It nonetheless provides a clear thread of continuity from his radical

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days to his later evolution as a Californian Democratic party politician, for it was not just the Kennedys in the party to whom he oriented his outlook: Hayden was somewhere between the Eugene McCarthy wing of moderation in the Democrats and those who were determined on a conflagration in Chicago in 1968 (Halstead, 1978: 407). At the time of his Chicago conspiracy trial, Hayden maintained that a large number of the demonstrators present at the convention protest were ‘disenchanted Democrats’ (Hayden, 1969b: 163). Indeed, as Brinkley argues, in 1968 Hayden still held out hopes for liberalism (Brinkley, 1998: 230). Fellow 1960s activist Fred Halstead suggests that Hayden was a betrayed liberal who hoped to shock the liberal establishment to its senses through provocative acts of civil disobedience, as in Chicago. But through it all, Hayden looked to the same establishment liberals to deliver social change (Halstead, 1978: 407). In turn, Hayden was one of the few radicals to whom the establishment liberals did not give short shrift (Kiernan, 1982: 233). Halstead’s portrayal is not too wide of the mark when compared with Hayden’s self-appraisal. This was evident in his reflections in the wake of C. Wright Mills’ death in 1962, which prompted Hayden to ask: ‘What kind of society so effectively destroyed radical protest? Is the basis of protest and revolution really dead in America?’ (Hayden, 2006: 70). Here he offered no answers in words, but his later actions in pursuing a career in the Democratic Party spoke volumes for what he came to believe. He later maintained that, even while he was a radical and influenced by Mills’ The Power Elite, he was bedevilled by an inner conflict about American society, which he believed was undemocratically run, but which nonetheless could be reformed through the ballot box (Hayden, 1988: 78). Given that this claim was made on the twentieth anniversary of 1968, it could be taken as a revision of history designed to validate Hayden’s later political adjustments. Yet the statement is otherwise consistent with the aforementioned events and facts. By his own recollection, Hayden hoped that the Chicago demonstrations would either be a setback for Johnson, in the process providing impetus to the Kennedy or McCarthy factions of the Democrats, or it would end in the sort of mayhem that would reinforce the need for the party to reformulate its Vietnam policy (cited in Zaroulis and Sullivan, 1984: 179). Hayden was not by his own self-assessment a principled revolutionary by the time of the early 1970s: if the system provided scope for action, then activists should use it, but if it did not, then they were obliged to oppose it (cited in Zaroulis and Sullivan, 1984: 393). It was not clear how much room there was to manoeuvre within the system. The same confusion helped him become a compromised Democratic politician.

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In the same light, perhaps, we should see his conservative strategy during the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial that followed the convention protests. Fellow defendant Jerry Rubin criticised Hayden, who appeared to entertain notions of authenticity in relation to the legal process, for not making a mockery of the charges and using the trial to strengthen the anti-war movement. He dismissed Hayden and John Froines, who later went on to work within government circles, as the conservative duo among those charged (Rubin, 1971: 35–7). Rubin, in contrast, wished to use the trial as a means to an end – that is, the furthering of the revolutionary movement – rather than an end in itself (cited in Kohn, 1972: 303). Hayden’s own recollection was that he studiously prepared for the defence because he wanted to be convinced that the legal system could work (cited in Miller, 1987: 312). If the Chicago conspirators had been presided over by a judge other than the deeply reactionary Julius Hoffman, Hayden believed, they would have won their case (cited in Zaroulis and Sullivan, 1984: 305). This was possibly true in this case, given how widely derided Hoffman was among legal observers, and in light of the fact that the conspiracy and other convictions were overturned on appeal (Goldberg, 1987). But Hayden was nonetheless displaying here illusions about the legal system as well as signs of a willingness to work within established political boundaries similar to that which he later showed in the Democrats as an assemblyman. Such examples cast doubt on the radicalism of individuals like Hayden in the first place, since radicalism usually rejects outright the possibility of fundamental change within current political-economic parameters. Others such as Régis Debray have questioned their own past radicalism. Despite his Guevarism and his prison sentence in Bolivia in 1967 for his involvement in guerrilla activities, Debray claims to have been unimpressed by the events of May 1968, which he ridiculed as ‘anarchist psychodrama’. His embrace of Gaullism was not undertaken in 1990, contrary to his critics’ claims, but was in fact something that had occurred some two decades earlier (Debray, 2007: 112–14). In using the term ‘psychodrama’, he had echoed the liberal Raymond Aron (cited in Hobsbawm, 2003: 249). This was interesting given that he had been in jail in Bolivia in May 1968, but it was also instructive of Debray’s politics, since as a member of the inner sanctum of the CIA front, the CCF, Aron had meant this in a pejorative sense to describe a puerile anti-authoritarianism stripped of any clear political substance (Bourg, 2007: 29; Saunders, 1999: 90). Perhaps more importantly, critics have made links between the Debrays, old and new: uniting his political positions as a Guevarist and a parliamentarist was the commitment to a socialism orchestrated from above by elites,

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and which entailed little collective mass participation (Oppenheimer, cited in Young, 1977: 258; see also Birchall, 2007). Debray had indeed made the highly elitist argument, based on Che’s ‘foco’ theory, that in undemocratic countries revolutionary victory was possible only under the leadership of a small but theoretically endowed, dedicated and professional unit of individuals (Debray, 1965: 23). But even as a guerrilla fighter, Che himself had reservations about the courage of the Frenchman, who was a little too persistent in reminding the Argentine-born revolutionary how helpful he could be on the outside. Indeed his capture in Bolivia, in Guevara’s assessment, owed to the urgency with which Debray sought to get out of the country, and it appears that he confirmed to authorities under interrogation Guevara’s presence in the South American nation (cited in Anderson, 2010: 682, 685).

Left Thatcherite: the flawed radicalism of Christopher Hitchens The former Trotskyist and radical journalist Christopher Hitchens, who evolved into an enthusiastic ally of the Bush administration in its wars ‘on terror’ and Iraq post-11 September 2001, also has a deeply flawed radical past. Like some of his renegade predecessors, he displayed important continuities between the various phases of his life. This explains why some sections of the left were scarcely surprised when Hitchens leapt to the defence of the Bush administration; others claimed always to have known Hitchens to be a reactionary (Caldwell, 2010). Though he never wholly committed to the neo-conservatives, Hitchens had expressed sneaking admiration for them as early as the mid-1980s when he admitted that he had always respected their perseverance, which he wished that liberals and radicals could match (Hitchens, 1986: 76). Long before his relationship with the American neo-conservatives began, Hitchens had been somewhat in awe of British Conservative Party Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He has even been described as a ‘closet Thatcherite’ (Eagleton, 2010). He was reported to have abstained from voting at the 1979 general election, which Thatcher won, on the grounds that he privately longed for her victory so that she might end the ‘mediocrity and torpor’ of British politics (Wilby, 2011). It may be going too far to label Hitchens a Thatcherite, for his contrived image as a contrarian and his individualism make it unlikely that he would join any camp exclusively (perhaps one reason why he could not stay in the International Socialists). Yet in Thatcher

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Hitchens was seduced – prior to her coming to power, he had found her sexually attractive – into seeing a ‘conviction politician’ (Hitchens, 2010: 177, 202). What the convictions were did not seem to matter! Hitchens confessed that he was dogged by the idea that on some key issues the Iron Lady was beyond reproach (cited in Caldwell, 2010). Hitchens displayed considerable naivety in electing to support right-wing politicians such as Thatcher and Bush. This is symptomatic of a deeper problem common to some other renegades (e.g. Debray viz Mitterrand or Hayden viz the Kennedys): the propensity to be attracted to individuals, failing to see that institutions, states, and systems both outlast these people and also substantially curtail their influence. Hitchens revealed himself along the way to be a politically gullible character easily seduced by power. In this sense, there was little radical about Hitchens, either pre- or post-September 11: indeed his former friend and colleague at the Nation Alexander Cockburn, who grew tired of fielding telephone calls from people asking where Hitchens went wrong, had ‘never thought of him as at all radical … In basic philosophical take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire’ (Cockburn, 2011). This was evident in Hitchens’ defence of Thatcher’s war against Argentina over the Falkland Islands, which is perhaps significant given his backing for the American neo-conservatives’ imperialist adventures after September 11. The same acute failure to realise the imperial motivations of Bush and Blair – in fact, he subsequently appeared to believe that US imperialism was a force for good, as indicated by his enjoining of young people to enlist in the American army if they wanted to make a difference (see chapter 2) – was evident in the support he lent to Thatcher. For a radical leftist, he exhibited little compunction about the flexing of the armed muscles of the state for supposed emancipatory ends – patently lacking, it should be stressed, in the case of the Falklands. Just as in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, he showed little ability to see through the fog of war, as he failed to put a clear radical position that opposed both the Galtieri dictatorship and the Thatcher regime, but which nonetheless saw the latter as the chief target for British socialists: ‘the main enemy is at home’ (Hallas, 1982). Hitchens was not alone on the British left in not handling the Falklands crisis well (see Christie, 1984). But in his case his response was an early indicator of a sabre-rattling tendency, for his attitude to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed his trip in the early 1990s to Bosnia, where he prescribed armed intervention (cited in Parker, 2006).After a history of shifting boundaries in the

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Balkans at the behest of great powers to create nations with hostile separatist minorities – machinations with tragic consequences for the region’s peoples (see Trotsky, 1980) – more Western interference was the last thing needed, particularly in a context in which there was no just national solution that did not come at someone else’s expense, and in which all sides were guilty of atrocities (see Glenny, 2000: 634–52). In advocating this course of action, he placed hope in great powers and the United Nations, whose military forays have often been disastrous (see Blackie, 1994). But in the 1990s, Hitchens had increasingly come to believe that what he regarded as Islamo-fascism could be tackled with the use of American firepower (Piatak, 2005). This showed considerable ignorance of the imperial interests and humanitarian disasters that frequently accompanied attempts to achieve peace through war (Chomsky, 1999). Thus even prior to his defection to the neo-conservatives, Hitchens at times revealed considerable innocence in the area of state military power, which he thought could be deployed on a case-by-case basis. In fact, there seems to be little pattern in his attitude to military actions: opposition to the Gulf War; support for intervention in Bosnia; reservations about the war against Serbia in 1999; blanket support for Afghanistan and Iraq. He thus ignored the point made by the French Emperor Napoleon that when an army travels abroad the state invariably goes with it (cited in Cliff, 1999: 24). Moreover, when it travels it does so in the interests of domestic capital and other elites. The way in which militaries are bound up with the needs of ruling regimes was evident in the fact that both the English and French Revolutions required the creation of new armies designed to serve the now dominant social classes and their interests (Ali, 2009: 22). Imperialism cannot be utilised by the left for progressive purposes, to be turned on and off like a tap. Witness Hitchens’ retrospective self-flagellation for not asking prior to the Iraq War whether the equipment was available to ensure the continued supply of electricity in Baghdad, or if the Marines would be able to secure the National Museum against looters (Hitchens, 2010: 307). This ignored the obvious point that armed forces are not designed to guard cultural artefacts but instead are trained killing machines, geared to defending the regime and its class constituents at home. Perhaps Hitchens read few of the American soldiers’ Iraq wartime memoirs, which often recorded in gruesome detail some of the activities of the US military, demonstrating how far removed the troops were from being a liberating presence (e.g. Key and Hill, 2007). Estimates of the death toll in Iraq post-invasion vary, but at the upper end of the scale they surpass one million (cited in Seymour, 2008: 226). The

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numbers may not have been predictable with any accuracy, but the general humanitarian disaster was to be anticipated so long as one understands the true role of states and their armies. The pre-2001 Hitchens seemed as indifferent to this as the post-2001 Hitchens. More generally, Hitchens as a radical seemed unable to grasp the fundamentals of Realpolitik. His celebration of Polish workers during the Gda´nsk Shipyard strike of 1980, for instance, came without recognition of the hypocrisy involved in Thatcher turning the trade unionists into a cause célébre. Thatcher and Reagan were bitter enemies of trade unions in their own backyards, and their statements of solidarity with the striking workers amounted to little more than Cold War-induced platitudes (Barker and Weber, 1982: 5). Hitchens’ support for the unionists showed no such understanding of the crude Machiavellian calculations of Western leaders. Hitchens may well also have been guilty of some inconsistencies of his own in devoting column space to the Polish strikers, given that he often failed in his radical journalism to address concrete labour struggles and to apply himself to the changing balance of class forces in politics (Keach, 1998: 152). In fact, over the course of his career he showed precious little interest in economics or class issues in general. This may be connected to Hitchens’ lack of theoretical engagement. Terry Eagleton (2010), a fellow student of Hitchens’ at Oxford, remembers him as being indifferent to ideas. Indeed, it can be argued that Hitchens’ overcooked prose masked a distinct lack of theoretical rigour and systematic thinking, evident in his idealism in relation to religion, which he seemed to think was the root of all evil (cf. Molyneux, 2008). There is a clear lack of depth to Hitchens’ work, where substance is clearly subordinate to style: his memoir is replete with quotes and references to poetry, literature, art, and music, but there is no mention of theories that could provide an understanding of the world system and its driving forces and tendencies. In the same vein, we should view his careless use of the expression ‘Islamofascism’ (Hitchens, 2010: 244). The systems of fascism that dominated the powerful Western European states of Germany and Italy, for example, bear no resemblance to Muslims’ undertaking of acts of terror in retaliation for Western and American violence. In dilettantish fashion, Hitchens cared little for how fascism has historically been understood. Again, this is characteristic of many a renegade’s modus operandi – ideas are nibbled on for the particular purpose at hand, and the remains discarded easily as they turn their gaze elsewhere to something more tempting.

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8 For thirty pieces of silver?

Perhaps one explanation for evidence – cited in earlier chapters – of radicals with similar politics setting off in completely different directions is corruption: that radicals are seduced by the temptations of money and power, which tend to grow during ebbs in movements and when pressures to conform increase. Wald comments that the most notorious of political apostates are those who deliberately attempt to fashion a career from their conversions (Wald, 1987: 290). It may be that the apostate is simply a venal character more opportunistic than most. A renegade herself, Pankhurst Walsh (1938a)1 lamented the phenomenon of intransigent communists who disparaged those who left the CPA as sell-outs driven by greed for money and power. This is a factor surprisingly understated in the work on renegades, notwithstanding Finkelstein’s claim that all their verbiage cannot mask the naked pursuit of material advancement underlying their shifting moral and political compasses (Finkelstein, 2008: 243). This explains why, Finkelstein argues, the renegade invariably shifts from left to right rather than vice versa, as there is almost no economic or power incentive to becoming a radical. More generally, people have often been pacified by improvements in their economic well-being, as in the case of the English discontents who were shipped to Australia in the 1830s and went on to enjoy lives of relative political docility 1  While this publication in her private papers collection at the National Library of Australia, Canberra is undated, the final line of the paper suggests that it was written in 1938: ‘[A]ll sensible people must understand why those who believed Communism might help the world in 1917, know it for a cruel fraud in 1938’ (Pankhurst Walsh, 1938a: 31).

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owing to the better living standards they experienced in their new homeland (Hughes, 1988: 200–2). In the same country, the case was famously put by Vere Gordon Childe (1964) that the privileges afforded to ALP parliamentarians vis-à-vis the working people for whose representation the party had come into being had opened a major gap in life circumstances between them and their countryfolk, in the process softening their radical ardour.

Mussolini: mercenary for imperialism As well as being affected by the outbreak of the First World War and possessing deep flaws as a radical, one explanation for Mussolini’s treachery lies in his ambition for greatness, and in the wealth and power he accrued as a result of his mid-war shift. Speculation about his motives has been fuelled in part by the abruptness of his transition to supporting the war and subsequent exit from the PSI. Prior to his apostasy he entered into discussions with the wealthy landowner Naldi, who subsequently bankrolled Mussolini’s new publication, Il Popolo d’Italia. Naldi was famous for his extravagant lifestyle and champagne binges, and he and Mussolini later set off for Switzerland in search of funding from the French secret service. Mussolini received money from the French and British, both of whom were motivated by the prospect of Italian entry into the war against Germany (Bosworth, 2002: 106–7). For similar reasons, it has also been suggested that his paper may have been funded by the Russians and the Americans (Mack Smith, 1981: 25). The tainted roots of this literary venture partly explain why Mussolini was unpopular with Italian war veterans in 1919 (Lussu, 1936: 2). It was a source of some embarrassment for Mussolini that the founding of his ‘socialist’ paper was paid for by the wealthy Italian capitalists and those with agricultural interests whom he had previously labelled class enemies, and whose property any socialist project worthy of the name would seek to appropriate. In fact, Mussolini was not discerning when it came to taking money from people (Renzi, 1971: 206). This perhaps sheds some light on the discrepancy between the behaviour of Mussolini the opponent of war in July 1914 and the sabre-rattler of October (Renzi, 1971: 206). A former associate of Mussolini, Alceste De Ambris argued that if Mussolini had been a principled interventionist at the outset, there would have been no question marks over his behaviour. But instead the amoral Mussolini had walked away from his socialist comrades purely out of self-interest (cited in Kirkpatrick, 1964: 62).

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On the other hand, it cannot clearly be said whether the first payment was made to Mussolini prior to or after he published his new stance on the war in October 1914 (Kirkpatrick, 1964: 63). Yet the growth and circulation of Mussolini’s publication brought new streams of advertising income. This may not have affected the politics of the paper, according to Mack Smith, but it contributed to the growing estrangement from socialist politics of Mussolini, who was probably mindful of the need to maintain the viability of the paper for the next stage of his political career (Mack Smith, 1981: 32). Mussolini’s lifestyle also changed: he began to indulge in meals at expensive restaurants, horse-riding, and later driving a car (Bosworth, 2002: 109). Angelica Balabanoff recalled her former PSI colleague hankering for the luxuries of the rich. Mussolini’s desire for things, she feared, would lead him to mimic the lifestyles of the wealthy. Her recollections included one occasion while walking along a pier in Geneva with Mussolini when he looked on enviously at the affluent people dining in the restaurants and hotels lining it. While they were being fortified by fine food and drink, he would have to travel ‘third class [and] eat miserable, cheap food. Porca Madonna, how I hate the rich! Why must I suffer this injustice?’ (Balabanoff, 1968: 52). Ludwig, the biographer of Napoleon and Bismarck, spoke at length with Mussolini in 1932, and found him unmoved by material incentives (Ludwig, 1932: 35). In relation to his own attitude to wealth, Mussolini professed in politics to loathe the upper class and to never having gained financially from his career. One might expect Mussolini – hardly capable of honest selfappraisal – to say as much. On the other hand, he did admit that, while money itself was ‘detestable’, it was capable of things that were ‘sometimes beautiful and sometimes noble’ (Mussolini, 1928: 13, 48). Moreover, the evidence – as we saw above – does not quite support his self-aggrandising assertions. While Mussolini may not have been privately obsessed with money, he was certainly well looked after as a result of his landowning interests, his income as a politician, and his unlimited ability to draw on state funds for himself and his family. In addition, the revenues he received as an owner of newspapers and as the recipient of royalties for his writings and speeches added up to significant assets, though he may have given some of his wealth to charity (Mack Smith, 1981: 2, 108). The trappings of power were certainly intoxicating for Mussolini. In this light we should see his notorious sex drive and appetite for submissive women, who were in plentiful supply for a man in his position of power and authority (MacGregor-Hastie, 1963: 210). In a sense, they were part of the

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spoils of office. It was once estimated that he had been with 4,000 women in his lifetime. On the other hand, Megaro argues that Mussolini’s desire for women paled into insignificance alongside his insatiable desire for political power (Megaro, 1938: 192). It was common among Mussolini’s enemies to attribute his treachery simply to ambition (Stewart, 1928: 844). He would not have been oblivious to the political moods and interests of Italian elites in 1914, including the Prime Minister Antonio Salandra who wished to use the war as a platform to establish liberal-conservative values and an authoritarian political centre, as well as to undermine democracy more generally. Sections of capital, too, were clamouring for war out of standard imperial ambitions for expanded markets and trading opportunities (O’Brien, 2005: 35–6). It was partly Mussolini’s keen political antenna and his drive to ascend the rungs of the political ladder that prevented him from being locked into any specific political doctrine or thinker (Bosworth, 2002: 65). As a contemporary of Mussolini’s, Trotsky viewed his conversion as largely a self-seeking act of greed for power and success, as well as illustrative of his stereotypically Italian manoeuvrability (Trotsky, 1941: 413).

Parvus, the ‘Marxist millionaire’ Trotsky had seen something similar much closer to home with his old friend and collaborator on the theory of permanent revolution, Parvus, who also was moved by vainglory and self-enrichment. In Turkey prior to the First World War, while still living hand-to-mouth as a journalist, Parvus went on to work for La Jeune Turquie, the journal of the new government. While defiantly declaiming in his first essay for the journal that he was a revolutionary Marxist, a turning point may have been reached here, for slowly but surely Parvus’s personal circumstances improved due to his growing commercial interests with Russian and Armenian merchants in Constantinople. The commencement of hostilities was the beginning of an illustrious business career, as he opportunistically capitalised on the mobilisation of Turkey to achieve wealth and power beyond his wildest dreams (Schurer, 1959: 320). As well as being on the receiving end of funds from Germany for political purposes, the ‘Marxist millionaire’ emerged from the war as one of that country’s wealthiest men (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 281). He had come a long way from the dank Tsarist jail cells of post-1905! No doubt from acting as an agent for the German state and being caught up in all the accompanying

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diplomatic intrigue, Parvus also obtained a tremendous sense of his own capacity to influence events. Schurer contends that there were two parts of his personality that accounted for the failure to live up to the great expectations others had of him: the rival German and Russian dimensions to his persona, and his fascination with making money (Schurer, 1959: 330). His desire to get rich was something that Trotsky had also observed in him (Trotsky, 1988: 172). His way of life in Switzerland after his business interests had taken off included indulgence in expensive meals and fine champagne and inhabiting luxurious hotels, all the while surrounding himself with glamorous women. Even his personal appearance changed as a result of his new habits, as he became a bloated caricature of the thrifty journalist he once was. Parvus even had the audacity to justify his wealth accumulation in Marxist terms by claiming to be simply expropriating the surplus value of the capitalists! (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 156–7, 204). But Parvus and Mussolini were far from the only renegades around the period of the First World War to be accused of selling out in the literal sense. It was alleged – though unsubstantiated – that the French anti-nationalist turned patriot Gustave Hervé was handsomely rewarded for moving from being a socialist to a national socialist, while another commentator put his behaviour down to a raw lust for power (cited in Loughlin, 2003: 516). Australian communists suggested that material comforts had corrupted their former comrade Adela Pankhurst Walsh (cited in Dickenson, 2006: 150–1). But in her case the evidence was not compelling, as her break with socialism profited her little in the long run. Moreover, her later internment and struggles with the government during the Second World War were hardly conducive to careerism or a more comfortable life. Finkelstein’s claim (Finkelstein, 2008: 243) that apostasy is almost always an attempt to leverage more material gains therefore is not true in this instance. On the other hand, her co-founder of the fascist Australia First organisation, Percy Stephensen, did appear to adjust his attitudes at the whiff of pecuniary advantage. His biographer suggests that the former Oxford communist’s favourable shift in attitude to the Nazis – while remaining enamoured more of Gandhi than of Hitler – was in part commercially driven. After a succession of publishing failures, Stephensen overcame his previous distaste for the Nazis by undertaking various literary ventures favourable to the Third Reich, including a pamphlet on the subject of barter with Germany (Munro, 1984: 160–1; Munro, 2002).

