This was an expansion on a previous piece by
@Aelita , riffing on George Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia. The new part by Bertrand Russell is the work of yours truly, and of course, Aelita wrote the original Orwell piece way back when, with parts of the piece appropriated from Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia.
Excerpt from "Journeys to Red America", an essay by Bertrand Russell, collected in Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956)
"..... Between April and May, 1936, I was invited for the first time to the young Union of American Socialist Republics as part of a larger delegation of Labour, Independent Labour, and Communist Britons sent to observe the first competitive election in the nation's history. I was tempted by the ideals espoused by the revolutionaries. The Soviet experiment had degenerated by that point, but there was still hope for communism, and in America that hope came into fruition.
All throughout my travels, I saw the revolutionary spirit in every facet of American culture. Buildings draped in the colors red and black, old commercial signs of "Macy's", "Bloomingdale's" and "Sears and Roebuck" destroyed in public, and slogans like "power to the workers", "Death to capitalism", "Workers of the World Unite" taking their place. Our highly bourgeois fashion was out of place with the swath of workers proudly flaunting their working class garb and militarized fashion.
However, aesthetics didn't necessarily mean action. My travel to the nascent Soviet Union had shown that this revolutionary veneer can hide an authoritarian behind it. I retained some level of skepticism over the events, but that was steadily chipped away as I watched the force of socialist democracy in action in workplaces across the nation. From factories to even the hotels we stayed at.
At one of our destinations, at the University of America, Princeton, our host, my late friend Albert Einstein showed us around the campus election events, before we sat and watched the debate between the campus representatives.
It was a debate between a representative of the Workers' Communist Party, the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, and the Democratic Republican.
In this case, the student for the WCPA, a young Negro named Ezekiel, eloquently defended Marxism, making specific references to many philosophers, including the late Eugene Debs and the late Daniel DeLeon, (both revered enough that the capital was renamed for their contributions to socialism), and stating that the Workers' Party government had helped invest in education and Secretary Dewey had reformed it. Not to say the Farmer-Labor and the Democratic Republican were deficient. The former candidate, a young woman named Florence, utilized the martyr Norman Thomas and the early utopian Robert Owen. Democratic-Republican Jon using Henry George.
Come election season, the new Princeton campus would vote majority for the Workers' Party.
[...]
This journey, and subsequent travels, reaffirmed my commitment towards socialism in a democratic mold. As opposed to the Soviet model, the Americans had managed to achieve the promise of a democratic society accountable to its people, and was the new hope for communism.
Indeed, even after the events of World War II, the atomic bombing of the Japanese fleet in the Korean Strait, and the current ongoing foreign policy entanglements between Premier Benjamin Davis and Prime Minister Anthony Eden, American socialist democracy has proven an enduring model and the Soviets have even begun to learn from its example.
Excerpts from Homage to America, by George Orwell (London: Secker and Warburg, 1939)
In my travels through America, I've come to see that conventional narratives of American communism; from the Commonwealth Workers' Party militants on the left, or the reactionaries on the right, are both fundamentally and inescapably wrong. Since the reasons for rejecting the Tory official history on the subject are all too clear, I shall dismiss this right out of hand, and focus on the Left's ideological shibboleths. It has not been because of the leaders of the Workers' Communist Party like Premier Foster and Chairman Browder themselves nor having utilized the tools of Marxist-Leninism that America achieved socialism. Rather, the leaders and the masses have worked in tandem to help bring about the advent of left-leaning communism in America.
The transformation of the country has been amazing. Very quickly, much of the land in American South was collectively cultivated by the former tenant farmers themselves, without landlords, without bosses, and without instituting capitalist competition to spur production. The government's collectivization programmes, for all their promises, have been most shameful. In the South, the old foremen and plantation owners have been replaced by party apparatchik, favored for political nepotism than leadership skills. Power inequalities, between worker and manager, have been preserved, not eradicated, especially with the ongoing de facto segregation in the so-called "African Federal National Republic".
The "genius" of the American planned economy relies less on the planners in their ivory towers, and far more on the initiative of the rank and file union members. In almost all the industries—factories, mills, workshops, transportation services, public services, and utilities—the rank and file workers, their revolutionary committees, and their syndicates reorganized and administered production, distribution, and public services without capitalists, or high salaried managers.
Even more: the various agrarian and industrial collectives immediately instituted economic equality in accordance with the essential principle of communism, 'From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.' They coordinated their efforts through free association in whole regions, created new wealth, increased production (especially in agriculture), built more schools, and bettered public services. They instituted not bourgeois formal democracy but genuine grass roots functional libertarian democracy, where each individual participated directly in the revolutionary reorganization of social life. They replaced the war between men, 'survival of the fittest,' by the universal practice of mutual aid, and replaced rivalry by the principle of solidarity...
This experience, in which a nation of some one hundred forty million directly or indirectly participated, opened a new way of life to those who sought an alternative to anti-social capitalism on the one hand, and totalitarian state bogus socialism on the other.
...When I had first arrived in America in April of 1936 to monitor the upcoming Congress of Soviets election, I was confronted with the freshness of the revolutionary fervor. It was as if the revolution had happened yesterday. Only later did I realize that the revolutionary fervor was still high because it had not ended yet. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with the red and black flag of the revolution; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; The churches were reformed, preachers now speaking to lending a hand to humanity and God's love than the wrath of the all-mighty. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.
Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had disappeared. Nobody said 'Mister' or 'Sir'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' (rarely, 'Brother' or 'Sister'). Tipping was now forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were few private motor-cars, most had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. As throngs of people passed through the city's busy arteries, the radios on the street corners and in the shops bellowed revolutionary songs and broadcasts of the public assembly's meetings. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a city of millions in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough denim working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. The greatly diminished number of women who still wore dresses or skirts were far less modest than before the revolution; 'To save fabric' one girl explained. 'Freedom to be a woman and not be smothered by a blanket,' explained another. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.[1]
[1] (original footnote) This was a rewrite of various passages from
Homage to Catalonia by Orwell, with the hopes of capturing Orwell's style.
