You won’t learn a lot about communism from Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, but you will learn a good deal about the emotional and psychological needs that in the first half of the twentieth century brought many people to join the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and that, to judge by the testimony given by those profiled in the book, were satisfied to a remarkable extent by membership in the Party. Gornick’s title might suggest that such people were merely infatuated with the idea of communism, but the often fervent insistence that life in the CPUSA actually was their life offered by most of Gornick’s subjects belies the notion that their commitments were so tenuous. Even those voicing some regrets about their years in the Party—and this would be a majority of them—do not seem to regret having joined the Communist Party in the first place, precisely because it was belonging to it that initially awakened in them a sense of purpose in their lives.
Gornick herself takes for granted that her readers are familiar enough with both the tenets of Marxism and the history of the CPUSA that any extended exposition of the Marxist program that appealed to very wide range of people who joined the Party—from the down and out working class to bourgeois intellectuals to the children of the upper class—is apparently superfluous. Few of the subjects interviewed themselves reflect much on the intellectual content of either Marxism or socialism more generally (at least in Gornick’s account), so although presumably many current readers come to the book without some foundational knowledge of Marx and Marxism, The Romance of American Communism won’t provide much enlightenment about exactly what the Party members thought were the political and economic structures that would replace the existing structure they so wanted to replace.
Similarly, one doesn’t really learn that much about the workings of the Party itself, except, of course, indirectly through the various particular experiences offered by Gornick’s subjects. Since Gornick has obviously selected the people that will help her fill out her tripartite organizational scheme—what it was like to join the party, what membership in the Party was like, and how it felt to leave the Party—this sort of oblique look at the Party’s internal operations is inevitable. But while we do get a general sense of the Party’s highly organized community outreach and, through at least one person’s testimony a glimpse at the process by which a member might be accused of apostasy or expelled from the Party (although “process” hardly describes it), given that the interviewees express few reservations about casting their lot with the Communist Party, the depiction of the CPUSA that emerges from The Romance of American Communism is at best incomplete.
These limitations of the book really only matter because its republication seems clearly enough designed to coincide with the resurgence of interest in socialism, obviously manifested in the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, as well as the increased prominence of the Democratic Socialists of America. The book’s intended audience surely includes those associated with this new movement, who perhaps might find the account of leftist political activism it offers edifying in various ways—including as testimony to the perseverance of idealism even in the face of the greatest adversities. However, The Romance of American Communism is not without its own romantic view of its subjects’ experiences (although not of Communism itself), so the effect on these readers is likely to be less illumination of the historical realities of Communism in America that a reinforcement of an already existing enthusiasm for radical activism (“radical” as such readers now understand the term, at least).
Despite Gornick’s occasional reminders of the dogmatic intolerance of the Communist Party, and the real damage done to some of its members because of it, the book ostensibly now stands as a testament to the endurance of progressive ideals. Indeed, in the conclusion Gornick explicitly attempts to recuperate American Communism as an indispensable link in the development of radical consciousness: “first had come the visionary socialism of the nineteenth century, then had come the fierce politicalness of the Communists, and now had come the unaffiliated consciousness of contemporary radicalism.” The “radical” consciousness Gornick invokes here is that of 1977, the year of the book’s original publication, which from our current perspective surely doesn’t seem very radical at all. Gornick acknowledges the changed circumstances in her new introduction to the book, commenting that “Today, the idea of socialism is peculiarly alive, especially among young people in the United States, in a way it has not for decades,” but that “peculiarly” would seem to then require some further observation about the implications of her book for a revived socialist movement, but intuiting that is ultimately left to the reader.
Many of the contemporaneous reviews of The Romance of American Communism were quite hostile, essentially accusing it of whitewashing the CPUSA’s collusion with the Soviet Union and its intolerance of dissent. Perhaps the most prominent critic of the book was Irving Howe, who thought the subject—looking back on the appeal of Communism—might have produced a useful book but that in her execution, Gornick was much too indulgent of her subjects’ nostalgia. “One sometimes has to remind oneself,” he wrote, “that in her evocation of coziness and warmth [Gornick] is writing about the CP in the time of Stalin and not about a summer camp. This is perhaps overly harsh, but Howe adds that “quite apart from the usual risks of alloy and contamination, idealism can in its very purity be a source of moral corruption,” Howe was, of course, one of the foremost of the liberal—in his case, still socialist—anti-Communists, but his comment still resonates beyond the polemical positioning of the cold war.