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The New York intellectuals: cold warriors for cash? Most prominent renegades, if not initially motivated by greed, find themselves moving in a different social matrix once their radical proclivities have been put behind them. Numerous New York intellectuals were material beneficiaries of the support they generously lent to American imperialism and Western capitalism. As Wald argues, in a period of declining living standards and state-enforced austerity for the working class, many of these newborn conservatives were handsomely rewarded for their important role in legitimising American imperialism. For casting in the most favourable light the exploitative activities of the ruling class, they were on the receiving end of lucrative grants from conservative bodies such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, as well as from various private corporations. These neo-conservatives had not altogether abandoned a Marxist analysis of society as composed of haves and have-nots – it was just that now they were allied with the latter (Wald, 1987: 363–5). Such intellectuals had been responsible for the output of ideas that served the interests of powerful forces well. Irving Kristol and fellow conservative Paul H. Weaver were the recipients of 100,000 US dollars from Nelson Rockefeller’s Commission on Critical Choices in order to assemble fifteen essays on the degree to which the ideas and values of human nature were enshrined in American institutions (cited in Steinfels, 1979: 12–13). In 1967 Philip Rahv, a New York intellectual whose own political allegiances were difficult to determine at the best of times, compared fellow members of that grouping who were involved with the CIA-funded CCF to the Stalinist stooges of the 1930s, suggesting that they had sold out for agency giveaways (cited in Wald, 1987: 267–8, 371). Despite denials that this was a gravy train, these ex-radicals were chauffeured in limousines to parties awash with smoked salmon and other fine cuisine dished out by servants, while first-class air travel to destinations such as India was in the offing. It was much more than just culinary delights that were being savoured at such parties, however, for the attendees were being given a taste of something much more addictive and corrupting: power (Epstein, cited in Saunders, 1999: 220, 346). There was, some commentators argued, a relatively straightforward process through which well-fed American radicals became complacent and content over time, in the ‘settling down’ process in the 1950s after the rebellious and radicals days of the 1920s and 1930s (Mattson, 2002: 24). The former pro-Bolshevik communist who altered his name from Louis Fraina

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to Lewis Corey may have been co-opted in 1937 when he was recruited to a New Deal agency, the Works Progress Administration. Other radicals had similarly been absorbed by New Deal authorities, but Corey, as well as being impacted on by fatherhood, had by the 1940s obtained a stable position – after years of insecurity and instability – as a college professor and trade union educator (Buhle, 1995: 104, 148, 143). A similar experience in bureaucracy was had by Nathan Glazer, the New York intellectual and former radical colleague of Irving Kristol at CCNY. Though Glazer did not move as far to the right as Kristol – yet far enough to condemn the 1960s free speech movement at Berkeley, where Glazer was a sociology professor – his experience working in the Housing and Home Finance Administration in Washington led him to adopt a much more sympathetic attitude towards bureaucrats, and he became convinced that the problems radicals railed against were more complex than the latter were prepared to admit (Glazer, 1970: 75; Margolick, 1998). Arthur Koestler’s decision to become an anti-communist changed his life circumstances in more dramatic fashion. His bestselling anti-communist novel Darkness at Noon catapulted him to fame and success. Like other renegades his political commitments, now congenial to ruling-class interests, were well received: the novel was set as a text in British and American schools (Cesarani, 1998: 146, 176). Koestler was also the beneficiary of the way in which the book had been caught up in an ironic tug-of-war: the British Foreign Office purchased and distributed 50,000 copies of the publication in 1948 at the same time as the French Communist Party was under orders to scoop up all copies of the book. As a result, there was an expectation of almost permanent sales for Koestler (Saunders, 1999: 60). Meanwhile, The God That Failed was used by the Foreign Office in the British Zone of Germany, while intelligence authorities in Canada requested a chinwag with Koestler about ideology (Cesarani, 1998: 352). None of this, needless to say, was imaginable so long as Koestler remained a radical communist. Not long after this, the Australian radical Jim McClelland shifted from Trotskyism to right-wing ALP politics in the late 1940s in line with his ambitions for a career in law. Similar pressures were understood to be behind his comrade Laurie Short’s parallel conversion (Greenland, 1998: 179). McClelland openly admitted the relationship between his conservatism and his determination on a legal career, which assumed greater importance for him in the context of his marriage and status as family breadwinner (McClelland, 1988: 78, 81).

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From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin and other 1960s sell-outs Perhaps the best-known former 1960s radical to have done spectacularly well out of the system he once detested is the anti-Vietnam War radical turned Yuppie businessman Jerry Rubin (Berger, 1994). As early as 1973, Rubin lost a fifth of his personal wealth as a result of a stock market correction (Rubin, 1976: 103). It was the much bigger crash of October 1987 that prevented Rubin from offloading some US$3 million of shares in Network America – stupendously ironic given his protest at the NYSE in 1967 (NYT, 1988). Rubin was also being paid $500 to $1,000 (a significant amount of money at the time) to speak on campuses during 1969–70 about the conspiracy trial. His new-found wealth was problematic for someone once so anti-money: he felt guilty dining out in expensive restaurants. In the mid-1970s he was already starting to make a lot of money, forcing him to obtain the services of a tax lawyer, a business adviser, a publisher, and an attorney (Rubin, 1976: 87, 105). Rubin had once identified having one’s hair closely shorn with conformity, acceptance of authority, discipline, and unhappiness (cited in Levy, 1994: 96). But he cleaned up his act by cutting his tresses and shaving off his beard (Lasch, 1980: 14). In the 1980s, according to Horstman (1999), what Rubin sought most was material wealth. He boasted that before him ‘nobody had really taken off their clothes and screamed out loud, “It’s O.K. to make money!” ’ (cited in NYT, 1988). He admitted in 1976 that ‘Money has been the most crazed area of my life, with power and sex running a close second and third. In this respect, I am a typical American’ (Rubin, 1976: 101). More ironic than losing money on the stock market was the fact that he obtained a position on Wall Street as a securities analyst with an investment firm in 1980 (Rubin, 1980). The lineup of guests celebrating his fiftieth birthday at his Upper East Side apartment in 1988 included investment bankers, rock stars, lawyers, and his nutritionist (NYT, 1988). When he died in 1994, Rubin resided in the prosperous area of Westwood (neighbouring Beverly Hills), Los Angeles, where he rented a $5,000/month penthouse on Wilshire Boulevard, paid for by ‘earnings’, according to Forbes magazine, of $60,000 per month (cited in Fitch, 1995; Pace, 1994). Rubin had apparently taken some convincing from his nutritionist that there was more to life than ‘Rolexes, BMW’s [sic] and a second home in the country’ (cited in NYT, 1988). According to one former business associate, Rubin was in the 1990s ‘an extremely successful capitalist and multi-level marketer’ (Economy, n.d.). Ironically, in his earlier guise as a

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radical Rubin implied that monetary motivations were at work in the treachery of the early 1960s radical Phillip Luce, who had helped organise illegal trips to Cuba before becoming a lead government witness at the HUAC and counter-insurgency lecturer (Rubin, 1970: 63–4). Fellow Chicago Eight defendant Rennie Davis also went on to become a highly successful businessman, which saw him accumulate at one point an eighty-acre estate with ten homes, electronic gates, and a private helicopter (Davis, 2003: 47–8). But one former 1960s radical who was even less apologetic than Rubin about selling out is Norman Podhoretz, the title of whose book Making It (1968) said it all. It may not have been revulsion at the ideas of the new left that turned him into a neo-conservative after all. Rather, here was a man who suddenly realised in the mid-1960s at age thirty-five that he wanted to be a ‘success’ rather than a ‘failure’, to be rich rather than poor, to be giving out orders rather than receiving them, and to be famous rather than condemned to anonymity like everybody else. Podhoretz claims to have been rebelling against the creed with which he had been indoctrinated in college and which had become an article of faith among educated Americans, namely the ‘cult of failure’ (Podhoretz, 1968: xv, xi). On top of money, as we already know, Podhoretz desired power and recognition. Open about his craven deference to famous literary figures, he described the emotions he experienced when the writer Robert Warshow invited him to lunch as akin to what a young girl feels when the boy on whom she has set her sights asks her out on a date. This typified more than his 1950s-era clichéd view of male–female relations. What motivated Podhoretz in the first instance when he started writing for Commentary in 1953 was not financial reward but the joy of seeing his name in print (Podhoretz, 1968: 102, 146). He was given to exhibitions of extreme and unashamed self-indulgence – Lasch categorises him as a ‘confessional’ writer in the business of employing the method of selfparody (Lasch, 1980: 18). Perhaps contradictorily, Podhoretz later claimed that he did not get accused of selling out for careerist reasons because, if anything, he was wrecking his job prospects at a time (the 1960s) when radical ideas were all the rage. His former friends thus put his conversion down to mental illness – at least until he earned a reputation (mostly overstated, he claims) as a powerbroker in the Reagan White House (Podhoretz, 1999: 3). Here we see a subtle – but nonetheless transparent – psychological ploy at work: to say that one has an exaggerated reputation as a powerbroker with the American president is just as flattering as claiming a deserved reputation as

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a powerbroker with the American president, except the former is preferable because it at least gives the impression of humility. Similarly, there was also undoubtedly an element of material and power ambitions at play in the Frenchman Régis Debray’s metamorphosis from guerrilla soldier into state functionary under François Mitterrand. Debray ascribes his decision to take up employment with the state essentially to a weakness for power, or his desire to see ideas implemented (Debray, 2007: 6). Power may not, however, have been the only thing Debray fed off. One observer recalled in 1982 that Debray had been fattened up by banquets at the Palace (cited in Ali, 2005: 343). There may also have been crude opportunism at work: his strident advocacy of guerrilla warfare gave way to a career serving the French president after the death of Guevara in 1967 and the subsiding of the wave of guerrilla struggle in the early 1970s (Birchall, 2007). More generally, as well as the deteriorated political climate dashing many radicals’ hopes for change, some former 1960s activists were lured to a comfortable life by the expansion of career opportunities for the new middle class of professionals and managers (Callinicos, 1990a: 113). Berger argues that when members of 1960s movements were left to fend for themselves after they departed the insular life of the university, they quickly realised that their hippie philosophies would not endear them to corporate bosses. As they progressed, more pressing matters than changing the world began to weigh on them, including property values in the context of the mortgage debts many of them had now incurred, and finding good schools for their offspring (Berger, 1994). Perhaps these retired fighters were returning to their roots: whereas American radicals of the 1930s had been spurred into action by the ravages of the great depression, 1960s radicals emanated from comparatively more affluent enclaves (Kristol, cited in Dorman, 2000: 134).

Christopher Hitchens: Oedipal child returns to the establishment? Molyneux sees Christopher Hitchens’ move from radical to renegade as more to do with material temptations than any theoretical flaws on the part of the one-time admirer of Margaret Thatcher (Molyneux, 2008). As we have seen, this overlooks Hitchens’ very deep flaws as a radical. Taking a slightly different tack, Terry Eagleton (2010) described him as an ‘Oedipal child’ of the establishment who, like many such children, reverted to type. According to

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Hitchens, his mother had told him once when he was a boy that, if any member of the family were destined to join the British ruling class, it would be him (cited in Palmer, 2010). Hitchens disliked being called ‘Chris’, because he felt that his mother would not have been amused by her son being addressed by a name more suitable for, in his words, ‘a taxi-driver or pothole-filler’ (cited in Wilby, 2011). What is most significant about this statement – the comment itself or Hitchens’ recollection of it after so many years – is an open question. But it is certainly the case that Hitchens thoroughly enjoyed the things to which money and power could lay claim. A notable feature of Hitchens’ most recent writings has been an almost complete neglect of the economics of capitalism, class society, and social inequality in favour of foreign policy issues: he appeared largely content with the social order. Keach in 1998 commented that Hitchens liked to be the type of radical journalist who got the insidethe-system scoop through invitations to plush hotels, only to marvel at their decadence (Keach, 1998: 148). A noted bon vivant, Hitchens admitted to being seduced by the rich and connected young boys at Oxford, and he acknowledged that he had taken up Gore Vidal’s advice never to let slip an opportunity to appear on television (Hitchens, 2010: 102, 343). This revealed his intrinsic desire for attention, which relates to notable aspects of his personality and psychology (explored further in chapter 10). Thought by many to be an alcoholic, Hitchens certainly appeared to get drunk on the sight of power. He boasted of having had brief liaisons with two future (male) members of Thatcher’s government and a future US President’s lesbian girlfriend (Hitchens, 2010: 103). Hitchens would even have been tempted by the offer of a life peerage in the House of Lords if it were put to him, though in all likelihood he says that he would probably have turned it down (Parker, 2006). An incident in 1999 is regarded by some as the start of his trek towards the neo-conservatives: Hitchens told House Judiciary Committee staff members that Sidney Blumenthal, a long-standing friend working in the Clinton White House, had gossiped to him about the President’s mistress Monica Lewinsky being a ‘stalker’. Because Blumenthal had provided evidence to the contrary he was at risk of a perjury charge, and the case against Clinton was strengthened. In the wake of this incident, some referred to him now as ‘Snitchens’, and former friend Alexander Cockburn argued that he had he was trying to court power by betraying a close pal (cited in Parker, 2006).

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conclusion to part iii

Many renegades were undoubtedly flawed radicals. For some, there were significant continuities between their different phases, while for others there may well have been aspects of their radicalism that contributed to their later migration to safer political terrain. In some cases, the ruptures identified in their political lives described in part I now look rather less dramatic. For some observers, the fascist Mussolini was not a substantially different being from the radical socialist Mussolini. There were persistent themes in the politics of British-Australian communist turned fascist Adela Pankhurst Walsh over the course of her political career, including conservatism on women’s issues and racism. Like some other renegades, she displayed a propensity towards one-sidedness in her thinking. The 1960s radical Tom Hayden had close ties with the Kennedys, which helps explain his later prominence in their beloved Democratic Party. Yet, as an overarching explanation, highlighting the flaws and continuities in radicals will not do. There is an understandable temptation with the benefit of hindsight to see all renegades as mediocrities from the beginning: the problem, according to this view, is not institutional or structural, but instead lies with the individual in question. However, it is often the overwhelming pressure of events – in Mussolini’s case, the outbreak of the First World War, in Jerry Rubin’s, the collapse of the 1960s movements – that put ideas and politics to the test. In the absence of such events, their trajectories potentially could have been rather different. Concentration on the continuities in Mussolini’s politics – and an assertion of a pre-1914 fascist culture on his part – ignores the triggering factor of the war (O’Brien, 2005: 49). Trotsky’s assertion of the role played by un-dialectical thinking in the desertion of Marxism by a series of American renegades only raises more questions about why they challenged the dialectic to begin with. But more importantly, it cannot explain why this anti-dialectical method did not prevent them from being radicals for a sustained period of time before becoming castaways. Thus the flawed radical approach can be criticised for underplaying the political context and social forces more generally that were revealed to

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be germane in chapters 3–5 in creating the conditions for actors to lose faith in the prospects for social change. It has been argued, for instance, that Mussolini’s marriage of Marx and Nietzsche was an approach to political leadership that was looked upon favourably by the PSI in the context of the party’s weak working-class base in a country with a largely agrarian and illiterate population. As Pierson comments, the PSI tended to be an unstable body, in part because of its brittle party structures. In this context, Mussolini was able to secure the victory of the PSI’s revolutionary left flank (Pierson, 2001: 24). The bourgeois backgrounds of radicals as diverse as the Belgian Marxist turned Nazi collaborator Hendrik de Man and the ex-Trotskyist CIA agent James Burnham have been noted (Diggins, 1975: 163). But these have questionable merit as a factor of importance in their renegacy: most of the leading classical Marxists, including Marx himself, enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing. Marx’s closest collaborator Friedrich Engels, it is well known, came from a family of prosperous mill owners, whose wealth helped to fund Marx’s theoretical ventures and living costs (Carver, 1981: 3, 35). In fact, Stalin was one Bolshevik leader who was raised amid genuinely grinding poverty (Deutscher, 1979: 3). The rest, as they say, is history. A further weakness of the flawed radical explanation is that the individual’s politics appear to be of limited importance in terms of their break with radicalism. Many of ex-Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s flaws seem only partly connectable to his later involvement with the Republicans. In some cases certain characteristics of the renegade during their radical phase were not prohibitive: Pankhurst Walsh’s conservative and right-wing views on race and women apparently did not prevent her from being a radical up to the early 1920s. Similarly, Koestler’s Stalinism appeared not to prevent him from being a radical for numerous years, which raises the question as to what other factors were important in his reneging on his communist past. Furthermore, there were plenty of anti-Stalinist socialists who became renegades just like Koestler: their endpoints were similar, but the starting points differed. The American Chicago Eight defendant David Dellinger had shown some sympathies for the dubious figure of Hô Chí Minh, who was responsible for the murder of hundreds of Trotskyists in Vietnam (Berman, 1996: 79; Sharzer, 2011). But this did not prevent Dellinger from remaining an activist over the course of his life, which included the consistent expression of radical dissent from the period of the Second World War – when he was jailed for refusing to register for service – right through to the twenty-first century, when the

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North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) moved him to hitchhike from Vermont to Quebec city to protest at age eighty-five (Dellinger, 1993; Carlson, 2004). The unavoidable fact is that radicals in the same movement, sharing very similar politics, often went in completely different directions. Trotsky’s brilliant collaborator on the theory of permanent revolution, Parvus, presumably shared many of his younger colleague’s politics. But the two followed drastically diverging paths, to the point where Trotsky broke off all contact with his former offsider. There were numerous American radicals from the 1930s onwards who charted completely different directions despite initially sharing broadly Trotskyist political frameworks. Tariq Ali (2009: 58) claims that Max Shachtman and his followers were victims of flawed analysis in the form of the theory of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’, which Shachtman described as ‘a new social order’ in the Soviet Union that was neither capitalist nor socialist (Shachtman, 1962: 1). This ignores the fact that numerous Trotskyists, including Irving Kristol, James Burnham, and Dwight Macdonald – and people sympathetic to Trotskyism such as Max Eastman – did not share Shachtman’s analysis, but still became arch-conservatives. Irving Howe, too, was a close follower of Shachtman’s for a time, but the two eventually parted ways ideologically (Sorin, 2002: 33). The endpoints of the various American Trotskyists seem in general to offer no clear pattern traceable to any particular theory or political weakness (see Bloom, 1986; Callinicos, 1990b; Wald, 1987). The same can be said of radicals in the 1960s. Jerry Rubin’s main Yippie co-conspirator Abbie Hoffman, for instance, undertook his own reconsiderations of his past activities, but nonetheless remained a radical and an activist right up until his death in 1989, and he despaired at the betrayal by his former friend – whom he debated in ‘Yippie v Yuppie’ forums in campuses across the US – of everything they once stood for. The two were estranged by the time Hoffman committed suicide (Hoffman and Simon, 1994: 307; Proyect, 2008). This suggests that, whatever the flaws in Yippieism or Rubin himself – who shared with Hoffman a fondness for celebrity and political stunts – these were not solely responsible for Rubin’s ending up on Wall Street. Similarly, Tariq Ali himself at one point was sanguine about the prospects of Mikhail Gorbachev becoming the vanguard of the new political upsurge in Russia (cited in Callinicos, 1990b: 53). But this did not cause him to become a renegade or to abandon radical politics. The weaknesses in this explanation therefore led us to look further afield, including to the possibility that renegades have been crudely lured by the

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attractions of wealth and power associated with more conservative political attachments. Undoubtedly many renegades have benefited in such ways from reconciliation with the status quo. In cases where the renegade has not actually been motivated by material advancements, they have usually benefited post-facto. This helps explains why the direction of apostasy is almost invariably from left to right. Yet this explanation has its weaknesses, too, including its failure to encapsulate many of the complexities in the different cases of renegades irreducible to ambition or careerism. More problematically, the explanation that centres on personal gain raises the question as to why some radicals were tempted while others were not. Like the weakness of the flawed radicals explanation, this material rewards approach shares the problem of not being able to account for individuals with similar politics going in quite different directions. Perhaps an explanation for this lies in personality and psychological differences, which lead individuals to respond in a variety of ways to changes in the political-economic environment. It is to this possibility that we turn our attention in the next two chapters.

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Part IV The renegade ‘mentality’

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a neo-something, a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-liberal, a neo-conservative, and in religion always a neo-Orthodox, even while I was a neo-Trotskyist and a neo-Marxist. I’m going to end up a neo. Just neo, that’s all. Neo-dash-nothing. (Irving Kristol, cited in Dorman, 2000: 194)

[Arthur Koestler] continued changing beliefs, partners, countries, houses (another of his serial compulsions). (Treglown, 2010: 4)

In five years, from 1971 to 1975, I directly experienced est, gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, rolfing, massage, jogging, health foods, tai chi, Esalen, hypnotism, modern dance, meditation, Silva Mind Control, Arica, acupuncture, sex therapy, Reichian therapy, and More House – a smorgasbord course in New Consciousness … (Rubin, 1976: 20)

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introduction to part iv

In surveying the experiences of so many different individuals over a lengthy period, it becomes clear that structural explanations at the geopolitical, economic, and social levels are insufficient to explain the often bemusing twists and turns of many a renegade’s journey. By no means do all radicals respond to political defeat, a deteriorated political climate, and state repression by renouncing their radical politics: some remain stubbornly unconvinced of the legitimacy of present political-economic arrangements. We also discovered, however, that simply having flawed politics as a radical was not an adequate explanation for the renegade’s betrayals, since individuals with often very similar political outlooks showed the propensity to strike out in very different directions. The fact of some radicals benefiting materially from their switch to more conservative modes of thought also raises the question as to why some are prone to such temptations while others are not. In the two chapters that follow we peel back the layers of analysis further to determine if there are any discernible patterns to renegades’ personalities and psychology that might explain the willingness to walk away – often with apparent ease – from one’s radical past. Recall the words of the French former radical Régis Debray (cited earlier), who pondered how it is that a person can ‘get up one fine morning and renounce everything that has driven us until that moment’. HUAC informant Phillip Luce presented his leaving communism in 1965 as a momentous and heartrending decision: ‘[T]he struggle to see through my folly has been a great personal struggle … The act of breaking with Communism was the most difficult one of my life’ (Luce, 1971: 34). Such statements are indicative of a profound psychological crisis, but one not peculiar to Debray or Luce. Drawing on elements of the psychohistory literature, part IV reveals that there are indeed some common themes in the personalities of numerous renegades, demonstrating that it is not only the altered political space inhabited by the radical that is important but also the way in which individuals respond in light of their individual traits. Kirkpatrick (1964: 70) refers to the ‘mentality of a renegade’ characteristic of Mussolini. Megaro also had Mussolini in mind

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when he pointed to the ‘vainglory, ambition, and intellectual and emotional instability which frequently causes rebels to become the most perfect types of renegades’ (Megaro, 1938: 191). Kirkpatrick and Megaro did not, alas, elaborate on these insights, but many renegades do evince a certain ‘mentality’, and some are characterised by the features to which Megaro drew our attention. Renegades are often erratic, mercurial, and unpredictable; frequently they come across as political adventurers. The renegade can be highly dilettantish in their attitudes to ideas and movements; their attachment to causes can be rather fickle. They often exhibit wanderlust tendencies and display wild swings of opinion. Quite a number of renegades resemble the thirteenthcentury Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, whose ‘spiritual and personal life veered from one emotional extreme to another; he sought ecstasy in dancing, singing, poetry and music’ (Armstrong, 2000: 86). Edmund Burke predated the twentieth-century renegade, but he understood why this pattern of vacillation caught on: extremes were so appealing precisely because they were extreme, which ‘in all things abhors mediocrity’. This process of lurching from one end to another was about experiencing life at its utmost, enjoying its highs and its lows with full feeling (cited in Robin, 2011: 224). Undoubtedly, such leaps quell the boredom from which numerous renegades suffer. Erikson argues that at certain stages of a person’s life they need a new ideology just as much as they need air and food (Erikson, 1962: 22). The renegade often exhibits the same craving: Arthur Koestler (see below) seemed to be on a never-ending quest for a new lease on life, which he hoped to find in causes, movements, and even experiments. It has been argued that young people are renowned for devoting themselves wholeheartedly to a new cause as well as for breaking off relations with others (Erikson, 1962: 42). If this is true, then the renegade may be accused of being immature, because there is certainly evidence of numerous renegades having fractious relations with friends. Norman Podhoretz (1999) devoted a whole book to the former pals with whom he parted company. Arthur Koestler had once been very close with the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre but later fell out with him and his partner Simone de Beauvoir (Scammell, 2009: 306–7). He also had a major public row with his former collaborator on The God That Failed, Richard Crossman (Cesarani, 1998: 331). Christopher Hitchens engaged in squabbles with many former allies, including Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and Edward Said (Wilby, 2011). He also conducted an on-again, off-again relationship characterised by melodrama with the writer and close friend Martin Amis (Hitchens, 2008a).

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It is even sometimes thought that renegades must be psychologically damaged or personally flawed in order to be capable of such somersaults in their political thinking (Loughlin, 2003: 516–17). Renegades are therefore prone to changing their minds regularly, sometimes with much fanfare: referring to Christopher Hitchens, Finkelstein observes that the apostate enjoys ‘the shock value of an occasional, wildly inconsistent outburst’, driven by the desire to gain public attention and to accrue the benefits that accompany it (Finkelstein, 2008: 244, 245). Thinking also of the neo-conservative-allied journalist, Sullivan writes of ‘the 15 minutes of infamy’ the turncoat typically enjoys (cited in Rodden, 2006: 144). The pro-Jacobin turned anti-Jacobin poet Samuel Coleridge similarly exhibited a certain shiftiness as he anticipated the reaction of an audience before altering his views, and he would utter phrases before knowing whether they fitted or not (Thompson, 1969: 153). With this context in mind, we begin chapter 9 with a discussion of the psychohistory literature and how it fits with the Marxist tradition, which has often been accused of economic determinism in accounting for human behaviour and political change. The chapter argues that this criticism is misplaced, and that an approach that draws on individuals’ psychology as a factor in their political decision-making is far from incompatible with the Marxist and structural analyses on which we have drawn so far. Chapter 10 continues with chapter 9’s application of this approach to some of the renegades described in earlier parts of the book.

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chapter

9 Psychohistory

Insofar as one is not a complete structuralist who excludes a priori the role of the subject in making history, then the capacity for the actor’s psychology – as a factor affecting the subject’s actions – to come into play must be considered. For our purposes, therefore, we are required to take into account the psychological contributors to the behaviour of renegades who have made history, for better or worse. There is a significant psychohistory, or psychobiographical, literature (Bullock and Burke, 1999; Erikson, 1962; Kearns, 1976; Fromm, 1980; Anderson, 1981).1 The psychohistory method has been defined as an ‘approach to historical subjects which attempts to take into account subconscious and private elements of human experience studied by psychologists’ (Bullock and Burke, 1999: 701). The method can purportedly help explain irrational actions on the part of individuals (Volkan et al., 1997: 4). Perhaps then it can be extended to explaining such seemingly irrational behaviour as renouncing all the things one used to believe in with the same vehemence used to argue the opposite. To argue that individuals have only political reasons for acting as they do ignores the psychological motivations on the part of many. As Bullock and Burke (1999: 701) suggest, to account for the actions of people in history without taking into account psychology seems untenable. The New York intellectual Irving Howe thus recalled his own immersion in socialist political

1  See also the journal Political Psychology.

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organisations for reasons that had as much to do with loneliness as anything (cited in Sorin, 2002: 11). Fellow ex-radical and anti-Algerian war activist Paul Zweig was attracted to communism because it offered an escape ‘from the failed rooms and broken vases of a merely private life’ (cited in Lasch, 1980: 15). For some immigrant radicals, in particular, leftist political activity was part of a desire to overcome isolation. Revolutionary political engagement can be about releasing radicals from the drudgery of daily life and giving meaning to their existence as well as about eradicating the horrors of racism and war. Conversely, radicals can become renegades for non-political reasons, including psychological ones. In short, the personal and political aspects of the individual both require scrutiny (Mazlish, 1972: 5). There is a variety of approaches to the psychohistory method (Volkan et al., 1997: 6). Moreover, its utility depends on a range of factors, including the individual in question: as a motivator for behaviour, psychology seems far more pertinent to former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover than to Senator Joseph McCarthy, given the former’s long-suspected but suppressed homosexuality and suggestions of an upbringing that instilled in him a fear of the outside world whose character effects included narcissism and a lust for power (Kovel, 1997: 110, 115; Clyman, 2011). We can agree with the poet William Wordsworth that the ‘child is father to the man’ in the sense that a person’s childhood plays an important role in who and what they become (cited in Dellinger, 1993: 7). But, for our purposes, rather than delve deeply into the whole history of an individual and their upbringing, we simply ask whether their psychological and personality characteristics – as they present themselves as adults – might have shaped the course their political lives take. Such an approach is well established: recently, for example, it has been argued that psychology is key to explaining why some individuals become suicide bombers. The phenomenon of Muslim suicide bombers could be explained by structural factors, such as opposition to US foreign policy in the Middle East, or the desperate poverty and oppression many in their communities face (Seymour, 2008: 14). Yet there are many people who are enraged by American support for the Israeli oppression of Palestinians, or who subsist in devastating conditions of neglect, but who nevertheless do not engage in suicide attacks. Research has shown that those willing to carry out such raids tend to be ‘followers’ rather than ‘leaders’, and are more likely to be psychologically inclined to submission to group pressure (BBC World Service, 12 December 2010, radio programme). Psychological factors (agency) are therefore critical to explaining these individuals’ political behaviour when

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combined with antagonism towards US foreign policy (structure). Similarly, the ultra-militant tactics of Germany’s Red Army Faction – including bombings and assassinations – were the product not just of a mistaken political analysis that believed it was possible to overturn capitalist social relations and the state through urban guerilla warfare; they were also, inter alia, a result of ‘the psychopathologies of the individual members’ (Varon, 2004: 13). In the case of the American Communist Party, Glazer considered it reasonable to suggest that one should investigate the extent to which psychology was a factor in explaining who chose to join the party. Yet underlining the importance of structural factors – including the capitalist exploitation and poverty that drove people to sign up – Glazer found that the number who became members of the party for unusual psychological reasons was relatively low. This largely explains why the party did so well out of the great depression (Glazer, 1961: 5–6, 187). Obtaining the full picture about those involved is important: as with the aforementioned suicide bombers, having greater knowledge of the individuals is crucial to gaining a more thorough understanding of the structural and subjective factors central to their behaviour. One aspect of the psychohistory method thus concerns the dialectical relationship between the personality and psychology of the individual and their social context: the former in part shapes the latter, and the latter in part moulds the former (Mazlish, 1972: 156). One of the most significant applications of this psychohistory method has been Erik Erikson’s study of Martin Luther, in which the author called for a re-evaluation of the psychological influences on the behaviour of the man whose protest against malfeasance in the Catholic Church sparked the sixteenth-century Protestant reformation. Erikson’s book, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1962), has been subjected to significant critique (Bullock and Burke, 1999: 701). Clearly Erikson makes too much of certain statements or incidents in Luther’s life, such as the alleged fit in a choir session in which he was alleged to have screamed ‘I am not!’, which his psychobiographer interprets as indicative of an identity crisis that set in motion a chain of events leading directly to his nailing of the ninety-five theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517 (Erikson, 1962: ch. 2). His suggestion, too, that stages in history may be linked to stages in the mind undoubtedly oversells his project (Erikson, 1962: 20–1). More importantly, his account is rather one-sided, for it needs to be recognised that the story of Luther and his impact is only one chapter of the story of events occurring in Europe and the wider world associated with the end of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and

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the later ascendancy of science, modernity, and capitalism – events with which the Reformation is inextricably intertwined (Weber, 2003; Tawney, 1961). But the method that he employed is nonetheless fruitful for our purposes in the sense that historians and psychologists – all too often engrossed in their own respective fields – have much to gain by combining both. There have been attempts besides Erikson’s to apply this psychohistory method, such as in the biographical work on former US President Richard Nixon (Mazlish, 1972; Volkan et al., 1997). Few of his biographers have been prepared to consider that his disturbed mental state contributed to the genocidal brutality of his administration’s actions in Indochina. From a structuralist perspective, one way to understand such policies would be in terms of the pressures exerted on the head of an imperial power (i.e. the US) to shore up its dominance during the Cold War, pointing to the fact of policy continuity on Vietnam between the five separate American presidents culpable for the crimes of the period. On the other hand, the fact that he was probably deranged, paranoid, and delusional may help explain the almost maniacal actions of the US under Nixon’s command (see Hitchens, 2001: 133–4). It is worth recalling Nixon’s ‘madman theory’, designed to create the impression that the American nation was dangerous, erratic, and enormously destructive so that its foes would easily submit (cited in Toscano, 2010: xxv). Indeed, it was probably not a coincidence that Nixon was labelled a ‘maniac’ by leaders of the Australian federal government in late 1972 when the US resumed bombing of North Vietnam (cited in Saunders, 1983: 89). He also exuded a narcissistic persona, which can hamper the ability of the person to experience grief, remorse, and empathy as opposed to envy, rage, and entitlement, which they experience in abundance (Volkan et al., 1997: 90–1). This accords well with Nixon’s lack of empathy for the plight of the Indochinese who suffered so appallingly under his government’s policies. Incorporating these kinds of psychological influences into one’s study of US foreign policy is not inconsistent with a structural analysis: as argued at the beginning of this book, structures create the opportunities for individuals to make a difference, and in this case the apparatuses of state power, among others, allowed Nixon – and his mental facets – to exert some influence over events. Another person with the same psychological traits as Nixon would not have been in the same position to have such a destructive influence (Kovel, 1997: 168). The frequent abuse of the method means that it needs to be applied with some caution (Mazlish, 1972: 5). Nixon’s predecessor President Lyndon

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Johnson, for example, has been the subject of a study by Kearns, according to whom a yearning for love from his mother drove his desire for political success and power (Kearns, 1976: 369–70). But the fact that a person was rebelling against their parents or was deprived of the love of their mother and father says little about how they prosecuted the Vietnam War and the constellations of interests and social forces that brought about that war, including the state, the forces and pressures of the capitalist system, Cold War tensions, and the class relations of American society. Similarly, de Man’s contention that the German petite bourgeoisie’s seduction by fascism reflected an inferiority complex on their part is undoubtedly true in the sense that the middle class felt squeezed between the organised labour movement and large business conglomerates (cited in Pierson, 2001: 60; see also Reich, 1970). But this assertion needs to be accompanied by an acknowledgement of the events and social phenomena – in particular the ruinous economic consequences for many Germans of the great depression – that allowed the Nazis to go from almost complete marginalisation in the late 1920s to occupying the largest number of seats in the German parliament in the early 1930s (Harman, 1999: 486). The corollary of some approaches to Hitler and the Nazis stressing the importance of psychology is the neglect of the social and political contexts – the roles of imperialism, economic crisis, and ruling-class interests in promoting a force to tackle organised labour and communists – in their ascension to power. In the remaining sections of this book, in adding to the social and political contextualisation of the individuals conducted in earlier chapters, I also seek to draw attention to the personas of those involved and what contribution these made to their renegacy.

Marxism, structuralism, and psychohistory As distinct from the anthropological structuralism associated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, the economic structuralism of Marxism has been widely criticised for underplaying the role of individuals and their psychological influences. In Erikson’s view, many psychoanalysts have ignored Marx’s insights on the impact of labour on individuals, whereas Marxism has often underplayed psychology by making a person’s position in the economic arena the sole determinant of their thoughts and actions (Erikson, 1962: 17). Similarly, Georges Sorel charged Marxism with concentrating too much on the part played in history by the productive forces, neglecting the role of psychology (Sorel,

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1976: 126). Sorel was naturally praiseworthy towards the revision of Marxism by Antonio Labriola in his Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History in which he arrived at what Sorel called a ‘psychological conception of history’ (Sorel, 1976: 155; emphasis in original). There is an obvious problem with the attacks on Marxist and structuralist approaches by those placing greater emphasis on psychology: Horowitz’s criticism of the politically eclectic Sorel – that his psychological socialism was just as incapable of predicting how or when a person’s psychology would give rise to revolution or reaction – could easily be applied to other followers of the psychohistory school (Horowitz, 1968: 162, 196). Notwithstanding this point, it is certainly the case that Marxism has gained a reputation for not taking individuals’ psychology seriously enough in terms of its impact on the process of historical change: Marx has even been accused of being anti-psychology (Mills and Salter, 1977: 62). Undoubtedly, Marx underestimated the potential psychological damage wrought by capitalism, as indicated by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) prediction that by 2030 more people will be affected by depression than by any other ailment (BBC, 2009). It would be a mistake, however, to say that Marx and his supporters have ignored agency at large, and psychology in particular, at the behest of economic determinism. If Marx devoted less attention to psychology than he should have, this was in part due to the vastly different ways of thinking about the subject predominant in Marx’s time, in particular the emphasis on enduring traits of human nature pushed by the so-called ‘instinct’ schools (Venable, 1946: 4). For numerous reasons, matters had changed significantly by the time of the end of the First World War when young men of vitality emerged from their experience in the trenches mentally destroyed, revealing the importance of the external environment – as opposed to heredity or mystical causes – to a person’s mental health (Arnold, 2009: 253).2 This would not have surprised Marx, who displayed a keen interest in the physical and mental needs of people and their interaction with economic and social contexts. Indeed, it was also something close to the family of Marx, himself prone to extreme loneliness and unhappiness when separated for even short periods of time from his wife and children. And despite his youngest daughter Eleanor being the most radical and politically gifted of his 2  Alas, mental health remains an area where sinister practices by the state are still commonplace and are invariably bound up with politics, culture, and power, in particular society’s treatment of so-called deviant behaviour and the threat it poses to social order (e.g. Metzl, 2009).

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children, she deliberately imbibed a fatally poisonous potion simply because she had learned of her husband Edward Aveling’s marriage to another woman (Gabriel, 2011: 585). For a political actor, therefore, psychology can be as an important determinant of outcomes as politics, as we saw earlier with the numerous radicals who killed themselves when the euphoric 1960s came to an end. Despite Marx’s well-known interest in economic forces, institutions, and classes, his real passion was the fulfilment of the intellectual and physical nourishment of the individual promised – but not delivered – by capitalism and liberalism (Miller, 1979: 14). His position was that all individuals’ relationships are distorted by the commodification of labour, and that the separation of the producer from the fruits of her exertions, allowing her little or no control over what she does and when she does it, has fundamentally damaging consequences mentally. This is an important starting point when it comes to the relationship between structures and psychology. Witness Marx’s famous passage in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in which he describes the way in which work under capitalism is alien to the worker, and therefore does not develop his ‘mental energy but [instead] mortifies his body and ruins his mind … [The worker] is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home’ (Marx, 1964: 110; emphasis added). This is largely a comment on the psychological consequences of work under capitalism. Even owners of capital are alienated human beings whose actions in the economy are largely predetermined by the need, not so much to enjoy a higher standard of living than the mass of the population, but rather to compete with other capitalists to maximise their return on investment, in the process precluding a fairer and healthier set of working conditions for their wealth-creators (Marx, 1976: 739). But both bourgeoisie and proletariat alike are deceived cruelly by an obsession with commodities that forces both to look for happiness in the bedazzling mystique of made things: money is not simply a measure of exchange value but an awe-inspiring ticket to the realisation of dreams (Roszak, 1972: 96–7). Thus Marx and his collaborator Engels were not ‘individual-psychologists’ but rather ‘social-psychologists’ who believed that our personalities and natures are socially developed (Goodman, 1977a: 67). In this sense, there was no fixed human nature – notwithstanding the need for all human societies to maintain and reproduce themselves through collective labour, which made people social beings – but instead one that evolved with changes in people and the lines along which society is organised (Venable, 1946: 4). How humans

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deal with this alienated world and how they develop psychologically will differ, with some going on to display the characteristics of the kind common to renegades, including those Megaro emphasised (see above). This should not blind us to the necessary collective solutions to individual problems: as the anarchist psychologist Paul Goodman puts it – summed up in a way with which Marx would almost certainly concur – the problems of people are the problems of society: ‘We have no special duties, we are hung up, we live in a bad world, our main duty is to change that world’ (Goodman, 1977b). More broadly, Marx was not deterministic in the sense of precluding the importance of human agency and political organisation – things heavily dependent on the actions, beliefs, and, ultimately, psychology of individuals (see Molyneux, 1983; Callinicos, 1993). Most vulgar portrayals of Marxism leave out the vital impact of human agency, reflected in Marx and Engels’ own warning that barbarism, or ‘the common ruin of the contending classes’, could conceivably be the end result of class conflict, rather than victory for either of the duelling groups (Marx and Engels, 1975: 33). In an epoch of nuclear weaponry and global warming, such a statement is even more apt. Whatever one thinks of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, they constituted the antithesis of a fatalistic Marxism that required nothing of revolutionaries but patience (Lukács, 2009: 31). It is true that Marx and Engels were materialists in the basic sense that they believed that politics, art, religion, and philosophy could exist only after people first supplied their basic needs. Depending on how this living was made, it would in turn affect these other spheres of life (Venable, 1946: 28–9). But it is a gross caricature to deduce from this the idea that economic forces would determine the artfulness of a composer or the decision handed down by a judge (Trotsky, 1973: 119). As Terry Eagleton writes, there is a large ‘difference between saying that a pen or computer is indispensable to writing a novel, and claiming that it somehow determines the content of the novel’ (Eagleton, 2011: 108). In relation to Marx’s famous statement that people make history but not in circumstances that they dictate, most commentators have overemphasised the latter part of the saying (Horowitz, 1968: viii). Their reputation for economic determinism partly owed to the stress Marx and Engels laid on the economic dimension in the course of their battle against the idealists (Venable, 1946: 31). Engels himself had sought to refute the criticism of Marxism as a deterministic economic science (cited in Clarke, 1950: 166). He had written plainly that, while he and Marx had formulated the materialist conception of history, which held that the mode of production was a determining factor in changing

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the world, he was adamant that if ‘somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase’. Parts of the superstructure – including politics, law, philosophy, and religion – did, Engels concluded, have the ability to shape and determine the course of events in history (Engels, cited in Venable, 1946: 31; emphasis in original). Once it is realised that Marxism is not inherently deterministic, the way is opened for agency – and all the accompanying characteristics and idiosyncrasies of agents, including psychology – to exercise its influence. Along these lines, though his Marxism did not survive, the Frankfurt school theorist Max Horkheimer had set out to revise a distorted Marxism for which human beings and their psyches were mere indicators of economic forces (Pierson, 2001: 93). The Marx who initially attracted the radical Louis Fraina was someone who recognised the significance of the individual and their psychological needs and dimensions (Buhle, 1995: 41). In response to Freud’s idea that human nature is explicable in terms of repressed sexual desire rather than social forces and history, Voloshinov replied that Marxism did not deny the importance of subjective psychic forces, but instead suggested that they were rooted in material realities, such as the social systems in which humans exist. Psychology thus had to be socialised, in the sense that human behaviour – and responses to that behaviour – could not be understood in the absence of an appreciation of the social stimuli of a person’s environment. The controversies generated by Freud’s claims in relation to the Oedipus complex could not be understood without accounting for the ideational meaning society attached to notions of a boy’s attraction to his mother and his desire to eliminate the father as a rival for her affections. Freud’s schema would,Voloshinov pointed out, be much less applicable to a medieval peasant or an ancient Greek (Voloshinov, 1976: 22, 81, 89; Bruss, 1976: 117). Freud normalised the Western nuclear family model with its patriarchal features, despite the very brief period – as a proportion of the total collective human experience – for which it has been the norm (Callinicos, 1999: 193). The flaws in Freudianism, then, meant that to Marxism fell the responsibility to develop a social psychology that superseded physiological or biological psychology (Voloshinov, 1973: 25). Further evidence of Marxism’s compatibility with psychology was provided by the Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher, who made some prescient observations about the impact of a renegade’s psychology on their behaviour without discarding his Marxism, notwithstanding his pessimism about the Russian Revolution’s internal rotting by Stalinism and his commitment to a version of

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socialism from above (Cliff, 1989: 14–17). Deutscher commented on the way in which renegades such as Arthur Koestler are perpetually torn by a sense of guilt about the betrayal of their ideals, a guilt which they attempt to mask through aggression and bombast. The standout motivation for their political activity becomes self-justification for their behaviour (Deutscher, 1969: 20).