The expression of moral certainty does indeed now seem to be widespread among those who call themselves democratic socialists. Since “democratic” socialism would seem to entail some tolerance for uncertainty—if everyone shared the same values and interests, there would be no need for democracy in the first place—that socialists would become better known for the vehemence with which they denounce those perceived as insufficiently progressive than for making alliances that might actually facilitate the enactment of policies they favor seems self-defeating, to say the least. If the goal of democratic socialism is to bring about not just political but also social and economic democracy, working within the constraints of existing political democracy is likely the only available strategy, unless of course it is in fact revolution, the forcible overturning of that democracy for a truly socialist alternative, that is still the implicit goal.
It is hard to imagine how such a revolution would actually be possible. Certainly if it is to be a violent revolution, the notion that armed socialists will somehow defeat American militarism and gun-toting white nationalists is far-fetched in the extreme. That the very idea such a conflict might plausibly break out seems manifestly absurd only confirms that talk of “revolution,” at least among self-identified democratic socialists, is for rhetorical display only, a reflexive gesture intended to underline the urgency of making change. This means, of course, that any such change will occur only from within the system, however much replacing that system with a more humane and, indeed, democratic one might still be the ultimate goal. Unless the socialist position is fated to remain merely spectatorial, allowing for a maximum expression of outrage and invective but a minimum of practical achievement, something even resembling a socialist future will have to come through participation in democratic politics.
In Achieving Our Country, his 1998 book warning the contemporary left that its distance from practical politics was likely to help create conditions very much like we face today (he even speculated about the rise of a political figure remarkably like Donald Trump), Richard Rorty advises that “In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you might have grace doubts.” I’m confident that Rorty would have been much in sympathy with the policy proposals featured in the 2020 Sanders campaign, but his admonition here has surely been rejected by Sanders and most of his supporters, who routinely derided not just other candidates but also many ordinary voters backing those candidates, accusing them of holding merely liberal values that remain in complicity with the neoliberal status quo. Although the primary target of Rorty’s criticism in Achieving Our Country is what he calls the “cultural left,” located largely in academe, this group shares with the current more populist left an ultimate detachment from the political process itself. For the former such detachment is a necessary correlative to the insularity of its academic setting, but for the former it is a paradoxically self-inflicted separation while ostensibly attempting to engage in electoral politics.
The Romance of American Communism is unlikely to be of much help in reinforcing the need for real political participation, including strategic cooperation with some “about whom you have grave doubts.” Rorty also reminds us that
. . .the Communist Part of the United States was of very little importance to the political life of our country. It marshaled some good picket lines, and it recruited a few good agents for Soviet intelligence. But the most enduring effects of its activities were the careers of men like Martin Dies, Richard Nixon, and Joseph McCarthy.
This may seem a severe judgment, but Rorty is concerned here with the political efficacy of the CP, not the actions of individuals, many of whom Rorty agrees “worked heroically and made very painful sacrifices in the hope of helping our country to achieve its promise.” But Rorty thinks also that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, represented by such anti-Communist intellectuals as Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith, also helped “achieve our country” through enhancing civil rights and social welfare programs and that reverence for the first group while showing contempt for the second is a counterproductive attitude for progressives to take.
While Rorty wants to pragmatically endorse all efforts to create a “fairer, less cruel” society as worthy of progressive affirmation, this move does blur distinctions that are nevertheless relevant to present circumstances. Those individual CP members, who “worked heroically” for change, are better described as activists engaged not so much in politics as dissent and resistance. The CP itself, however excluded from the existing political process, embodies the bureaucratized, hierarchical logic of organized party politics. The oppressive structure of the CPUSA surely resulted in part from a kind of bureaucratic, hierarchical purity that came from the CP’s enforced separation from democratic politics; overcoming this separation would have inevitably loosened Party discipline and would have compelled negotiation and compromise for any kind of real influence.
But of course this would have been almost literally impossible: As a party organized around pure ideology, for the CP to make compromises with ordinary political parties and groups would undermine the ideology, which depends on its systemic integrity. (I make a distinction here between Marxism as a source of political, cultural, and economic analysis and communism as the expression of a political program rooted in Marxism.) The radical certitude of communism is thus entirely justified according to its own inherent logic, but it is this certitude, even putting aside the sadism of Lenin or Stalin or the petty authoritarianism of the CPUSA leaders (which no one in the democratic socialist movement excuses) that still threatens to render socialism an ineffective agent of progressive politics, as its performance in the 2020 presidential primaries has already demonstrated. Solidifying a small but enthusiastic segment of the left-of-center electorate accomplishes little if it deliberately alienates the rest of that contingent. Readers of The Romance of American Communism might usefully reflect on how easily idealism congeals into dogma.