The mentality of early twentieth-century renegades: Mussolini, Parvus, and others Psychology has been a recurring theme in the behaviour of early twentiethcentury renegades. As we have seen, Kirkpatrick (1964: 70) referred to the ‘mentality of a renegade’ characteristic of Mussolini, while Megaro argued that the latter was prone to a range of traits – including ‘vainglory, ambition, and intellectual and emotional instability’ – destined to produce typical renegades (Megaro, 1938: 191). O’Brien has pointed to the self-obsessive psychological motivations driving Mussolini’s authorship during the First World War of a diary, which generally can be understood as a desire on the part of the writer for the self to live on into the future and therefore maintain a dialogue with succeeding generations. Mussolini’s diary, in particular, was deeply contrived and politically motivated when not dishonest (O’Brien, 2005: 68). He also had a penchant for orchestrated public gestures and displays, including a fondness for tilting his head back, jutting his chin forward, placing his hands on his hips, and stiffening his body (Kirkpatrick, 1964: 156). For his ex-PSI colleague Angelica Balabanoff, Mussolini’s perfidy was inexplicable except according to psychosocial factors, in particular his narcissistic and ego-driven desire for fame and status. His opposition to capitalism was not the hostility to a system typical among revolutionaries but rather was rooted in his personal humiliation at his place in society, and in a desire to seek revenge against those who kept him there. She further derided him as a vain, pompous, and incompetent political adventurer beset by a deep inferiority complex – a man whose immoral character allowed him to do and say whatever came to mind, regardless of whether it contradicted the thoughts and actions that went before them (Balabanoff, 1968: 315, 45). Balabanoff’s remarks are not merely those of a betrayed associate, for they are supported by numerous others who have highlighted his self-indulgent nature (Mack Smith, 1981: 28). Mussolini, too, hinted at the psychosocial factors explaining the direction of his life: ‘[P]erhaps rage is the dominant feeling. I had been

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infuriated by the sorrows of my parents; I had been humiliated at school; to espouse the cause of the revolution gave hope to a young man who felt himself disinherited’ (cited in Ludwig, 1932: 43). While such disclosures emanate from the post-PSI Mussolini, they are applicable to him across the different periods of his life. Megaro notes that his repudiation of radical leftist politics was merely one act in a performance that always centred on the individual (Megaro, 1938: 319). Prior to becoming a fascist leader, Mussolini had been in search of ‘fame and fortune’ (MacGregor-Hastie, 1963: 32). As well as arguing that Mussolini was motivated by a quest for power and success, his Russian contemporary Trotsky viewed him as the supreme egotist (Trotsky, 1941: 413). Not only did Mussolini support involvement in the First World War out of fear of the reaction from whichever group of powers won the war should Italy remain neutral, he also felt ‘the need for a great stirring of the whole people to consolidate the moral unity of our nation – with or without socialism’. Convinced of his infallibility up to his last day in the PSI, at the meeting confirming Mussolini’s expulsion from the party he showed no remorse, blaring back at his detractors: ‘You hate me because you still love me!’ (cited in Ludwig, 1932: 87–8). Mussolini emerges as a paranoid and insecure figure utterly ill-suited to the self-sacrificing nature of left-wing radical political activity at a life-and-death time of revolutionary upheaval. When he was still aligned with the PSI he required Balabanoff to accompany him on the walk home from the newspaper office at night because he was afraid, in his own words, of ‘trees, of dogs, of the sky as well as of my shadow. Yes, my own shadow!’ (cited in Balabanoff, 1968: 100–1). This was consistent with his record as a soldier, for Mussolini’s ‘war hero’ status was constructed for political purposes. Prior to assuming control of the Italian state, he was very unpopular with veterans, so much so that when he attended the congress of ex-combatants in Rome in 1919, he was refused permission to address the soldiers, who were not oblivious to the discrepancy between Mussolini’s bellicosity and his actual fighting record. Even his supposed war injury did not save him because the question was posed as to why he could not return to combat once his injury had healed (Lussu, 1936: 2). He was not shy in promoting his warrior qualities: ‘I can say tha in every regard I was an excellent soldier’ (Mussolini, 1928: 29). Yet Mussolini fought in few real battles, and was originally thought to have been the casualty of an accidental explosion, which he claimed led to forty-four fragments of a grenade entering his body: ‘Flesh was torn; bones broken. I faced atrocious pain’ (Kirkpatrick, 1964: 73–4; Mussolini, 1928: 56). But subsequent

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research has shown that, apart from the removal of a few pellets from his body, his injury was a complete concoction designed both to hide the embarrassing fact that he had contracted a form of syphilis and simultaneously to enhance his charismatic features (O’Brien, 2005: 121–2). Perhaps this is an early indicator of the duplicity underpinning Mussolini’s behaviour in the lead-up to betraying former PSI allies. Indeed, in the trial for his involvement in the campaign against the invasion of Tripoli in 1911, he and his lawyers constructed a defence based on the patriotic actions of Mussolini in seeking to protect the Italian state from itself. Furthermore, he downplayed his role in the general strike in order to minimise his culpability and, presumably, to reduce the severity of his punishment. As Megaro points out, Mussolini might have been ideologically contemptuous of the bourgeois system of justice, but even so his actions were decidedly supine (Megaro, 1938: 257–62). More generally, there is evidence of Mussolini’s troubled nature. As a child he was a violent bully who was prone to fits of rage (MacGregor-Hastie, 1963: 20). In church he was known to pinch people to the point of tears, and he displayed an infamous streak of brutality. A man who carried a knuckleduster out of habit, Mussolini was reputed to have knifed one of his girlfriends (Mack Smith, 1981: 3, 5). All of his biographers have noted his aggressiveness (Pierson, 2001: 23). According to his lover and fellow fascist Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s ‘homocidal tendencies’ were on display in his eagerness to prematurely rub out his heroine and main character, Claudia, in his novel, The Cardinal’s Mistress (cited in Motherwell, 1929: ix). As it happened, the Cardinal’s mistress did come to a violent end: after surviving a vicious knife attack, she was the victim of a deliberate poisoning (Mussolini, 1929: 189, 216–20). This was not surprising from the hermitic and misanthropic Benito, who considered the need for friendship a character defect (Mack Smith, 1981: 4). Having little time for his fellow creatures, he cited approvingly the apparent fact that Machiavelli was a ‘despiser of men’, whom his fellow Italian had portrayed in the ‘most negative and humiliating aspects’: ‘Men, according to Machiavelli, are wicked, more fond of possessions than of their own families, quick to change their opinions and feelings’ (Mussolini, 1975: 27–8). Mussolini – and many others – no doubt read Machiavelli in a way that said more about him and his own features than about the Renaissance thinker. Witness also Mussolini’s affection for cats, widely regarded as the more selfish, independent, and disloyal of domesticated animals vis-à-vis their canine counterparts (Child, 1928: 10).

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None of these traits, of course, by themselves made Mussolini a suitable candidate as a fascist dictator prepared to spill the blood of hundreds of thousands of his compatriots in the name of an alliance with Nazism’s insane project of racial genocide and global domination. But his rampant narcissism, cowardice, and violent tendencies were coupled with a highly cynical and distrustful view of his fellow human beings, which would have made it impossible for him to remain committed to any programme involving the masses’ self-emancipation, the heart of classical Marxism. In fact, his personality was arguably incompatible even with a version of reformist social democracy based on the need for government intervention to address market failures, assuming as it does at least a modicum of interest in human health and happiness (Hay, 1999: 57). Like many renegades, he was a mercurial figure whose abrupt departure from socialist politics should have come as no surprise. His statements and views were so episodic and contradictory as to render almost impossible the discernment of any links between them (Stewart, 1928: 849). In part, this was because of Mussolini’s extreme individualism – something again characteristic of the renegade, who tends to act alone – and his distinct lack of scruples, which encouraged him to improvise. The swiftness of Mussolini’s volte-face might indeed raise questions about his mental stability in the context of his adeptness at assuming almost any role he felt was required (Kirkpatrick, 1964: 37, 195). Witness Sarti’s description of him: ‘Clown, petit-bourgeois, opportunist, power-corrupted demagogue, subtle innovator, and reactionary in disguise’ (Sarti, 1967: 1027; emphasis in original). A Muslim anarchist Leda Rafanelli recalled from discussions with Mussolini the ease with which he switched sides in the mere course of a conversation (cited in Kirkpatrick, 1964: 53). Mussolini in a speech in parliament before taking power had described himself as against socialism and therefore inevitably hostile to Giovanni Giolitti, the then-Italian Prime Minister. This astounded Giolitti, because only a few days prior the two had been allies (Lussu, 1936: 17). Clearly, reading more Marx would not have helped Mussolini overcome these deep personal flaws. In relation to another ex-radical Monicelli, Mussolini had – prior to his own rebirth – fulminated that spineless and unscrupulous characters were not up to the challenge of the times (cited in Balabanoff, 1968: 91). Though probably projecting, Mussolini was correctly drawing a connection between the unreliability of individuals such as Monicelli and their political betrayals. As a fellow deserter of class for nation during the First World War, the Frenchman Gustave Hervé mirrored Mussolini in some significant ways. It has

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been suspected that Hervé’s several leadership attempts amounted to attention-seeking behaviour, while others have assumed that his actions reflected psychological and personality quirks. On the other hand, Loughlin counters that his personality was ‘remarkably stable’ (Loughlin, 2003: 516–17). But, like some other renegades discussed here, he underwent a spiritual as well as a political conversion, traversing between agnosticism and faith, and he was also given to ‘rhetorical excesses’ (Loughlin, 2001: 6–8). Prior to the war Hervé had been, according to Balabanoff, Europe’s most fiery opponent of nationalism and patriotism, but after 1914, like other men of his ‘temperament’ he became an equally unforgiving nationalist (Balabanoff, 1968: 81; Megaro, 1938: 248). Her reference to his explosive personality lends further credence to the impression of renegades as excitable madcaps. But he may also have had some of the individualism, restlessness, and contrarianism common to other renegades (Loughlin, 2001: 26). Sharing some of these personality and psychological characteristics was the revolutionary Marxist turned war profiteer Parvus, another unstable individual inclined to fits of rage. He was a ruthless person who showed callous disregard for his spouses and offspring – justified on the grounds that the bourgeois nuclear family is a ‘nest of robbers’ – when his political interests warranted it (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 33, 73–4). His persona was regarded as ‘enigmatic’, and in spite of his undoubted theoretical feats, Parvus was always irrational and undependable, according to his former collaborator Trotsky (Schurer, 1959: 313; Trotsky, 1988: 172). Signs of his manic behaviour were evident in his extreme self-indulgences (see chapter 8), such as splashing out on fifty tickets for his friends to join him at his favourite play amid the 1905 upheavals in Russia. As Trotsky recalled, the police were bewildered when they arrested Parvus and found such a large quantity of tickets on his person. What they could not have known was that Parvus did not do things in halves (Trotsky, 1988: 184). His impatient and ill-tempered ways made relations with editorial boards delicate, and there was always the possibility that the protagonists would eventually come to blows (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 33). The editors of Iskra, which published his pieces, were wary of the same unreliability Trotsky had identified in the man (Deutscher, 1954: 100). The flippancy displayed by many renegades leads at times to striking political and personal suppleness. When Parvus followed up his withering attack on Bernstein’s famous revisionist socialist arguments around the turn of the century with a statement of support for the latter’s proposal that the SPD accept the vice-presidency of the Reichstag, observers were flabbergasted at

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his capacity to duck and weave his way through a political debate (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 43–4). Too much is probably made here of the conflict between these stances – revolutionaries can utilise the parliamentary arena as a platform to ridicule the whole set-up – but there is little doubt about Parvus’s unsteadiness. His biographers noted that at certain points during the war, Parvus the dangerous revolutionary would be transformed into ‘Dr. Helphand, the diplomatic adviser’ (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 187). In this vein Trotsky described Parvus as a ‘political Falstaff’, after the chameleon-like character Sir John Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV (cited in Deutscher, 1954: 220). In fact, a number of renegades – particularly the most vocal ones – resemble the comical and scheming traits of Falstaff, qualities so unflattering as to force the famous playwright to alter the name of the character in response to protests from the descendants of the real person after whom it was originally named, Sir John Oldcastle (Wells, 2005: 481). Such facets may well have been necessary for Parvus to forget his anti-imperialist politics as he went to work for the Hapsburgs. Biographers point to his chief character flaws, including his flippancy and his indifference to the plight of friends and colleagues (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 70). His vacillating nature was to some extent revealed in the titanic struggle of Russian revolutionary politics, in which Parvus chose not to align with either the Mensheviks or the Bolsheviks, preferring instead to act as an arbiter between the two (Deutscher, 1954: 101). His slipperiness was evident in his fluctuating attitude to the Bolsheviks in the lead-up to and after the Russian Revolution. In April 1917, prior to the insurrection, Parvus’s attempts to form an alliance with Lenin and the Bolshevik party were rebuffed. After the Kerensky government was overthrown in October, he sought to curry favour with the Bolsheviks in a highly opportunist manner by presenting himself as a broker between the leaders of the new government and the German SPD. Engaging in shameless sycophancy towards the Bolsheviks, he spoke of the great destiny as a European power towards which Russia was inexorably headed. But Lenin would not budge, and so a shattered Parvus turned on both the Bolsheviks, whom he derided for heading up a backward state comprised of Chinese peasants, and Lenin, whose political inspiration was not Karl Marx but rather Konstantin Pobedonostsev – a low blow, since the latter had been regarded as a toady of Russian autocrats (Schurer, 1959: 327, 329–30). As part of an enterprise comparable to Western anti-communism, he then orchestrated a propaganda campaign – partly funded by the Germans – against the Bolsheviks (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 254).

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Not dissimilar from some other renegades, Parvus lacked the fortitude to see out the difficult times. Biographers contrast the experiences in jail of Trotsky and Parvus following the 1905 revolution: while the former utilised the opportunity for theoretical labour, the latter suffered greatly from the isolation and struggled to cope with his confinement (Zeman and Scharlau, 1965: 96–7). Deutscher, while cognisant of the literary and political influences of Parvus on the younger Russian, nonetheless drew attention to the – in the end decisive – personality differences between the two men (Deutscher, 1954: 105).

Adventurers to the end? Pankhurst Walsh, Stephensen, and Mosley Sharing some of Parvus’s traits was another renegade active during an overlapping period, the British-Australian Adela Pankhurst Walsh. In some senses her eventual defection to fascism was indicative of an era in which the Irish Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats could embrace his countryman General O’Duffy’s Blueshirts (Shelton, 1986: 492). Admittedly, Yeats was known to be associated with some curious causes, including the occult Order of the Golden Dawn (Morrow, 1960: xix). He may have had something in common with Adela other than being associated with the far right, for she also, as we shall see, flirted with myriad odd ventures. Pankhurst Walsh was more than swept up by the turbulent epoch in which she lived: best suited to periods of radical upsurges, when her talents could find their fullest expression, she was not cut out for the more trying times that demanded persistence and selflessness (Pugh, 2001: 371). She also had a tendency towards issuing outlandish statements for their effect, something Finkelstein observed of other renegades (see above). Coleman remarks on her tendency to generate ‘outrage on the left and disdain on the right of politics in Australia as she moved dramatically from creed to creed’. It was a case of like father, like daughter, the former also having promoted ‘with courageous enthusiasm … one contentious cause after another’ (Coleman, 1996: 57). In the midst of debate in the lead-up to the Second World War, it was these traits that helped to open a rift between her and fellow members of the Women’s Guild of Empire (Pugh, 2001: 448). At the other end of the spectrum, labour movement activists were turned off not only by her embrace of anti-communism after years of residing on the left, but also by the sheer extremity of her

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standpoints (Macintyre, 1998: 303). In one tirade during the Second World War, Pankhurst Walsh made the bizarre claim that communism was the ‘most vicious form of Capitalist exploitation [!] the world has ever seen’, and that the war was driven by the interests of finance capitalists bent on overhauling the economic systems of the Axis powers whose only crime was not to use gold, the currency in which finance capital exploited human labour (Pankhurst Walsh, n.d.c).3 As with other renegades, her career was marked by startling twists and turns, strident rhetoric, and ever-changing stances. Her often wild and unpredictable behaviour was accompanied by the frequent embrace of different movements and organisations, including the CPA, the VSP, the Women’s Guild of Empire, and the fascist Australia First. In part, what had generated outrage among political actors on both the left and right of politics was the ease with which she hopped from cause to cause (Coleman, 1996: 57). Hence the consummation of Adela’s career was her conversion to Catholicism in 1960 towards the end of her life (Cannon, 2002: 264). Coleman appropriately considers her psychosocial dimensions, pointing to the experience of her youth and the way in which she had become accustomed to acclaim and constant upheaval, as she was spurred on by the desire to triumph in the next campaign, whatever it might be. Similar personality traits could be observed in her elder sister Sylvia, whose biographer, commenting on her various identities – artist, socialist, communist, monarchist – noted that she ‘joined a cause, fought hard, then switched to another even before the first battle had been won, as though the cause were all – or nothing’ (cited in Coleman, 1996: 169). There are some resemblances here with fellow renegade and co-founder of Australia First, Percy Stephensen. Like many renegades, Stephensen’s ideas and actions were volatile, unpredictable, and sometimes comic – traits particularly notable as he moved to the right (Munro, 1984: 209). Even before he joined the fascist camp, Stephensen – like Parvus – had shown a tendency to do things in a manic fashion (Muirden, 1968: 16). He admitted that the (stridently nationalistic) argument of his Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936) was indicative of ‘a psychological development’ in him, as well as in wider Australian society, brought on by the looming European war (Stephensen, 1936: 7). In Xavier Herbert’s novel Poor Fellow My Country, he was caricatured as not merely a renegade, according to Munro, but also as an ‘opportunistic 3  Some of her publications, including this one, located in the National Library of Australia’s Manuscript Reading Room, were authored by Adela using only her maiden name, Pankhurst.

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and paranoid’ ‘“erudite wrangler”’. The often absurd and shrill language of renegades and ex-radicals was also characteristic of Stephensen: in 1942 he declared the ‘Brit-Usa-Com-Jew’ to be Australia’s true antagonist. Such behaviour exposed him to physical attack from communists and waterside workers during the Japanese bombing of Darwin in February 1942 (Munro, 1984: 206, 215, 218). Stephensen also happened to be a particularly squeamish radical who relented under pressure from authorities relatively easily, acquiescing to sign a statement initiated by Oxford University as a result of his political activities and which required him to disassociate himself from communists and their ideas; in future, he pledged to put his head down and concentrate on his studies (Muirden, 1968: 18; Munro, 1984: 41). Seemingly it was in the wake of this incident – followed by a red-baiting leader about Stephensen in The Times in February 1926 – that he parted ways with the Communist Party. This was effectively the beginning of the end of his radical days, though he later cited different reasons for his political metamorphosis, including the failure of the British general strike the same year (Muirden, 1968: 19). From the experience of Stephensen and others, one cannot help but form an image of the renegade as a radical who takes flight at the mere sight of danger. In turning to fascism, Stephensen was seen in some quarters as simply swapping one god with another – again, a charge capable of being levelled at numerous turncoats. Frank Clune, for whom Stephensen ghost-wrote near on seventy books down the years, thus mocked him accordingly for substituting his communist god for the god of fascism. Stephensen had once warned that fascists posed a far greater threat than Bolsheviks, who at least aspired to humanitarianism and some form of philosophical project (Stephensen, 1936: 128; Munro, 2002). Yet he became a fascist in the space of a few years. Stephensen possessed the insecurities and paranoias of other notable anticommunists renegades, including Arthur Koestler (see below). Here there are parallels, too, with fellow communist turned fascist Mussolini. Stephensen’s individualism was inspired by the thinking of Bakunin and Nietzsche, and under different social conditions he risked becoming an extreme narcissist, given his assured sense of status as an Australian cultural legatee. He also had an appetite for self-destruction (Munro, 1984: 153). With other former communists who compromised with fascism, there were also clear psychological factors in their political behaviour, including the propounding of ideas and causes with an at times religious fervour – before replacing them with something more suitable. The Belgian Marxist turned

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Nazi collaborator Hendrik de Man believed that in Marxism he had found at once a panacea for virtually all social ills and a cure for deep psychological cravings. The deeply addictive aspect of Marxism lay not in its theoretical explanatory power alone but in its status as ‘a substitute religion, a philosophy of history, a scientific method, a social ethic, a political strategy, and all that drawn together in a comprehensible logical system’. In addition to intellectual fortification, this provided him with ‘a feeling of security and personal force’ he could not resist (cited in Pierson, 2001: 35). We noted earlier evidence of de Man undergoing an experience of defeat related to the demoralising collapse of working-class solidarity at the outbreak of the First World War. But what apparently struck him most about these events was the collapse of his own moral fibres as he ditched his pacifism to volunteer for front-line service, as well as the possible impact of feelings dredged up from his subconscious. In commenting on his pilgrimage, Pierson points to the way in which de Man’s bourgeois mentality had led him to understate the powerful political forces commanding European politics, but he also finds noteworthy his descent into a rather narcissistic psyche (Pierson, 2001: 38, 74). As Dodge observed, de Man exhibited a self-assuredness that gave no credence whatsoever to opposing arguments. Not unlike numerous other renegades, he was a hothead whose forceful style of debate introduced an unavoidable testiness into relations with others (Dodge, 1966: 170, 172). Along with de Man, Mussolini, and the Vichy collaborationist Marcel Déat, Oswald Mosley has been categorised as a First World War-era renegade (Loughlin, 2003: 516). While arguably distinguishable from these others by his Conservative political heritage, Mosley shared a tendency for confused and contradictory leanings, reflected in his admission that it may be ‘a paradox to claim to be of the centre when my policies must seem sometimes to be to the left of the Left and at other times to be to the right of the Right’. Yet his was no ordinary centre but rather one that was ‘dynamic and not static’. Furthermore, by his own reckoning, contrast had been a permanent feature of his life (Mosley, 1968: 100–1, 319). In fact, Mosley had initially ruminated over whether to stand as a Conservative or as a Liberal candidate, and, in his son’s assessment, he chose the former in part to retain his social connections in London. ‘He made it plain he did not care about political party labels’. Moreover, his mind was churning amid the political turmoil, for the events of the First World War had thrown him: parties and causes were being swapped with great rapidity and old truisms were being called into question (Mosley, 1982: 8–9).

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Here it is important to take stock of the rollercoaster ride that was Mosley’s career, one which undercuts the notion of a simple desertion of radicalism for some variant on conservatism: • he went from being a Conservative at the 1918 election to being an Independent after not even two years; • he then joined the Labour Party less than four years after becoming an Independent; • in 1931 he founded his more centrist New Party; and • after the collapse of that short-lived experiment, he founded the BUF a year later in 1932. This was a remarkable flurry and breadth of affiliations, ideologies, and organisations over a fourteen-year period. There is a strong sense here of the political adventurer tag attached to Mosley by critics (cf. Skidelsky, 1975: 15), and which is reminiscent of other renegades. Reportedly Mosley had given little thought to fascism before 1931, and it was suggested that his anti-Semitism was an opportunistic and cynical flourish (Mosley, 1982: 207; McIntyre, 1988: 56). Mosley’s promiscuity was not confined to his politics: he conducted affairs with many of his wife’s friends, as well as with her sister and stepmother (Mosley, 1982: 248). There are some resemblances here to Arthur Koestler (see below). Indeed, his son Nicholas suggests that it was his unsteadiness, his proneness to boredom, and his manic behaviour – also reflected in his sex drive – that set in train the downward spiral of his political career (Mosley, 1982: 180). Irrespective of whether we accept this assessment, undoubtedly there is a link between his peculiar combination of ideas, psychology, personality, and political realignments. According to Cross, what typified Mosley was his inability to move on from a political battle and a fantastic belief in his destiny to rank alongside the Cromwells and Napoleons of history. Mosley possessed a colossal ego and enormous self-belief, reflected in his decision to found his own fascist movement. Where most politicians on the receiving end of the defeat he suffered at the 1930 Labour Party conference would have attempted to build on existing bases of support and to seek out the next opportunity to strike, Mosley impetuously quit and began to assemble his own forces. This, it was thought, may have cost him a promising career, including the leadership of one of Britain’s major parties and potentially the prime ministership (Cross, 1961: 41, 53–5). Hubris helped determine the course of events. As his son commented,

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it was either his way or the highway (Mosley, 1982: 80). Impatience and petulance were hallmarks of his character (McIntyre, 1988: 50). While not in principle wrong for leaving the Labour Party because of its timidity, this was a symptom of his extraordinary belief in his own transformative leadership capacities and his inflated sense of his attractiveness as a political figure (McIntyre, 1988: 53). He recalled grandiosely that the depth of the crisis facing the country in 1931 meant that it fell to him to provide a political solution sufficient to save the nation from destruction and to spur a ‘renaissance’ across the land (Mosley, 1968: 90, 288). Perhaps he shifted to fascism simply for power-political reasons: by his own assessment, he could not achieve his ultimate ambitions for power in the Labour Party at that instant, so he pursued them elsewhere. His highly sympathetic biographer Robert Skidelsky notes that Mosley has been attacked for his ‘appalling judgment, colossal vanity, suicidal impatience … He had an insatiable lust for power.’ While critical of this view, Skidelsky accepts that Mosley was an exceptional narcissist convinced of his indispensability to the resolution of Britain’s problems – character traits into which psychoanalysts would relish the prospect of getting their teeth (Skidelsky, 1975: 18). According to his son, Mosley had studied psychoanalysis later in life, only to reject the possibility of any significant impact of a violent childhood on his adult behaviour (Mosley, 1982: 2). It has even been argued that Mosley’s turn to fascism in his midthirties indicated his affliction with a form of narcissism known as the Nobel Prize complex, according to which the sufferer is driven by unbridled ambition for scaling great heights of achievement (McIntyre, 1988). The explanation for Mosley’s political behaviour is considerably more complex, according to Skidelsky, and was the product of his experience in the First World War, to whose camaraderie and spirit of sacrifice he longed for a return (Skidelsky, 1975: 21). Lord Skidelsky’s hagiography of the megalomaniac and fascist Mosley was probably related to his own zig-zags and promiscuous behaviour in relation to party politics.4 But other commentators 4  Skidelsky drifted from the Labour Party in the 1970s to the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, before becoming a Conservative Party whip for eight years in the 1990s. But he fell out with the Conservatives after being removed as Lords frontbench spokesperson for opposing NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. He lamented ‘having lost one’s political home all of a sudden’, but he was philosophical about the whole thing: ‘I thought well if I’m in the House of Lords I can’t really do anything unless I attach myself to a political party. I probably attracted myself to the wrong party in retrospect’ (cited in Reid, 2010).

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have made similar references to the psychological impact of Mosley’s participation in the war alongside other ‘front generation socialists’ for whom, according to White, the conflict was a formative experience because it instilled in each of them a fondness for the comradeship of the troops and an attachment to the nation. Mosley himself had expressed joy at the intimacy he felt in the BUF (White, 1992: 3, 4, 158). Thus Mosley’s decisions as a renegade were not merely an index of the tempo of class struggle or reflective of any theoretical weaknesses on his part. Nonetheless, diagnoses of narcissism complexes to explain his turn to fascism ignore Mosley’s fascination with great leaders early in his career (see chapter 6) and his conservative political tutelage more broadly, not to mention the importance of the times in which he lived – characterised by the rise of fellow fascists Mussolini and Hitler – as key ingredients in Mosley’s pattern of behaviour. This is another salutary reminder of the need to view psychological explanations with a critical eye.

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10 Arthur Koestler, the twentieth-century ‘sceptic’, and other Cold War pilgrims

Among the renegades who embraced a wide range of movements and causes – in some instances, so many that the break with radicalism appears as just one step in a long series – probably the most egregious is Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-born communist and novelist who became an equally dedicated anti-communist. His biographer Cesarani has warned of the need to exercise caution in relation to Koestler’s own self-serving interpretation of his life (Cesarani, 1998: vii). Thus we need an alternative to the standard depiction – corrected partly by a recent biography of him – that portrays him simply as a communist who, upon discovering the reality of the regimes to which he once was devoted, became an anti-communist. Indeed, this aspect of his life was merely one dimension of his almost endless evolution. Like Oswald Mosley, the promiscuity of his politics appeared a close match with his sexual praxis – he was renowned for his countless affairs – faithfulness was not his modus operandi in any sphere of life. The subtitle of one Koestler biography, ‘The homeless mind’, sums up the nature of the man (Cesarani, 1998). As has been detailed in a more recent biography of him, Koestler subscribed to a lengthy menu of causes, movements, cults, and cures over the duration of his life (Scammell, 2009). The first of his many conversions – and one from which, typically, he would later detach himself – was to Zionism, which impelled him to Palestine in 1926 in a quest for a utopian existence. His subsequent embrace of communism was, in a sense, a transition on the part of Koestler to an alternative solution to the Jewish question (Cesarani, 1998: 33, 62). But this was only the beginning: Koestler was also persuaded by

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Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about sexual freedom providing the key to happiness; a one-time enthusiast of Freud’s, he eventually became disillusioned with the Austrian father of psychoanalysis; in science, an area of special interest, he had been a fan of eugenics as late as the 1930s when the Nazis were on the rise; he supported Lamarckism, an alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution; in India he conducted a spiritual whistle-stop tour, and was taken in by Gandhi’s spiritual heir Sri Vinoba Bhave; he willingly subjected himself to experiments involving hallucinogenic drugs;1 and, notwithstanding his interests in science, he was a strong supporter of extra-sensory perception, including one of its practitioners, the self-proclaimed psychic and spoon-bender Uri Geller (Scammell, 2009: passim). In light of all this, Hitchens argues that to describe Koestler as a ‘sceptic’, as one of his biographers has done (Scammell, 2009), is deeply mistaken. Hitchens – also a ‘sceptic’, in his case seduced by the neo-conservatives – correctly regards Koestler as someone gullible enough to embrace enthusiastically whichever scheme was put in front of him (Hitchens, 2009: 5). His break with communism is therefore indicative of something much deeper than mere discovery of the ugly reality of life under Stalin. Instead the explanation for his pinball behaviour is less likely to be found in history or politics than in his psychology and personality, characterised by an unending quest for a new source of euphoric self-realisation. The connection between Koestler’s various affiliations and his psychology is not mere speculation but an unavoidable reality in light of his ongoing and intimate relationship with psychoanalysis – reflected in his own recollections of his childhood, his image of himself, his relations with the opposite sex, and his thoughts on death (Cesarani, 1998: 99, viii). As Treglown (2010: 4) comments of the Koestler aged between his mid-forties and his seventies, he regularly swapped beliefs, spouses, countries, and homes. His canine companions were apparently among the few constants in his life. He longed for, by his own admission, regular subversions of his previous thought patterns (cited in Cesarani, 1  Koestler had informed Timothy Leary of his intention to pull out of a planned trial of magic mushrooms after a negative experience with the drug psilocybin. Yet after agreeing to visit Leary as an observer of one such trial, Koestler could not help himself and elected to participate, to the surprise of the former Harvard professor. After a period in which Koestler had gone missing, Leary went looking for him and found him in bed ‘cuddled up under the blankets, clutching a pillow to his chest and grinning madly, high as a balloon’ (Leary, 1990: 56, 59–60).

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1998: 101). His constant shuffling and distractability made him, like Adela Pankhurst Walsh, an unlikely candidate for radicalism. As Kovel puts it: ‘How could such a narcissist ever submit to the ascetic discipline of Communism – or resist the self-aggrandizing appeal of life as an anticommunist celebrity?’ (Kovel, 1997: 163). One of Koestler’s biographers has argued that a survey of his personal papers positioned his zest for movements in the context of deep burning desires, themselves the product of a fundamental unhappiness running through his life (Scammell, 2009: xxi). Koestler apparently viewed his search for the ‘absolute’ (an affliction self-diagnosed as ‘absolutitis’) as the cause of his inability to find satisfaction, and he admitted that the same all-or-nothing approach driving him into the arms of the Communist Party was the identical phenomenon egging him on in the search for meaning elsewhere (cited in Scammell, 2009: 19, 77). He observed how those such as himself who were duped by the mighty illusion of communism simply had to find a replacement for it, otherwise they would pay a hefty price for the rest of their lives. Koestler compared the communist’s ideological disposition to that of the inner psyche of a drug addict, something the non-addict simply could not comprehend (Koestler, 1949: 55–6, 62). There may have been something significant here in Koestler’s metaphor about drugs, which occupied an important place in the lives of a number of the renegade adventurers discussed throughout this book including, in addition to Koestler, Eldridge Cleaver and Jerry Rubin (see below). Mansfield has argued that a critical attraction to drugs lies in their provision of ‘infinite power together with infinite desire’ (cited in Kimball, 2000: 54). Now, different drugs have different effects and people take drugs for diverse reasons under capitalism, with all its ‘great lakes of pain’ (see Farrell, 1997: 40–1). But the same euphoria Koestler found in drugs was also sought in his various crusades. In the case of abandoning communism, the inevitable withdrawal symptoms meant that he had to replace it with something else. Indeed, the decision by Koestler to apply for Communist Party membership in the first place on 31 December 1931 was provoked by a strange sort of spiritual experience involving not only a poker game in which he lost a substantial sum of money, but also a ruined engine in his car, and a less than pleasurable one-night stand (Cesarani, 1998: 75). The God That Failed, the anti-communist confessional to which Koestler contributed, also has unmistakably religious and spiritual connotations. Citing this text, Kovel (1997: 161) argues that the transformation from communist to anti-communist is frequently articulated in religious terms.

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In his contribution to the book, Koestler had compared his attachment to communism with falling in love with a woman or embracing the church, both of which tended to occur not as a form of rational behaviour, but as an act of blind faith. Moreover, he suggested that psychologically there was little to distinguish between a revolutionary’s belief in a future non-capitalist society and the standard faith, because both envisaged some future paradise (Koestler, 1949: 15–16). The editor of The God That Failed, Richard Crossman, had Koestler in mind when he discussed the way in which the ex-communist’s confrontation with the Soviet Union closely mirrored the internal struggle with oneself, which, he argued, was the source of the creativity driving the Hungarian novelist (Crossman, 1949: 11). Koestler also possessed the same mercurial nature as many former radicals. According to his biographer, Koestler was given to extreme mood swings. Indicating these very tendencies, Koestler elaborated on the process of intellectual discovery and the responses triggered in him after reading classic Marxist texts such as Lenin’s State and Revolution. The work, he claimed, had set off something in his brain. Again, the description, aided by his literary gifts, bears considerable similarity to the way in which drug addicts often relate their experience with narcotics: To say that one had ‘seen the light’ is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows (regardless of what faith he has been converted to). The new light seems to pour across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past – a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don’t know. Nothing henceforth can disturb the convert’s inner peace and serenity – except the occasional fear of losing faith again, losing thereby what alone makes life worth living, and falling back into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. (Koestler, 1949: 23; emphasis in original)

As important a work as The State and Revolution is, it is hard to reconcile Koestler’s euphoric reaction with the serious tone of a pamphlet that reduced states to ‘bodies of armed men which have prisons, etc., at their command’ (Lenin, 1970: 10). What makes this all the more surprising is the fact that, as we learned earlier, Koestler only dipped into Marxist texts in a desultory manner (Cesarani, 1998: 72). Moreover, to believe that Marxism had a ready answer to all life’s problems, and that circumspection and inner torment could safely be consigned to the dustbin of history, went against the critical spirit of

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the revolutionary ideology to which Koestler was apparently an adherent: Marx’s personal motto was, after all, ‘Doubt everything’ (cited in Callinicos, 1993: 10). By enjoying ‘intoxicating’ effects from the written works of Marx and Engels, Koestler evidently had read the two Germans in a way they undoubtedly would have found disturbing (cited in Saunders, 1999: 61). But it is consistent with his short-lived and mercurial interest in matters, for he never committed to anything for long. In part, this was because of his evolutionary theory of the way in which humans embrace new ideas, which he saw as key to their constant improvement: subscribing to a version of survival of the fittest, the adoption of new thoughts and creeds was part of the ceaseless adaptation to one’s environment. Novelty, meanwhile, represented an escape from the imprisonment of habit (cited in Leary, 1990: 185). On top of these psychological influences on his behaviour, he was a generally tormented figure, as revealed in Scammell’s (2009) biography of Koestler: consider his numerous attempted suicides (including his final success in 1983), the accusations levelled at him of repeated sexual assaults on women, as well as the force he liked to employ during sex, and his apparent symptoms of manic depression. Cesarani points out that even in the context of the meltdown of so-called communism in Eastern Europe, which might have been expected to vindicate him, the lasting impression of Koestler would be as ‘a half-forgotten crank who was reviled as a philanderer and wife-beater when he was recalled at all’ (Cesarani, 1998: 3). An extreme case though he may be, a religious-like embrace of causes was by no means the exclusive preserve of Koestler. The Trotsky translator turned McCarthyist Max Eastman had a tendency to glide between causes, which he backed initially with the utmost enthusiasm. As Diggins argues, in his conservative phase Eastman was a dilettante who suffered badly from confirmation bias, which led him on a mission for ideas and evidence to confirm what he already believed (Diggins, 1975: 231). Like Koestler, Eastman was heavily influenced by a pamphlet of Lenin’s – on this occasion The Soviets at Work – as he recalled being utterly mesmerised. Indeed, after describing his revelatory reading of Lenin, Eastman proceeded to say that, while he did not blame Marx for Realpolitik, he nevertheless believed that the phenomenon of immorality among people striving for a more just world was attributable to the author of Das Kapital (Eastman, 1955: 10, 81). Perhaps Eastman’s stunning reincarnation is in part a reflection of his upbringing in a religious family: both his parents were Christian ministers (Eastman, 1948: 23). Indeed, his transition to McCarthyism, according to Sidney Hook, was akin to a religious

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conversion (Hook, 1987: 141). Hook himself was not immune to such criticisms, since he was ‘fiercer than anyone’ in his denunciation of his former beliefs (Berman, 1996: 66). Moreover, as a disciple of New York communism, Hook went from Stalinism to Trotskyism to Bukharinism (Saunders, 1999: 53). But his observations are accurate of Eastman, who came to Marxism originally to quell religious doubts (Diggins, 1975: 119). His final break with socialism, it will be remembered, occurred at a cocktail party in 1941 when it suddenly dawned on him that he was no longer a believer. As we shall see, numerous other renegades experience similar moments of clarity. More generally, like other renegades, Eastman was unstable and unpredictable. Observers struggled to comprehend the man, who one moment could be an intelligent writer capable of drafting a powerful polemic, while the next he would absent himself from crucial political battles: in the early 1920s in the Soviet Union he found the Communist International’s fourth congress to be no match for the attraction of nude bathing and a more rewarding love life (Wald, 1987: 112). According to the novelist Upton Sinclair, Eastman had simply substituted one extreme for another in becoming an ardent anticommunist and a fan of the American Cold War right (cited in Eastman, 1955: 19). The philosopher John Dewey referred to Eastman’s ‘180-degree shift overnight’ (cited in Hook, 1987: 141). More generally, he was a somewhat paranoid figure. Hook relates that Eastman had made the trip to Columbia University specifically to convince Dewey and the philosopher Frederick Woodbridge of what a disreputable character Hook was, just because he had been critical of Eastman in a footnote to an article he had published in the Journal of Philosophy (Hook, 1987: 138–9). In terms of odd destinations, Eastman cannot compete with the remarkably diverse activities of the SWP (US) member and Trotskyist Felix Morrow, who had stated emphatically at the party’s 1946 convention that he would never be expelled from the organisation and would live and die in the struggle (Wald, 1987: 287). Morrow authored a book on the Spanish Civil War enunciating a revolutionary socialist position and urging American workers to accept the baton presented to them by Spanish workers and peasants. Their job would be to distil the lessons from the revolutionary conflicts in Russia, Spain, and France, and to succeed where the others had failed in their own momentous challenges: the future of humanity was at stake (Morrow, 1974: 2, 254). Yet after the Second World War, Morrow’s behaviour descended into farce. After leaving Trotskyism and revolutionary socialism, he later went into the publishing business and engaged in anti-communist activities, including

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informing the CIA about the activities of Communists, and possibly Trotskyists as well. He then began to harbour doubts about these activities but did not return to radicalism, concentrating instead on publishing. This led him to the field of the occult where he founded his own Mystic Arts Book Society, writing (under the pseudonym of John C. Wilson) numerous introductions to the books published by his firm, University Books (Wald, 1987: 288–9). In his introduction to TheVampire: His Kith and Kin, written in his own name, he sought to prepare the reader for the material in the coming pages, which was bound to appear as bizarre: ‘Just what will you make of the author’s earnest advice concerning how to dispose of the body of a vampire? Or of his description of what the usual vampire looks like?’ (Morrow, 1960: xiii). Needless to say, this put him light years from the real flesh and blood of the Spanish Civil War. After venturing into the business of soft pornography, Morrow suffered a mental breakdown and was forced to sell his enterprise. But he would go on to develop religious inclinations, and became a publicist for Dr Ira Progoff, the Jungian pioneer of the intensive journal method designed to help a person work their problems through with regular diarising. Then he read Michael Harrington’s The Twilight of Capitalism (1976), and the book’s message of Marx’s continued relevance given the return of all the old economic contradictions of capitalism in the mid-1970s after a quarter century of growth and full employment must have inspired him to recommence his political activities, because he joined the Democratic socialist organising committee. But not surprisingly the inspiration did not last, because by the 1980s Morrow was working as a consultant for the IRS and spending his weekends at a spiritual community known as the Center for the Living Force (Wald, 1987: 288–9). Interestingly, the years he regarded as the most squandered were not the ones during which he was preoccupied with vampires, but those during which he identified as a Trotskyist (Myers, 1977: 198). Wald’s conclusion that such changes are products of external factors such as the ‘economic boom, upward mobility, the failure of revolutions in Western Europe, and the advent of the international Cold War and domestic McCarthyism’ is highly unsatisfactory, if for no other reason than the fact that many other radicals around this time did not follow Morrow’s meandering path. Another renegade active in the Cold War years with undeniable signs of religiosity in relation to his various attachments was the former Marxist and atheist turned Jewish anti-communist Will Herberg. His journey also was not a simple step from left to right, for as fellow conservative William F. Buckley Jr noted, Herberg had inhabited many philosophical and ideological planets

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(Buckley Jr, 1989, xi). Herberg’s creeds included personalism, humanism, pluralism, Judaism, neo-Orthodoxy, existentialism, and historicism. Diggins suggests that Herberg’s journey, not to mention that of others such as the writer John Dos Passos, was inexplicable without resort to psychology (Diggins, 1975: 302, 432). We noted earlier the way in which the intensity of Herberg’s Marxist convictions saw him try to unite Marx with Einstein and Freud. But, paradoxically, this was indicative of the religious function his socialism fulfilled. As he put it candidly, what made Marxism a religion so powerful as to land the world at Marx’s feet was its ‘vast, all-embracing doctrine of man and the universe, a passionate faith endowing life with meaning, vindicating the aims of the movement, idealizing its activities, and guaranteeing its ultimate triumph’. His precise understanding of religion is not spelled out here. Nevertheless, it is clear that in leaving Marxism for Judaism, Herberg was – by his own interpretation – swapping one form of religion for another (Herberg, 1989b: 22–3). There was something of the evangelist in Herberg when it came to particular texts. His discovery of the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance, constituted a eureka moment. Bereft as a result of his ebbing Marxist faith, he found life was no longer bearable – until in 1940 he happened across Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, whose revelatory brilliance he believed gave him what he needed to rearrange his life affairs and reconfigure his thinking (Herberg, 1989c: 39). He recalled that his fortuitous encounter with Niebuhr’s ideas ‘literally changed my mind and my life. Humanly speaking, it “converted” me, for in some manner I cannot describe, I felt my whole being, and not merely my thinking, shifted to a new center’ (Herberg, 1989c: 39–40). The religious features of his politics presented themselves throughout his life. Diggins observes that Herberg’s attraction to radicalism and his later desertion of it for conservatism were both products of inner desires deeply pious in nature (Diggins, 1975: 118–19). Indeed, Herberg came to the view in the late 1930s and early 1940s – coinciding with and animated by his reading of Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society – that Marxism could not overcome the simple fact of human sinfulness; its quest for power, meanwhile, would ultimately be corrupting (Ausmus, 1986: 16–17). Paraphrasing a Marxist critic’s description of his adoption of Judaism, Herberg admits that the antagonist’s jibes were not altogether wide of the mark. Beginning with the discovery of the flaws in economics, he turned to politics, before also becoming disillusioned with politics, hence his move to ethics. However, this too proved corruptible, and so he finally arrived at religion (Herberg, 1989b:

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26). Whereas Max Eastman had discovered Adam Smith on his journey to conservatism, and the writer John Dos Passos had become reacquainted with Jefferson and the American enlightenment, Herberg had turned to something far more profound: God (Diggins, 1975: 269). Herberg finished his journey at religion and did not keep searching for another experience of euphoric self-realisation in the manner of Koestler, the reason being, it can be speculated, that religion offered – like it did for Eldridge Cleaver (see chapter 4) – a rock of stability to which nothing else in life could come close to emulating. But the changes he underwent nonetheless provide some sense of the spiritual remaking of the man. This is something, again, which he had in common with other renegades, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, the British socialist and admirer of the Bolsheviks who subsequently turned into an anti-communist and wannabe candidate for the British Conservative Party, not to mention agent for MI6 (cited in Hunter, 1980: 23, 83; Ingrams, 1995: 150; Saunders, 1999: 174). But he had also been a non-believer who later recalled rather cryptically experiencing moments of clarity whose cumulative effect was to reinsert faith back into his life as part of a process of Christian conversion. He was thus accepted into the Catholic Church in his senior years, despite his admission that it had the foulest of all records of the contemporary churches (Muggeridge, 1988: 14, 16). While Muggeridge was inclined to portray his religious awakening in his sixties as akin to a return to the fold after a leave of absence – he turned into a self-confessed ‘Jesus freak’ – his critics have pointed to the paucity of evidence for his previous religiosity, indicating more of a late-in-life reincarnation with few portents in his earlier years (Krebs, 1990; Ingrams, 1995: 13). Like some other former radicals, Muggeridge toyed with changes in lifestyle by giving up smoking in 1964, then later swearing off alcohol, followed by the adoption of a vegetarian diet (which he first sampled in India decades earlier): somewhat like Koestler’s, his whole life was one continual journey searching for meaning and answers that had some odd stops along the way (Hunter, 1980: 221; Wolfe, 1995: 52). He, too, was regarded above all as a ‘paradox’ (Krebs, 1990). The resemblances with Koestler do not stop there, for Muggeridge was the subject of some derision as an unpredictable adventurer unable to commit to something for any length of time, and as someone who was little more than a commentator capable of spouting varied and contradictory opinions. Muggeridge was also highly promiscuous sexually – though he opposed the ‘sexual revolution’ – and had a generally troubled nature, consequences of which included bouts of depression severe

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enough to prompt him to make an aborted but nonetheless life-changing suicide attempt (Wolfe, 1995: xii, 204). There were also spiritual dimensions to the apostasy of Jim McClelland, the Australian radical who shed his Trotskyist politics in 1948 to later join the right-wing of the ALP. McClelland confessed to having given up his revolutionary politics for a legal career, and he cited disagreements with tenets of Trotskyism (see chapters 8 and 3). As we have seen, however, in explaining McClelland’s political journey Greenland alluded to a more complex process involving a shift in the balance of class forces against radical intellectuals, who possess significant talents and can thrive during radical upsurges, but often lack the patience and determination to ride out political depressions (Greenland, 1998: 179–80). The American Trotskyist James P. Cannon had in a similar vein described intellectuals as mere ‘tourists in the proletarian movement’ (cited in Isserman, 1987: 40). Like other renegades, McClelland’s radical politics served a quasi-religious purpose. Indeed, according to his wife, McClelland had originally latched on to Trotskyism as a religion designed to replace the real one (Catholicism) he had disavowed (Appleton, 2001: 60). The scholar Donald Horne recalled that if McClelland invested in something, he did so with absolute conviction, but if he ceased believing in that something, he renounced it with equal intensity (cited in Appleton, 2001: 62). Looking back over his career, his wife had little doubt that as soon as something no longer held interest for him, he quickly moved on (Appleton, 2001: 62). Earlier we saw how McClelland described his shift as occurring one night en route to a Trotskyist meeting – giving the impression of an epiphany of the sort that had preceded other renegades’ awakenings. Phillip Luce, whose break with communism was by his own account gradual – and therefore properly thought through – insisted that a person does not ‘discover early some morning that everything you believe in, and perhaps have staked your life on, is a myth’ (Luce, 1971: 34). Yet McClelland may well have ended his relationship with Trotskyism in exactly this manner. Indeed, he likened his decision against attending the meeting to the time he decided one morning that he would no longer be going to mass. ‘Losing a faith,’ McClelland related, ‘is something like losing a tooth. The pain soon disappears but it leaves a gap’ (McClelland, 1988: 77). How right-wing social democracy or a legal career filled this vacuum is not immediately clear, but these are the things with which he replaced his revolutionary politics. And he pursued his new path of parliamentary careerism with sufficient zeal to become a minister in the ill-fated Whitlam Labor government (1972–75).

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Often there is a remarkable self-effacing tendency on the part of renegades in relation to their undulating lives. The former Trotskyist turned neo-conservative Irving Kristol made light of his own dalliances by referring to the long list of ‘neos’ he had adopted over the course of his life, including neo-Marxism, neo-Trotskyism, neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, and neo-Orthodoxy in religion: ‘I’m going to end up a neo. Just neo, that’s all. Neo-dash-nothing’ (cited in Dorman, 2000: 194). Elsewhere, with similar candour, he explained that he: became radical because I thought I had good reason to become radical. I became liberal because I thought I had good reason to become liberal. And then I became conservative because I thought I had good reason to be conservative. It seems to me perfectly natural. (cited in Margolick, 1998)

There is, of course, nothing ‘natural’ about such zig-zags. Kristol’s journey was not simply from radical to conservative: his political life involved multiple contradictory leaps of ideology, possibly driven by boredom. He conceded that he needed some kind of ‘enemy’ to sustain his interest in politics; so when the Cold War ended he lost the enthusiasm to write and debate, leading in turn to introspection (cited in Robin, 2011: 127). On top of his many flirtations, Kristol was also guilty of the paranoid behaviour and shrill rhetoric typical among other ex-radicals. He would often have little to contribute when it came to questions of substance at the centre of intellectual debate across the US. However, one could expect rabid assaults on the treasonous behaviour of American civil liberties defenders, such as Arthur Miller and Bertrand Russell. On one occasion, Kristol launched into a tirade about the misuse of private sector funding of US colleges, where the money was being misspent on radical humanities and social science departments, women’s studies programmes that were really a front for lesbianism, safe-sex programmes that were legitimators of homosexuality, and environment studies that were anti-capitalist at heart (cited in Dorrien, 1993: 73, 100–1). Attacks of such ferocity on targets so minuscule only raised doubts about the mental balance of the individual in question. Even the New York intellectual literary critic Irving Howe, who continued to identify as a socialist of sorts, recalled changing politics in the mid-1950s in what was a highly flippant manner. Marxism and class analysis had been discredited so he and others sought to marry elements of Marxism with ‘the mass society approach, [sociologist] Danny Bell’s pluralist theory, whatever seemed to work’ (cited in Sorin, 2002: 149). The post-war period was one

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during which, Howe notes, intellectuals ‘stumbled from fad to fad, notion to notion’ (Howe, 1983: 197). There were numerous other renegades and ex-radicals during the Cold War – particularly in the US – who were politically promiscuous, unpredictable, and frivolous. Dwight Macdonald was technically an ex-Trotskyist New York intellectual, but it is difficult to label him an ex-anything, since his very stock-in-trade was his willingness to pour scorn on his old beliefs (Howe, 1970: 220). Even his Trotskyism was a brief affair: commencing just prior to the Second World War, it was all over in just two years, after which he became a ‘permanent renegade’ (Buhle, 1987: 211). Macdonald, according to Podhoretz, had a history of changing his allegiances seemingly as often as he changed his clothes: ‘Luce-man today,2 Trotskyite tomorrow, pacifist the day after that’ (Podhoretz, 1968: 171). He was an erratic character, according to James Farrell, while Howe dismissed his outpourings as a ‘grab bag of modern confusionism’. C. Wright Mills, meanwhile, ridiculed Macdonald as a person not ‘capable of fixing his beliefs in any warrantable way’, preferring instead a ‘fetish of confusion and drift’ (cited in Mattson, 2002: 30, 40). Macdonald did hold to a highly unusual – not to mention unsustainable – cocktail of ideas and attitudes: he was a former communist in the 1930s and a Trotskyist in the 1940s who became a committed anti-communist and equated Stalinism with Nazism (while remaining hostile to McCarthyism). He was also a supporter of the West in the Cold War, a critical advocate of conservatism, and an opponent of revolutionary change. While opposed to McCarthyism he was nonetheless involved with CIA-funded journals such as Encounter (of which he was a contributing editor of sorts for two years from 1956) and was influenced by ideas of original sin not too far removed from Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought. Yet he also flirted with the new left and the antiVietnam War movement in the 1960s (see Wreszin, 1994). Macdonald was in addition a disillusioned ex-Marxist, who could no longer detect a shred of revolutionary élan in the proletariat (Macdonald, 1957: 268). While not a typical renegade who left his radical politics, never to return, his political style and personality nevertheless matched that of many other ex-communists and ex-radicals. As his biographer noted, the defining feature 2  This is a reference to Time magazine founder Henry Luce, for whom Macdonald worked in his twenties before he resigned in protest at editorial interference (Wreszin, 1994: 22; Macdonald, 1957: 9). Luce’s publications were regarded as consumerist and capitalistic propaganda par excellence (Goodman, 1960: x).

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of Macdonald – if one could be identified – was contradiction (Wreszin, 1994: xiv). Macdonald appeared to be guilty of the tendency much maligned by Marxists of eclecticism, characterised by the combination of contradictory ideas, and a political allegiance that fluctuated between bourgeois and proletarian programmes of action (Mann, 1988: 202). Macdonald himself recalled perusing Marx and Engels just prior to his becoming a Trotskyist in 1939 in order to ascertain whether or not he was a Marxist, but he was unable to say one way or the other (Macdonald, 1957: 17). It was a source of astonishment even to him how he could so rapidly shift from a liberal into a radical and then from a communist into an anti-Stalinist (cited in Saunders, 1999: 161). Referring to the erroneous nature of a previous statement of his, Macdonald plainly admitted that he still did not know why he had written such a falsehood, since there was no evidence for the claim. But he suspected that it was the ‘intoxication of rhetoric’ at work (Macdonald, 1957: 42). The ‘intoxication of rhetoric’ was, of course, something to which numerous other ex-radical drifters at times succumbed. Another example of an ex-radical constantly in search of fresh inspiration was the Trotskyist Albert Goldman,3 who left the SWP (US) to join Max Shachtman’s Workers Party after making a case for unity between the two groupings which dominated the American revolutionary Marxist left, partly on the basis that the invention of the atom bomb meant that socialists were living on borrowed time (Goldman, 1947: 18). A year prior to resigning in turn from the Workers Party Goldman had, according to Wald, undergone a steep political decline and was disbarred. He took up taxi driving, and then became assistant manager of the Courtesy Car Service, a limousine taxicab company in Chicago. During this period he embraced vegetarianism, developed a fetish for cleanliness, drew on the ethical principles of Christ and the prophets for his brand of ‘socialism’, and flatly refused to drink nonboiled water. With a changed appearance and behaviour his friends found him barely recognisable (Wald, 1987: 286–7). Unfortunately, Goldman’s anticommunism saw him breaking bread with the FBI, though he did resist the temptation to testify against former American Communist Party founder and later Trotskyist leader Arne Swabeck in return for reinstatement at the bar, which came after being pardoned for a Smith Act conviction (Myers, 1977: 198; Kerry, 1977: 90; Wald, 1987: 287). 3  Not to be confused with the John Lennon biographer of the same name cited elsewhere in this book.

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Goldman’s former colleague Shachtman might not have shown as much enthusiasm for startlingly different life changes, but he appeared to have an infatuation with organisational change, for his political career was characterised by an affiliation with progressively smaller groups. Originally in the Communist Party, he became a Trotskyist oppositionist; from the Socialist Party, he left for the SWP (US); from there he went on to form his own Workers Party (Isserman, 1987: 56). In this vein, Trotsky was amazed by Shachtman’s ‘extraordinary zigzags, his improvisations and leaps’. Trotsky had similarly commented on the way in which Burnham showed little consistency and lacked the mettle required of a proletarian disciplined by life and labour. His impression of Burnham was of someone for whom the door of one party closing invariably meant that another was opening. Writing patterns were not much different: Burnham would compose a lengthy and substantive piece on a topic, and then act like he had never written it at all (Trotsky, 1973: 105, 181, 183). Moreover, Burnham returned to Catholicism towards the end of his life after a lengthy period of estrangement from the religion in which he had been schooled (Kimball, 2002).

From radicalism to faddism: Rubin, Cleaver, and other 1960s searchers The ex-1960s radical Jerry Rubin has much in common with the personalities of many of the aforementioned renegades, and it is abundantly clear that psychology was a key factor in his transition from radical to consciousnessseeker to entrepreneur. Jensen and Lichtenstein (1995) are partly correct in depicting Rubin as someone who kept pace with changes in the world around him. But it is also true that many 1960s radicals did not follow him on this score: even his Yippie collaborator Abbie Hoffman, who shared much of Rubin’s attention-grabbing propaganda-style politics, could see Yuppiedom for the blatant sell-out that it was. The unique nature of his transformation, therefore, must partly be explained by the personality of Rubin, who drew attention to the psychological roots to his activism when he admitted harbouring a burning desire for fame, the equivalent for him of ‘heroin, my main line’. The psychological roots of Rubin’s antics can also be seen from his admission that he needed ‘attention from the outside, a platform, recognition as an outlet for my energy’. He adds that he sought to become famous ‘because I believed that people needed a reason to notice me. I was

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trying to get from the outside what I felt I lacked on the inside’ (Rubin, 1976: 100–1). This reveals unambiguously the psychological motivations for Rubin’s political behaviour. Berger (1994) likens Rubin to Leonard Zelig, the central character of the 1983 film Zelig by Woody Allen, who, playing the lead role, portrays an attention-seeking chameleon with the unique capacity to change his appearance – including even his skin colour – to blend in with those around him in an effort to feel ‘safe’ and be ‘liked’. It would be caricaturing Rubin to depict him in this fashion, but part of the reason for the neglect of Rubin in serious studies of the 1960s and its leading figures – there are three biographies of Rubin’s fellow Yippie Abbie Hoffman,4 and yet none of Rubin – is that he has been widely dismissed as a juvenile clown. In Lasch’s unsympathetic eyes, Rubin had such pitiful results to show for his political theatre that he could only ascribe self-publicising motives for his radical activity (Lasch, 1980: 83). As we saw earlier, he thoroughly enjoyed being in the glare of the media, and his instincts for self-promotion were just as apparent as a radical as they were when he joined the ranks of the bourgeoisie (Jezer, 1992: 291). Thus when he telephoned a journalist to promote his Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven (1976), he introduced himself before asking whether the journalist knew ‘who I am?’ (Leonard, 1976: 34). Witness also his ceremonious announcement of his arrival on Wall Street in 1980 via a letter to the New York Times (Rubin, 1980). Rubin exhibited several tendencies common to other renegades from earlier periods, in particular the zeal with which he sponsored various causes. In 1971, at the beginning of the downturn, Rubin was in the process of embracing the ‘human potential movement’, and with as much belief as he had publicised the Yippie cause he now sincerely felt that this offered the path to revolutionary change. From proselytising for the human potential movement, Rubin went on to become an evangelist for the Yuppie way of life in the 1980s (Jezer, 1992: 240, 291). Whereas he was once famous for not trusting anyone over thirty, Rubin in the 1980s switched to being sceptical towards anyone under fifty (cited in NYT, 1988). One view of Rubin was that he was a mere sloganeer predisposed towards empty rhetoric and throwaway lines: he simply substituted his banal political slogans of the 1960s with equally illthought-out ones about therapy and rejuvenation in the 1970s (Lasch, 1980: 15). In this vein we might see his call for 1960s radicals to commence the

4  See Hoffman and Simon (1994), Jezer (1992), and Raskin (1996).

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revolution with the slaying of their parents, particularly given that Rubin himself became a loving father (see chapter 2). The case of Rubin springs to mind when one reads the observation by an activist in the years 1969–70 that movement participants were frenetically agitating and organising for a revolution to the point of experiencing guilt for being insufficiently committed to making it happen (cited in Harman, 1988: 180). To some extent this is an understandable – and indeed necessary – element of radicalism: when a long winter of conservatism finally breaks, activists throw all their energy into making hay while the sun shines, knowing that opportunities to change the world are few and far between. Yet there was a kind of manic behaviour, a sense of mindless activism, about the unbalanced Rubin, who as we saw earlier had no time for theorising. He recalled that between 1965 and 1970, he was a full-time political activist who worked day in, day out for the movement while making sacrifices along the way, including dropping out of graduate school at Berkeley. He confessed to constantly thinking, dreaming, talking, and doing politics. Recalling how he was inspired initially by his first experience at a picket line, he decided to become a ‘full-time picket-line walker. I walked in more circles than anyone in town’ (Rubin, 1976: 77, 74). Another standout aspect of Rubin was the very sharp reversal he negotiated suddenly when he determined that the movement was over after 1970 (Rubin, 1976: 1). He quickly turned his back on radicalism once he realised that the revolution had not taken place, discarding the causes to which he had dedicated himself so wholeheartedly. In his 1971 book, We Are Everywhere, Rubin noted the multiple political and personal changes he and other radicals were undergoing (Rubin, 1971: 7). It is striking what a transformation takes place in him in just the six years between this book and Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven (1976). It is indicative once again of the adaptability common to many renegades. In Growing (Up), Rubin revealed that in the years 1971–75 he sampled an extensive array of cures and treatments, including gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, rolfing, massage, jogging, health foods, tai chi, Esalen, hypnotism, modern dance, meditation, Silva Mind Control, Arica, acupuncture, sex therapy, Reichian therapy, and est. His daily routine during this period was relentless: commencing with an early morning jog, it was followed by a modern dance class, tai chi, yoga, swimming, an organic meal, massage class, a sauna bath, and therapy or a growth collective at night time (Rubin, 1976: 20). His earlier cited nomination of sex as the second most ‘crazed area’ of his life, behind only money, was reflected in Rubin’s 1980 book, co-authored

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by his then-wife Mimi Leonard, The War Between the Sheets, which marked a further step away from activist politics towards psychological introspection, since the project started as the Chicago Eighter’s firsthand recollection of sexual problems he had confronted over the years (Rubin and Leonard, 1980). The soul-searching and experimentation did not stop there: in the 1980s, he followed in the footsteps of other ex-radicals (e.g. Muggeridge and Goldman) and became a vegetarian (Jensen and Lichtenstein, 1995; NYT, 1988). His earlier comparison of his addiction to fame with heroin was almost certainly not coincidential for, as we noted earlier, drugs were an important part of the lives of some of the most distractable renegade adventurers. The radical Rubin complained that the left would rather give a soldier ‘a leaflet than a joint’ (Rubin, 1970: 113). He later recalled his first acid trip in 1967 during which he ‘experienced the make-believe quality of all reality and [henceforth he] became a consciousness explorer’ (Rubin, 1976: 79). As we saw earlier, it was later that year that in the midst of a psychedelic experience the Yippie concept had been invented by Rubin, Hoffman, and Krassner (Leary, 1990: 268). In believing that marijuana could help dissolve the barriers between people and allow them to experience unalienated existence (Jensen and Lichtenstein, 1995), Rubin ignored both the fact that this could only ever be temporary, as well as the possibility that its somnolent effects detracted from the kind of political activity required to achieve a society where alienation is transcended once and for all. But drug use produced the same euphoric self-realisation – albeit short-lived – sought after in Rubin’s many pursuits, including his 1960s radicalism, which, given the political summits the period scaled, might have provided him with the biggest high of all. Later, he swore off drugs altogether – an act whose decisiveness and resolution may also have produced a short-term kick (Jensen and Lichtenstein, 1995; NYT, 1988). The latter was one of Rubin’s multiple rebirths and identity makeovers. In fact, he appeared to revel in the process of being reborn just as much as did the musician John Lennon, with whom, as we saw earlier, he got on famously when the English musician arrived in New York in 1971. Lennon, for whom Rubin expressed ‘genuine love’, had over the course of his life sampled an array of cures, potions, and treatments, including drugs of all kinds, Indian gurus, the occult, and hypnosis (Goldman, 1988: 430–3, 459; Rubin, 1976: 11). This would not have been lost on Rubin, who in 1973 – in notably psychological terms – referred to the early years of the decade as a period in which many people, including him, were going through a process of self-discovery after the hectic and dizzying 1960s. In the 1970s, it was time for people to slow

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down and reconnect with their inner selves (cited in Shelton, 1986: 415). It was notable that Rubin employed progressive and liberationist – though unconvincing – rhetoric to justify this self-exploration and experimentation (Lasch, 1980: 15). He endured some ten years of this before morphing into a Yuppie businessman in the 1980s (Hayden, 1988: 487). If Rubin’s daily routine in the early 1970s (see above) seemed scarcely designed to make one more relaxed after the hectic 1960s-induced burnout, it was because he was hyperactive. In fact, his business interests were just as varied and as enthusiastically pursued. Hard on the heels of becoming a stock analyst on Wall Street, he had become well-known in the 1980s for organising networking parties at the Palladium night club in New York City, reportedly attended over the years by tens of thousands (NYT, 1988). When he died in 1994 he was a highly paid distributor for the Texas-based Omnitrition International, which sold powdered mixes and other beverage products for the nutritional drink firm, Wow! (Fitch, 1995; Pace, 1994). The hyper-enthusiasm Rubin displayed for his business endeavours was observed at close quarters by a former business associate of his, Peter Economy, whom Rubin tasked with ghost-writing a book that would promote his latest getrich-quick scheme. He had asked seven other writers prior to Economy to do the job, none of whom had produced anything satisfactory. But Economy made the fatal mistake of giving Rubin his home telephone number: a ‘bundle of energy’, he would call Economy up to six times per day to get a progress report on the manuscript, even going so far as harassing his wife and motherin-law for an update. Yet when the manuscript was finally delivered, there was deafening silence. Economy managed eventually to get in touch with Rubin, who made it clear that he was displeased with the work, and was now on the look-out for writer number nine (Economy, n.d.). The life of ex-Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver also seemed to be one never-ending voyage towards the unknown as he sought in vain his spiritual Shangri-La. Like Rubin, he was given to bursts of adrenaline-fuelled – but short-lived – enthusiasm for different political, economic, and social pursuits. Indeed, it may be no coincidence that Cleaver and Jerry Rubin were kindred spirits – for a time, at least, for even their friendship was fleeting! (see chapter 7). After the police shoot-out that took the life of Bobby Hutton, Cleaver endured seven years (1968–75) in self-imposed exile in places as varied as Cuba,Algeria, North Korea, China, the Soviet Union, and France. At the end of his sojourn, he was no longer a radical. But, as is the case with so many other renegades, his was not a simple conversion from radical to conservative. Cleaver’s pattern of

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behaviour resembled that of Koestler – a fellow communist turned bitter anticommunist – in his pursuit of euphoric experiences of self-realisation through a shopping list of crusades and causes, but also in his misogyny, sexual obsession, narcissism, and the troubled nature that brought him to the threshold of suicide. Kimball regards Cleaver as a ‘serial extremist’ whose only enduring feature was ‘fanaticism’, noting that he was a born-again Christian, a disciple of the Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a Mormon, a crack cocaine addict, a designer of pants with codpieces,5 as well as a Republican. The running theme in Cleaver’s politics, according to Kimball, was ‘buffoonery’, in the pantheon of which were Mussolini and the Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin (Kimball, 2000: 214–15, 222). It would be absurd to compare Cleaver’s actions with the state terror of Mussolini and Amin, rulers who were collectively responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. But certainly Cleaver at times seemed to be an unsual combination of delusions of grandeur, naivety, egotism, and gullibility. Hence his involvement with the Reverend Moon, a sinister and mega-rich businessman for whom Cleaver had volunteered and given campus lectures under the auspices of the Korean’s organisation, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (Rout, 1991: 255–6). When he wrote to Bobby Seale in 1982, Cleaver was a relatively marginal figure in conservative politics, and in radical circles either an irredeemable traitor or the butt of jokes. But he was not to be deterred from his grand plans: I am going to run for mayor of Oalkand in the next election – 1985, just 33 months from now. Just enough time to organize victory. I am asking you to join with me and we can win. Then we can bring a whole new climate to the entire nation. We hold the keys to victory in our hands. (Cleaver, E., 2006a: 283)

Kimball is right to draw attention to the bemusing eccentricities of Cleaver’s post-Panther life, which also included selling phallic-shaped ceramic pottery, the founding of a revivalist movement called Eldridge Cleaver Crusades, an attempt to fuse Christianity and Islam into a new church, Christlam – after a millennium of conflict between the two religions – establishing a recycling business, and arrests over drug possession and burglary in 1987 and 1988 (Kram, n.d.; West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, n.d.; Rout, 1991: x; Marvin X, 2009: 106). Perhaps the bizarrest of Cleaver’s ideas to elude Kimball was 5  By drawing attention to the male sex organ – striking a balance between complete exposure and the repressive confinement of traditional men’s trousers – Cleaver believed that the pants would revolutionise relations between the sexes, and even end rape.

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his plot to annex Treasure Island off the coast of San Francisco so that ‘Captain Cleaver’ could reap its hidden booty (cited in Russell, 2009). But more importantly, Kimball’s denunciations of Cleaver as a consistent exponent of ‘fanaticism’ need to be treated critically, for its destructive, dangerous, and negative connotations have all too often been taken for granted, when in fact fanaticism has been an important – and sometimes indispensable – ingredient of social change (see Toscano, 2010). Fanatacism ultimately has to be judged in terms of the merits of the cause at which it is directed. Moreover, the problem was not so much that Cleaver was a fanatic, but that he so easily and so often discarded his fanaticism for one cause in preference for another, very different, one. Just how different the latest new cause was became apparent to Timothy Leary. Cleaver’s mental instability would not have been lost on the former Harvard psychologist, particularly after the nightmare of his time with him in Algiers when he and his partner were kept under house arrest by the author of Soul on Ice and subjected to a ‘campaign of humiliation’, which included threats to turn the pair over to the Algerian government for dealing in drugs. Now a jailmate of Cleaver’s at the San Diego federal prison following the latter’s return from exile in 1975, Leary learned that apart from being a strident Reaganite, Cleaver was in the business of advocating space migration, something dear to his own heart (Leary, 1990: 305, 375). As well as these post-Panther metamorphoses, it is worth noting that Cleaver was prior to his political radicalisation a devout Catholic, although he says he became so initially for pragmatic reasons: in a California youth authority at the time, he wished to mix with the blacks and Mexicans rather than the white Protestants (Cleaver, 1968: 30). For a while, he had also been a Muslim follower of Malcolm X while in jail, but then jumped ship to follow him out of the Nation of Islam, before going on to join the Panthers following his release in 1966 after initially planning to continue on Malcolm’s work in the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) (Kifner, 1998; Cleaver, 1969a: 81–2). Malcolm X, whom Cleaver revered, had also undergone several rebirths, including from petty criminal to outspoken figure in the Nation of Islam, before going on to found his own Muslim movement under the new name of El Hajj Malik el Shabazz prior to his assassination in 1965 (Myers, 1993: 182–8). Cleaver may well have been influenced by what he saw as successful reinventions on the part of a man he respected greatly. These religious experiences of Cleaver may also be early indicators of a man fellow 1960s radical Jonah Raskin dismissed as a ‘chameleon’ willing

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to change his tune at the drop of a hat (Raskin, 1998). Indeed, as early as 1965 Cleaver had written in third person of his arrival at prison as a different Eldridge Cleaver – a man who no longer existed and who was a foreigner to the new version. This should have come as no surprise, Cleaver suggested, for if a person ‘has been undergoing all kinds of extreme, involved, and unregulated changes, then he ends up not knowing who he is’ (Cleaver, 1968: 16). He remarked later that he had left nothing behind in jail ‘except half of my mind and half of my soul’ (cited in Murch, 2010: 167). Cleaver’s use of the qualifying word ‘except’ indicates a certain equanimity in relation to the idea that ‘half’ his mind and soul had been stolen by the prison system. But the occasion just described was not the first or last time one Cleaver had been replaced by another: originally named ‘Leroy Eldridge Cleaver’, he admitted in his last public speech before he died that he ‘had to let Leroy go because I wore that out with the Los Angeles Police Department’ (Cleaver, E., 2006b: 306). On the night of the murder of Bobby Hutton after the Oakland shootout with police in 1968, another Eldridge Cleaver had met with mortality (Cleaver, 1969b: 94). And he was reborn several times after that, as we saw above. As Holte notes, Cleaver’s self-reflections indicate a ‘man who has had the opportunity to make himself over more than once’ (Holte, 1992: 29). It has been suggested that the late 1960s was a time in which the ‘doctrine of death and rebirth’ was all the rage (Goldman, 1988: 258–9). The US, in particular, has been home to many high-profile religious conversions, the details of which often bear considerable resemblance to Cleaver’s experience (see Holte, 1992). But in Cleaver’s case, his actions and statements along such lines were those of an unbalanced individual. According to his one-time assistant Marvin X, the ruthless Huey P. Newton might have been psychopathic, but ‘he was still no match for Cleaver’, who not only left behind him a trail of bodies, he also obsessed about the male sex organ, suffered from sexual addiction, and had an addictive personality in general. As we saw earlier, he was also known to have battered his wife, whose lover the ferociously jealous Cleaver made disappear (Marvin X, 2009: 12–13, 38–9, 108). This behaviour cannot be seen in isolation from the harshness of his formative years, which included years spent in and out of prisons and juvenile detention centres, beatings from his father, as well as seeing the latter physically abusing his mother. So scarred by this experience was Cleaver that it left him with the desire to kill his father (Cleaver, 1979: 40–1, 63). But he may also have retained deep-seated resentments towards his frequently absent mother, and it has been speculated that this may have fuelled Cleaver’s misogyny (Rout, 1991: 3). So disturbed was

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Cleaver that one night in 1975 on the Mediterranean coast in France he decided to end his own life, before undergoing a life-saving spiritual experience while staring into space. He had a vision of his old idols – Castro, Mao, Marx, and Engels – parading in front of the moon, before each of them faded one by one. Replacing these evaporated heroes was an image of Jesus, propelling Cleaver down the path of Christianity (Cleaver, 1979: 191). Whether Cleaver was at the time under the influence of narcotics is not known, but it is a distinct possibility given his well-known drug addictions, which may ultimately have killed him in 1998.6 According to his ex-wife Kathleen, Eldridge returned to the US – despite his newfound faith – ‘a very unhealthy person, unhealthy mentally, and I don’t think he’s ever quite recovered’ (cited in Kifner, 1998). Before setting foot again on US soil his ‘inner restlessness and spiritual emptiness were to reach awful proportions’ (Cleaver, 1979: 163). This was manifested in his constant search for meaning and identity, and probably for the same highs he reached on drugs. In some of his final reflections, he admitted to being perpetually on the hunt for the truth. This brought him to manifold sects and cults, which led people to claim him as one of whatever particular grouping he happened at the time to be inhabiting (cited in Neale, 2004). In fact, the final cause to which Cleaver dedicated himself was the future of the planet. We get a strong sense that we have been here before when we read the recollections of Cleaver’s then-girlfriend, who reported that he ‘couldn’t stop talking about it. It was like he had a new purpose, a new direction’ (cited in Neale, 2004). This endless cycle was repeated until his death. Rubin and Cleaver were undoubtedly not the only ex-1960s revolutionaries to undertake much soul-searching. The post-radical life of Rubin’s fellow Chicago Eight defendant and SDS organiser Rennie Davis also underwent some strange twists and turns. Chicago co-conspirator Tom Hayden regards Davis as a 1960s anti-war hero who went missing in action (Hayden, 1988: 461). After dropping out of radical politics, Davis became an organiser

6  Cleaver’s family would not disclose his cause of death, but according to his ex-wife Kathleen he ‘apparently’ died of a heart attack. In 1994, Cleaver had been struck on the head by an unknown assailant on the streets of Berkeley, forcing him to have brain surgery (Cleaver, 2006: xi, xii). Doctors then warned him to keep away from the crack pipe, but Cleaver apparently could not: the inference from Marvin X, his former personal assistant, is that this killed him in the end (Marvin X, 2009: 134, 135). Former Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard recalls that at the time of his death Cleaver ‘had battled severe drug abuse, cancer, and diabetes’ (Hilliard, 2006: 157).

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and fund-raiser for the Indian fifteen-year-old ‘Perfect Master’, Maharaj-Ji (Halstead, 1978: 703). After returning from his trip to India, Davis related to Hayden his experience in an initiation ritual that left him feeling euphoric and totally absorbed in the event, as well as unable to see anything other than light for a fortnight. He vividly recalled crouching by a stream of water, only to see a giant black bird float above him as he lay, powerless to move, beneath it. The mysterious creature then appeared to be opening up his body and entering him. ‘I was blissed out, man’, he confided to Hayden (1988: 461–2). Davis had reportedly remarked after India that his sole wish was to have been able to place his forehead on the boot of Maharaj-Ji for an eternity (cited in Stephens, 1998: 63). According to Jerry Rubin, Davis had exclaimed to him upon his return: ‘God has returned to the planet, Jerry. God is on the planet in a human body. And I’ve met him!’ (Rubin, 1976: 18). The real gift of the Maharaj-Ji, whom Davis described as ‘a great king’ and a ‘guru’, was his ability to show each person how to find ‘the light inside of yourself that is keeping you alive’. Davis was himself astonished at how, only a few years after Chicago, he could become deeply immersed in a ‘very deep meditation … really believing that a breakthrough in human consciousness was going to be the solution to the problems of the world’. He now saw that peace was achievable through a biological process: the pineal gland in the brain held the key, since it was a light receptor: and when we turn to the energy inside ourself which is light it activates a gland that right now in the human body is not active and this gland in turn secretes chemicals that leads to a whole harmonisation of the physical body so that the gland that ordinarily secretes chemicals that lead to fear and outrage and anger are actually brought under control. (cited in Anonymous, n.d.)

Like his experience with the black bird by the stream, Davis had a eureka moment when he hit rock bottom with business collapses and wealth disasters in the 1990s, including the loss of two companies and several homes, leaving him homeless and destitute. But this only reminded him that ‘there was beauty in the condition of emptiness’. Soon, magical gifts appeared out of nowhere, including five dollars for a cup of coffee: ‘Magic happened when I had “nothing” at all’ (Davis, 2003: 47–8). In the end even the five dollars did not matter, because he came to believe that money is a ‘psychological construct’ and that the feelings one has towards money ‘shape[s] your experiences of money’. This was an idea that he compared to Copernicus’s discovery that the earth revolves around the sun! (cited in Hoffman, 2006).

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His 2003 book, The Great Turning, contained many cryptic prognostications including that in a century’s time ‘there may be smiles that hidden mysteries could be seen through veils’. He was proposing the ‘existence of a mechanism, or switch, that clicks off and then back on again in a rare but natural occurrence in the universe’, but he accepted that ‘no science can know this mechanism to exist and no evidence is likely to validate this on/off/on universal moment, at least not before it is over’. This moment was the ‘great turning’. The book seemed a genuine attempt to understand a chaotic and crisis-ridden world – characterised by the attack on the twin towers in 2001 and extreme weather events – and therefore, on one level, represents the sad decline of a once committed and thoughtful activist (Davis, 2003: xiv, 1). But on another level, Davis always seemed prone to many a renegade’s seduction by very odd ideas, including that the Vietcong were Jesus Christ incarnate (Halstead, 1978: 703). He had other renegade traits, such as the habit of latching on to causes and promoting them singlemindedly, before moving on to something else. Hayden recounted how he had taken up the cause of the Vietnamese initially with almost religious zeal by carrying an antipersonnel bomb on his person wherever he went, showing it to those who were interested in the hideously destructive device that split into numerous fragments in order to better penetrate the skin (cited in Miller, 1987: 283). The experience of Davis might well have been puzzling, but as we have seen he was scarcely alone among ex-radicals in experiencing a moment of clarity. The new left radical turned conservative Peter Collier recalled how his father’s onset of terminal cancer – occurring around the same time as American defeat in Vietnam – forced on him a process of reflection that culminated in the abandonment of his radical ideals. Collier’s father delivered a speech on his deathbed that struck his son dumb, so strikingly did it contrast with the disingenuousness of his erstwhile radical friends (Collier, 1989: 61–3). While it is hard to imagine how radical activists could be expected to conjure up the emotional sincerity of a dying man, the point is that the lapsing of Collier’s radical ideals stemmed not only from misgivings about what was happening in Cuba under Fidel Castro (see chapter 4) but also from psychosocial factors and deeply personal experiences. Scourge of the Democrats turned Democrat politician Tom Hayden was not entirely immune to these political impulses for growth and revitalisation among fellow 1960s rebels. He had not always been against the system, but had progressed from mainstream student to radical revolutionary: at times he gave the impression of someone undergoing permanent change (Young,

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1977: 191, 330). In the aftermath of the Chicago 1968 protests, he had lent his support to Free Territories in the Mother Country, autonomous zones of radicalism for activists (cited in Miller, 1987: 307). Hayden had also flirted with a hippie variant on Maoism. The Weather Underground captured his attention for a time, before he left for Berkeley and became associated with the Red Family, which idolised the North Korean ruler Kim Il-sung and prepared itself for guerrilla war. According to Berman, after these movements failed to amount to anything Hayden opportunistically utilised his links with the Democrats to become an established politician with benefactors in Hollywood (Berman, 1996: 108–9). By his own account, the only difference between his and Rennie Davis’s conversion was the destination: Hayden was a ‘ “born-again” Middle American, emotionally charged by my reacceptance in the political mainstream’ (Hayden, 1988: 465). Like many renegades, he had been deeply confused as a radical, confessing to being torn between, on the one hand, backing liberals such as Robert Kennedy and working through the Democratic Party, and on the other supporting guerrilla warfare and razing the edifices of American society to the ground (cited in Miller, 1987: 288). Hayden as a radical had also been unsure as to whether it was necessary to build counter-institutions – including community unions, freedom schools, experimental universities, and community-formed police review boards – as alternatives to present structures within contemporary society, or as opponents of them designed as a contribution to rebuilding the world anew (cited in Young, 1977: 333). While doubts and radical political activity go handin-hand, the doubts of Hayden and other renegades were of the existential variety destined to lead to drastic changes in life course. It was not only American 1960s radicals who remade their images, however, as the ‘stick man’ militant turned German foreign minister Joschka Fischer was dubbed a man whose modus operandi was ‘self-reinvention’ (cited in Berman, 2005: 30). Fischer, along with anti-Vietnam activist and actress turned fitness addict Jane Fonda, had inititally shifted his gaze from global liberatory preoccupations to body obsession (Žižek, 2008: 139). Indeed, the disillusioned radical Fischer retreated inwards and became preoccupied with his identity crisis, driving a taxi, working in a bookshop, learning how to play the drums, and indulging in the consumption of hallucogenic drugs in an effort to find his true self. He now admitted that Marxism had been for him an ‘ersatz religion’ (Hockenos, 2008: 135–7). Fischer’s Green colleague, the most famous of all May 1968 radicals, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, was not a perpetual searcher for identity – he seemed content

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with parliamentary life – along the lines of some 1960s ex-radicals. But his lack of radical sustenance was probably related to psychosocial factors, including his rampant self-indulgence and desire for attention. All in the space of a 900-word article sketched for the fortieth anniversary of May 1968, Cohn-Bendit referred to the advice once whispered to him by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who complimented Dany on being ‘so successful’; he dropped the name of Jean-Paul Sartre, to whom he granted an interview; and he modestly suggested that ‘the surrealist essence of the [1968] rebellion’ was enscapsulated in a famous photograph snapped of him smirking at a riot police officer, an incident which by itself ‘subvert[ed] the frozen, established order’ (Cohn-Bendit, 2008). But this self-obsession did not develop in his post-radical days. His ‘celebrity status’ (Hockenos, 2008: 97) clearly did not bother him, for in his 1968 book, co-authored with his brother Gabriel, Obsolete Communism, he began by informing readers that, ‘so wildly has the name of Cohn-Bendit been bandied about … the publishers now come chasing after me, begging me to write about anything I choose’. He mused: ‘Strange isn’t it, this Cohn-Bendit myth, this legend of the “cherubic Danton” ’ (Cohn-Bendit and Cohn-Bendit, 1968: 11). Judging from this, his brother and co-author was merely a support act for the star of the show. In perhaps a pointer to his later acceptance of state power as a legislator and all the attention that goes with it, Cohn-Bendit on one occasion in 1968 found himself, along with Tariq Ali, swamped by photographers. The vacuous capitalist media scrum was no deterrence:‘I like all this. It’s like a drug. I don’t know how I would live without it’ (cited in Ali, 2005: 280).

‘Hypocritchens’ Someone else for whom psychosocial factors are critical variables in his political behaviour is Chistopher Hitchens, whose behaviour in breaking ranks with the left after September 11 and zealously taking up the cause of the neoconservatives was symptomatic of a renegade mentality. Structural factors, such as political defeats and a changing political environment, do not sufficiently explain Hitchens’ actions. For his former friend and colleague at the Nation, Alexander Cockburn, Hitchens’ political behaviour was best understood in terms of his personality and psychology: I met him in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and indeed personal traits were visible enough … He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest

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expression when he elected to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. … [I]n the 90s he got a bee in his bonnet about Clinton which developed into full blown obsessive megalomania: the dream that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and finish off Bill … Actually I think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he could make a difference. (Cockburn, 2011)

A formative experience in Hitchens’ life was his mother’s death in Athens, in 1973. She and her boyfriend made a suicide pact, leaving the elder son with a strong sense of guilt about her death. He agonised over the fact that the tragedy might have been prevented had his mother been able to reach him by phone – as she attempted to – shortly before she died. From that point on, his written work provided the cathartic function of overwriting his anguish about what had happened (cited in NPR, 2010). Hitchens also referred repeatedly to his contradictory behaviour – a common facet of many a renegade’s makeup – while others have commented on his Janus-faced appearance. He confessed to ‘keeping two sets of books’ and even to have considered calling his memoir Both Sides Now in reference to his virtually bipolar nature (cited in NPR, 2010). The title he settled on, Hitch-22, has clear connotations of irony and paradox, given that it is a take-off of Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s classic novel which gave rise to a term denoting a problem whose inherent insolubility lies in the nature of the problem itself (Heller, 2004). In his memoir, he wrote candidly about his two faces, which included allying himself with working-class and progressive movements, while at the same time enjoying the best that the world could offer and discarding the inhibitions plaguing the schoolboy Hitchens (Hitchens, 2010: 94). In recalling the fact that Hitchens was known as ‘hypocritchens’ even in his radical Oxford days, Terry Eagleton evokes Hitchens’ contradictory, paradoxical, and duplicitous psyche. One obituarist commented on the split between the ‘Chris’ who by daytime would appeal to blue-collar workers out of a bullhorn atop a milk-crate, and the ‘Christopher’ who by night attended elite Oxford banquets (Wilby, 2011). Alternatively, he was described as part ‘political agitator’, part ‘upper-crust sybarite’ (Grimes, 2011). Hitchens was widely accused of the opportunistic, narcissistic, and attention-seeking behaviour associated with other turncoats (cited in Parker, 2006). He admitted that his standout feature was insecurity (Hitchens, 2010: 334). This recalls Deutscher’s point about the ex-radical’s habitual haunting by feelings of guilt and betrayal, which they try to mask with aggression. Some commentators speculated that his support for the Iraq War and backing of Bush

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in the 2004 elections were products of the need on the part of Hitchens, son of a naval commander, to demonstrate his masculinity (cited in Wilby, 2011). Parker suggests that Hitchens’ well-known disdain for former US President Bill Clinton was part envy at the high status achieved by his one-time Oxford contemporary (Parker, 2006). Finkelstein, however, in making a general point about how the renegade seeks to draw attention to their mediocre work, cites Hitchens as an example of someone who despite his left-leaning disposition would assault readers with outrageous statements opposing abortion, complimenting the deeds of Christopher Columbus, or praising the sexist lyrics of 2 Live Crew. Lashing out in such a manner was designed merely to grab headlines and force people to read his work (Finkelstein, 2008: 244). His narcissism and delusions of grandeur were reflected in his ‘evidence’ for the claim that the US’s attitude to the Middle East had changed, which included conversations he had conducted with connected people in Washington, DC (cited in Finkelstein, 2008: 247). At one point, he lauded his and fellow ex-Trotskyist Kanan Makiya’s efforts in keeping alive the tradition of the left opposition that resisted Stalinism! (Hitchens, 2010: 300). Witness also his description of his autobiography as a memoir (Hitchens, 2010), a term normally reserved for people of high public importance whose decisions and actions have shaped historical events (Hobsbawm, 2003: xi). Characteristics of this kind, needless to say, do not accord well with the sorts of requirements for radical leftist politics to be sustained in the long run: while renegades can maintain their radicalism for long periods, even decades, it is frequently the case that the pressure of events can bring out their worst elements. In Hitchens’ case, perhaps this was September 11 and the difficult environment it ushered in for leftists, who were forced to explain patiently in the midst of the wave of reaction and clamour for revenge that the actions of American administrations over many years had helped bring on the attacks, and that any military retaliation would only heighten the possibility of such attacks in the future. But then again radicalism was simply not enough fun for Hitchens, who recalled reading Oscar Wilde’s complaint about socialism’s inevitable corruption by boring meetings (Hitchens, 2010: 149). This brings to mind Jerry Rubin’s attack on the left’s fetish for ‘theoretical bullshit’ and long, uninspiring meetings, and we are reminded of the boredom that afflicted Irving Kristol once the Cold War ended and the enemy had been vanquished (Rubin, 1970: 115; Robin, 2011: 127). In fact, it was partly the disruption of boredom presented by the events of September 11 that appealed to Hitchens, who confessed to feeling a great sense of ‘exhilaration’: ‘Here was the most

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frightful enemy – theocratic barbarism – in plain view … I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost’ (cited in Robin, 2011: 167). Hitchens needed a crusade, and in September 11 he found one. In this sense, he displayed some of the boredom induced reinvention common among other renegades: his ‘discovery’ of his Jewish heritage in the late 1980s provoked the quip from Noam Chomsky that Hitchens had gone from ‘anti-Semite to self-hating Jew, all in one day’ (cited in Cockburn, 2011).

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conclusion to part iv

This examination of numerous renegades across the most important periods of capitalism since the beginning of the twentieth century shows that there are often notable similarities in personalities and psychological profiles. ‘Erratic’, ‘unpredictable’, and ‘mercurial’ are some of the adjectives aptly applied to renegades. The break with radicalism, for some, was merely one rupture among many: included in the list of things known to have caught the attention of renegades were religion, spiritualism more generally, numerous self-help programmes and therapies, drug addictions, and a variety of business ventures, not to mention a multiplicity of political affiliations. In the cases of Mussolini, Arthur Koestler, and Eldridge Cleaver, the renegade was an individual whose damaged state was reflected in violent and anti-social behaviour. The common self-sacrificing requirements of radical leftism were beyond many of these renegades. It may be that ex-radicals are not alone in having mercurial and erratic styles and personalities, and needless to say being a more stable and grounded individual is not a sufficient criterion for staying true to radicalism. Moreover, not all renegades are flippers, drifters, and searchers: some depart from radicalism after decades of commitment to leftist causes. But even where this is the case, psychosocial factors are important in their decision to leave behind their former allies and make peace with conservatism. The decision to break with radicalism may be prompted by some external event – such as September 11 in the case of Hitchens – but the seeds for the desertion were probably sown many years earlier. The psychohistorical approach can also overcome some of the obvious weaknesses with the structural and flawed radical explanations, both of which were unable to account for why individuals in similarly harsh circumstances, or with comparable politics, nevertheless often arrived at very different endpoints.

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conclusion

Renegades are omnipresent figures throughout political history. They differ in kind rather than in substance: the circumstances and examples vary from period to period, but the essence of the renegade – the one-time radical opponent of the system who negotiates a rapprochement with existing political-economic institutions – stays largely the same. The large number of 1960s apostates led the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel to lament that generation’s lack of political toughness compared to some of its predecessors (cited in Ali, 2005: 347). Yet the record of New York intellectuals from the 1930s onwards tells us that ex-1960s radicals were no more or less numerous than renegades from earlier periods. There is, of course, no simple explanation for why people desert the causes and beliefs to which they have dedicated sometimes their whole lives. None of the explanations discussed throughout this book holds the key to understanding the renegade across time and space. Donaldson and Poynting’s (2007: 22) ‘collective portrait’, which we set ourselves the task of attaining in the introduction, seems elusive. The experience of defeat approach is a powerful one that sets each renegade in the context of a long line of radicals who have deserted seemingly lost causes since at least the seventeenth-century English Civil War. It should not be surprising that some radicals could not persevere with their opposition to the status quo during periods of reaction, falling levels of strikes and protests, sometimes brutal state repression, and a less hospitable political culture. This was the case, for example, in relation to the New York intellectuals, many of whom shifted to the right in a period of capitalist consolidation, domestic anti-communism, state repression, and geopolitical events – such as Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union – that prompted a reappraisal of their political frameworks. Similarly, some ex-1960s radicals put their past political activities behind them in the early 1970s when the anti-Vietnam War movement collapsed and capitalism and the state emerged shaken but, alas, unbowed. Irving Howe has invoked a historical pattern that American radicalism follows, starting with a period of growth, an upsurge in energy, and a

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Conclusion

buoyancy of hope. But this soon fades as it confronts politics and all its hurdles – what soon follows is a scene of despair, splits, and infighting (Howe, 1983: 326–7). Hirschman, too, has speculated on the basis of the fluctuating political moods between the 1950s and the 1970s that there may be waves of political shifts, from public- to private-orientated behaviour and vice versa (Hirschman, 1982: 3). Arguments about ‘cycles’ in politics are similarly mistaken, for there is nothing guaranteed about trends in politics, and nothing certain about success or defeat (Davis and Sprinker, 1988: 3). To accept the cycles theory of politics is to accept a deterministic approach that denies the impact of agency which has revealed itself to be so apposite in relation to the behaviour of renegades. The structural explanation for apostasy thus has its weaknesses. The question remained as to why, even when prospects for leftist radicalism looked most grim, many radicals did not relent. Some retained their trenchant and unflinching criticisms of the social order and stayed dedicated to the cause that many of their peers abandoned, persevering even at great cost. Radicals will not inevitably be captured by the system against which they once fought. Among the most persistent radicals, some – such as Isaac Deutscher, Christopher Hill, and Tariq Ali – even sought to explain the phenomenon of the renegade whose fate they were able to avoid. As a consequence, we examined more closely the politics of some renegades when they were radicals to see if any aspects of their radicalism might have foreshadowed their later metamorphoses. Indeed, there were cases of renegades whose politics as radicals were deeply flawed and, with the benefit of hindsight, we can detect some continuity between the different chapters of their political lives. A clear case was Mussolini, who displayed an ability to move easily between political theorists, including Marx, about whom he had read little despite being a ‘Marxist’. Authoritarianism was the hallmark of Il Duce even during the radical phase of his political career. Similarly, the former Yippie turned Yuppie Jerry Rubin was a flawed radical who had little time for theory and was obsessed with attention-grabbing theatrics, earning him a reputation as an incorrigible clown. Yippieism itself was notoriously ambiguous and only vaguely progressive at times, arguably making Rubin’s turn to Yuppiesm less of a major leap. In some cases, the lure of money and power proved irresistible. By proving the ease with which they could be corrupted, such renegades were flawed radicals. Even in cases where it is not clear that the renegade’s break with radicalism was motivated by the desire to accumulate wealth and power, dropping

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their criticisms of present political-economic arrangements certainly had materially beneficial consequences. The Russian Marxist Parvus, for instance, may sincerely have believed in the potential revolutionary consequences of a German triumph in the First World War, but it was also clear that he expressed a great desire for self-enrichment. The ex-1960s radical Norman Podhoretz, too, brazenly touted his ambition to get ahead. This explains why the renegade typically moves from left to right rather than vice versa. If it were purely a psychosocial phenomenon, we might expect to see renegades in equal proportion on left and right, or at least criss-crossing backwards and forwards between progressive and reactionary causes. But the pull is to the right, with the grain of conventional society. There were, however, also well-founded objections to the flawed radicals approach. While the politics of some renegades were undoubtedly flawed even during their so-called radical phases, there is no set of politics that can inoculate a radical against renegacy. Indeed, individual radicals with very similar politics can chart drastically different waters. A significant number of New York intellectuals were Trotskyists whose more progressive opinions on Stalinism and democracy might have been expected to shield them from conservatism. Yet this was not the case. While some former Stalinists, including Arthur Koestler, went on to become conservatives, so did numerous Trotskyists such as Irving Kristol. Chris Harman and ‘Chris’ Hitchens were both aligned at one point with the Trotskyist International Socialists. But whereas Harman maintained his Trotskyist and anti-capitalist politics up until his death in 2009, bequeathing to future radicals a vast output of anti-system scholarship, Hitchens ended up a barracker for the same neoconservative project of global imperialism Harman had dissected in his final book, Zombie Capitalism (Harman, 2010: 272–3). The story of the two Chrises proves beyond doubt that the politics one holds as a radical do not necessarily offer many clues as to the final destination. In such cases, the ultimate explanation is to be found somewhere in the complex interaction of agency and structure. It is notable that even among the renegades discussed here, there was unity sometimes only in the abandonment of radicalism, with their resting points differing quite significantly from case to case: some went to the far right, others to right-wing social democracy, while still others simply learned to live with the system. Only the vast interplay of social forces, personalities and preferences can account for these diverging stories. Clearly, for numerous renegades the split with radicalism was merely one break among many, and their desertion of radicalism

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was part of a bigger story of political wanderlust. Arthur Koestler and Jerry Rubin, for instance, subscribed to endless causes, movements, cures, fads, and treatments. Undoubtedly some of their psychological and personality characteristics made it much easier for them to put their radical politics behind them and move on to something else more interesting. This is not to say, however, that all renegades suffer from some of the psychological and personality tendencies apparent in the likes of Koestler and Rubin: despite Trotsky’s claims about his tendency for interest to be followed by disinterest, James Burnham, who moved from Trotskyism to the Cold War right of American politics, was regarded as a fairly stable individual, in contrast to the typically boorish New York intellectual (Barrett, cited in Smant, 1992: 6). There are weaknesses and problems with all the explanations, and given the vast number of ex-radicals who have appeared over such a lengthy period of time, this is not surprising. One of the main flaws in discussions of renegades hitherto has been the overemphasis on structures and insufficient consideration of the role of personality and psychology. Yet it is also the case that structural changes in political climates and defeats of social movement need to be taken into account in terms of enabling those personalities and psychologies of individuals to come to the fore. Indeed, Proyect (2008) may be right in suggesting that the most pernicious power of capitalism is its ability ‘to get inside peoples’ [sic] heads’ and create all kinds of distortions about their reality, including the ones to which many a renegade fell prey. Therefore, to see one factor as necessarily more important than the other is mistaken: in a proper dialectical sense, the renegade needs to be seen in totality, as subject acting upon the world, and as object of the world’s influences. The very essence of human nature – combined with the fact that decisions to renege are usually made by individuals, rather than by parties, movements, or societies – introduces a level of complexity into each case in defiance of all-encompassing theorising about the causes of the phenomenon. In order to understand each case, careful analysis is required of the political and economic context in which the renegade emerges, combined with an understanding of the characteristics of each individual and the circumstances of their own milieu, and consideration of how they attempt to shape the world around them. The renegade is thus the product of historical developments, changes in social and political environments, as well as beliefs and personalities specific to the individual in question. Is radicalism fatally weakened by its significant number of ex-members? There will, of course, always be renegades, and to some extent the large

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number of ex-radicals is a monument to the wasted talents put to the service of conservatism and defending unjust political arrangements – powerful voices lost from the left’s arsenal of weapons against state and capital. But radical movements do not live or die by the actions of turncoats. In some ways, as in the experience of defeat phenomenon, ex-radicals are merely an index of the failure of such movements to break through and achieve permanent change. Suffice to say there is not the space to elaborate on these issues here, but the broader strategic questions of political agency, the nature of the state and how its brutality can be overcome, and what it is exactly that radicals are fighting against – not to mention for – remain the defining challenges for anti-systemic movements. In terms of these specific questions, it is undoubtedly the case that the radical left has made many mistakes: we would not still be living with global capitalism if the left had not committed some disastrous errors. Yet when one compares these with the tortuous paths of renegades – whether it be Mussolini starting a fascist movement and dragging Italy into a catastrophic war alongside Hitler’s Germany, Pankhurst Walsh admiring the Nazis, Rubin extolling the virtues of becoming a Yuppie, or Christopher Hitchens supporting the neo-conservatives’ criminal overseas adventures – those who have stayed loyal to radical left politics come out solidly vindicated. The staple left radical commitments – anti-capitalism, solidarity, collectivism, and equality – remain remarkably alluring in the face of all the calumnies and contortions of ex-radical defectors.

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index

Abel, Lionel 29 Abern, Martin 74 Afghanistan War (2001-) 46, 56, 148 Al-Din Rumi, Jalal 170 Alessi, Rino 113 Ali, Tariq ix, 15, 40, 82, 104, 121, 164, 170, 220, 226 Alioto, Joseph 140 Allende, Salvador 56 Althusser, Louis 52, 92 Ambris, Alceste De 152 American Enterprise Institute 156 American Indian Movement 100 American Workers Party 31 Amin, Idi 213 Amis, Martin 170 Arendt, Hannah 72, 123 Aron, Raymond 146 Attlee, Clement 35, 38 Augustine 11 Australia First 26, 189 Australian Labor Party (ALP) 38, 204 Aveling, Edward 179 Axis Powers 26, 37 Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction 83, 121, 175 Babeuf, Gracchus 114 Badiou, Alain xi, 86, 88, 104, 136 Bakhtin, Mikhail 13 Bakunin, Mikhail 190 Balabanoff, Angelica 3, 21, 23, 111, 113, 153, 182, 186 Baudrillard, Jean 220 Bay of Pigs 35, 52, 144 Beauvoir, Simone de 170

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Beckett, Samuel 121 Bell, Daniel 39, 71, 205 Bellow, Saul 29 Benn, Tony 12 Berkman, Alexander 68 Bernstein, Eduard 186 Bin Laden, Osama 122 Bismarck, Otto von 153 Black Liberation Army 100, 121 Black Panther Party 43, 46, 48, 82, 90–1, 98–100, 102, 105, 137–41, 212, 216 Blair, Tony 11–12, 55 Blanqui, Louis Auguste 114 Blumenthal, Sidney 161 Bolsheviks ix, xi, 8, 24, 33–4, 62, 66, 68, 70–2, 75, 96, 114, 122, 125, 163, 180, 187, 190, 203 British Foreign Office 157 British Socialist Party 10 British Union of Fascists (BUF) 27, 192, 194 Brown, Gordon 11 Brown, H. Rap 48, 99–100, 139 Buckley, William F. Jr 33, 201 Bukharin, Nikolai 8, 74, 122 Bulgakov, Sergius 23 Burnham, James 29, 34–5, 74, 81, 122, 133, 163–4, 208, 228 Burke, Edmund 170 Bush, George W. 1, 55–6, 147, 221 Callaghan, James 12 Callinicos, Alex 55 Cannon, James P. 78, 204 Carmichael, Stokely 105 Carter, Jimmy 84

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254

Index

Castro, Fidel 36, 85, 136–7, 142, 216, 218 Catholic Church 175, 203–4, 208, 214 Catholicism (see Catholic Church) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 3, 29, 31–2, 35, 38, 52, 56, 99, 122, 146, 156, 163, 201, 206 Charles I, King 61 Chartists 6, 95 Chertoff, Michael 55, 221 Chicago Eight 42–3, 89, 99, 103, 142, 146, 159, 163, 216 Child, Richard Washburn 113 Childe, Vere Gordon 152 Chirac, Jacques 53 Chomsky, Noam ix, 15, 41, 45, 55–6, 170, 223 Churchill, Winston 15 City College of New York (CCNY) 30, 157 Cleaver, Eldridge 1, 46–8, 50, 90–1, 98, 100, 105, 137–41, 163, 197, 203, 212–16, 224 Cleaver, Kathleen Neal 140, 215–6 Cliff, Tony 117 Clinton, Bill 161, 222 Cockburn, Alexander 148, 161, 170, 220 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 49–51, 83, 93, 219–20 Cohn-Bendit, Gabriel 220 Coleridge, Samuel 171 Collier, Peter 41, 82, 85, 136, 218 Columbus, Christopher 222 Communist Party of Australia (CPA) 25, 80, 151 Communist Party (France) 157 Communist Party (GB) 81 Communist Party (Germany) 69, 117, 126 Communist Party (US) 64, 69, 73, 75, 96, 175 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) 22 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 38, 146, 156 Conservative Party (UK) (see Tories) Copernicus, Nicolaus 217

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Corey, Lewis (see Fraina, Louis) Coulter, Ann 55 Cowley, Malcolm 31 Cromwell, Oliver 61, 192 Crossman, Richard 170, 198 Cuban Missile Crisis 144 Daley, Richard 45, 101 Davis, Mike 82 Davis, Rennie 43–4, 89, 98, 159, 216–19 Déat, Marcel 66, 191 Debray, Régis 1, 2, 52–3, 86–7, 92, 98, 105, 146–8, 160, 169 Decter, Midge 134 Dellinger, David ix, 15, 43–4, 103, 163–4 Democratic Party (US) 33, 35, 45, 47, 83, 89, 101, 143, 145–6, 201, 218–19 Deutscher, Isaac 1, 69, 181–2, 188, 221, 226 Dewey, John 200 Domenach, Jean-Marie 86 Dutschke, Rudi 49 Dylan, Bob 11, 43 Eagleton, Terry 3, 150, 160, 180, 221 Eastman, Max 3–4, 33–5, 70, 80, 95, 122–6, 164, 199, 200, 203 Edwards, Harry Einstein, Albert 36, 202 Elizabeth II, Queen 38 Engels, Friedrich 10, 47, 74, 95, 163, 179–81, 199, 207, 216 Erhard Seminars Training (est) 89 Erikson, Erik 175, 177 Farrell, James T. 29 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 31, 75, 95, 98–9, 104–5, 122, 207 Felice, Giuseppe De 114 Felice, Renzo De 114 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz 22 Finkelstein, Norman 55, 151, 155, 171 Fischer, Joschka 49–50, 83, 219 Fischer, Louis 68

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Index

Fonda, Jane 219 Foucault, Michel 86 Fourier, Charles xi Fourth International 75, 81 Fraina, Louis/Corey, Lewis 12, 37, 64, 75, 78–9, 97, 125–7, 156–7, 181 Franco, Francisco 83 Frankfurt School 181 Frankfurt Spontis 49 Freud, Sigmund 36, 181, 196, 202 Froines, John 43, 146

255

Gandhi, Mahatma 155 George, Lloyd 5, 117 Greens (Germany) 49–50 Glazer, Nathan 32, 157, 175 Glick, Brian 98 Glucksmann, André 51–2, 86–7 Gold, Ted 84 Goldman, Albert (Trotskyist) 207–8 Goodman, Paul 30, 180 Goodwin, Guy Lee 99 Gorbachev, Mikhail 164 Gramsci, Antonio 111 Gray, John 10 Great Depression 77–8 Greenberg, Clement 29 Greene, Bob 42 Guevara, Ernesto (‘Che’) 45, 52, 92, 147, 160

Hill, Christopher ix, 2, 5, 11, 14, 61, 82, 94, 226 Hilliard, David 216 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 29, 133 Hitchens, Christopher 1, 3, 5, 14, 54–7, 93, 109, 121, 132–3, 147–50, 160–1, 170–1, 220–4, 227, 229 Hitchens, Peter 54 Hitler, Adolph 26, 28, 67, 70, 72–3, 117, 120, 134, 155, 177, 194, 229 Hô Chí Minh 163 Hoffman, Abbie 40, 43, 91–2, 142–3, 164, 208–9, 211 Hoffman, Julius 146 Hook, Sidney 29, 31–2, 38, 70, 79, 122–4, 128, 200 Hoover, J. Edgar Horkheimer, Max 181 Horne, Donald 204 Horowitz, David 40–2, 55, 82, 85, 136 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 43, 141, 169, Howe, Irving xi, 7, 25, 29, 32–3, 37, 70–1, 74, 123, 164, 173, 205–6, 225 Human Rights Watch 49–50 Humphrey, Hubert 35, 45 Hussein, Saddam 56 Hutton, Bobby 90, 140, 215 Huxley, Aldous 123 Hyndman, Henry Mayers 10

Hain, Peter 11 Halstead, Fred 142, 145 Hapsburg, Otto von 51 Harman, Chris ix, 15, 40, 82, 88–9, 102, 104, 227 Hayden, Tom 35, 43–6, 53, 73, 82, 98, 142–6, 162, 216–19 Hayek, Friedrich August 34, 124 Hazlitt, William 11 Heller, Joseph 221 Herberg, Will 36, 73–4, 127, 201–2 Heritage Foundation 156 Hervé, Gustave 1, 23, 65, 115, 155, 185–6

Il-sung, Kim 41, 137, 219 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 96 Industrial Workers of the World (Australia) 95 Information Research Department (IRD) 38 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 99, 201 International Socialists (see SWP (UK)) International Socialist Tendency 54 Iona State Hospital for the Criminally Insane 101 Iraq War (2003-) 46, 55–6, 103, 147–9 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 121

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256

Index

Jackson Henry 134 Jacobins 62, 171 Jambet, Christian 51 Jefferson, Thomas 203 Johnson, Lyndon 45, 144, 176–7 Jouhaux, Léon 22 Kagan, Anatol 81 Kautsky, Karl 11 Kazin, Alfred 3 Kennedy, John F. 35, 144 Kennedy, Robert 143–5, 219 Keynes, Lord John Maynard 135 Khrushchev, Nikita 68–9, 87 Kidron, Michael 119 King, Martin Luther Jr 90, 99–100, 139 Koestler, Arthur 11, 37, 54, 69–70, 120, 123, 126, 157, 163, 170, 182, 190, 192, 195–9, 203, 224, 227–8 Kouchner, Bernard 52 Krassner, Paul 143, 211 Kristol, Irving 29–32, 38, 50, 103, 133, 156–7, 164, 205, 222, 227 Kristol, William 134 Kronstadt Rebellion 66, 68, 71, 121 Krylenko, Eliena 70 Labour Party (UK) 11, 27, 36, 134–5, 192–3 Labriola, Antonio 178 Lafontaine, Oskar 49 Lagardelle, Hubert 113 Lardreau, Guy 51 Lasky, Melvin J. 29, 31 Leary, Timothy 39, 196, 214 Lenin, Vladimir 11, 24–5, 27, 64, 66, 74, 94, 104, 123, 125, 180, 187, 198–9 Lennon, John 142–3, 211 Leonard, Mimi 211 Leopold III, King 28 Levellers ix, 61 Lewinsky, Monica 161 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 177 Lévy, Bernard-Henri 51–2, 87, 137–8

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Liberal Party (UK) 7, 36 Liebknecht, Karl 63 Limbaugh, Rush 55 Lipset, Seymour Martin 29, 32, 39 London, Jack 64 Lovestone, Jay 73 Luce, Henry 206 Luce, Phillip 43, 159–60, 204 Ludwig, Emil 153 Luther, Martin 175 Luttwak, Edward 10 Luxemburg, Rosa 24, 63 Macdonald, Dwight 29, 37, 164, 206–7 MacDonald, Ramsay 36 McCarthy, Eugene 145 McCarthy, Joseph 4, 30, 33, 174 McCarthy, Mary 29 McClelland, Jim 38, 81, 120, 157, 204 McGovern, George 39, 92 Machiavelli, Niccolò 113, 184 Machine Gun Kelly 140 Maharaj-Ji 44, 217 Makiya, Kanan 222 Malcolm X 214 Man, Hendrik de 1, 23, 28, 66–7, 115–17, 135, 163, 177, 191 Mandel, Ernest 225 Mao Zedong 52, 95, 138, 216 Marcuse, Herbert 72 Marvin X 216 Marx, Eleanor 178–9 Marx, Karl 7, 10, 12, 31, 67, 74, 95, 112–13, 163, 177–81, 187, 199, 201–2, 207, 216, 226 Miller, Arthur 205 Mills, C. Wright 45, 145, 206 Mitterrand, François 53, 98, 148, 160 Moon, Rev Sun Myung 213 Moore, Michael 122 Mosley, Nicholas 192 Mosley, Sir Oswald 1, 27–8, 66, 134–5, 191–5 Morris, William 2, 68

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Index

Morrow, Felix 200–1 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 134 Muggeridge, Malcolm 68, 128, 203 Muravchik, Joshua 134 Mussolini, Benito 1, 3, 5, 13–14, 21–2, 28, 64–6, 70, 95, 105, 111–16, 134–5, 152–5, 162–3, 169–70, 182–5, 190–1, 194, 213, 224, 226, 229 Muste, Abraham John 34 Naldi, Filippo 152 Napoleon Bonaparte, 61, 115, 149, 153, 192 National Health Service (NHS) 35 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) 49, 51 Nazis (see Nazi Party) Nazi Party (Germany) 3, 8–9, 27–8, 67–8, 70, 72, 74, 112, 116, 117, 120, 130, 155, 177, 185, 229 Neal, Kathleen (see Cleaver, Kathleen Neal) New Deal 157 New Guard 26, 80 New Left 30, 39, 84–5 New Philosophers 51–2, 86, 135–6 New York Panther Twenty-one 99 New York Stock Exchange 42, 158 Newton, Huey P. 46, 48, 82, 90–1, 100, 105, 138–140, 215 Niebuhr, Reinhold 202, 206 Nietzsche, Friedrich 113, 163, 190 Nixon, Richard 29, 45, 56, 92, 99, 137, 176 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 164 Nuorteva, Santeri 97 Oakland Seven 99 Obama, Barack ix Occupy Wall Street Movement 46 Ochs, Phil 92 Oughton, Diana 84 Owen, Robert xii

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257

Palmer, Alexander 96 Pankhurst Walsh, Adela ix, 25–8, 38, 75–6, 80, 88, 96, 105, 124, 127–130, 137, 151, 155, 162–3, 188–9, 197, 229 Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) 3, 6, 21, 64–5, 105, 111, 113, 153, 163, 182–4 Parvus (Alexander Israel Helphand) 12, 23–5, 66, 95, 154–5, 164, 186–8, 227 Passos, John Dos 202–3 Patter, Betty Van 82 Pegg, Duncan vii Péguy, Charles 113 Pels, Doriot 111 Pentagon 89, 101 Phillips, William 12 Pinochet, General Augusto 56 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin 187 Podhoretz, Norman 13, 29–31, 79, 132–4, 159–60, 170, 206, 227 Pol Pot 85 Post-war boom 78–9 Poulantzas, Nicos 92 Progoff, Dr Ira 201 Progressive Labor 101 Radosh, Ronald 85, 91, 136 Rahv, Philip 156 Raskin, Jonah 105, 214 Reagan, Ronald 29–30, 34, 41, 47–8, 51, 53, 150, 159 Red Brigades 121 Red Guards 138 Reed, John 33 Reformation 176 Reich, Wilhelm 196 Republican Party (US) 46–8, 137, 140, 213 Revolutionary Struggle (Germany) 49 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 70 Robbins, Terry 84 Robespierre, Maximilien de 62 Rockefeller, Nelson 156 Rubin, Jerry 4, 12, 40, 42–3, 88–92, 98–9, 101, 105, 141–3, 146, 158–9, 162, 164, 197, 208–12, 216–17, 222, 226, 228

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Index

Russell, Bertrand 205 Rustin, Bayard 85 Sagarin, Edward 36 Said, Edward 170 Saint-Simon, Henri de xi Salandra, Antonio 154 Sarkozy, Nicolas 51 Sartre, Jean-Paul 86,170, 220 Saul/Paul 11 Savio, Mario 138 Schroeder, Gerhard 40, 49 Seale, Bobby 43, 46, 48, 90, 138–140, 213 Second International 63–4 Sedgwick, William 11 September 11 terrorist attacks 55–7, 93 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr 111 Shachtman, Max 30, 34–6, 74, 81, 119, 122–3, 164, 207–8 Short, Laurie 157 Silone, Ignazio 1 Sinclair, Upton 64, 71, 200 Sioux 90 Sirhan, Sirhan 144 Skidelsky, Lord Robert 193 Smith, Adam 203 Social Democratic Party (UK) 54, 193 Socialism ou barbarie 50 Socialist German Student Union (SDS) 49 Socialist Party (France) 53, Socialist Party (US) 63, 96–7 Socialist Workers Party (UK) 54–5, 71, 128 Socialist Workers Party (US) 32, 74, 98 Solidarno´sc´ 87 Sollers, Philippe 86 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 87, 124, 130, 136–7 Sorel, Georges 113, 177–8 Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) 64–5 Spanish Civil War 75, 126 Spender, Stephen 31 Stalin, Joseph 67–8, 70, 72, 112, 163, 196

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Stephensen, Percy Reginald 26–8, 80–1, 131, 155, 189–90 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 99–100, 144 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 43–4, 46, 82, 84, 88, 216 Swabeck, Arne 207 Sweezy, Paul 7 Thatcher, Margaret 147–8, 150, 160–1 Thomas, Norman 30 Thompson, Edward Palmer xi, 62, 69 Tikhomirov, Lev 2 Tories 7, 36, 38, 134–5, 147, 192 Trotsky, Leon ix, 4, 23–5, 29, 32–3, 66, 68, 72, 78, 93, 112, 118, 120, 122–3, 125, 128, 133, 154–5, 162, 164, 181, 183, 186–8, 199, 207 Tsar, Nicholas II 24, 125 United Nations 149 Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) 25 Vidal, Gore 161 Vietnam War 34, 36, 41–5, 51, 55–6, 73, 82, 86, 89–90, 137, 142, 144, 163, 176–7 Wald, Alan 40, 72, 151, 155 Walsh, Tom 26 Watergate scandal 45 Weathermen (see Weather Underground) Weather Underground 84, 100–1, 219 Weaver, Paul H. 156 Weimar Republic 9 Weiner, Lee 43 Whigs 7, 134 Wilde, Oscar 222 Wilhelm, Kaiser II 24, 64, 66 Wilson, Harold 12 Wilson, Woodrow 64, 96, 117 Wolfowitz, Paul 134 Women’s Guild of Empire 129, 131, 188–9 Woodbridge, Frederick 200

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Index

Wordsworth, William 174 Workers Party (US) 74 World Health Organization (WHO) 178 Yeats, William Butler 188 Yippies 43, 88, 141, 143, 158, 164, 209, 226

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259

Yuppies 42, 88, 143,158, 164, 209, 212, 226, 229 Zinn, Howard 55 Žižek, Slavoj xi Zweig, Paul 174

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